Fantastic Metropolis

K. J. Bishop was born in 1972 and published her first novel, The Etched City (Prime Books, excerpt), in February 2003. The Etched City has won the praise of writers such as Jeffrey Ford, Jeff VanderMeer, and Liz Williams, and has been reviewed positively in Publishers Weekly and Locus April ‘03. The story, about the drifters Raule and Gwynn and their sojourn in the lush, vivid city of Ashamoil, is a dark fantasy that fuses surrealist and decadent elements.

K. J. Bishop’s stories have appeared in Aurealis, Fables and Reflections, and Album Zutique #1. In addition to writing she works as a freelance artist and designer. She lives in Melbourne.

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Mike Simanoff: The Etched City is concerned with, among other things, the question of evil, in a way that is reminiscent of the 19th century poets Charles Baudelaire and Lautréamont and the novelists Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Eugene Sue. You’ve also acknowledged the influence of Lautréamont in your story “Maldoror Abroad,” appearing in The Ministry of Whimsy’s Album Zutique #1. Which other writers have influenced you, implicitly or explicitly, and to what extent?

K. J. Bishop: Concerning the question of evil, and also the figure of the anti-hero, Milton’s Paradise Lost was a big influence on me. I somehow ended up reading it when I was sixteen, and didn’t quite realise that the reader isn’t suppose to barrack for Satan. Baudelaire has also been important, though less for his treatment of evil than for his analysis of the dandy, the self-authored individual—the person as artist and work of art in one. I like the decadents in general; that rich and strange writing appeals to me, and then so does the opposite thing, the laconic voice; so in The Etched City I tried to mix the two.

Michael Moorcock has influenced me enormously; I couldn’t count the ways. I think it would be hard to be a fantasy writer of my generation and not be influenced by Moorcock, either directly or via other writers. Just to mention a couple of things specific to writing, I admire the way he often has deep thinking, action, tragedy and comedy all flying in the air at once—the sublime and the comic playing in sync. And I love his irony. It was Moorcock’s writing (as well as various moments on the TV news) that made me think about the possibility for conflict between irony and sincerity.

M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories were probably the first stories I fell in love with on the level of the writing itself. He was the first author whose techniques I really tried to study; I wanted to learn how he achieved that climate of strangeness which is somehow all the more strange for having a strong resonance with reality. Perhaps it’s only a slight exaggeration of the strangeness of our own world. He really inspired me to try writing fiction, which I didn’t begin to do until my twenties. At school I was never into writing.

Jeffrey Ford was the writer who made me think, “Yes, I’m going to try to write a novel.” The way he creates a fantasy world, then moves the register of that world into the surreal, where the fantasy world’s own logic (or the reader’s assumption of logic) is broken, is brilliant, and when I read The Physiognomy it made a big impression on me.

I can’t leave out the Bible. I’m not a Christian, but I was educated at a Christian school for 13 years, and I’ve kept up a sort of antagonistic fascination with the Judeo-Christian mythos. The Bible interests me in all sorts of ways—as myth, as philosophy, as a document of the human heart in exile, and as sheer beautiful language.

Going back to evil, a writer who I’ve found very helpful on that subject is Mark “Chopper” Read. I’m not sure if he’s well known outside Australia or not. He’s an ex-standover man, specialist in toe-cutting, who wrote his memoirs. The amount of truth in them is debatable, as he himself says. But I like his stories. They’re tales of the misadventures of people who are unglamorous and for the most part none too bright, and while they’re entertaining, you never have to put up with the feeling that someone’s trying to make you think that something unpleasant is somehow sexy and cool.

Mike Simanoff: Besides books, did anything else inspire you to write your novel or influence the story?

K. J. Bishop: Travel, certainly; I was inspired by places I’ve been to. Regarding the plot—and this is back to evil again —one important event in The Etched City is based on an actual murder. It happened in the family of a girl I knew, years ago. Obviously I changed a lot of the details. But it was this thing where professional criminals took revenge for something through someone’s family. It made me think a lot about humankind’s perennial fascination with violence—from which I don’t exclude myself. I love westerns and gangster movies. I guess we like to go to the movies and identify with the powerful figure of the killer, and trick ourselves into feeling stronger and safer; even if we really know that it takes more courage and more genuine strength to abandon the power trip and put the gun down.

Mike Simanoff: M. John Harrison has written that “[y]ou cannot make a reliable map” and that “[t]he great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric.” Your lands likewise have a rich but uncharted geography and eschew the maps and tedious explication of commercial fantasy. How did you create the geography of The Etched City and what are your thoughts on world-building in general?

K. J. Bishop: For years I’ve had a mental image of people living on a very high plateau with a desert underneath. I like something about that, aesthetically. To a large extent the characters brought the geographical elements with them; there were certain environments they wanted to be in. The Copper Country has some basis in reality. It’s a mixture of outback Australia and Morocco, via Sergio Leone. Ashamoil is more nebulous; I couldn’t tell you much about what it looks like. I took a few things from the place where I live, which is a Victorian-era suburb, with bits of old industrial architecture and places where the trees are getting the better of the buildings. There’s a bit of Rome in it, and some imagery from India, which I’ve only seen as an armchair traveller. But I tended to use whatever my subconscious came up with, if it seemed to fit. I was usually just trying to create a climate, an impression. I hoped that if I described details now and then, the reader would fill in the rest to his or her own liking.

On world-building in general, I’m not sure that I have any firm opinions. I don’t have the kind of mind that thinks up mappable, explicated worlds, so it’s probably a good thing that I’m not interested in making them. An imagined place can have an incredible presence—think of Gormenghast—without having long histories or architectural plans to shore it up. Or you have Jeff VanderMeer’s city of Ambergris, which he presents both as fiction and as metafiction, and that works wonderfully; that’s the particular style of his magic show. But I also enjoy the immersive experience of being in the mapped kind of fantasy world, as long as there’s a sense of wonder when I look around. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a very solid illusion, but he still presents it as myth; there’s still the sense of “Once Upon a Time” in it. I think it’s when you don’t have that bit of fairy dust, that feeling of a tall tale, that fantasy becomes tedious.

Mike Simanoff: You mentioned that you didn’t start writing until you were in your 20s. What were your first stories like, and how do you think you’ve developed since then?

K. J. Bishop: The first things I wrote were about a sort of fairyland where some of the otherworld denizens had kept in touch with human society, and had brought some of the technology into their world, so they had their own versions of cars and TV and things. They weren’t proper stories, just fragments. I only wrote three stories, about a year apart, before I got started on The Etched City. They were all decadent urban fantasies. Two got published. The first one, “The Art of Dying,” had the cliff and the desert, and a beta version of Gwynn, who gets the full treatment in The Etched City. Since then I’ve gotten more interested in surrealism and in the fantasy world as a purely psychological, dreamlike terrain. Hopefully I’ve learned a few technical things about writing, too.

Mike Simanoff: No teenage love poetry? Straight to decadent urban fantasy?

K. J. Bishop: I wrote one poem to one guy. Not exactly a love poem, though. It was called “Dear Scumbag.” The rest of the time I just drew pictures of David Bowie. I got married at 21, wrote one love poem to my husband, Stu, then got down to the d.u.f. As distinct from getting up the duff.

Mike Simanoff: What’s life like for a speculative fiction writer in Melbourne? Are you involved in any sort of writerly community?

K. J. Bishop: I don’t hang out with other writers much. There’s an SF community here, but for some reason I mostly like to socialise in other circles. Melbourne’s a challenging place for a spec fic writer—maybe I should restrict that to fantasy writer—because of the lack of mythology here. As a kid I lived in England for six months, and was blown away by the feeling of the world of myths and stories in my head connecting with the places I was actually standing on. Ditto when I went to Rome. But there isn’t much of that here; there hasn’t been time for it. And there’s also—at least for me—the guilty feeling that we’re squatting on someone else’s land. There are Aboriginal myths connected with this place, but I’ve got a certain trepidation about trying to use anything of the Aboriginal mythos or metaphysics in stories, because I feel I only understand it superficially, and don’t own it in any way. But you can address that sense of disconnection and precariousness, and you can get quite a lot out of the weirdness of suburbia. There’s also quite an interesting sense of being in a city on the edge of this arid continent that you hardly inhabit, but that somehow inhabits you. It’s a feeling that all these skyscrapers and suburban mansions aren’t quite real, and the sand’s going to win out in the end.

Mike Simanoff: As a writer, do you view the Internet as a useful friend or a time-sucking foe? Or both? How do you use it?

K. J. Bishop: Vastly more friend than foe. I use it for research, for hunting out books, movies and music, and, having said that I don’t hang out much with other writers, I talk with writers online. The Internet’s a great tool for exchanging feedback on works in progress. Without the Net, The Etched City would still be looking for a publisher. I hadn’t had any luck with selling the manuscript, until Geoff Maloney met me on a mailing list and put me in email contact with Prime Books. Nearly all of the business after that, including a lot of the editing, was done over the Net. I haven’t actually met any of the people involved in making the book, other than by email. My editor Trent Jamieson and I eventually exchanged photos, so that we wouldn’t just be these two disembodied voices.

The Net closes the distance from Australia to the rest of the world down to nothing. It’s really a godsend. The Maldoror story only got into Album Zutique because of the speed of electronic communication. Sometimes I spend too much time in online conversations, but there are worse vices.

Mike Simanoff: What’s your background as an artist, and how do you think it affects the form and content of your writing?

K. J. Bishop: I was one of those kids who constantly drew pictures. Weird beasties, mostly. I went to art school, planning to be a graphic designer, but it all went pear-shaped and I dropped out. I ended up going into web design, and finally fell into teaching 3D computer graphics. I love the things you can do on the computer, but as a physical process—moving the mouse around and clicking—I don’t find it terribly enjoyable, and there’s very little room for the happy accident, so I’ve gone back to scribbling on paper. An appreciation for art certainly influences my writing. Pictures inspire scenes, or I’ll get a mood from an image and try to evoke that mood through words. One thing I really try not to do is think of a fabulous image and then describe it in pedestrian language. I try to engage with the verbal medium on its own terms.

I think that having an interest in art is possibly helpful in enabling you to appreciate experiments in writing. We’re used to abstract art and installation art; we expect art to mystify us, be elusive, hold something back from us. We love the fact that we can’t understand Mona Lisa’s smile. Speaking generally, I don’t think we’re quite as open-minded about writing, maybe because we process words with the pedantic left side of the brain. I find that when, as a reader, I can’t find my way into a strange piece of writing, making analogies with art can help. Some writing, I think, asks to be taken in as an experience, a climate, something like an installation, rather than to be made sense of in a completely rational way.

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.