Fantastic Metropolis

Jeff VanderMeer: Would it be fair to say that your wife is your first reader? If so, what kinds of comments does she provide? General? Specific line-by-line? Or both?

Daniel Pearlman: Yes, Sandy is my first reader. Her comments cut to the chase, and though at first I am inclined to be defensive, I eventually come round. When my work has needed it, and my first drafts usually do, her criticism has proved invaluable. It is her general comments that are most important to me. Of course, it’s always helpful to have her point out a fuzzy phrase or sentence too, but I don’t ask her to function as my editor or proofreader.

Jeff VanderMeer: Looking back over your body of work thus far, do you see any recurring themes?

Daniel Pearlman: I’ve never stopped to look back, but a couple of astute readers of mine have seen, as a recurrent theme, characters trying to achieve freedom, dignity, and self-expression against both social forces and their own “mind-forged manacles,” as Blake so nicely puts it. One recurrent theme I do see, now that I think of it, is the sudden incursion of humor into the most serious of situations. I rarely plan to write a humorous story. Humor just demands insertion. Perhaps I am an absurdist of a sort—but I don’t really see the world as meaningless. Although I have been, professionally, a literary critic regarding other writers’ work, I have rarely even attempted to employ the same analytic tools regarding my own. Something in me rebels against the effort. It’s simply not my “job.” The energy of creation seems quite enough to give. I get embarrassed, even tongue-tied, when graduate students of mine ask me literary-critical questions about my work.

Jeff VanderMeer: Is there a major difference in theme or approach between your Final Dream collection and The Best-Known Man in the World collection?

Daniel Pearlman: The conscious effort in The Final Dream collection was to include almost exclusively science-fiction stories. The emphasis in The Best-Known Man is on every other kind of subgenre of the fantastic I’ve dabbled in. In my new collection, only “Over the H.I.L.L.” is a straight out-and-out SF story, but my SF tends to be of the “soft” sociological kind, fooling around with a “What if?” premise for comic-satiric purposes, but always, I hope, with great attention to the traditional narrative desideratum of a character-driven plot. Ever since the sixties there’s been this postmodern disrespect for the much-maligned concept of “plot,” but I think that what such pomo writers mainly are disgusted with is a formulaic storyline, not plot per se, and the formulaic storyline is evident not only in the vast majority of genre fiction but in the vast majority of so-called literary or mainstream fiction as well. Even my occasional SF experiments in form (e.g., “A Möbius Trip” and “Megabride“) strive to be well-rounded, recognizable “stories” with interesting plot twists.

To return to my new collection, I like it better, I think, as a “collection” because it showcases what I like to think of as my versatility somewhat more than The Final Dream volume does, given its one-genre emphasis. I like to think that, from one story to the next in my new volume, the reader can’t know what to expect and is thrown into an entirely different fictional universe; I like to think that I am not consciously or unconsciously repeating myself from story to story. With each story I write I hope to reinvent myself, to energize unexplored potencies. Otherwise, what’s the point? To be truthful, certain technical “discoveries” of mine (actually “appropriations” of what some author, somewhere, must already have done) I do employ in a number of pieces. In this new volume, specifically, I have included stories that fool around with a controlled confusion of two realms, the psychologically subjective and objectively real worlds of the protagonists. Such “psychobizarre” tales include the novella “Death in the Des(s)ert,” chronologically my first exploration of that technique, and the later stories “Zeno Evil” and “The Fall of the House.” My 1997 novel Black Flames made extensive use of that form. That novel also involved a great deal of historical research (into the Spanish Civil War), and I have a great regard for stories of mine, like “The Einstein-Jung Connection,” in the current volume, which have involved significant historical and biographical—as well as technical-scientific—research.