Pilgrimage to Peoria
Philip and Bette Farmer sitting in their living room. Craig and I alternated
asking questions and Bette came in towards the end of the interview with some
funny stories. However for simplicity I don't designate who asked a question
and who answered it.
We are all looking forward to NOTHING BURNS IN HELL. Are there any
familiar faces in this book, any mention of Tarzan or anything that someone
would read and think, "Oh, there's a Phil Farmer trademark"?
Well, the only trademark that I know would be that the protagonist is a
trickster, as Kickaha and Tarzan were, for instance. Many of my novels contain
tricksters, but I don't remember if I've written any short stories about
tricksters or not. I've always been very interested, ever since I was a child
and I came across books on North American mythology in the children's library.
The trickster was a universal figure among the North American Indians, as well
as in the myths, legends and fairy tales of all peoples, all over the world. I
do make reference in NOTHING BURNS IN HELL to the Peoria Indian trickster
Withihakako, "Withiha" for short. I'm trying to point out to the obtuse reader
that the guy is a trickster although most people will figure it out anyway. I
wanted to show what a long line of tricksters there were and how he fits right
in.
What's the main character's name?
Thomas Gresham Corbie; as a matter of fact Corbie is Scotch dialect for
crow. The crow, especially among the Northwest Indians, is the trickster
figure. If nobody understands that, that's all right, and if they do, it's a
little extra salt.
There seem to be literary references in most of your books, such as the
characters from the World of Tiers being named for characters from William
Blake. Or an uncommon word the average reader has to run to the dictionary to
look up.
Well that's true, I can't keep from doing it! {laughs}. Well, if you have
a lifelong background, and I'm almost 80 now, of stuff like that, why not use
it? Actually when I wrote the Doc Savage biography, I was doing what I'd been
prepared to do ever since I was 8 or 9. A lot of the stuff I could remember,
or I knew what to look up or to make up.
The bibliography of TARZAN ALIVE is very interesting. I've had people
here and in England trying to buy some of those obscure books referred to in
the bibliography, and they had some trouble. And I say no more {laughs}.
The thing is, they are all very authentic-sounding.
It's interesting, too, in Tarzan Alive how you have quotations from
Kickaha and from Paul Janus Finnegan.
Well, cross-transfer between my books, that's always been a thing with me.
But as far as NOTHING BURNS IN HELL, which is actually a P.I./Regional novel,
I did make a reference to Sherlock Holmes, but it was relevant. I don't think
I made any to Tarzan or anybody else. I'm trying to keep it sort of straight,
except for the trickster.
Is there a character in it that might be you, since it takes place in
Peoria? Any P.J.F.'s?
No. NBIH is actually the first of what I call a Peoria Genealogy, none of
which I am connected with. The main character, the narrator actually, of my
late 1950's novel, FIRE IN THE NIGHT, is Danny Alliger. The Alliger family is
implicated in NBIH, and they're one of the cases that my P.I. has. The P.I. is
the third cousin to the man who hired him, but he never mentions it. It will
be mentioned later on in another book.
I've wanted to write a book for a long time called PEARL DIVING IN OLD
PEORIA, a mainstream novel. Which is concerned also with a branch of the
Alliger family. Actually it's concerned with the father of my P.I. in NBIH
only when he was a young man coming back from WWII. His mother was an
Alliger. There is a very close emotional relationship between the
mother, who is trying to run this huge house she's inherited on High
Street. When the family had money, her branch of the Alliger family owned
it, then they lost their money and now she's running it as sort of a
boarding house. The two sons and daughter come back from the war.
Then I wanted to write a novel which takes place in the late 18th century
in French Peoria and the first Corbie that comes over. I might write one
later on about the first Alliger but it's a long range plan and I'm not
sure I'll live long enough to do it.
We actually have the PEARL DIVING question on our list, have you written
any of that or is it all in your head?
I've written numerous notes and very brief outlines of this or that
character or situation. I'm not a character in it. It's based on a group of
GIs I met when I went back to Bradley in '49. That was a fabulous group; it
would equal anything you'd find in Berkley or Greenwich Village back then.
All of the novel is in '48; it takes place at Bradley University or at the
Corbie household on High Street. In this novel, Mike Corbie, who's the father of the P.I., is a paratrooper in WWII.
Those are my plans, if I ever get an idea I just can't resist I'll write
another science fiction novel. I have a whole bunch of ideas for science
fiction or fantasy short stories but I don't know if I'll get around to them.
What are your plans after Tarzan? Are you going to write another Tarzan
novel? Have they left the door open for that?
They could, but I just wanted to write one, so I could fulfill a
childhood ambition.
So after that you're going to stick to mysteries?
I thought I'd go back to the P.I. novel (sequel) and then PEARL DIVING IN
OLD PEORIA. I've been threatening to do that for years. I always got
sidetracked on the other novels, but I think I'm about ready to do it.
Is the Tarzan novel based on a thread from TARZAN THE UNTAMED?
Yes, in TARZAN THE UNTAMED, Tarzan crosses a desert during his quest, and
then he comes to a rather lush area. While in the desert, he encounters a
skeleton of a rather large man who is clad in, well, Burroughs is a little
unspecific but I would say 16th-century Spanish armor, with the helmet,
cuirass and blunderbuss. Tarzan also finds a copper cylinder with the
skeleton and he opens it. Inside there's a manuscript and a parchment map,
in a language he thinks is Spanish, but of course he can't read it. For future
reference, he puts it back in the cylinder and puts it in his bow quiver.
That's the last you ever hear of it in Burroughs, except that when Tarzan is
later in the city of Xuja, he does run across a mention of a giant stranger,
or a tradition of a giant stranger, in armor who came through the city once,
terrorized it and then fled. So obviously it's the same person, except that in
my novel, Tarzan eventually had the map and the manuscript translated when he
went back to British headquarters. It turns out not to be about the city
of Xuja at all but some other place, because that Spaniard didn't have time
to write down anything after he'd gone in the city of Xuja and then fled.
So I picked up that one adventure, which I'd years ago hoped that Burroughs
would complete. I always wanted to do that. It takes place in October 1918,
near the end of WWI. It's sandwiched between TARZAN THE UNTAMED and TARZAN
THE TERRIBLE. TARZAN THE TERRIBLE is actually the sequel, involving Tarzan's
quest for Jane, who's been abducted by a German officer and taken into the
Belgium Congo for reasons unstated.
How far have you gotten with the Tarzan novel?
I just got started because Del Rey, or the people that own them, just
dragged out the negotiations for months and months and then, finally, they
sent me the contract, but it was a contract for work-for-hire. Which I
didn't know was coming but I should have figured that out. That means that
Burroughs owns it, and they're just hiring me to write it. I get just a
portion of the royalties. It's copyrighted in the Burroughs' estate's name,
which of course they have every right to do. I expected that.
So I sent it back and then it took months. I called up my agent yesterday
and he said that the contract got in today with the check. Well, now I can go
ahead, because I was never really sure, but in the meantime I had started
work on it. And then, right in the middle of it, I got the copy-edited
manuscript of NBIH. It took me two weeks to go over that, I cut it down from
100,000 words to 90,000. I cut out a lot of good stuff, which was necessary;
I cooled off since I wrote it. I got enough stuff left over from that to make
half of another novel.
One of the troublesome things, a thing you hate to do when you're
writing, is to cut out the good stuff. You can cut stuff that isn't quite
relevant or maybe makes the book too long. You just hate to do it, but
after you've been a professional writer long enough, you can do it. And if
you're economical you'll save it.
Kind of like RIVERWORLD WAR, which was cut out of THE MAGIC LABYRINTH.
But this was funny stuff, like Peoria Indian legends that I made up. Then
I cut out two characters completely; a one-legged woman and a three-legged
dog who were symbols of courage despite handicaps. It's not what it was
originally, but I hope it'll be better. Anyway, I'm going to use that stuff
in another book.
We're looking forward to NOTHING BURNS IN HELL coming out next spring.
It should be out in May or maybe earlier; I don't know if the publisher's
changed his mind. I had to wait more than a year for it, but they're moving
on it now.
The current Locus magazine lists it as a forthcoming book.
They're going to put an artist on it, and after the editor goes over what
I've done, then they'll send it to the printer. Then I'll get the galleys
to go over, then I'll send that back, and then they will supposedly bring it
out in May.
Are there any specific sites in Peoria that are tie-ins to the novel?
There's Grandview Drive. Unfortunately, I cut out one of the parts where
the hero is on Grandview Drive, looking out over the upper Peoria Lake.
But then the rest of it concerning a big house on Grandview Drive is there.
(note: I've reinserted that part). I just kind of put together a mélange
of houses there, and so forth. I cut out a lot of the history of the family
and the house too, but it's still referred to and a lot of the action takes
place there.
Then there's High Street, I don't think I refer to it in this novel, but
in PEARL DIVING IN OLD PEORIA a lot of the action takes place in a house
there. High Street was originally called Highwine Street because the whiskey
barons and the beer barons lived there. During the time of the Civil War, the
tax on the liquor produced in this area provided half of the money used to run
the Federal Government's war efforts. It was a terrible amount of money that
the Federal Government got. Now all of that is gone. I think there is a
microbrewery there now. {laughs}
For many years in the 19th and 20th centuries we had the world's largest
distillery. Back then the whiskey barons lived up there, eventually they
left, other people moved in and then a blight, you might say, hit. People
lost money like the mother in PDIOP and a number of them turned into
boarding houses, now people are fixing them up again.
We also have right by there, which I'm going to mention in the next book,
a 500-year-old oak that started growing about the time that Columbus came.
Would you believe, that a number of years ago, some developer was going to
cut it down? Then, the local citizens raised hell.
You have published many stories in dozens of science fiction magazines.
To the best of my knowledge you have never published anything in Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Was that because of the trouble you had
with the abridgement of Jesus on Mars? Did it sour the relationship?
No, it didn't sour it, I just didn't have any stories that were aimed
towards that magazine. I think the editor at that time, George H. Scithers,
may have become sour, not with me, but with my agent.
I was never in Astounding, either, or Analog, its successor. I sent a bunch
of stories to John Campbell at Astounding. Of course, the most famous is the
first one "The Lovers", which he said made him sick in his stomach. I sent a
few after that, but he wouldn't take any. I stopped sending them because I
figured he's not going to take them. His magazine is not my type----I mean, I
love the magazine to read but it's not the type of story I write. I sent THE
GREEN ODYSSEY to him. I thought it was a sure thing, but no, he thought I
didn't treat the medieval-type people right. He thought I made too much fun
of them.
I don't think he had a great sense of humor. Well, he should have, with
some of the inventions that he backed. A perpetual motion machine, for
example {chuckles}.
Didn't Horace Gold at Galaxy also say at one time that the story "Mother"
made him sick?
He said the same thing about "The Lovers" but later on he changed his
story. He told people that he wanted me to rewrite it and put it in modern
times but I wouldn't do it. He never suggested that, never. Of course, Gold
was famous for changing writer's stories. "Open to Me, My Sister" made him
sick, it might have been "Mother" too, for all I know. I seemed to make a lot
of people sick, back then. {laughs} Now that you've jogged my memory, he did
say that about "Mother". I can't remember if I sent it to Campbell or not.
If I did, I shouldn't have, he would have bounced it. A lot of that early
correspondence has been lost.
Too bad, that would make interesting reading.
We were curious about the role that your wife plays in your writing and
in your career. In the introduction to River of Eternity, you mention her
reaction to Shasta not paying you up front, and that is the most we have
ever heard about her.
She used to read my stuff back in the days when she had time. For one
thing, she's now taken over keeping our books. It's not an ordinary
household; she has all these stories to keep listed, keep tabs on the money
that comes in, deal with our income tax man, and so forth. Even now, she is
very busy with the kids.
During the Shasta contest, initially she warned me against Korshak. She
has kind of antennae out, and quite often her reaction is true. She warned me
not to have anything to do with him, but I was so keyed up about the idea of
having my first book come out, that I went ahead anyway. I should have
listened to her.
Bette's also played a very important part in my life in that she does
almost everything and has freed me to write. She's probably taken on too much,
at least now, which is why we are thinking about moving to a smaller place.
Trouble seems to dog you in your old age. It's not the golden age; problems
still keep coming.
Part of this question comes from the Philip José Farmer Forum, which
is at someone else's (Mile's) page on the internet. People can post messages
and then other fans can comment or react. It has been up for a couple of
months and there are already over 100 messages. The first part of the
question is about your famous speech "Reap". "Reap" was from a very liberal
point of view and I was wondering if you have become more conservative as
you have gotten older. The second part of the question is, are you still
pessimistic about the future of the planet?
I'll answer the last part first, yes I am. I've done some talking about
it around here at our book review clubs. I made a speech at a church once
about it. As far as I'm convinced, and I think I'm right, in that the
continuing overpopulation and the dwindling of our natural resources,
including water, farmland, and so forth are going to meet in the next
century. Maybe in 2020 or 2050, I don't know. Then there is going to be a
collapse of civilization, at which everyone laughs. They can't conceive it,
but they don't have the imagination.
I'd write a hell of a novel about it, except it would be so pessimistic.
Well actually it's not, it'd be optimistic, because I don't look for the
whole human race to become extinct. I look for the world population to
dwindle considerably, maybe by that time it'd be six billion, maybe six and
half, or more. There would be a big mad scramble, and a bloody mess
battling for food, water and so forth. It'll settle out and the tribes that
are left will start again. Maybe they will have learned their lesson.
About the first question, actually the trouble with me is that everybody
thinks I'm a pessimist. I'm basically an idealist, which no one should be
unless they have the ability to bring their ideals around to fruition. I
was all hepped up about that, about the society, but later on I really got
to thinking about it and thinking about the contrary human nature and how
we don't seem to be really capable of doing much with directing social
experiments. It might be a desirable goal but there was no way in hell, or
on earth, (same thing) that we were ever going to bring anything like that
about. And as I depicted in "Riders of the Purple Wage", I'm not even sure
we'd want to.
What it needed was a fanatic to go out and preach, and I'm a
writer. I'm not going to dedicate my life to something that is going to
fail anyway. But it was a phase I went through. I'm an idealist and an
idealist's ideals never come about. So most idealists, I think, become
pessimists, go to the opposite. They think you can bring about everything,
and you find out you can't, because of the contrary, conservative,
reactionary human nature. Actually we need a certain amount of conservatism
in society. The conservatives, are the ones that keep the society from
going ape but I think we got too many. On the other hand, there are the
wild-eyed idealists, who are also fanatic at the other end of the spectrum.
So I guess things will just have to work their own way, what is, is, what
will be, will be. Meantime we can do what we can, but they are all
band-aids, as I've mentioned before. Same thing with cleaning up the earth,
we can clean up this spot and that spot but in the meantime the rainforests
are all being burned, the salmon and the cod and thousands of other species
are all disappearing. But I don't mean the end of the human race.
On the subject of the REAP speech, we understand that Randall Garrett,
unannounced, got on the stage and did some sort of song that lasted for an
hour. We were wondering if that was really true.
He might have gotten up there and sang, I don't remember. It wasn't too
long. Actually, Silverberg and Ellison, I love these two guys, but they got
up there and fucked around for a long, long time. However, part of that was
my fault, because it wasn't until I gave that speech that I realized that
all these people had eaten, and the room was very warm. If I'd had the
experience then that I'd had later, I would have ripped the speech apart and
just given part of it or maybe tried to switch over to something else very
short, because they were sitting there (heads lolling to the side). I
didn't blame them, it was just too much.
Speaking of speeches, have you kept track of the speeches that you have
made at conventions or have you kept the original notes?
No. If they recorded them or read them out someplace, good. I guess I
tend to forget about them. I did one speech at the ICON called "Dumbing
Down" a couple of years ago that I think I might have a copy of around.
About the growing illiteracy, or aliteracy among the young. Then I got to
thinking about aliteracy in my own age group, you know, it wasn't too good;
it was better than it is now, but it wasn't as good as it was supposed to be.
What did you think of "Writers of the Purple Page" by John Thames
Rokesmith (pseudonym of Jean Cox).
I talked to Jean Cox before he wrote it. I thought it was great.
We have noticed the word Brobdingnagian in a lot of your books, we were
wondering if you have an idea of how many of your books you used the word?
No, I didn't know I had. {laughs} I'll have to keep using it. The man
that's used the word Brobdingnagian more than anybody else...
Actually, I have written more stories than any living author about
lighter-than-air craft. I'm including short stories, novels, and the floating
island in GATES OF CREATION.
Did you take a blimp ride at one time?
Yes, out in L.A., and then I took two balloon rides out here near Peoria.
The balloon is great, I was even thinking about buying one, but I'm not the
kind of guy who is a good organizer, or likes to go to a lot of trouble. You
have to get a crew, they have to follow you, they have to inflate it, they
have to deflate it, pack it, and so forth. You can only do it early in the
morning or near dusk, with very little wind. It wasn't worth it, so I just
went on balloon trips in my imagination.
How many languages have you studied?
I've always been interested in linguistics, I used to have quite a
library. I used to read the grammars of these languages without any effort
to master them. So about twenty, Indo-European and non Indo-European.
Especially the non Indo-European - fascinating, but that has been to
varying degrees. I even went through a Swahili one. I could pretty well
remember the rules of the grammar and the vocabulary at that time. I did
some work on Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, American Indian, and Australian
Aborigine. In finding out how other people use languages that are very
foreign to the way we use English, besides gaining some knowledge about it, I
think it kind of frees your mind, breaks some of your mental bonds, and
stimulates your imagination. At least, that's my theory. At the moment I'm
reading a Fijian grammer.
When you get into Finnish, I think there are about twenty cases, but
actually it's a lot easier than the cases in the Indo-European languages.
They're all at the end, they're all regular, once you learn them you've got
them. But something like old Icelandic or old Norse for instance, it's such
an irregular language; you learn a particular case or plural, and then
there are exceptions all over the place. And Russian, ugh. Russian is very
archaic, it didn't progress like English or French or some of the others.
They use grammatical forms that even the old English didn't use two
thousand years ago. But that's what makes it interesting.
Do you have a personal favorite book that you have written?
Well it's hard to say. See, I tend to regard as favorites those that I
think are funny.
That would be THE PEERLESS PEER, VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL...
And GREATHEART SILVER. I think one of the best books I ever wrote and one
of the most far out, was THE UNREASONING MASK, which for some reason didn't
seem to do well. I don't know if it was too far out, or what. I liked the
setup in Dayworld, and of course, I'm extremely fond of the first two
Riverworld books. It's hard to say which is a favorite, but the only ones I
reread are the funny ones.
Any short stories that you are particularly fond of?
Well there is one that is very short, one page, "The King of the Beasts."
It has been reprinted many times, in children's books as well as adult.
There is the story that took place in Beverly Hills, "Brass and Gold,"
although it was flawed structurally. I thought about rewriting it, getting
rid of the flaws, but nobody seems to care. Another favorite of mine is "The
Summerian Oath."
Do the initials from TIME'S LAST GIFT, "TLG", intentionally stand for
Tarzan Lord Greystoke?
It's not intentional, it's another case of people reading into my stuff
things that weren't there. I was unconscious of it. "Time's last gift" was a
quotation from a poet, whose name I can't recall right now.
Were you frustrated that a lot of your early paperbacks left off the
accent on the "e" in José?
Well that was no big deal, not as frustrating as putting two letter l’s in
Philip. It was even on my first Hugo! I've had people write me and say "I've
been reading your books for years, I'm your most devoted fan...", and they
spell it "Phillip."
Well we won't talk about spelling and typing errors, with some of the
lists I've sent you.
You mentioned in 1990 that the Tiers series would probably be two more
books, KICKAHA'S WORLD and the conclusion of the series, THE GARDEN OF
EVIL. Since then you wrote RED ORC'S RAGE and MORE THAN FIRE. How do those
tie in with your original plans?
I intended to then, but things change, you get new ideas. The titles of
the first three World of Tiers books were not mine, they were dreamed up by
(editor) Don Wollheim. KICKAHA'S WORLD was an idea and title I originally
suggested for A PRIVATE COSMOS.
So is the Tiers series finished?
Yes, I think I've mined that vein. I have too many other things to write
and not enough time left.
How about the Opar series?
I have thought about finishing it. But instead of the proposed five or
seven books, I'd just try to finish in it one book. I knew the final
cataclysmic ending right from the beginning. A huge earthquake wrecks the
civilizations and opens the inland sea to flow into the Congo. The dry
spells were just starting then, before the Sahara became a desert.
12,000 years ago there was a lot of water there, it was the end of the Ice
Age.
At the end of the first letter I sent you, you wrote "more to come re 3
unpublished novels, one of them lost." Was the lost one you mentioned PEARL
DIVING IN OLD PEORIA?
No, that's the one I did with Randy Garrett, "The Ballad of Hillary
Boon". I've been thinking about reconstructing it as a deliberately
old-fashioned novel.
Was that one a space opera?
Yes, it was based on the story in Charlie Tanner's song, that he wrote and
composed the music to, "The Ballad of Hillary Boon".
Steinbeck's agent was interested in science fiction and wanted to get a
science fiction author. So Randy and I had written "The Ballad of Hillary
Boon," and we sent it out through her, but she didn't know what to do with
it.
She was great for Steinbeck, but science fiction, she knew nothing about!
Then she died, and apparently the people who took over the agency continued
sending it out. I finally asked for it back, but they couldn't find it. So
it's out there someplace.
It was a strange book, because we didn't try to match styles to make it
seem like one writer, like I did with Piers Anthony. It would have been a
fun book, it wouldn't have been a classic.
In GODS OF RIVERWORLD, Peter Frigate claims that he had written a
biography of Richard Burton, but that Fawn Brodie's THE DEVIL DRIVES came out
before he could get his published. Did you actually write a biography of
Burton?
I was going to do that, but her biography came out (1967). It seemed to be
pretty definitive, so I decided not to write mine. I knew I'd have to do some
research which would contain material that hadn't been in any of the previous
books. I didn't have the money or the time, I still kept it in my mind, but
then about four more books on Burton came out and I figured I couldn't add
anything really new.
You wrote a piece for a men's magazine in the 50's called "A Rough Night
for the Queen"
That was about part of Burton's Mecca adventure. The editors didn't seem
to care for it, I guess they had something else in mind.
Was it a complete story?
No, it was an incident that started when Burton was on that boat and they
were having a mutiny. He was on his way to Mecca, before he got to Saudi
Arabia. The editors didn't tell me what they really wanted or I would have
written something different. That's the way it goes.
Your biography in CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION AUTHORS II mentioned the
possibility of you writing THE WILD WEIRD CLIME, a mainstream novel about the
science fiction world.
I had lots of notes and even some chapters, but it never came about. In
the first place, at that time, I couldn't interest anybody in giving me a
contract. They seemed to think that a realistic book about the science
fiction world just wouldn't go over. It didn't do me any good to argue with
them, so eventually I gave up on it.
Any chance you'll ever write an Autobiography?
I doubt it, the really interesting parts I wouldn't want to put in.
Did you enjoy writing "Maps and Spasms" for FANTASTIC LIVES?
Yes, but that's just a fragment of my life. I never thought about adding
to it. I think most people ought to try to figure out what an author is
like from reading his books. Of course, that doesn't give any details of his
life, and so forth. I'd rather write fiction.
In 1967 the adult magazine KNIGHT published two pieces by you, "The
Blind Rowers" and "Blueprint for Free Beer." Did they publish anything
else by you, possibly under a pseudonym?
No, not that I can remember. You have to remember I've written a lot of
stuff {laughs}.
In a 1977 interview with David Pringle in VECTOR, you mentioned writing
sex and/or violent scenes to be included in a separate manuscript of LORD OF
THE TREES/THE MAD GOBLIN that you planned on publishing in Europe.
I should have done that, it's another thing I never got around to.
What became of the novel about a runaway oil well called THE DRAGON'S
BREATH?
That has a real history. It was a long novel, mainstream----well, not
really mainstream, it was science fiction because it took place in the
future, but it was realistic. I can't remember if I sent it to anyone before
Ballantine, Judy and Lester Del Rey got it. She wanted me to rewrite it,
start out with this whole catastrophe being the blunder by the oil engineer,
who was the hero. So I rewrote it, but she still didn't like it. I owed her
money since they'd advanced it on that. So then I wrote DARK IS THE SUN to
replace it.
Do you still have the manuscript?
Yes, it's somewhere down in my stuff.
Do you have any other books or short stories sitting on the shelf ready
to go to print? There have been so many stories that you have said you
wanted to write, we were wondering how many of them you actually finished.
My ambition has always outraced my ability, or I should say outraced my
time. Nothing's ready to be published. There's the sequel I did to FANTASTIC
VOYAGE, that's around, but it will never be published. I think Doubleday has
the rights to it right now. Ike Asimov wrote an account of that, which needs
to be added to. He was basically sympathetic; he read it and didn't see any
reason why it shouldn't be published. It was a million-dollar deal, but the
original publisher got cold feet. I wrote a screen treatment, then I wrote the
novel. Then the publisher backed out. It was a very traumatic event for me. I
would have made a lot of money and I put in a lot of time. It was especially
traumatic, not because of the work on the manuscript or the treatment for the
movie, but because the deal just fell through.
Didn't you do a lot of research for that?
Oh yeah, at one time I knew how to travel through the human body to any
point you wanted to get to. Which vein, which artery to take.
We had hoped to see at least one story from Kenneth Robeson a la the
Grant-Robeson papers.
I never got around to writing another. It didn't go over too well, or
it was too small a market. At least, I didn't get any feedback, and I quite
often depend on feedback.
I went through a long period, which I call my fictional author phase.
VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL began it. I was going to write a story by David
Copperfield, which by the way Gene Wolfe did. We talked about it, he wrote
his, but I never got around to writing mine.
Where did you derive the title for the book MORE THAN FIRE?
It came from Blake, I don't remember the exact location now.
Could it be from this line?:
"Whene'er I enter, more than mortal fire
Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire."
Yes, that's it. Good, I had forgot.
I searched a long time for that!
We were wondering if you have read A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE STYX, by John
Kendrick Bangs, or any of his other books?
I read that when I was a young man. They were funny, I read the sequel to
HOUSE-BOAT and the parody on Sherlock Holmes. I may have also read some of
his short stories.
Do you enjoy doing the commentaries for the Boris Vallejo Calendars?
I would, except that Boris is always so late with the paintings that
sometimes I had to do a couple of the write-ups in one day. It started out
with him writing the comments, then I entirely rewrote them. He liked that,
so after the second or third year he just said, "I don't have the time for
them and you do a much better job, so you think them up." {laughs}
One of the questions I got from the internet is "Are you a Cardinals
fan (baseball not football) and if so, since when?"
I'm not a baseball fan at all; in grade school, high school, and college
I was a track man, and I played football. Maybe the question came from FLESH,
where they had their strange form of baseball, throwing the ball with the
spikes on it, trying to hit the pitcher. The pitcher is trying to bat it
away, you were liable to get killed if you made a home run!
The Beacon first edition of FLESH contains no dedication page, while
second and later editions are dedicated to your wife, Bette. Was the
dedication omitted in error, or added to later editions?
Back in those days, I never thought to dedicate books.
I see a lot of mention on the internet of VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL. To
this day many people think Vonnegut or even Trout wrote that book.
I was going to give a speech at UCLA and the day before, in the student
newspaper, there was an article proving that Vonnegut wrote VOTHS. After my
speech, where I state that I wrote VOTHS, they had to print a retraction.
Would it be OK for me to reprint letters you have sent to magazines and
fanzines on the web page?
I guess so, I don't remember calling anybody names!
Right after the interview Bette took a picture of myself, Phil and Craig.