New Taboos (11 page)

I think of cyberpunk as SF plus noir (or vice versa). How would you describe it? After all, you were there.

Your description is not far from mine. And I always quote Gibson: “The street has its own uses for things.” People on the street, or the poor, the underclasses, can appropriate technology and use it against the power structure; use it to challenge the status quo. Look what happened in the Arab Spring. Look what Anonymous does, or WikiLeaks. It's not all good. But it's all cyberpunk.

“Dystopian” seems a rather gentle euphemism for the worlds you create. Have you ever written a utopian novel or story?

I sometimes take things in a metaphysical direction—I prefer that term to “spiritual.” I'm influenced by Aldous Huxley, who did that so well in
Time Must Have a Stop,
and
The Perennial Philosophy.
In those metaphysical explorations we find doorways “out” of the worst of the human dilemma; or a transcendence of it—a right relationship to our condition. Right congruence.

Usually even my darkest novels, like
Everything Is Broken
or
Demons,
have a resolution where things are at least improved; where there's hope, a direction to go in. But getting there can be hell.

The Other End
is a novel of alternative apocalypse, where I make up the Judgment Day I'd like to see. It's a Judgment Day without an angry God, but there's still … something. And that's a kind of utopian vision, I guess.

The idea of city personified animates your classic
City Come A-Walkin'.
Fritz Leiber had a different take on the same theme (and same city) in
Our Lady of Darkness.
Was the old German an influence?

I don't think I read
Our Lady of Darkness,
but another Germanic fellow (he was Swiss) was an influence: Carl Jung.
City Come A-Walkin'
is a bit influenced by Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious, but mostly influenced by my stays in San Francisco at an impressionable time, and by the music and lyrical content of Patti Smith. I simply perceived cities that way—each had its own mind. City as a kind of organism.
City Come A-Walkin'
was also influenced by my involvement in progressive, edgy, prepunk rock 'n' roll. I was trying to capture that feel, that energy, that pulse.

I have always tried to fuse things, to bring contrasting art forms into some kind of creative unity. It seems contradictory to fuse storytelling with surrealism (hence someone had to make up the term “magic realism”)—real surrealism shouldn't be rational enough to have the internal logic of a story. But I have tried, anyway, and succeeded at times, or so I am told. J.G. Ballard of course did it in novels like
The Crystal World.
He has always been an inspiration.

I often think of SF and Fantasy as this jumble shop of ideas to be examined, reused, appropriated, and returned—a commons, if you will. Your thoughts on the copyright/commons debate. Should music be free? What about literature?

I'm a person who makes a living from intellectual property. I have an album—mostly songs, not readings—that came out in January 2013, from Black October Records. So I don't leap headlong into Creative Commons for books and music.

Having said that, I do think it's possible to worry too much about, say, free music downloading.
South Park
made fun of Metallica: the poor Metallica musician had to buy a
slightly smaller
private jet because of music piracy! Well, I don't have a private jet but I don't like it when
The Crow
(I was co-scripter for the movie) is pirated, as I get money from DVD sales.

And yet my son has almost convinced me that there's room for it all. For example, a lot of artists put free stuff up on YouTube to publicize their work. If you offer a song free, people will buy your album. I have some of my short stories free at my blog in hopes of encouraging people to buy books.

Tell us about your work with Blue Öyster Cult. Was this a natural fit?

I wrote lyrics for them—eighteen songs. BOC is “the thinking man's hard rock band.” Their music is intricate, their lyrics vary between deliberately ironic and chilling. They often used horror and science fiction imagery, stuff that had
the resonance of Lovecraft or Bradbury. They had a vision of a dark underlying reality behind the accepted human world, and I identified with that point of view. You find something like that in the shadowy organizations behind a futuristic neofascism in
A Song Called Youth,
my cyberpunk trilogy—even though I tend to disdain conspiracy theories.

And in fact my first novel is called
Transmaniacon,
which is the name of a Blue Öyster Cult song. In my rather jejune way I dedicated it to them and to Patti Smith (who also wrote lyrics for the Blue Öyster Cult—as did Michael Moorcock). The band was aware of me because of the book, and many years later I got the invitation to write lyrics for them. And jumped at it.

The Crow
has a dark history. What was your share in all that?

I found the comic, which was obscure, took it to a producer who optioned it (attaching me as screenwriter). It's not an accident the comic was movie-like, since James O'Barr, the creator of
The Crow,
was into Japanese samurai films. I wrote the first four drafts of the script but didn't get along with one of the producers.

I wanted to have a ruthless corporate scumbag be the main bad guy in
The Crow,
but the producer I had the runin with came from a family that owned a big corporation. He insisted on changing it, I argued with him, and soon I was out. They brought David Schow in for a rewrite, and he did fine. So Schow and I share the credit.

Obviously the real shadow on
The Crow
was the death of its star, Brandon Lee, during filming. Just an accident, something stuck in the barrel of a prop gun, and a
powerful blank shell … but it could have been avoided. The movie was mostly done when he died, and they paid a settlement, then finished the film in post, and it was a hit. All in all it was a good movie, seething with stylistic originality, because despite the tragic accident, it had the right director, Alex Proyas.

Any movie projects in the works? There were rumors about
Demons
…

My novel
Demons
has been optioned a few times. The Weinstein brothers optioned and reoptioned it, and they had a director attached, and a script. But then the recession hit, and the Weinsteins almost went broke. They had to ditch most of their film projects and refinance, so the film was dropped.

But there's interest, still.
Demons
is a nightmarish novel, with spiritual overtones, having to do with demons invading Earth the way hostile extraterrestrials do in other tales. And it's an allegory about how far industry is willing to go in sacrificing innocent people for the sake of profits …

Your nonfiction book on Gurdjieff shows not only an understanding but a sort of affinity. How did this project come about?

It was the product of fifteen some-odd years of intense reading in spirituality and philosophy. People like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley and William James and Meister Eckhart and Lao Tzu and Ramakrishna and Emerson
and Thoreau. Zen writers like Shunryu Suzuki. Sufism, Christian mysticism, certain forms of Gnosticism—even old C.S. Lewis. In philosophy, Plato (the
Timaeus
dialogue), Spinoza …

Then I read an interview with Jacob Needleman about Gurdjieff's ideas on the human condition. And I felt, yeah, that's right! Needleman's book
Time and the Soul
had a great influence on my thinking. So I became a student of Needleman and, through him, of Gurdjieff. Essentially, Gurdjieff says that we're all psychological machines; that we're asleep when we think we're awake. But even though we are unconscious, there are moments of freedom and liberation. And it's possible to develop something inwardly that can be freer yet, and more conscious.

Me, I wanted practical results. I didn't want to jabber about spirituality. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be in command of myself—I'd been such a bull in a china shop, in my life! Most of all I wanted to be more conscious. How could I get there, practically speaking? The Gurdjieff Foundation provided specific methods. To my astonishment, the methods really helped. I am not conscious, but I can see the signposts to a fuller consciousness.

So when Penguin gave me the chance to do a serious book on the subject, an intro to Gurdjieff's life and ideas, I jumped at it.

But while I'm influenced by Gurdjieff, and use his methods, I'm influenced by Zazen methodology too, and by the teachings of Krishnamurti. Yet it's not a vague mishmash. I am focused on a specific methodology, one you find in all the greatest metaphysical traditions, when you get to their inner, esoteric circle.

You have strong connections in cyberpunk, in underground comics, and in rock music. How did this come about? Does it all still fit together?

It overlaps more than fits together. Frank Zappa influenced underground comics; underground comics—for example, the work of Paul Mavrides and Jay Kinney and [Victor] Moscoso and Spain Rodriguez—influenced me, and so did Zappa and so did Captain Beefheart and so did King Crimson … and so did composers like Stravinsky and Varèse, for that matter. And Penderecki.

Groups as diverse as Blue Öyster Cult, the Rolling Stones, the Sisters of Mercy, Hawkwind, the Velvet Underground, artists like Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, John Lydon … they were all voracious readers. Most of them had read the better science fiction. Patti Smith was especially influenced by Baudelaire and Verlaine, as I was. And people in that scene had an appreciation for filmmakers like Fellini, like Kubrick, like Roeg …

Somehow it all made up a counterculture to the counterculture. We were outside the counterculture per se; we were our own underground counterculture, and it all overlapped.

Which do you like better, writing for TV or for comics (leaving aside the money)?

I've only written for comics once: a five-issue mini series for IDW:
The Crow: Death and Rebirth,
which is a sort of reboot of
The Crow
set in Japan (and in Japanese Buddhist hell). It was a good experience in some ways, frustrating in
others, but I got my story told. It's out in a graphic novel now.

So I haven't had that much experience with comics. But it wasn't as committee-oriented, in terms of the writing, as television. You're always filtered through producers and executives, “suits,” in TV and movies. Few people get to be
auteurs.
I'm still waiting for my first really satisfying film or TV writing experience. I had a bit more artistic freedom writing the comic.

Do you have a daily routine as writer? A certain bow tie, an heirloom chair, a time or word-count quota? (People like to know these things.)

So you know about the bow tie and the chair? Well, it's true: I tie a bow on a chair, and then the chair tells me what to write.

Beyond that, I try not to get up too late in the day, I try not to spend too much time online, and I usually end up writing from about noon till three. I take a break, then write till dinner. If I'm writing a work-for-hire piece I assign myself a certain number of pages per day. If I'm writing out of my own wellspring of inspiration, which naturally I prefer, I try to write at least five pages. Sometimes it will be more. Thank God for revision. I often start the writing day by revising what I wrote the previous day to get into the swing of the narrative.

That's fiction. Nonfiction, of course, I write nude, on my roof (in all weathers), wearing a balloon-animal hat.

What are you reading right now for fun?

Are we allowed to read for fun? I usually read biographies or historical fiction, at this time in my life. Now reading
1356
by Bernard Cornwell. I'm also a big fan of Patrick O'Brian and tend to reread him. I like reading something that edifies me and entertains me at the same time. Guilt free!

Did you learn anything useful from your stint in the Coast Guard?

Sure. I learned that I had a hell of a lot to learn. I learned that I was a clumsy, fairly absurd, loutish young snot. I learned respect for men who risk their lives to rescue people, too. It was all a bit like Kipling's
Captains Courageous,
but I didn't pull it off as well as his snotty boy did.

There is a persistent theme in your work: the battle between the young and the old. The good guys being usually the young. Has this changed over the years?

Not entirely. Over the years, I've accrued more understanding of elders, and of some traditions. But of course lots of traditions are vile and need to be dumped. Racism is traditional, customary in some places—a thing being customary doesn't make it good.

You will of course find more older people in my novels now that I've grown up. But when reediting earlier books I find I still connect with most of the writing. My
A Song Called Youth
(I think of it as one novel, and it is—in the Prime Books omnibus) was titled that because I knew, even back then, that youth has its own point of view. And it's all relative.

A reader described
Everything Is Broken,
your anti-libertarian thriller, as
Atlas Shrugged
turned on its head (a contortionist metaphor worthy of Cirque du Soleil!). What inspired that work?

Ugh, I hate to be compared to Ayn Rand at all. If it's on its head, it's because my thinking is the opposite of Ayn Rand's. What inspired the book was a reaction against Randian thinking, against Libertarianism, against the Tea Party.
Everything Is Broken
is a crime novel/disaster novel fusion that, underlyingly, is also an allegory about the value of community and the need to fight back against the Ayn Rands out there.

How would you describe your politics?