 The Original DarkEcho Interview:
This interview first appeared in the newsletter DarkEcho and has
become an ongoing, updated part of this site. The only problem
with interviewing John Shirley is that you can't use the really
good stories...
|
 |
A: Did you have to ask me a question that takes ten years of
story telling to answer?
It was steam-engine time for cyberpunk. Gibson was writing
NEUROMANCER when Ridley Scott was doing BLADERUNNER and I had just
done CITY COME A WALKIN'. My first novel TRANSMANIACON often had a
cyberpunk feel to it, too. We just reacted against the glossy Star
Trek/Asimov future that we'd been fed; we didn't see that coming down.
Plus, culturally we were
interested in injecting all kinds of other influences into science
fiction like the better detective writers, and the better post-modern
writers like William Burroughs, Pynchon etc.
The influence of the rock scene (and certain drugs, like speed)
can't be discounted. I was the only one of the group who was an actual
punk-rocker. I was lead singer of a buncha bands like SADO NATION,
OBSESSION, some others. The prose felt like music to me; my music was
rock. Balls-out rock.
Bruce Sterling gathered us together under the cyberpunk aegis,
through a little
magazine he edited (the name of which I forget,) and through snailmail
correspondence -- there was no email in them olden days.
Q: In horror, you could also be called as least an uncle to
"splatterpunk." Where does that come from?
A: My own link to it comes from the fact that I always wrote
in extremes -- if I wrote horror, I pushed it to extremes. It was the
punk thing to do.
My actual progenitors in writing were as much painters and
songwriters as writers; I was into the dadaists and surrealists and
Italian futurists and conceptual artists and early performance artists
-- extreme people. And in music into hardcore, bloody nosed rock like
the Stooges. So when I wrote Q: Tell me about THE CROW. I hear David Schow usually get
the credit for the screenplay, sometimes with no mention of you.
What's the story?
A:THE CROW came about like this: James O'Barr created the
comic book, art and story, for Caliber comics. I found the comic, an
obscure black and white comic, and took it to Jeff Most and we took it
to Edward R. Pressman, who eventually sold it to first Paramount and
then Miramax (after the Paramount thing fell through.) I was attached
as the writer. I wrote numerous drafts of a treatment, and then FIVE
drafts of the script. The first five. Then I had a fight with Cotty
Chubb, one of Pressman's producers, and was dropped.
Much of what Schow wrote was cut from the film. What remains is
mostly James O'Barr's stuff, with my take on structure, general story,
tone, etc., and some lines and situations from Schow. What they ended
up with was the comic book. James O'Barr is in effect the real
screenwriter. I'm credited along with Schow but he got first position
because he did more drafts than I did. However, much of what he wrote
in those many drafts wasn't used. Schow did a good job and his mark is
on the movie; so is mine.
Q: You weren't always clean and sober, you obviously know
the street. How
did a nice boy from Houston wind up that way? Tell me about the bad
old days and how it
effects your writing.
A:I was born in Houston but didn't grow up there; mostly I
was a boy from Oregon, but never a particularly "nice" one.
How I ended up that way is a very personal matter. I will tell you
that at the end of the sixties drugs were everywhere, and I was a
stone weirdo, a misfit, an outsider, the classic alienated punk kid,
and one of only three long haired kids in my high school. I was very
political, in my under-educated way, and published high school
underground papers and this got me into trouble. I was kicked out of
school for this, and for disruptive political actions, and for staging
"dada marches" and for "public display of
affection" (kissing, feeling up my girlfriend at school), a
remarkable number of times
before they finally expelled me for locking a teacher (harmlessly) in
the closet and taking over the class so I could lecture it on why they
were all going to die in nuclear holocaust. The principal of the
school heard the sobbing teenybopper girls in the class, (I was
telling them they'd be gang raped by radiated lunatics,) and the
teacher pounding on the closet door and kicked me out of school and...
Only short stints, a day or three here, in jail. Peripheral
involvement in dealing MDA and pot.
I was a rock musician and underground sf/fantasy writer so, of
course, I often had a girlfriend (or wife) who had a good job. Often
they were strippers. What do you call a rock musician without a
girlfriend? Homeless. My story becomes very very complex about
here...so...never mind.
Q: But you eventually got straight...
A:It took me several tries to get clean from cocaine and
other drugs. It's something one works on for life, really, though
years go past sober. I didn't start to mature, to become whole, till
I'd given up booze and drugs. I want to say this though: I was a
binger, and never did write under the influence of booze and drugs,
not directly, though drug experiences, remembered, may have informed
some writing.
Q: Music: What about the punk bands and your involvement
with Blue Ouml&;yster Cult? Your musical influences? Where are you
with it now?
Rudy Rucker used to say that cyberpunk was about more information
per square inch, so to speak, more intensity, more more and more.
("I want MORE!" - Iggy Pop)
Punk was, too, to me. To me, that wall of sound was information,
was metal sculpture in soundwaves, was aural telepathy. I had more
than my share of bottled up rage and here was the corkscrew. Plus, I
was one of those guys, when I was young (I'm 42 now,) who thrived on
ticking people off, being the gadfly, being the Symbol of the
Outsider. Consciously. Punk was made for my shattered inner self; my
lack of a centered self-image.
It was also a legitimate reaction to the mindlessness, the SLEEP of
society. I sensed that
we were all asleep; in my clumsy, misdirected way I was trying to
awaken. I still am.
Q: You wrote your first novel, DRACULA IN LOVE when you
were still in your teens ...
A: Yeah. Took me a couple of years to get it published.
Q: Since then you've written prodigiously and widely:. some
magic realism, fairly straight SF, cutting edge "horror,"
fantasy, splatterpunk... and it works on many levels. There always
seems to be social commentary and redemptive value. Where do you write
from? How does it come out?
A:I used to write more or less the way the surrealists
painted: directly from the unconscious, tying it together as I went
along. Now I try to use two hands on the clay of the sculpture: one
hand the unconscious, the other conscious, as conscious as possible. I
start with an AIM, a monomaniacally focused AIM.
Also I consciously suck up the input from the world, and try not to
get too subjectively involved in it; I try to remain objective. I used
to say I used Dali's "paranoid critical method" of almost
paranoid objectivity, and I still do to some extent, although I'm also
interested in understanding character and the human condition in its
subjective, suffering-it-as-we-go sense.
I have always assumed both chaos and meaning in life; it's never
been a problem for me to see these things side by side. And there is a
place, a Tao point if you like, where they are resolved with one
another. Chaos is order from the distance; order is chaos in small
segments. All this informs my writing. It's my surfboard.
I know that life is cruel, and tragic; I know also that life is
significant: that is, it SIGNIFIES. It is sending messages.
Incorporating all this leads me through magic realism, fantasy,
horror, real-world noir, and science fiction.
Q: Another obvious aspect is the depth of your work. You
have some heavy influences. You've mentioned Gurdjieff and
Krishnamurti; in literature there's William
Burroughs and Philip Dick...who, what else?
A: I don't read horror fiction, not since I was a boy. When
I want to read horror, I read history.
What else? I read a lot of biographies; I try to get that kind of
feel without its dryness, increasingly. I'm influenced by C. S.
Lewis's space trilogy, (especially THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH,) by J. G.
Ballard and by people like Elmore Leonard and Hubert Selby and for
that matter, Lou Reed. I was influenced by Louis Celine and
Baudelaire, especially when I was younger.
Currently I admire Cormac McCarthy, but I don't try to write like
him. Philosophically I
gravitate to anything that can harmonize my innate skepticism with a
spiritually inclusive
point of view. I don't take to fuzzy edged new agey bullshit.
Q: What about the screenwriting?
A: What about it? I'm writing a new spec script, an
"actioner," as they say in VARIETY. I've got a number of
unsold screenplays. Who hasn't, in the business? I make a fair amount
of money writing television: I have to do that because of the enormous
child support payments I must make to two ex-wives. I see my kids as
much as the ex-wives will let me.
Jeff Most and I are still working over (me as writer, he as
producer) Robert McCammon's
STINGER. I have a great script of Rudy Rucker's SOFTWARE that's stuck
in development hell.
Jeff Most is also closing a deal with Alliance to film my script
THE BRIGADE, based on my novel, a suspense/action picture.
My fantasy for kids about Wyatt Earp and a literal ghost-town, THE
MARSHAL OF CENTRAL PARK, has interested the agent of certain
child-stars, and is being taken by them (and Jeff Most) to Disney and
Universal, where the child-stars have deals. We'll see.
Q: So TV is the "day job." Any of it you want to
claim as yours?
A:I developed and wrote the pilot for a show called PRIMAL
SCREAM that will be shot soon for the Showtime Channel. It's horror
set in the real world...I did an episode of a
new show called POLTERGEIST I rather like. It is a sort of horror
anthology show with a continuing cast having various horrific
supernatural adventures as they investigate the paranormal.
I did an episode of a very interesting upcoming show called PROFIT.
A good show...I did a DEEP SPACE NINE episode but I'd rather forget
that.
I am developing a miniseries for Warner New Regency television to
be called either Pangaea or Mystery Traces (so far)
about many, many strange things, including visitors coming en masse
from another dimension.
Q: Other than the day job, what are you working on now?
A: Q: Why aren't you more famous, John Shirley? Do you want to
be?
A: Why wasn't Edgar Allan Poe more famous during his
lifetime? Up to a point, it could be useful; beyond a certain point,
tiresome.
Q: Oh, then, like Poe, you see yourself revered by future
generations?
A: I'd be very surprised if future generations revered me.
Some of my work may be appreciated on levels it isn't appreciated on
now. There are levels to be appreciated, I assure you.
©1996 Paula Guran
Interview Update: December
1996
Interview Update: January
1998
Interview Update: January
1999
|
Q: You have a semi-legendary aura about you.
Let's start with you being the "godfather of
cyberpunk." Folks like William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce
Sterling, Marc Laidlaw and
you were the progenitors. You even "discovered" Gibson. What
is cyberpunk? How did this all happen?
Gibson met me in Vancouver when I was
there for a convention; he gave me a short
story, which impressed me, I gave it to Terry Carr; others I
recommended to
Robert Sheckley, who was then editor of OMNI. Gibson's early short
stories
created a sensation. He had the feel we were all looking for, but he
had it DOWN.
DRACULA IN LOVE, I
pushed out the edges of what was "acceptably sick" in
horror. Same in CELLARS and IN DARKNESS WAITING and my short stories,
like "I Live In Elizabeth" in HEATSEEKER. I was willing to
use perverse sexual content too, early on, before Anne Rice and
friends. I was there first, frankly.
They then brought David Schow on. Schow
tried to eliminate everything I'd done, even names that didn't need to
be changed, locations that didn't need to be changed, so that when WGA
arbitration came up he could shove me out of the picture. However, the
director, Alex Proyas, resisted this.
Then PUNK ROCK came along, god bless it. I moved
to Portland and then to New York City, where many punk rockers became
involved in the sex industry, stripping, etc., in order to live
without having a square job. I got into some pretty underground scenes
-- I just wasn't suited to a regular job. Wasn't COMPETENT to do a
regular job.
I just always loved the mysterious, atmospheric,
intricate, intelligent but tough sound of the Blue Oyster Cult and
jumped at the chance to write lyrics for them. My first novel
TRANSMANIACON was named after one of their songs.
Social issues cry out to be addressed.
How can I ignore them? A writer can make a difference -- Dickens
actually affected what laws were made. I'm not saying I have, I'm sure
I haven't, on any broad scale. But I try. At the same time I am WIRED
to tell a good story. I was born a storyteller (when I was a kid they
called it LYING, but...never mind). I used to regale the other kids
with adventure stories. I'm a born storyteller who has a need to
express meaning. to search for meaning, and who feels
always a link to musicality.
I was influenced by film makers, especially
Fellini, early on, and Nicholas Roeg -- I mean, I was influenced by
them in the way I wrote short stories and novels. I tried to create
cinema in the mind of the reader. My novel A SPLENDID CHAOS is an
attempt to do an interplanetary Fellini movie in prose. Sort of...
By turns, the novel SILICON
EMBRACE, a vampire story for Nancy Collin's BLACK HEARTS BLEED RED,
which is a new vampire collection by "master" vampire
writers, recording new material with the Panther Moderns which will be
on a CD released along with the book of SF punk stories, THE EXPLODED
HEART
(from Eyeball Books I hope this summer.). The current music is
progressive, sort of
King Crimsonish, sort of Zappa edged, modern rock, involved, maybe a
certain flavor
of the Doors about it, and a flavor of Goth. I do lyrics and lead
vocals. Also
developing a show I created for NBC called HELIX. Will they ALLOW ME
to make
it a good show? I don't know yet.