John Shirley 

Interview to Rudy Rucker

for The 2003 Readercon book. Pinole, California 3/3/2003

Q: What are the  three most important events  of your life apart  from
your marriage and children?

A: That’s  kind of  an unrealistic  question, like  why important, why
three, why should I  tell you, etc. But,  since you're a friend,  I’ll
complete the exercise. How about these three.

	(i) Having a vision on  Memorial Day weekend in 1970,  hearing
	God tell me He would always be there and would always love me,
	His voice close and warm inside my head.

	(ii) Meeting Robert Sheckley in the 1980s and finding that  my
	boyhood SF hero was a  fellow human perfectly willing to  be a
	friend, and learning that all along Sheckley’s science-fiction
	had actually  been about  his real  life, just  like the way I
	wanted to write.

	(iii) Going  hiking in  Yosemite in  1992 with  my son  in and
	realizing that the Universe is held together by Love.

It’s all about God or Robert Sheckley...

Q: What is seminal now?

A: The last two years I've been writing an epic SF fantasy  structured
along  the lines  of the  Monomyth stages  in Campbell's  Hero with  a
Thousand Faces.  It's called  Frek and  the Elixir.  The hero  Frek is
twelve and the book is set on a bio-collapsed Earth in 3003 ---  there
only about ten kinds of animals and plants left. Frek journeys to  the
center  of our  galaxy to  get a  kind of  elixir to  restore Earth's
missing plants and animals.

I was working  with a deeper  breath in Frek,  that is, I  used longer
chapters. With long  chapters and fifteen  monomyth stages, the  novel
came out to about  170,000 words, nearly twice  as long as most  of my
others, which  is what  I wanted.  I'd always  wanted to  write a long
novel. I just wrote the last page of the first draft yesterday.

What I write next is totally up in the air. Lately I’ve been  thinking
a lot about how  to move to a  higher level of commercial  success. It
would be nice to  get enough royalties to  retire from teaching. I  do
realize that  commercial concerns  can become  a will  ‘o the  wisp, a
distraction. There’s no cosmic reason why I necessarily “deserve”  the
big bucks.  I would  do well  to be  content with  the level that I’ve
achieved. But still...

I'd dreamed that my historical Peter Bruegel novel As Above, So  Below
would be a cross-over best-seller,  and that I would write  a followup
novel about Bosch, but in fact my book’s had very few reviews, so  I’m
not so optimistic on that front anymore.

Frek represents my  newest strategy for  scoring big in  novel market,
it’s my take on the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter route. If  Frek
does well,  I’d love  to write  a sequel.  I like  Frek’s world. But I
think I’d want to do something else before I go jump back into it.

The reviews and sales for  my last year’s novel Spaceland,  are pretty
good.  I can  easily imagine  knocking out  another short  present-day
Silicon Valley novel. I have a couple of ideas.

People  sometimes  advise  me  to  write  a  non-fiction  science book
relating to mathematics or computers.  I teach computer science as  my
day job, and I’m somewhat over-familiar with the material, a bit jaded
and lacking in the proper gee-whiz spirit. But I could get excited  if
I got a huge advance. “This is important.”

I enjoy writing fiction more than non-fiction. Fiction lets me be more
creative; there’s a lot of discovery and surprise. And fiction lets me
express deeper things than non-fiction  can reach; I can put  my whole
self into it.