Fantastic Metropolis

Carol Emshwiller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1921, and began publishing short fiction in 1955. Much of her early fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. She won the World Fantasy award in 1991 for her collection, The Start of the End of it All. Other collections include collections Joy in Our Cause (1974) and Verging on the Pertinent (1989). Novels are Carmen Dog (1988), Ledoyt (1995), and Leaping Man Hill (1999). Small Beer press recently published her new novel, The Mount and a new collection, Report to the Men’s Club. Carol lives about half the year in New York City and half in Eastern California, between the Sierra and Inyo Mountains. She was married to the late Ed Emshwiller, science fiction illustrator, painter, and experimental film-maker.

Robert Freeman Wexler: The Mount is more explicitly science fiction than much of your work. It’s an alien invasion story, though you deal more with relationships than battles. Not at all like the way Hollywood portrays anything with aliens. I’m wondering how the novel took shape. For example, did you have the idea of these aliens using people as horses, and work out some of the historical details later, such as how the situation started, how the aliens got there, etc.?

Carol Emshwiller: I had just taken a class in the psychology of prey animals vs. predators.

It was supposed to be about the psychology of horses, but it contrasted all prey with all kinds of predators—about how we are predators riding a prey. I think the first thing I wanted to do with The Mount was to reverse that—to put a prey animal riding a predator. And I thought how interesting it would be if the prey animal had all the acute senses that we don’t have. Then I started, right in the middle, with the first chapter which is in the point of view of one of the hoots. In the beginning I thought it was a short story, but I got so interested (in chapter 2) in Charley’s desire to be a good slave that it just went on. I fell in love with Little Master as much as I fell in love with Charley.

I actually wanted the reader to feel torn about what was best, being looked after or having the hardships of being “free.” I thought, just because I like camping out and hardships and getting along with less, doesn’t mean that everybody would like it or is suited to that life. I still don’t know for sure what I think about that. It’s such a cliché to say and so easy to say, “Of course freedom is best.” Maybe eating regularly and staying warm is just as good.

I never work out the plot or “historical” details except as I go along. I just jump right in. I got the story going and then figured out how the hoots got there, etc., once I was pretty far in and once the characters and scenes were pretty much set.

Robert Freeman Wexler: With Charley/Smiley, and his reactions to his life as a mount and being freed from it (he wants to go back to being a mount, living in a stall), I found myself wanting to yell, “Don’t you know what’s happening to you? To everyone? You think life is better being a slave!” I found his behavior totally believable. For a writer, it seems like a delicate and difficult task, establishing his relationship to his life as a mount/slave and carrying him beyond it, to accepting a free life. And, of course, it was complicated by his relationship with Little Master. Because nothing real is ever so simple as “all humans good—all aliens bad.” How did that develop? Was it obvious at which point you needed to have him progress from one condition to another?

Carol Emshwiller: Oh dear, that’s a hard question. I just get the personalities going. I get to know Charley and Little Master. I got to know them so well (and quite early in the novel) that they moved on their own. As when Charley sees the guards marching by. I… the author… didn’t realize that of course he would want to be one. He acted like himself and surprised me. When I saw him want to go off and want to join them, I knew he was right and he was more in character than the author had realized. Actually to me that’s the fun of writing. I think my mind is mostly deeply inside the characters. I remember a friend asking me if Charley’s father really did start the landslide and come down in it. I told her I only know what Charley knows. I only think what Charley thinks.

I would never write a story where humans were all good and aliens all bad. In fact I think villains are too easy. I mean really bad villains. I think it’s harder to have the conflict be about people.

I couldn’t even manage to make the Hoots villains. They just wouldn’t fight and I couldn’t make them. They won (when they won) by giving in. Fights mostly bore me. I go pee when watching TV and the car chases and fights come on. Unless there’s something else peoplish going on in the fight.