Strange Horizons, Dec ’01
Strange Horizons, Inc.
CONTENTS:
Article: Interview: James Morrow, by Faith L. Justice
Article: Bose-Einstein Condensates, by Marissa K. Lingen
Article: Sleeping with the Bug-Eyed Monster, by Jim C. Hines
Article: An Evening with Freeman Dyson, by Greg Beatty
Fiction: Fiddler, by H. Courreges LeBlanc, illustration by Shelton Bryant
Fiction: Carol for Mixed Voices (part 1 of 2), by Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond
Fiction: Carol for Mixed Voices (part 2 of 2), by Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond
Fiction: Other Cities #4 of 12: Amea Amaau, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Fiction: Other Moments, by Daniel Goss
Poetry: purified on the only visible moon, by T. Emmett Mueller
Poetry: Threnody at Sea, by Mark Rudolph
Poetry: Oracle, by Kendall Evans
Poetry: An Open Letter To Our Astronauts, by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Review: I Love Anthologies: A Review of the Year’s Best Science Fiction 2001, reviewed by Danyel Fisher
Review: Ken Wharton’s Divine Intervention, reviewed by Lori Ann White
Review: Marie Jakober’s The Black Chalice, reviewed by Christopher Cobb
Reviews: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, reviewed by Walter Chaw
Editorial: Where Does Genre Come From?, by Jed Hartman
Interview: James Morrow
By Faith L. Justice
12/3/01
Award-winning author James Morrow takes on the foibles and inconsistencies of Western religion with wit and vigor, holding up a mirror and asking, “How far will we go?” Booklist dubs him a “genius” and compares him to Twain, Heller, and Vonnegut, for bringing much needed humor to this too-serious subject. The science fiction and fantasy community has honored him with two Nebulas (for his 1989 short story “Bible Stories for Adults #17: The Deluge” and 1990 novella “City of Truth”) and a World Fantasy Award (for his 1990 novel Only Begotten Daughter).
In his most recent work, known collectively as the Godhead Trilogy, Morrow takes us on a tour of a post-theistic world. In Towing Jehovah, a disgraced tanker captain seeks redemption by fulfilling a dying angel’s request to tow God’s immense dead body from the middle of the Atlantic to its final resting place in an Arctic ice cave. In Blameless in Abaddon, God’s body is discovered and He is posthumously put on trial in the World Court for all the evil He allowed in the world. Morrow’s newest novel, The Eternal Footman, brings this cycle to a close as people struggle with “death awareness” and the psychic consequences of God’s abandonment of humankind.
In this interview from his home in State College, Pennsylvania, Morrow discusses his debt to the SF/F community, scientific humanism, organized religion, the literary roots of his stories, the difficulties of addressing the “big questions” in satire, and his writing process.
Faith L. Justice: You’ve been called one of the “great modern satirists” and claim Twain, Vonnegut, and Heller among your literary influences. How did you wind up writing in the SF/fantasy genres rather than in mainstream fiction?
James Morrow: As early as my first novel, The Wine of Violence, I was producing fiction that obviously partook as much of satire and allegory as of “SF/Fantasy.” But the events in Wine occurred on another planet, and the people got there in spaceships. We all looked at each other—my agent, my editor, and me—and said, “It probably makes sense to market this as science fiction, but let’s hope we can somehow reach a crossover audience.”
I’m not a fatalist. I don’t like Original Sin scenarios. But it’s possible that, in defining myself as an SF author right at the beginning, I have irretrievably exiled myself from the Garden of Mainstream Acceptance. If I had it to do over, however, I suspect I’d choose to lapse from grace once again. I’d love to have the large audience enjoyed by Twain and Heller. But it’s important to remember this: there’s no obscurity like publishing a mainstream novel that goes nowhere. Heller was the first to admit that, for every Catch-22, fifty equally worthy mainstream novels fall by the wayside.
I shall always feel enormously indebted to the SF world. It’s given me an audience, critical acclaim, half a living wage, and more than my share of awards. And here’s the most powerful argument of all: by working in relative obscurity, addressing myself to the freewheeling, low-pressure science fiction community, I think I’ve probably done better work—more biting, more audacious, more honest—than if I’d quickly become a high-profile writer. And in my haltingly idealistic fashion, I shall always insist that the work, not the royalty check, is what counts most.
Now, if the mainstream wants to discover me at this point in my career, that would be perfectly all right with me. I could use the money.
FJ: You call yourself a “scientific humanist.” What does that mean?
JM: I like that term—I first heard it in connection with Jacob Bronowski—because there’s something slightly paradoxical and ambiguous about it. And I think that worthy fiction always partakes of paradox and ambiguity.
C.P. Snow’s famous dichotomy between “the two cultures,” scientists versus humanists, goes back to 1962, and I think it’s still very much with us. If anything, the schism has gotten worse in recent years. Snow was concerned about the failure of academic humanists to comprehend the insights of science. Today we have hundreds of postmodern academics who are actually proud of their failure to comprehend the insights of science—a pride in which they are so noisy and articulate and persuasive that they make someone like me feel slightly ashamed to be caught using a phrase like “the insights of science.”
Bronowski liked to point out that science is “a very human activity.” I think he meant that it’s a mistake to regard science as a sterile, passionless, bureaucratic pursuit, destined to turn us into numbers. But the postmodernists have distorted Bronowski’s idea—as they have distorted similar ideas drawn from Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper—beyond recognition, turning science into a mere “metaphor” or “narrative.” Bronowski was inviting humanists to join in the great post-Enlightenment conversation about the limitations and misuses of scientific knowledge. And the humanists, to their eternal shame, responded by declaring that the Enlightenment was dead.
We need a serious critique of science in this culture. The apologists for the technocratic machine must be countered and contradicted. But this will never happen by filtering science through the bizarre epistemologies of French intellectuals. Jacques Derrida didn’t discover the threat to the ozone layer. Scientists did. (Their names, for the record, are F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California.)
FJ: You’ve said that satire is the child of anger and comedy. In your writings on western religion, where does your anger come from? Your comedic touch?
JM: As I mentioned in a Paradoxa interview with Samuel R. Delany, people are sometimes surprised to learn that my childhood contacts with religion were undramatic. My readers assume that, given the vehemence with which I question Christianity’s legitimacy, I must be working through some terrible, quasi-repressed trauma. They think I was hit with a ruler by a nun, or I had to empty a Lutheran minister’s bedpan—something like that.
My religious upbringing was actually quite tepid and generic—a white Presbyterian Church in the Philadelphia suburbs. My skepticism comes primarily from reading the world’s great disbelievers—Voltaire, Twain, Ibsen, Camus, and so on—and realizing that their anguish and their disaffection felt honest to me in a way that the theistic worldview never did. To use my earlier terminology, Voltaire and Camus seemed to be among the real grown-ups on the planet.
Let me hasten to add that, while my skepticism is essentially intellectual, that doesn’t mean it’s passionless. Quite the contrary. For me, thinking and feeling are inextricably intermixed.
To quote from the aforementioned interview: “I guess I’m writing for readers who, whether they’re believers or not, are viscerally disturbed, on a almost daily basis, by Christianity’s claim to occupy some moral and epistemological high ground. My imagined audience includes people who’ve noticed that you can’t depend on religion to get us thinking intelligently about war, peace, ethics, eros, gender, nature, intolerance, or human origins—au contraire, religion often gets us thinking about these problems in vacuous and ugly ways—and this state of affairs shakes them to the core. It drives them crazy. It makes them want to scream.”
The comedy in my fiction functions as a kind of Trojan horse. It lets me smuggle all sorts of grand opinions into each story without seeming too pretentious. Woody Allen does it better than I do. He has a gift for condensing a devastating—yet at the same time rather subtle—critique of the theistic worldview into a single line. In Love and Death, Allen raises the possibility that God is “evil,” then quickly adds that he’s probably just an “underachiever” instead.
FJ: Your writing has been called everything from “irreverent” to “blasphemous.” How would you characterize your writing and, given Salman Rushdie’s fate, does this vehemence affect your writing or personal behavior?
JM: Obviously a whole book could be written about the Rushdie affair and the differences between Western and Islamic perceptions of fiction and its power over reality. On the whole, I don’t imagine myself becoming the next Rushdie—I don’t fear reprisals from Christian militants. At this point in history, theological satire in the West flies well below the radar of the religious right. There’s no need for me to put a barbed-wire fence around my house.