James
Morrow was born March 17, 1947 in Philadelphia. He received a
B.A. in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania and
went on to get an M.A. in teaching from Harvard Graduate School.
Morrow worked in various public schools for the next seven years
then in 1978 he left the education field to pursue a writing career.
His first book,The Wine of Violence, was released in 1981.
It was followed by many award winning novels and short stories
over the last twenty years. His latest book The Eternal Footman
is in stores now.
ACS:
What prompted you to devote a decade of your writing career to
religious SF and Fantasy?
JM: I've always been drawn to the "epic"
format - whether in film, theater, poetry, or the novel. Given
that affection, that love of narratives that range across many
years, locations, and modalities, it was only a matter of time
before I attempted a magnum opus. As you know, I've been calling
the result the Godhead Trilogy: Towing Jehovah,
Blameless in Abaddon, and - just released - The
Eternal Footman. And, good God, you're right - it really
did consume a decade of my life, didn't it?
Then, of course, there's that earlier novel of
mine, Only Begotten Daughter, in which I'm clearly
rehearsing many of the themes and obsessions that appear in the
Corpus Dei books. You might say that Only Begotten Daughter
is to the Godhead Trilogy as The Hobbit is to The
Lord of the Rings. The similarity ends there, though:
Tolkien and I don't see the world the same way.
At one level, the Corpus Dei cycle is my
answer to the Divine Comedy. In Towing Jehovah,
the characters find themselves in a kind of Purgatory, a normless,
aimless, Godless reality. Blameless in Abaddon corresponds
to the Inferno - indeed, Abaddon means "Hell" in
Hebrew. The Eternal Footman explores the possibility
of a post-theistic world that, while not Utopia, is better than
what obtains now. So that novel could be mapped onto the Paradiso.
Now, this is admittedly a rather cerebral way
of looking at the Corpus Dei books. What I really value
about the Godhead Trilogy is the opportunity it gave me to wrestle
with large philosophical questions. Towing asks,
"Where does morality come from?" Blameless asks,
"Why does an omnibenevolent Creator permit suffering?" Footman
asks, "What might the world look like if God required us to shed
our dependence on Him?" Each book was a kind of literary "thought
experiment," to borrow a term from Einstein. I didn't answer any
of the questions definitively, but I explored the competing possibilities
as elaborately as I could.
ACS: Did you have a hard time selling
your Godhead Trilogy?
JM: Believe it or not, two different publishers wanted
to stake me to this project, even though it existed only in the
form of a few sample chapters, a crude outline for Towing,
and one-paragraph summaries of the sequels. I was evidently benefitting
from the unexpected success of Only Begotten Daughter.
It had just received the World Fantasy Award, and the paperback
had found an audience, so there was a vague perception out there
that I was some sort of hot writer.
I give Harcourt Brace a lot of credit for their faith in me.
They probably won't get rich from the Godhead Trilogy, but these
three "thought experiments" do exist now, and I like to believe
they each make a contribution to the neverending conversation
(at least, I hope it's a neverending conversation) our species
is having with itself about God and the enigma of existence.
ACS: Will you be writing any more "Bible Stories for Adults"?
JM: If I had world enough and time, I would love to pursue
that project. What pieces of Scripture might I grapple with in
the future? Let me think. Well, from Blameless in Abaddon,
it's obvious that I have lots to say about the Binding of Isaac.
In The Eternal Footman, you'll find an irreverent
discussion of the Empty Tomb from the Gospels, so maybe I'll spin
that into a separate story. And I suspect that the Garden of Eden
would lend itself to an SF treatment, though I hear that's been
done.
I'm pretty sure I could do something Morrovian with Jonah and
the Whale. Maybe his relationship with the "great fish" is more
complicated than the Bible leads us to believe. All during his
career as a preacher, Jonah keeps longing to be swallowed again.
Eventually this occurs, and he and the whale spend their lives
tooling around the universe together. Now all I need is a plot...
ACS: I understand that you've worked in film. Are any
of your films available for viewing, or will any new films be
coming out soon?
JM:
All during high school, I made short 8mm horror films (and one
long comedy) with two of my best friends, Joe Adamson and Dave
Stone. Years later, when we were in our mid-twenties, we scraped
together $20,000 and made a 16mm satiric short, combining live
action with animation, called "A Political Cartoon." It's all
about Peter President, a cartoon character who gets elected to
the highest office in the land, and you can currently find it
on a VHS anthology from Kino on Video called Cartoongate!
By the
way, Joe and Dave both went on to work in Hollywood. Joe won an
Emmy for his PBS documentary called W.C. Fields Straight
Up, and Dave received an Oscar for cutting the sound on
Coppola's Dracula.
In recent
years, I've started looking to Hollywood as a possible source
of financial stability. About four years ago, my wife and I wrote
a feature script - "on spec," as they say. Then we ran into a
wretched piece of luck. A John Travolta movie called Face/Off
appeared, and it had virtually the same premise. However, our
L.A. agent is trying to turn this unintended similarity into an
asset; he's calling it "The Fugitive out of Face/Off."
If it's ever produced, it will probably be as a made-for-TV movie.
ACS:
What can you tell us about your Alamo book, John and the
Cosmos?
JM:
At the moment this project is on the back burner. I conceived
it as part of a new Morrow trilogy: three interconnected novels
about the American Dream. But then I decided that I didn't want
to commit myself to another magnum opus. I figured it would make
more sense to write each book as a stand-alone novel, without
consciously creating any narrative or even thematic connections.
The first
American Dream novel is now well under way, and Harcourt will
publish it sometime in 2001. It's called The Last Witchfinder,
and it's about a woman whose father hangs witches for a living
in Restoration England. Eventually her unhappy little family travels
to America and gets involved in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Much later, in her forties, my heroine becomes romantically involved
with the young Benjamin Frankin - he always appreciated mature
women, as one of his essays reveals - and together they try to
destroy the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act, which gave disasters
like the Salem persecutions their patina of legality.
Maybe I'll
follow this novel with John and the Cosmos - I'm
not sure. It will begin in 1959, and the main character will be
a fictional rival of John Wayne's. Both men are struggling to
complete epic movies about the fall of the Alamo. Before long,
my hero is abducted by aliens and transported into the future,
where he beholds the horrors of the Vietnam war. The aliens convince
him that, if he makes a pacifist film about the Alamo,
most Americans will turn against their country's military involvement
in Southeast Asia, and the Vietnam tragedy will be averted.
ACS: How did you set about the daunting
task of researching religious writings for Blameless in
Abaddon? How long did this take?
JM: I'm glad you inferred that Blameless
took a lot of research, because it sure-as-hell did! Some critics
asserted that the various "theodicies" - explanations of divine
acquiescence to human suffering - were treated in a "cartoonish"
fashion. That certainly wasn't my intention. I'm not sure those
reviewers read the book very carefully.
Initially I thought I could get away with simply
reading C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain a couple
of times and then poking holes in his logic. I also had Jeffrey
Burton Russell's four-volume history of the Devil on my shelves,
which I'd acquired to research the Andrew Wyvern character in
Only Begotten Daughter. But about halfway through
the writing of Blameless, I realized that I wasn't
giving theodicy its due. Whatever one may think of Christianity
as a philosophical system, it certainly - unlike Lewis - takes
the problem of evil seriously.
So I threw myself into a massive research effort.
Luckily, I live down the street from the library of Penn State
University, where I unearthed about a dozen complex and sophisticated
books on the problem of evil by various philosophers and theologians.
I spend a couple of months plowing through them, penciling notes
in the margins (which I later dutifully erased) and trying to
decide how Martin Candle might respond to each argument.
I must say, though, that Lewis's The Problem
of Pain remained the main source of my energy during the
composition process. I truly detest that little book - and think
it is itself an evil - and my anger provided me with the needed
inspiration.
ACS: Do you get much fan mail? Hate mail?
JM: Now that I have a web site, I get
a fair amount of fan mail - two or three letters a week. It's
easy and very satisfying to answer them: e-mail technology is
great for that. No overt hate mail yet. A couple of cyber-evangelists
have blundered into my home page, doing Jesus searches or whatever.
They've been moved to fire off messages to the effect than my
soul is obviously in peril, and I would do well to seek Christian
salvation by sundown.
Most of the serious fiction written in American
and Europe flies well below the radar of the Christian Right.
They simply don't care to seek it out. Why should they? It certainly
isn't corrupting their constituency. As far as Jerry Falwell is
concerned, science fiction is ipso facto depraved, so why bother
making distinctions between the overt blasphemy of a James Morrow
and the mere earthy humanism of a Norman Spinrad?
Now, if somebody were to make a feature film
out of Only Begotten Daughter, I might consider
putting a Sherman tank or some other deterrent on my lawn. Even
low budget, modestly distributed movies like The Last Temptation
of Christ and The Handmaid's Tale drew flack
from the self-appointed preservers of Jesus' reputation.
Occasionally I'm interviewed on a live radio
program, and then I do inadvertently connect with the Christian
Right. A couple of times, a fundamentalist has pulled his car
over, called up the station, and demanded to know why they were
giving air time to Satan's press agent.
My fans sometimes suggest that I should arrange
for one of my books to become controverisal. For example, I could
assume the persona of an outraged believer and send a copy of
Towing Jehovah to Falwell or the Pope. Such propositions
are always made half seriously, and I always listen to them half
seriously, but I'm sure I'll never try any such stunts. It wouldn't
be honest, and besides, it might work, and then I'd really
be in trouble.
ACS: Have you considered expanding any
of your stories into a novel? How about "Spelling God with the
Wrong Blocks," your evolution story?
JM: As they stand, most of my stories
are a bit too gimmicky to sustain entire novels. I think somebody
could make a pretty good feature film, sentimental in the positive
sense, from my story "Daughter Earth." I got a chance to explore
its dramatic possibilities recently when I adapted it as a radio
play for Seeing Ear Theater. You can tune it in by roving around
the Sci-Fi Channel's web site.
And I recently adapted "The Deluge" - with many
changes and elaborations - into a film treatment, but I won't
write the actual script unless someone pays me.
It's interesting that you singled out "Spelling
God With the Wrong Blocks," because for awhile I was pretty sure
that my second novel, the follow-up to The Wine of
Violence, would be about robots who have no idea where
they come from or what "nature" is. I planned to call it Mind
and Iron, a phrase the occurs early in Asimov's I,
Robot. But the material never really caught fire for me
as a novel, and eventually I transmuted it into "Spelling God."
I do have an evolution novel in mind,
because the agenda of so-called scientific creationists continues
to drive me crazy. It would be a kind of loopy, SF version of
Inherit the Wind. On a distant planet, an alien
society has become violently divided over the issue of Natural
Selection vs. Special Creation. They decide to resolve the matter
by a clash of arms (don't ask me why), and they select Earth as
their battleground. So suddenly we have to settle the issue,
so our planet won't be laid waste by extraterrestrial theology.
This premise is still very much in embryo. If anyone reading this
interview wants to offer me some ideas for fleshing it out, I
would be happy to steal them.
To learn more about James Morrow, or read
the first two chapters of his new book check out his web
page. James Morrow will sign The Eternal Footman at
Adventures in Crime and Space Friday, November 19, 6:00-8:00 PM.
Order a copy of his new book for the
signing.
