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JACK DANN

Q: Let’s start with what you’re doing now. The last book of yours I am aware of is the one about Leonardo da Vinci. I am sure I missed something. There was a book about the Civil War I saw you showing around earlier this afternoon.

Dann: The da Vinci book was The Memory Cathedral, which I’ve had really good luck with. It was about the time that the book came out in the States that I moved to Australia. HarperCollins Australia also bought the book, and it was a bestseller there. It topped the bestseller list on The Age magazine. The other big surprise was Germany, where it sold heavy-duty numbers—for me anyway. The cover price was 49.5 deutchmarks, which is about $50 Australian. When I heard what the price was going to be, I asked, “Are people going to pay $50 for a hardcover book?” I guess they did. So that book went into about ten languages. The next book was a Civil War novel called The Silent. It isn’t a genre novel. It was published here, and it was also published in Australia and Germany. While I was writing The Silent, I was also editing Dreaming Down-Under with Janeen Webb. That’s the Australian anthology. Again we were lucky. It won a Ditmar Award in Australia and the World Fantasy Award here. One of our purposes in doing the anthology was to try to get Australian genre writing noticed in the States and Great Britain. I think we succeeded in our small way. I’m still doing the Magic Tales anthologies with Gardner Dozois. Those are still coming out at the rate of about two a year. And I’m working on a big James Dean/Hollywood novel that I sold to HarperCollins US. It’s basically the story of James Dean after his accident. So I am doing this as a mainstream, alternate-time novel.

Q: You seem to be moving very much to the fringes of traditional science fiction, or beyond it completely. Is this an intentional career strategy, or are things just working out that way?

Dann: I think it’s just things working that way. When I’m told I’m this kind of a writer or that kind of a writer, my response—like Harlan Ellison’s—is that “I’m a writer.” I guess a politically correct way of saying it is that I write “across the genres”. That will probably translate into “out of genre.” This Quixotic course is a marketing nightmare. I’ve actually been very lucky in Australia, because HarperCollins has been publishing me there as a Flamingo author—that’s their literary line—and they have also been pulling in my science fiction readers. My early science fiction novels such as Starhiker and Junction and The Man Who Melted were on the far-out edges of the genre. Junction was a weird, fringe, where-do-you-put-it novel, although The Man Who Melted was a straight science-fiction novel. (I thought so, anyway!) As for The Memory Cathedral, some people are calling it fantasy, some are calling it SF, and some are saying that it isn’t genre at all. So I just don’t worry about it. I think of my novel-in-progress about James Dean as mainstream in intent, but it really is an extrapolation of what could have happened if James Dean had lived. He goes into politics. He hangs around with the Kennedys. He beats Reagan in California.. I wanted to play around with the idea of cultural icons and myths. If Dean had lived, would he have the same iconic stature that he does now? I don’t think so. Look at Brando. If he had died young, he, too, would have become a cultural icon. So I am dealing with stuff like that, with Marilyn Monroe, with Elvis Presley and Bobby and Jack Kennedy—they’re all major characters.

Am I intentionally moving my career into the mainstream? I think I am intentionally trying not to be categorized, but that’s just because of the kind of writer I am: I get interested in something and want to write it, and it may be genre, or, as is usually the case, it may not be.

Q: I guess you could say the James Dean book is a non-category fantasy, which means it’s a fantasy but you don’t tell anyone it’s a fantasy. I understand that Mark Helprin, for example, is very defensive about not being labeled a fantasy writer, because everybody assumes fantasy means elves and unicorns. Of course fantastic literature is much broader. But as we well know from all those books that you haven’t heard of before they win World Fantasy Awards, there is a great deal of interesting fantasy being published outside of the fantasy category. So I guess you’re very lucky to be able to publish fantasy as mainstream. Great work if you can get it.

Dann: Certainly with The Memory Cathedral I am doing the same sort of thing that John Crowley is doing. And there is the same sort of problem of where to categorize it. But, you see, I love the genre, so it’s not as if I don’t want to be associated with it. I just want to have any given book reach its audience. I’ll give you an example. When The Memory Cathedral won the Aurealis Award in Australia, it was selling very well there, and it was selling as a mainstream, historical novel. I was very lucky. It got full-page photo reviews. When it won the Aurealis Award, my publisher decided to do a sticker, which I thought was a great idea. It read, “Winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy.” Within two weeks, the books disappeared from the center shelves, where they had been selling very well. I asked bookstore clerks and managers what had happened, and they told me, “People who read historical novels want everything to be real. Of course we know that this is a historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci. But the sticker says ‘fantasy’, so historical-novel readers won’t buy it.” I had effectively lost the mainstream audience. So when my novella “Da Vinci Rising”, which was adapted from the novel, won the Nebula Award, Harper made a bigger sticker, which read “Winner of the Aurealis/Nebula Award.” It had “Aurealis” on top, “Nebula” on the bottom, but it said nothing about fantasy. Two weeks later, the books were right back in the center and they were reaching that audience again. True story. Now you and I both know that this is insanity, but it’s the way that stuff gets categorized. So when I say I don’t want to be categorized, I try to make sure that when one of my non-genre or cross-genre books comes out, it’s going to be able to reach that mainstream audience.

Q: There are others who luck out like this. James Morrow, for example, is reviewed as mainstream but also sells as fantasy. Harlan Ellison has certainly made a very vocal point throughout his career of not being categorized as one type of writer. But there are many others who may strive their whole careers and never be discovered outside of the SF/fantasy field, no matter what they write.

Dann: Again, I’ve been lucky. I’ve had publishers who were willing to work with me, and so far I have been able to walk the tightrope.

Q: Did it make any difference because you moved to Australia? Norman Spinrad refers to the “prince from another land” strategy. Were you able to do some of that?

Dann: I wouldn’t call it a strategy, because for me it wasn’t a strategy. I have always been very lucky in that here in the States, and also in Australia, I have had editors and publishers who really believed in the work. This has been a huge help and has made me feel very secure, shall we say, as I am not one of those writers who can knock out a novel or two a year.

The irony is that since I’ve been living in Australia—it’s been about seven years—I have more of a presence in the United States. I was at a convention and Bob Silverberg said, “You’re 50...and you’re hot.” [Laughs.] When I lived in Binghamton, in upstate New York, George R. R. Martin referred to me, correctly, as the hermit of Binghamton, because you couldn’t get me out of upstate New York. I am more present now in terms of a public person, and in terms of just being around in the country, here in the States, than when I lived here. When I travel now, I make a point to be “out there.” I’m in New York and I’m in LA, and I’m at this convention.

Since I’ve been living in Australia, my career has been doing well. In the “bad old days” I would spin off other jobs to stay afloat. I’d say, “I’ll try marketing,” and before I knew it I’d have a viable company that was demanding time. Would you believe it? I took a job in insurance because the hours were good, and after I left, I was asked to be on the board of directors. Crazy stuff. In Australia, I just write and pay attention to the writing. That made a big difference. I was able to make enough money by focusing on the writing.

Q: How has moving to Australia affected your writing? I notice that the first book you wrote after going there was about the American Civil War. Do you have a different perspective, viewing the United States from the outside now?

Dann: I had sold that novel before I moved, but I found myself commuting, living in Melbourne, but commuting back and forth to Virginia. I am one of those writers who tries to get as much information as possible. So I walked all the places depicted in the novel. I was there. But people kept laughing and chuckling and saying, “You’re living in Australia and you’re writing a novel about the American Civil War,” and I noticed that in the reviews, especially the ones in Australia, there was much talk about the idea of distance and perspective. I suppose I am obsessed with my own culture. I think that being out of one’s culture changes the way you see everything.

I did an article for the SFWA Bulletin called “Double Vision.” I see things as an American, enmeshed in my culture, basically, as a New Yorker, but I also see things now from an expatriate perspective, and everything looks different because of that distance. When you travel as a tourist, you take your own atmosphere with you. It’s different when you find yourself living in a place. After I was living in Australia for about eight months, I realized that Australian culture and American culture look very similar, but are really profoundly different. Even the language is different. So, although I’m here [in the USA] and I am comfortable and this is my culture, I feel like an outsider because I can never stop seeing with this double vision. I’m comfortable everywhere, but always an outsider. So I think it has given me this strange kind of perspective, and I am very interested in trying to figure out my home culture.

Q: I am sure a lot of writers have done that—

Dann: Of course, Hemingway living in Paris—

Q: With any number of expatriate Russians.

Dann: But I didn’t do it for that. I met Janeen, and I never believed in this, but it was basically love at first sight. And three months later the Hermit of Binghamton was living in the center of Melbourne and trying to navigate the infrastructure. I would try to dial “operator” on the telephone. I would dial zero and nothing would happen. I would get into a car to drive and then I would have to remember that the steering wheel was on the other side. In other words, I wasn’t saying, “I’m going to go and immerse myself in another culture to have stuff to write about.” I found myself there, and then all that stuff started happening. So it was all unplanned.

Q: Most writers lives are, I suspect, unplanned. Real deliberation doesn’t work.

Dann: For me, life and writing are like gambling. You can feel when you’re on a roll. Salesmen know about this. You can knock on doors and keep knocking on doors and nothing happens, and then suddenly you get on a roll and you could sell ice to Eskimos. So I’ve been on a roll. Every once in a while it stops, and nothing you do will work. You just keep walking and walking until something else happens. So I guess in a way I am not a tremendous planner.

Q: Are you ready to write about Australia?

Dann: I’m getting ready. I think there can be a rather long period of gestation between experiencing traumatic, life-changing experiences and writing about them. I wrote a story called “Jubilee,” which was one of the first on-line stories. That was when Omni was testing the, er, aether with Neon Visions. That story is in my new collection called...Jubilee. Part of that story takes place in the States and in Greece, because I had been in Greece just before I wrote it, and part takes place in Melbourne. I think I am beginning to see the Australian culture now and what aspects I’m interested in writing about. So it may happen in the next couple of years.

Q: Getting back to science fiction, wouldn’t this kind of perspective better equip you to write about another planet?

Dann: [Laughs.] When I was working on The Memory Cathedral, the idea came to me of history being a different place, a dislocation....I was on a number of panels here [at the World Fantasy Con in Corpus Christi] and I was listening to a number of people asking questions about myth and about how stories worked in the past, and we were all assuming that the mindset in the past was the same as the mindset now. I feel that people in the Renaissance had a completely different mindset, a different sensorium. They perceived things differently.

Most novels about space-travel don’t talk about the tremendous, hollow alienation that is a consequence of being away from everything familiar. You feel this distance toward everything. When I moved to Australia, when I started living in a different culture, even though it’s an English-speaking culture, I viscerally felt that dislocation. So, yes, I expect I’ll try to write about that in the future. I want to write about never being able to go home again in ways that maybe haven’t been done a lot in the genre. Fool that I am, I suppose I want to write the great American novel. [Laughs.]

Q: You could take your experiences and then make up another planet, and deal with the sense of dislocation far more convincingly than could a writer who has never been out of New Jersey.

Dann: Being a science fiction writer gave me a leg up when I tried to write about the past. It was a question of extrapolating backwards! The alieness of the past fascinates me, and I tried to recreate that alien world called the Renaissance in The Memory Cathedral, just as I tried to recreate another alien world, that of the American Civil War with The Silent.

But, to answer your question, which I keep dancing around, yes, it would be interesting to write about science fictional alien cultures as I did with, say, a novel like Starhiker, but with my own experience behind it.

Q: I would also imagine, by way of perspective, that your view on science fiction now is very different from what it was when you started out. Surely you are now writing things which you would never have imagined yourself writing, back at the beginning of your career in the early ’70s.

Dann: I have become a completely different writer, but part of that is just growing as a writer and, dare I say it, as a person.

When I was flying over here, we stopped in Sydney, because I had to give a lecture about Leonardo da Vinci at the Powerhouse Museum—they had the Gates Codex on exhibition. Later on, I bumped into a friend at the Sydney airport whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. She used to have a bookstore in my hometown, and she was visiting Australia. She had known me from the time I was fifteen and was one of the people who had guided me toward books and educated me. To paraphrase what Gene Wolfe once said about Damon Knight, she grew me from a bean. So there I was chatting about my career and talking about Hong Kong being one of my favorite places, and how I wouldn’t be making it back this year...blah-blah-blah.... And she said, “Listen to yourself. Did you ever think way back then that you would be living as you’re living now?”

No, I could never have called it....

One of the things that I think has happened since I have been in Australia, which I am proud of, is the effect that Dreaming Down-Under, the anthology I edited with Janeen Webb, has had on genre publishing in Australia. When Harlan Ellison visited Sydney a few years ago for a conference, he said, “You know, you guys are having your golden age right now.” He’d touched a nerve. There was a real zeitgeist going on. Writers were starting to talk to one another, and there was a lot of excitement. Our Dreaming anthology became a sort of focus, a showcase for that excitement.

It has been wonderful to see these writers starting to publish in the United States and in Europe. I acted as a facilitator for a lot of people in the early days. They didn’t have a sense of how American publishing worked, so I was acting as a de facto agent. It was a real kick because I could see the effect on the industry, and it was lovely, positive stuff.

Q: Are you going to do another Dreaming Down-Under?

Dann: I wasn’t going to do another anthology like Dreaming unless something really big came along. People kept asking, “Why don’t you do another volume?” I kept saying, “No, another volume in maybe five years.” But Dreaming was like Dangerous Visions. It had that same effect in Australia. Janeen and I wanted to wait until new people came up before editing another Dreaming Down-Under. We didn’t want to edit another volume prematurely just because the first anthology worked commercially. Then Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison approached me with an idea for an international horror anthology, using really powerful writers, putting the bar very high. Dennis would edit the American portion. Ramsey would edit the British portion, and I would do the Australian. So we would cover a good portion of the English-speaking horror genre. The idea was that it had to come out simultaneously in the US, Great Britain, and Australia. Tor is doing it in the US, and HarperCollins will publish it in the Australia and Great Britain. The anthology will be called Gathering the Bones, or maybe just Bones; we’re not sure yet. It’s another one of those big projects editor/writers do out of love.

Q: You must have a better sense of this than most editors. What differences in approach do the Australians have toward fantasy or horror?

Dann: That’s a difficult question. It was interesting to see the American reviews of Dreaming, which were very good. Again we were lucky. But reviewers seemed to think that Australian fiction would be about place. In other words, Australian geography would be the great influence. There are stories in which geography is very important, but I don’t think that is at base where the difference lies. I think it’s in the language and culture. You could almost say that Australian English is built on irony. I often tell tourists that all Australians know about ten thousand jokes and anecdotes. When they’re chatting with you, they’ll use these anecdotes and bits of wonderful irony, but they’ll only tell you the punch line. You’re supposed to know the rest to ‘get it’.

Australian English sounds like the same language we use in America, but I often find that when I’m just having conversations with my wife, who is Australian, that we can think that we’re saying the same thing, yet we’re misunderstanding each other because the words don’t mean the same thing.

I think, however, that in the genres there is a commonality that runs among English-speaking writers. In, say, science fiction, in the States, in England, and in Australia it’s not the place that makes the profound difference, because I think we’re all dipping into the same wells. We’re all cross-fertilizing each other. There is that difference of perspective and geography which every once in a while makes you say, “Ah....” But I think it’s the quality of the work that is important, and the fact that a given location has a number of writers who are doing really interesting work. If you look at the stories in Dreaming, you wouldn’t necessarily look at them and say, “These are Australian.” You might look at them and say that this or that story is wonderful.

Q: I’d think that the one thing the Australians would have in common with the Americans is a sense of frontier or at least a memory of a frontier. You go to Britain and you get the sense that every clump of trees has a name that’s probably recorded, with the name of a forester, in the Domesday Book. But in Australia and in the United States there is empty land. In that geographical sense, I would think that the U.S. would have a lot more in common with Australia than with Britain.

Dann: I think one of the differences between Australia and the United States is that in Australia there is still the sense of frontier. It’s very strong. You can move. You don’t have to be near people—your closest neighbor can be a hundred miles away. Yet you’ve also got this wonderful frisson, if you want to use the word, of world-class cosmopolitan cities such as Melbourne and Sydney.

I think that in the States we are starting to feel a limitation on Manifest Destiny, an end to the frontier. I don’t know that this is necessarily real, but I think this sense of limit is becoming part of the emotional consciousness. I think Americans perceive Australia to be what America once was. Again, it’s the idea of the frontier. When I first got to Australia, for the first number of months, I felt a crazy sense of freedom, that I could just go out on the road and never stop.

Q: Is that any different from, say, Arizona or other parts of the U.S.?

Dann: Probably not. The Outback can be like the Gobi Desert; so if you’re going to go from X to Y, you’ve got to know that you have enough water and such, because if you get stuck, you could be dead. The U.S. is almost completely habitable. It’s a big country with a lot of people. Australia is a big country that is not completely habitable. You can basically only live around the edges. The interior is like the Red Planet. The Outback...where the myths reside.

One of the things that I’ve noticed as an ex-pat is that Americans look inward. It’s the idea that everything is right here and available in the United States, and to a certain extent everything is here. We produce what has become world culture. We radiate our culture out. Also, in terms of military might, we are very secure. The major superpower.

By contrast, Australia is a country that looks outward. Australia is always looking out at what is going on in the world. That is why you see Australians everywhere—they are always traveling. That’s a big difference, culturally, in the way people perceive themselves and perceive the rest of the world. Americans take it for granted that they’re from a place that is powerful, central. We assume that as Americans we’re in control, that most countries can’t screw around with the U.S. and, indeed, must make accommodations. In many ways, we Americans really are insular...insulated. You can get an idea of this by comparing news in the States with news media in Europe or Australia. Again, it’s a question of how we sense ourselves and our place in the world.

Q: The perspective I had going to Europe for the first time was an appreciation of how much older European cities are than American cities. In Rome you can see what New York will be like in two thousand years. I coined the term “the layercake of history” because you see layers upon layers from different eras. Australia is even younger than the U.S. and has even less of this. My favorite symbol of it all is in Rome: a seventeenth-century marble elephant by Bernini, with an ancient Egyptian obelisk on its back, and a papal cross on top of that. It’s as if time-travelling aliens had just grabbed all this stuff and assembled it at random.

Dann: Well, cultures subsume each other. If you conquer a country, you tear down its places of worship and build your own mosques or churches over the sites. I think you’re spot on about the U.S. and Australia being new countries. I have a friend who is a Brit, one of my dearest friends in Australia; he moved there about fifteen years ago. He tells me that when he was living in England, he could feel the accretion of history, almost like weight. There, you could be walking along the street and come across a thousand year old cairn. When you’re living in all that antiquity, the past can seem more important than the present. One of the reasons that my British friend feels such a sense of freedom in living in Australia is because everything isn’t mired in the centuries past. There is a different energy. The U.S. and Australia are similar in that respect. I think one difference between the US and Australia is that Australians still perceive England as the mother country. There is still a sense of deference here toward Great Britain, even though the majority of the people want a republic. Americans don’t feel that kind of deference, perhaps because we shrugged Great Britain off during the Revolutionary War. Australia simply wasn’t in a position to do that, primarily because communications technology had changed, allowing easier and faster communication between the colonies and the mother country. The advent of telegraphy, perhaps more than anything else, allowed England to maintain a firm hold on Australia. Before that, it could take months for messages from England to reach Australia. They left quite a bit of leeway for independence and self-government. There was a small rebellion in Ballarat, which is not far from Melbourne, after the United States declared independence, but it failed. So although the idea of a republic is very much in the public mind in Australia and it is debated constantly, the relationship between Australians and the Brits still feels to me to be somewhat colonial.

Q: This is the sort of thing you can write straight mainstream fiction about, or historical fiction, or we get back to the idea of transmogrifying the experience and writing about another planet. You’d have even greater freedom on another planet, where everything would be absolutely fresh, particularly if it was far enough away that you couldn’t get back to Earth.

Dann: [Laughs.] In a sense I’m sort of living in one of Harry Harrison’s worlds. Most unfriendlies in Australia can kill you. Spiders are deadly. Almost all the snakes are poisonous. There is one particularly nasty spider whose bite causes something like gangrene to set in the wound. There’s no antidote for it; the area just rots away. In America and Europe, most of the wildlife is benign. Not so in Australia. That puts a different perspective on things. For instance, in Queensland, you “watch out for redbacks” (spiders) before you plant your bum (ass) on the toilet.

Q: Have you met any Aborigines?

Dann: My novel Bad Medicine, which will be published as Counting Coup in the US, has just been published in Australia. One of the protagonists is a Native American medicine man. While researching this novel, I spent about a year ceremonying with Sioux people. But that’s another story for another interview. I was very interested in meeting Aboriginal people when I first got to Australia. I could see that there were certain similarities with native Americans. They’re what I think of as the similarities of natural people, that sense that they have taken on the moral and ethical roles of caretakers of the land and its deep history. But I didn’t have any real interaction until last year when my partner Janeen Webb and I were invited to be guests of the Perth Writers’ Festival. I met a guy there by the name of Boori Pryor, an Aboriginal writer. We just hit it off. As a result, I became an honorary “Blackfella”, and he became an honorary Jew. I taught him how to do Jewish schtick; he taught me Blackfella stuff.

One of the really interesting things that happened was this. We were talking when we first met, and he told me that he takes everything he writes back to his people in Queensland, and the tribal elders look at it before it’s published. The elders have the final say. We were discussing reconciliation between the government of Australia and aboriginal peoples, which is a major issue. We currently have a rather right-wing, conservative “Liberal” government. About forty years ago, Aboriginal children were taken from their parents by the State to be re-educated and re-acculturated. That generation of Aboriginals has come to be known as the Stolen Generation. As aboriginals were considered to be primitive, the government policy was to “save” the children by forcing white culture on them. Now there is a reconciliation process going on at all levels in the country. Whites from all walks of life are saying...“We’re sorry.” But John Howard, the Prime Minister, doesn’t believe that the present government should take responsibility for what happened in the past. When I first met Boori, we talked about his books and about reconciliation; and I said, “Look, if people won’t accept you, screw them. You don’t have to take this shit from white people.” His response surprised me. He said, “No, we’re all involved. We’ve got to reach out to each other. It’s not about anger. The idea is that we’re all in the world together.” This from a guy who has been beaten senseless by the police...who has lost family members and other people he loves. But he had no anger toward whites. I was the one feeling angry. And I had gotten it completely wrong. Boori and I will hang out in the future, and eventually I hope to learn something about his culture...and maybe about myself.

Q: You’re looking at this material with what is presumably a science-fictional method. That is to say, if Ernest Hemingway went to Australia and saw the things that you saw, he would write a reportorial book. You might turn it into something else.

Dann: I’ve mentioned this before. I think that working in the genre for a lifetime as I have gives you certain tools. Pam Sargent, Kim Stanley Robinson, and I have talked about using the tools of science fiction to write historical fiction. When I write historical fiction, I “extrapolate” the past, which is as alien as the future. As a science fiction writer, I look for the alien...and the past is an alien country with mindsets that our not ours. And naturally I am always looking for the alien in the familiar, for that strange kind of magical sense of wonder, that frisson that makes me want to write. That’s why all of my work, even the mainstream work, has an underlay of magical realism. I think that magical realism describes something vital and evocative about our lives. It’s that numinal, luminous, vital stuff that interests and excites me. That’s what I want to write about. In science fiction that’s the sense of wonder. Even with The Silent, which is a Civil War novel, I was using techniques gained by writing science fiction to create my young character Mundy McDowell. He is dislocated and alienated. He has witnessed the rape and murder of his mother, heard the screams of his father, who was trapped in his burning house. So Mundy makes himself...invisible and follows ghosts and spirits, who teach him how to survive. That’s the kind of stuff that interests me. That’s the underlay of this “mainstream” novel. I used genre techniques to extend the layering of consciousness of my young protagonist.

Q: Does he literally become invisible?

Dann: He thinks he’s becoming invisible. The Silent is narrated in first person point of view. Mundy is a darker version of Huck Finn. As a reader you see how Mundy reconstructs reality; you see the world through his sensorium...through his eyes, the eyes of a child, and if I’ve done my job properly, you’ll also see with a sort of double vision—you’ll see the past through the lens of the present, and through the eyes of a child of the nineteenth century. You’ll see Mundy’s world and the objective world superimposed. The fabulous inheres in the mundane. Our mundane, go-to-the-office-and-come-home lives are limned with the mysterious, shot through with the laser light of the numin. As a writer, I try to capture those magical and often terrible superimpositions. And I like to think that science fiction gives me an edge....

(Recorded at the World Fantasy Convention, Corpus Christi Texas, Oct 26-28, 2000)

An Afterword from the Present

Dann: Reading this interview conducted in October 2000 gave me a strange sense of déjà-vu. Much of it can stand, and I found myself...agreeing with myself. A lot of the politics have remained the same: John Howard’s conservative government is still in power here in Australia; and I’m still the proverbial stranger in a strange land, although the strange land has become home in some ineffable, profound way. But home is also Los Angeles and Binghamton and New York. Where else (but New York) can you get an egg cream, I ask you?

But in some ways this interview feels like it was written long, long ago in some sense because it was pre-9/11. A time when Americans were unbeaten, when we were the iconic leaders of the pack. We are still all of that...yet we aren’t. We’ve become something different. The world has shifted.

America has become darker, less secure, and the sinister shadows of fear are growing ever longer. Our culture is fracturing at the edges while its center is becoming more homogenous. Our President is acting out a religious morality play. And we are experiencing political and cognitive dissonance.

Australia, which prided itself on being “the Great Experiment,” has been flatlined by conservative politics. It has become an integral part of the Coalition of the Willing...America’s “Sheriff in Asia.” Education, which was free when I arrived here, is free no longer. The majority of citizens have done quite well economically—Australia is a Standard & Poor’s dream—but Australians have become politically passive and unaware, while a pro-business, anti-union government has profoundly changed the nature of workplace relations. We’re reliving the greedy eighties here in Australia, and arbitrage and Reagan’s trickle-down theories reign supreme.

Yet the culture remains vibrant, and Janeen and I spend most of our time writing at our farm by the sea, and making forays to our apartment in Melbourne.

A good life between the lengthening shadows.

And the Dean book was published in 2004, titled The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. The U.S. paperback edition should be in bookstores by the time this goes to press. Although I would guess that a lot of my genre readers didn’t see the book, which was packaged as mainstream, the genre reviews were terrific. (Locus: “Jimmy’s personal discussions and confrontations, often by phone, possess a crackling laconic energy worthy of a powerful film script. In this Dann has embraced a technique perfect for a Hollywood psychological novel, and it is by his words, tender or frenzied, that the phantom of James Dean acquires full, extraordinary life. No superficial Tinseltown gossip here, no languorous intrigues on the film set: instead, private torment, public rage.”)

Some of the mainstream reviewers loved the book, others couldn’t understand the idea of writing alternate history as literary mainstream (But James Dean died! How can you write a book about his life after the accident?), and a few became really upset with my literary icon-smashing. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, called The Rebel “Relentlessly trashy and profane, name-dropping and scandal-mongering”...“a Harold Robbins-style tale of gratuitous sex, ambition, and famous people behaving badly.” (I really did try to explain to my film agent that this was a negative review, but she just wouldn’t believe me.)

I still haven’t written my “Australian” novel. I’m working on a novel based on my novella “The Diamond Pit.” I’m still fascinated with America and the American Dream, and the novel will be a sort of family saga that begins in the 1800’s, works its way through the 1920’s and into the present. Well, I think it will end in the present. For me, stories are live things that constantly surprise and confound all my preconceived plots. Oh, yes, I’ve done a collection of my collaborative short stories called The Fiction Factory, which will be published in October; and I’m working on a number of anthologies. I’m also working on a psychological novel about nasty politics tentatively titled Extra Duty.

After all, I have to keep up my reputation as the new Harold Robbins.

19 June 2005

Windhover Farm

Australia