Fantastic Metropolis

Josh B. Lukin: You know that people are inevitably going to discuss a couple of the stories in your collection as “Belonging to the tradition of Monastic Science Fiction that runs from Ladies Whose Bright Eyes through A Canticle for Leibowitz to ‘Souls.’” Is that okay with you?

L. Timmel Duchamp: How could it be otherwise? Science fiction—which is what I write—is recognizable by its intertextuality with other science fiction texts. The density of this intertextuality is such that even when an author of a story has not read all the possible stories her own story could be said to have a genealogical relation to, her story may nevertheless be read in relation to any or all of them. (I have on occasion amused myself by drawing maps positing such genealogical relationships between stories, establishing some pretty startling connections.) Although I’m a highly conscious writer, I’m prone to noticing months after having written a particular story that it picks up on or talks back to or in other ways engages with a story I hadn’t been thinking about when I wrote mine. I sometimes even leave clues for myself in the text—even going so far as to name characters, for instance, after characters in the stories I’m referencing—without any consciousness of doing so. And perhaps I should add this, as well: even if I did not believe that the writing of sf is always intertextual, I certainly believe that the reading of it is and must be. Sf stories make sense to the extent that they are read intertextually. (Which is why it is so difficult for those without experience in reading sf to appreciate sf texts.)

Josh B. Lukin: A character in your great novella, “Quinn’s Deal”, writes that her work is to be used “after the restoration to society at large of a general sense of moral sanity.” Is that gonna happen? Will literature play a role in it? Are we indeed prophets of a future not our own?

L. Timmel Duchamp: You know me, Josh, to be a notorious pessimist. Which makes these particular questions somewhat, er, loaded. Before 1991, the US news media still possessed the capability of serving as a vector for speaking truth to power (however seldom it chose to exercise that capability). After 1991, the media became an instrument of censorship in regulating the US’s primary sphere of political discourse. I wrote “Quinn’s Deal” in 1996. That was before the travesty of the impeachment of the POTUS, before the Supreme Court’s usurpation of the democratic process in December, 2000, and before the far right wing had completely subsumed the television news media and made US political culture radically unintelligible to the entire rest of the world (I presume your question applies to the US). I’m now a good deal more pessimistic about the US’s prospects than I was in 1996; I have no hope that the sense of being under siege will lift any time soon. I don’t think moral sanity is possible when most members of a society think of themselves as the victims of the rest of the world and that same society’s leaders think of themselves as the rightful masters of the world. That’s where we are now. What we need is a different kind of vision, one that is free of both the drag of the ressentiment of people under siege and the megalomania of rulers who think the world is theirs to plunder and dispose of at will. “Literature,” as you put it, could provide such a vision. I’ve no idea, though, whether a moral vision in literature could make a difference. Certainly it has in the past. But social, economic, and cultural conditions are always changing, and at the moment, literature in our society has almost no moral gravity to speak of, particularly given its status now as entertainment (preferably providing pat lessons in the received wisdom so comfortable to those who are complacent with the current climate of moral insanity). I’m more inclined to think that literature in the 21^st century US is a life-raft, keeping a few souls alive, than a flotilla of ships, leading an expedition in search of a new vision.

Joshua B. Lukin is the editor, with Samuel Delany, of Paradoxa 18: Fifties Fictions. His critical work has addressed authors as diverse as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Grant Morrison, Philip K. Dick, and Patricia Highsmith; among his previous interviewees are William Tenn and Chandler Davis. Dr. Lukin teaches in the English Department of Temple University, where he and novelist Don Belton occasionally bemuse the staff with their renditions of classic show tunes.