Growing up in Hawai'i it's impossible to not know a little something about Hawaiian mythology and Madam Pele, the immortal goddess who dwells in Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Being interested in mythology and fantasy as I am, you can imagine that I'd want to know a little more about the Hawaiian gods than the average person on the street. So you can imagine my pleasure when a book like Fires of Eden comes along, interweaving things I know about with places I've been to!
Mr. Dan Simmons, the author of Fires of Eden, kindly consented to do an e-mail interview with me, and now you get to enjoy the results! So please, read on and find out more about Mr. Simmons and his thoughts on his (to my biased perceptions) awesome, outstanding novel!
The interview that follows comes from e-mail messages sent back and forth between myself and Mr. Simmons. I've filtered the interview down somewhat, but all with his approval. Enjoy!--XS
XS: I assume "Dan Simmons" is your real name.
DS: Yes. Well, I sign my checks "Daniel J. Simmons." During 18 years of teaching elementary-level, my students referred to me as "Mr. Simmons" (and I accorded them equal respect).
XS: I'm learning about how important that is in my Education classes. Sorry, please continue.
DS: When I began publishing in 1982, I decided that "Dan Simmons" was the proper form of my name to appear on books and stories and so it has.
XS: Have you ever considered using a pseudonym?
DS: I've never been tempted to write under a pseudonym. Then again, I've never had to write pornography to make ends meet.
XS: Er...um...okay. Where do you live, if you don't mind my asking?
DS: I live in Colorado, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains (near Boulder, north of Denver). Much of my writing is done at our "cabin"--a wonderfully comfortable place surrounded by 100,000 acres of national forest and watched over by an 8-foot-tall sculpture of the Shrike--at about 8,000 ft. altitude, tucked near the base of Mt. Meeker and Long's Peak.
XS: I passed through Rocky Mountains National Park and Boulder once. That area is breathtaking! I envy you...though I wouldn't give up Hawai'i for the world. Were you born and raised in Colorado?
DS: I grew up in the Midwest--Illinois, Iowa, Indiana--and worked in Missouri and New York state as a teacher before moving to Colorado in 1974.
XS: What was your family life like as you were growing up?
DS: No traumatic tales to tell. There were three boys in the family--my older brother Ted, younger brother Wayne, and me--and my parents Robert and Kathryn Simmons. I realize now that we were "poor" by modern standards--my folks couldn't afford to buy even a modest home until they were in their late 40's--but money issues in those days were the problem of the adults and they didn't put the burden on the kids. I was a happy kid.
XS: Well, nothing traumatic, huh? How about a fond memory or two?
DS: Some of my fondest memories of childhood are expressed in my novel Summer of Night and consist of living in a small Midwestern town with plenty of friends and celebrating the freedom of summer, taking off in the morning on bikes and returning late in the evening...an amazing freedom compared to the regimented, fear-bound lives of kids today.
XS: Growing up in the '70s and '80s as I did, I guess I can't really imagine that kind of freedom.
DS: In the late 1950s, children had a world of their own. They also had what I refer to as "the secrets and silences of childhood," a complex inner life which nostalgia purveyors such as Disney Corporation will never understand.
XS: I suppose I'll never understand it either. What is your family life like now?
DS: I'm currently married (25 years this month [August--XS]) and have a 17-year-old daughter who is not only smarter than me but also wiser (as is her mother).
XS: What educational level did you achieve?
DS: I have an undergraduate B.A. in English--
XS: Just like me!
DS: --with honors--
XS: Rats.
DS: --from Wabash College (1970), a Master's degree in Education (kindergarten through junior college certified) from Washington University in St. Louis, several dozen additional hours of educational courses, and an honorary doctorate awarded to me by my alma mater, Wabash.
XS: Impressive! I wonder if I'll ever accomplish as much. Oh, well. So, what drew you into writing?
DS: I loved story-telling, even as a kid, and attempted my first typed story--a science fiction adventure--when in fourth grade, tapping out the tale on the tough keys of an ancient Underwood upright typewriter. By fifth grade, I was writing sequels to The Wizard of Oz for my classmates (not knowing that such sequels already existed).
XS: It took me a while to discover that, too.
DS: In the end, of course, it was reading which drew me into writing.
XS: Of course. How did you learn to write creatively? Did you take classes or are you entirely self taught, or...?
DS: I think that most writers are "self-taught" in the sense that the reading-writing-reading-writing loop feedback is the only way to immerse one's self in writing, but I had one fiction-writing course in college that was seminal for me. In the movie "Hearts of the West" the old writer-turned-stuntman (Andy Griffith) tells the young stuntman-wanna-be-writer (Jeff Bridges), "Son, you're a writer when someone else tells you you're a writer." Harlan Ellison has amended this to "You're a writer when another writer tells you that you're a writer." I tend to agree with this.
XS: I don't suppose you could...no, never mind. Who are the biggest influences on your craft?
DS: Too many "influences" to list--I admire so many writers, especially like John Fowles, Saul Bellow, Richard Matheson, etc.--but my style is essentially my own through all of my books, across the various genres. I've always had my own "voice"--i.e., reading lots of Hemingway doesn't make me try to write like Hemingway, ditto Steinbeck or Norman Mailer or J.G. Ballard or any other powerful stylistic writer.
XS: I's say that's a lot of influences right there. Where do you draw your inpsiration for writing subjects from?
DS: Inspirations come from every aspect of encountered life and art for a good writer. As Hemingway said, "...such a writer finds rain [note--the "rain" of real fiction, as opposed to "feeding on the dried manure of schism and the dusty taste of dispute dialectics"] to be made of knowledge, experience, wine, bread, oil, salt, vinegar, bed, early mornings, nights, days, the sea, men, women, dogs, beloved motor cars, bicycles, hills and valleys, the appearance and disappearance of trains on straight and curved tracks, love, honor and disobey, music, chamber music and chamber pots, negative and positive Wassermanns, the arrival and non-arrival of expected munitions and/or reinforcements, replacements or your brother. All these are part of rain to a good writer along with your hated or beloved mother, may she rest in peace and pieces, porcupine quills, cock grouse drumming on a basswood log, the smell of sweet grass and fresh-smoked leather and Sicily" (from an introduction to a novel by Elio Vittorini).
XS: "Chamber pots?" Chamber pots?
DS: Or as Homer put it even earlier--"Dear to us ever is the banquet and the harp and the dance and changes of raiment and the warm bath and love and sleep." Here are the inspirations for writing.
XS: That I understood. What genres do you write in? Horror, I know, and sci-fi, but any others?
DS: I've written some science fiction and horror, but--in truth--the vast majority of my 15 published books cross genres. Some, like the most recent The Crook Factory (about Hemingway in Cuba) and Phases of Gravity are absolutely mainstream novels. My just-finished novel, Darwin's Blade, is a suspense novel about auto insurance fraud and the Russian mafia.
XS: I'm not sure how those two go together but...what genres would you like to write in? That you haven't written in already, of course.
DS: I've never done an espionage novel--nor a true hard-boiled detective tale--and it would be fun to try those.
XS: I'll look forward to seeing one sometime, then. What do you find easiest about writing?
DS: Ideas.
XS: How about most difficult?
DS: Writing well. That's why there are only about 300-500 men and women in America who can make a living writing fiction.
XS: I see. What do you feel to be your greatest strength?
DS: Probably respect for the reader's intelligence.
XS: How about your greatest weakness?
DS: Weakness? They're legion.
XS: You couldn't tell it from what I read. What kinds of problems have you encountered since you began writing?
DS: Publishing houses going bankrupt just as one delivers a manuscript--
XS: Ouch!
DS: --a few idiot editors, pressure to keep writing the same book over and over (resisted), constant deadlines, lack of publisher support for a book, the low taste of the general reading public (Grisham, etc.) and the pandering to that taste by publishers, illness, loss, exhaustion, exhilaration, bad covers, foolish book tours...I'll stop before I get started.
XS: Okay...do you believe in "writer's block"?
DS: I tend to agree with the theory that Writer's Block is the book's way of saying, "Stop, something's not right here"--I've not suffered it per se--just as Death is Nature's way of saying, "Slow down."
XS: Do you get a special feeling each time you see one of your books in print?
DS: Not really. I'm too preoccupied with whatever current project is possessing me.
XS: Now, let's talk about Fires of Eden. I'm sure you can understand my appreciation for it. What drew you to craft this novel? I mean, where did the inspiration for it come from? You weren't flying over Kilauea in a helicopter by any chance, were you?
DS: The idea for Fires of Eden came during a vacation my wife and I were taking on the Big Island. We were in a van being driven to the Mauna Kea Hotel, the day was beautiful, when Karen said, "It would be hard to write a horror novel about this place." At the same moment, another passenger in the van, actor/comedian Artie Johnson, said, "Right over there is a lava tube that runs about 20 miles down from the volcano." I knew right then that I wanted to write a Hawaiian horror novel.
XS: Then you've obviously been to Hawai'i. I imagine this book required a great deal of time and research. How do you feel about doing research for your novels in general?
DS: I enjoy researching my novels. That research has taken me to Dracula's childhood home in Sighisoara, Transylvania, to the sex-club streets of Thailand, to the darkest alleys of Calcutta, to Hemingway's 1942 Cuba, and to Peoria, Illinois.
XS: You're very well-traveled. How did you feel about researching Fires of Eden?
DS: The Hawai'i research was the easiest I've ever done.
XS: I like the metaphor of rape that you used with regards to the ruination of the land. How did you come up with that particular one?
DS: Fires of Eden was more about the difficulty facing women--in the 19th century and today--in being truly independent creatures more than it was about goddesses or monsters. Ecological rape was one of several metaphors that were woven into the book.
XS: I guess I noticed the "ecological rape" most, then. What led you to set up two parallel stories--the one in the past and the one in the present?
DS: I liked the resonance of the "Aunt Kidder/Mark Twain" tale and the "Eleanor and Cordie" tale. It also showed the kinship of several independent women across more than a century of time. "Aunt Kidder" was modeled on Isabella Bird and other Victorian-Era female travel writers and adventurers.
XS: Setting up the male gods and demi-gods against Pele seemed like a one-sided match. Did you plan it that way? I mean, I can understand why you might limit the goddesses to Pele alone--I know something about her relationship with Kamapua'a, after all--but didn't the sides seem a bit uneven?
DS: Everything in a novel is planned, whether consciously or otherwise. A novel is a minded thing.
XS: Well, I guess that answers that. I haven't taken the opportunity to read about Mark Twain's visit to Hawai'i, so I'm sort of wondering--since you probably read it doing the research--whether there was opportunity for him to be involved in everything Aunt Kidder wrote about.
DS: Many of Mark Twain's adventures in Hawai'i in Fires of Eden are based on Twain's adventures and misadventures there. It was his visit to "the Sandwich Islands" that made him famous--both because of his coverage of a shipwreck while there and the lectures he gave upon returning to the States. Hawai'i made Twain Twain--literally. Before that, he was writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.
XS: You know, no matter how often I see that I can't help but wince. Anyway, let's go on. As central as Eleanor Perry was to the plot, I think I liked Cordie Stumpf the best. She hardly seems the type to be a heroine, yet she was, wasn't she? Where did you find the inspirtation for her?
DS: "Cordie Stumpf" was 11-year-old "Cordie Cooke" in my earlier novel, Summer of Night. I was curious what Cordie would be like 30-some years later.
XS: Aunt Kidder was a similarly attractive character...she really held my attention, what with her standing toe-to-toe and barb-to-whimsical jab with Twain. Although...she didn't really seem to be the kind of woman 19th century American writers described. Was there a reason for making her so distinguishable? Or did I just answer my own question?
DS: As mentioned, Aunt Kidder was based very heavily on the lives and writings of such real 19th century female travel-writers as Isabella L. Bird (as in Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands, 1890) and other female correspondents of the age. Their literary style was amazing and their adventures were even more exciting than my novelized version.
XS: Hmm. You've piqued my interst. Now, another thing I liked were the descriptions of the cockroaches Kidder and party had to deal with aboard the ship. I take it you've had experience with them? Someone told me that cockroaches in the continental U.S. are nothing compared to the ones we have here in Hawai'i: 747's and B-52's and C-130's (well, that's what my family calls the big ones that fly at you). How would you compare them?
DS: When Mark Twain saw Haleakala at dawn, he wrote, "I've seen Vesuvius and it's just a tea kettle compared to this." I've seen New York cockroaches and Hawaiian cockroaches and the former are midgets.
XS: Gee, what a claim to fame for us. How do you feel about Hawai'i?
DS: My favorite spot on planet Earth is the area--Kipahulu--beyond Hana where [Charles] Lindbergh is buried. I love the parts of Hawai'i--such as Hana--where the native peoples still own their own land and have kept things as close to the old Hawai'i as is possible at the beginning of the 21st century.
XS: That's an admirable view. Now, how do you feel about Hawai'i's cockroaches?
DS: You seem to have a cockroach fixation.
XS: After finding out that our roaches are bigger than the ones in New York? Sure! Seriously, though, is there any chance you might set another story in Hawai'i, maybe this time involving some of the other goddesses you mentioned, like Poliahu, Hi'iaka, or Na-maka-o-Kaha'i? Or maybe Maui the demi-god?
DS: No plans to set any future stories or novels in Hawai'i...but such things creep into one's fiction. Check out references to "the Maui Covenant" in my Hyperion novels.
XS: What projects are you working on now, and what are your plans for future projects?
DS: I've just finished the fourth and final draft of a screenplay adaptation of my novel Children of the Night for Germany's "Twin Films," to be directed by Robert Sigl. That was fun. My next novel to be published (Spring 2000) will be Darwin's Blade and I'm beginning a new novel, The Hounds of Winter, next week [of August 8, 1999--XS] while vacationing on the Big Island.
XS: I wouldn't mind seeing a movie of Children of the Night. Any parting comments?
DS: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth ofthe Imagination..." John Keats in a letter to a friend.
Well, there you have it. I enjoyed learning more about this terrific author, and I hope you did, too. If you have a comment or question of your own for Mr. Simmons, please e-mail him at DSimSHRIKE@aol.com. Also, please take a look at my reviews of Fires of Eden and Children of the Night, and read those and others of his works.
Comments? Suggestions? Just click here to send me e-mail.
Back Home Back to Starfire Reviews Back to Corridors of Communication
Get your own Free Home Page