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T E R R Y   B I S S O N : Fixing the World
(excerpted from Locus Magazine, September 2000)

Terry Bisson
    Photo by Beth Gwinn
 

Terry Bisson was born February 12, 1942, in Owensboro, Kentucky. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Louisville in 1964, he lived in New York, scripting comics, editing the short-lived ‘zine Web of Horror, and doing various ‘‘hackwork’’ for tabloids. He lived for four years in the Red Rockers hippie commune in the Colorado mountains, working as an auto mechanic, then returned to New York in 1976, serving as an editor and copywriter at Berkley and Avon until 1985. For the next five years, he ran ‘‘revolutionary mail order book service’’ Jacobin Books, and in the mid-’90s he was a consultant at HarperCollins.

His first novel was fantasy Wyrldmaker (1981), followed by novels where Americana blends with magical/SFnal themes, Talking Man (1986) and Fire on the Mountain (1988). His short story ‘‘Bears Discover Fire’’ won the 1991 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards. Later novels combined serious SF with satire in Voyage to the Red Planet (1990) and Pirates of the Universe (1996). Bisson was also chosen to complete Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997). The short story ‘‘macs’’ (F&SF 10-11/99) won this year’s Locus Award and received Nebula and Hugo nominations. It appears in his latest collection, In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000). His next novel, The Pickup Artist, is due from Tor in spring 2001.


www.terrybisson.com

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Index to Locus Interviews
 
 

‘‘There’s a danger in the field of science fiction. Science fiction can be very liberating, but it’s a postmodern field in a sense. It’s sort of like rock’n’roll. Its salad days are over, and the people writing in the field now are living in the ruins of what was established before. It dictates an ironic stance, an unserious attitude toward your material that is not always a good thing.

‘‘But in SF you can still say something serious. I’m sort of optimistic. I don’t know if that’s true of the field as a whole, since one of the things science fiction is about is catastrophism. You also have a whole period of dystopian science fiction. But that’s not what I want to write. As much as I love Walter M. Miller, I don’t agree with him that civilization is cyclical. I don’t think there’s going to be another Dark Age. In the worst case scenario, if you had a nuclear war in the world right now, I think after 150 years you would have basically the same technology we have now, with much reduced levels of population.’’

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‘‘We used to think we were going to Outer Space. We’re not. We used to think robots were going to change everything, and they didn’t. None of that happened. If you look back at what really changed America, it was the interstate highway system and air conditioning. And look how the discovery of America transformed the world, every single person in the world, in the last 500 years. It was natural to think that going to the moon or to Mars would have the same transformational effect, but it didn’t. That’s the kind of thing I wish science fiction dealt with more.’’

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‘‘I’ve done a lot of short stories, and managed to sell a story to Playboy about once a year, which is probably more than any other science fiction writer does. The last two or three years, in my short fiction I’ve been doing what I would call light romantic comedy, like the Playboy stories. But I’ve sort of gone away from that recently, and my science fiction is more political. This story ‘macs’ was the beginning of that. It’s about the death penalty. ‘macs’ actually came out of a panel discussion I was on, with Jack Williamson and Nancy Kress out in Portales, New Mexico. We were talking about cloning and genetic engineering and all that. I felt this devilish urge to say something outrageous and shock people. This was only a year or two after Oklahoma City, and I said, ‘I was working on a story where they cloned Timothy McVeigh 168 times, so that every victim’s family would have their own McVeigh to kill.’ Then, as I thought about it, it actually became the basis of ‘macs’.’’

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‘‘I also wrote the last 75 pages of Walter Miller’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, but I didn’t touch a word of his writing. I think it’s a great book. It obviously doesn’t have the force or the singularity of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but to me it’s almost Tolstoyan, a very broad canvas with a lot of characters in it, like a picaresque novel, much more ambitious and more mature than Canticle. I was disappointed that it didn’t get any recognition whatsoever. I thought I’d be on all the talk shows and everybody would be fascinated by the idea of this guy who wrote one great bestseller and never did anything else, then killed himself after he hired someone he never met to finish the book. This is a great story! But the family didn’t want to put it out there. Even if I never laid eyes on Miller, I really grew to love the guy as I worked on this book.’’

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‘‘Miller’s take on religion is that it’s a system of repetitious actions carried out by fools, which in the long run saves them. You have religion because we’re so unspiritual. His monks are the least spiritual people in the world, but after you spend four or five hundred pages with them, you realize that’s what it’s all about. The book is really about this guy who becomes a saint in spite of himself. He’s chasing this girl through the whole book, and at the end he meets up with her. I got word from the publisher that they wanted him to consummate this relationship. I didn’t fight with anybody about this, but I said it was very clear that wouldn’t happen. ‘‘My new novel, which will come out next year, is The Pickup Artist. The idea is that there’s too much stuff in the world - too much music, too much art, too many movies and books - so there’s been a bureau set up which randomly selects and deletes twelve hundred items a year, to make room for new stuff. The Artist is sort of a Melville-type character of bureaucrat. He goes around and makes sure you don’t have any old Philip K. Dick paperbacks lying around the house, since Phil’s been deleted.’’

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‘‘[Kim] Stan[ley Robinson] told me, when he was in the middle of the Mars books, the remarkable thing about them was that for the first time he could write without irony. He could write straight at the subject, without having an ironic stance. He had come into science fiction as a lot of us did, as educated literature majors who used the tropes of science fiction for our own ends. That commits you to an ironic stance toward your material. In the Mars books, Stan was able to break through that. That’s the direction I want to go into, and I think I’ve done that in my short stories more than in my novels.’’

© 2000 by Locus Publications. All rights reserved.