Fantastic Metropolis

Mike Simanoff: On your web site, you mention that you’re “[w]orking on two new books, one set in the real world, one in the surreal.” Can you give us a little more of a tease? Anything else cooking in terms of short fiction or special projects?

K. J. Bishop: One is semi-autobiographical. It’s about my experience of growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, and it’s about my family, essentially, though it’s still a work of fiction. There are elements of fantasy in it, but I’m not sure how large they’re going to grow. Some of them are sort of factual fantasy, if there’s such a thing. My mother has seen (or possibly, as she admits, hallucinated) ghosts, and a fleet of UFOs, so there’s a question of how to deal with that kind of material.

With the other one, I’ve been reading a lot of Rikki Ducornet’s books lately, and also some of Leonora Carrington’s stories, and her novel The Hearing Trumpet. The wonderful experience of reading them has nudged me towards wanting to try a surreal novel of my own. I’ve started calling it my bedtime story, because I’m telling it to myself, purely for my own enjoyment, as an experiment in how freewheeling I can go and still maintain a narrative. It has some tenuous connections with The Etched City, in terms of the settings and the characters.

I’m finishing off a short story to submit to an anthology, but otherwise not writing any short fiction at the moment. I found that when I was writing Etched City, most of the little ideas I had on the side ended up going into the novel, and that seems to be happening again.

Mike Simanoff: And lastly, as a native Australian, please elucidate for those of us who only know it in legend and song: What exactly is a dropbear?

K. J. Bishop: There’s a lot of misinformation about dropbears. People put pages on the Web saying they’re eight feet tall with foot-long fangs and who knows what. That’s all bunkum. A dropbear is a marsupial, one of the few marsupial carnivores, which include the Tasmanian devil and the various species of quoll. Dropbears look somewhat like Tasmanian devils, but are more closely related to koalas, and, like koalas, are arboreal. Think of a very big, black koala with pointy ears, a pointy snout and lots of little pointy teeth. A pointy, depraved koala. And heavy. Did I mention heavy? They drop down from the gum trees onto their prey, which is typically knocked unconscious by the impact. Then the dropbear chows down. They’re not big enough to eat a whole human, though, and most victims of dropbear attacks survive, albeit so disfigured that they retreat from public view. There is speculation that Ned Kelly, the bushranger who always wore a bucket-like iron helmet, was a victim of a dropbear attack. Dropbears are a menace to campers, bushwalkers and cross-country skiers, but thankfully Vegemite repels them, if smeared thickly all over the body (under the clothes, if you are wearing clothes). That’s why Australians always carry a jar of Vegemite when we go abroad. It has nothing to do with wanting to eat the stuff, tasty though it is; we just don’t feel safe without it. That is the truth about dropbears.

Mike Simanoff: Wow, that’s scary stuff, like the jackalope in America, an unpredictable, wily monster. Keep safe, and thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I look forward to reading more from you in the future!

K. J. Bishop: Thank you very much, Mike—and I look forward to writing more.