MK: What authors, what book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing? You mentioned you’ve recently been mainlining Neil Gaiman, who you remind me of to some degree. You’re not covering the same ground, but like him, I’m never quite sure on your pieces if you’re going to scare me, amuse me, or show me something beautiful. What grist have you had for your mill, including history and the news?
AD: Ideally, I think, a work should do all three—scare you, amuse you, show you something beautiful. Certainly Gaiman does that, in and out of his Sandman books. (Allow me to insert a plug for Gaiman’s new novel, American Gods. It’s terrific.) Gaiman I’ve discovered only recently, but most of my strongest influences I discovered quite young. A partial list: Lewis Carroll, James Thurber, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, John Bellairs, Edward Gorey, Eleanor Cameron, P.G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and lots of comics—1970s-era Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and Batman, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, Mad magazine, Plop!, the EC and DC horror comics, the Warren magazines such as Creepy and Eerie. Two Robert Arthur-edited anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense and Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum.
Later, in adulthood, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Joseph Mitchell, Lee Smith, John Kessel, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link. Other grist for the mill: I’ve been a movie junkie since childhood, especially old movies, and I’ve probably read more books devoted to the movies than books about any other single subject. For the first half of my life I seem to have watched television 24/7, as I vividly recall everything broadcast, however lame, through the Carter administration at least. I was raised in a newspaper-reading family, and my years as a journalist only aggravated that condition, so I still buy the local papers everywhere I travel, and I can’t imagine not subscribing to at least one. Music is increasingly important to me, especially pre-Beatles folk and country—but I revere the Beatles, too. I love urban legends and folklore of every stripe. Lately I’ve been surfing the Web a lot. It all figures into the writing, in some unholy and monstrous way.
MK: What are you working on now? Are you tackling a novel now, or are you still focusing mainly on short stories? And some of your stories would make great screen plays—any word on that?
AD: People keep telling me my stories are naturals for the movies, but so far no producers have told me that! So my occasional bursts of screenwriting have been purely “on spec,” for my own education, really, because you do learn a lot when writing screenplays. The first thing you learn is that the screenplay is a really difficult form to master—it’s like mastering the haiku, or the sestina. The second thing you learn is that screenplays have very little in common with fiction. Another form that I’m trying to learn by doing is, of course, the novel, which has a lot in common with short fiction but is nevertheless a very different animal. I have a couple of novel projects, several short-fiction projects, a screenplay project or two. There’s no shortage of things to work on. Occasionally one project reaches critical mass, distinguishes itself somehow from the other projects, and when that happens I work on that project exclusively until it’s done. So far everything I’ve finished has been in the realm of short fiction, but who knows what next year will bring?
MK: What advice would you give to an aspiring young writer?
AD: Bruce Sterling likes to say that his ambition as a writer is to write really “Sterlingian” fiction, to be the most like Bruce Sterling that he can possibly be. I think all writers should aim to write more like themselves, and less like anyone else. My advice is, write that unique stuff that only you can write, the stuff that won’t get written if you don’t do it. Don’t worry about what other writers are doing, much less about what the “market” is dictating this week. Write your own fiction (or poetry, or drama), make it as true to your unique vision as you possibly can, and you’ll draw an audience. You’ll create your own genre, your own market.
MK: Faulkner once said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Care to comment on this as regards your writing?
AD: It’s my motto. I think growing up the youngest member of an extended Southern family had a lot to do with my fascination with history. My parents were considerably older than the parents of my classmates. For everyone else in the classroom, the Depression and World War II, for example, were remote events that existed only in history books, whereas for me they were vitally real, immediate events, because my parents and their siblings talked about them all the time. So I concluded that all the other stuff in the history books must have a similar immediacy. It’s not exaggerating to say that from an early age, I came to view all times and places and people as co-existent, in some metaphorical but deeply meaningful and truthful way. I still feel that way when reading history—that all these people are my next-door neighbors, that I share their problems, that it’s in my interest to know something about them. That empathy carries over, inevitably, into the fiction, but for me it’s less a writing technique than a personality trait, one that’s hard to separate out and view dispassionately. I can say, though, that when I first encountered that Faulkner quote, it had real resonance for me. It was the articulation of something I had known to be true all along.
MK: Andy, tell me what’s coming up or what has recently happened with your fiction, would you? “The Chief Designer,” a story about the Russian space program, came out June in Asimov’s. Anything else on the horizon?
AD: As for new stuff, “Senator Bilbo” is in Starlight 3, just out from Tor. Both my World Fantasy-nominated stories will be reprinted in the next few weeks, “Lincoln in Frogmore” in the October/November double issue of Asimov’s and “The Pottawatomie Giant” in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, from St. Martin’s. The August Locus has a long interview with me (that hardly overlaps this one at all); excerpts are online. And I’ll be on the bill at the third Slipstream conference at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga., in February 2002, for those who want to come say hey.
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Mack Knopf is a consulting editor for Strange Horizons. His previous appearance in Strange Horizons was “Things We Were Not Meant to Know: H.P. Lovecraft and Cosmic Horror.”
Further Reading:
Andy’s personal web page, full of more information on him and his stories.
The Past is Not Past: An interview with Andy Duncan.
Stories online: “Fortitude” and “The Pottatowatomie Giant.”
Strange Horizon’s review of Beluthahatchie and Other Stories.
Another review of Beluthahatchie and Other Stories.
Under the Daddy Tree: Family Relations in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
By Heather Shaw
8/20/01
Nalo Hopkinson is one of the brightest new stars in the world of speculative fiction. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Aspect First Novel contest in 1997. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, has been nominated for this year’s Hugo, was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year in 2000; it is also on the short list for this year’s Tiptree Award, as well as the Canadian Sunburst Award.
One of Hopkinson’s great strengths is her masterful and unique use of language. Readers will enjoy listening to the rhythm behind the music of her words as she reads in her melodic Caribbean accent. Indeed, language is the first thing one notices upon opening a Nalo Hopkinson book, but the surprises don’t end there. The combination of language and strong storytelling makes Hopkinson’s work compelling.
One of Hopkinson’s talents is using speculative elements to explore human relationships, especially the delicate relationships between family members. Hopkinson does not shy away from telling hard truths, and her books explore both the tenderness and the difficulties of family life. There is a kind of duality in these relationships that she examines close up; we see, in her work, how the power that parents have over their children can be both extremely comforting and undeniably terrifying. Her books feature protagonists who are initially young and helpless; through the tough realities of their interactions with their parents, they begin to learn the more about themselves, and discover aspects of themselves that would have remained hidden had their relationships with their parents been entirely unproblematic.
Midnight Robber is the most disturbing example of Hopkinson’s use of the duality of parent-child interactions. The novel opens with the protagonist, Tan-Tan, living a cushy life as the daughter of the Mayor of Cockpit County on the planet Toussaint. Her only problem is the neglect she suffers from her biological parents, who brought her into the world as another pawn in their heated, passionate marriage. Tan-Tan develops a fascination with a Carnival figure, the Midnight Robber; during Carnival, the Robber stops people in the streets and tells them a fantastic tale in exchange for coins. The Midnight Robber is known for being good with words, good at coming up with outrageous, fascinating stories on a moment’s notice; this kind of freedom of speech, of demanding attention, of being confident enough to know oneself worthy of such attention, is the perfect complement to quiet, almost invisible Tan-Tan. Already we see a duality in her personality.