Fantastic Metropolis

M.M. Hall: Tell us about the influences upon your early and than later writing life. I’ve read that you have stated Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman and M.R. James were big influences. What about Harlan Ellison, Virgina Woolf and George R.R. Martin?

Lisa Tuttle: Harlan was a huge influence and was a mentor to me. He helped in all kinds of ways, including materially (giving me a place to live) and critically (going over some of my stories on a word-by-word basis to help me improve them). His committment to the short story as an art form was enormously inspirational to me, personally—a good corrective to the emphasis always on the novel in other quarters—and he’s been a good friend to me over the years. Not to mention how much fun it’s been hanging out with him… and a very educational experience! Before I met Harlan, I was knocked sideways by Dangerous Visions when I read it as a young teenager, and promptly wrote him a fan letter. But as writers, stylistically and in other ways, we are very different, and I doubt anyone reading my stories side by side with his would recognize a connection… . and yet, as I write that, I recall that there is a direct, traceable connection between one of my books for children, Mad House, which is about an intelligent, self-aware, computer-run house, and Harlan’s classic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” So maybe some astute literary critic would be able to winkle out even more connections elsewhere.

Virginia Woolf is a great iconic figure for me—people who knew me in Austin in the ’70s may remember me in my Virginia Woolf T-shirt. (Alas, it has shrunk and I’ve expanded so I’ve had to pass it down to my daughter.) I don’t think Woolf has been much of an influence on my writing—although I have been working on a novella called “The Woolfwoman” which is about someone obsessed with VW. For the most part I prefer reading Woolf’s diaries and letters to most of her novels, although I do love “Mrs Dalloway” and have lately been wanting to reread “To the Lighthouse.”

George R.R. Martin is a dear friend of long standing; I first got to know him when we were both just making our first professional sales of short stories—we were both on the short list for the John W. Campbell Award, though neither of us won that year (it went to Jerry Pournelle). We were part of a group of writers, mostly based in Texas (George was the odd one out, geographically)—including Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Tom Reamy—who not only competed with and helped each other, but also collaborated on stories together, so I suppose we all did influence each other and learn from each other to some extent. Though probably not to such a degree that anyone would classify us as a cohesive literary group. (The Turkey City School, perhaps? The mind boggles!) I think George and I were always headed on quite different tracks, although we did manage to come together long enough to write one novel, Windhaven, together.

If I said M.R. James, Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman were influences, that’s because I can identify them as being my literary forebears in one genre I often write in—call it the ghost story, dark fantasy, tales of unease. I feel we’re on common ground, and they are among the writers I most admire in that field. Others I feel are conscious literary influences in the same way are Ray Bradbury (I can even remember, when I was much younger, trying to write a “Bradbury”-style story of my own) and Theodore Sturgeon.

M.M. Hall: You’ve collaborated with Steven Utley and George R.R. Martin. Do you enjoy collaborative work and do you think you’ll ever collaborate again with another writer?

Lisa Tuttle: I’ve also collaborated with my husband on an unsold novel, although that was a very different process from previous collaborations. It was an idea that we developed together, but then he did all the writing himself; I just made suggestions and comments along the way, most of which he incorporated. Other collaborations have been with artists or editors, where I’ve effectively done all the writing. I do enjoy certain aspects of collaboration—there is no doubt that it can be a tremendous help to have someone else to work with, to bounce ideas back and forth and so on—but it’s not something I am that eager to do; especially not the kind of back-and-forth, shared-writing collaborations I was invovled with when I was in my twenties. (Not only with Steven Utley and George R.R. Martin, but also with Joe Pumilia, Bill Wallace, and possibly others I don’t immediately recall… ) I wouldn’t say “never”—it very much depends on the particular project and the other writer.

M.M. Hall: Now you could hardly be defined as a genre writer. Why were you drawn to science fiction? Horror?

Lisa Tuttle: As a reader, first of all. And what I especially enjoyed reading became, not surprisingly, what I most liked to write. I’m attracted to the intellectual aspect of SF —I like fiction which deals straight-forwardly with ideas, fiction which is intellectually stimulating and questioning. I like the idea of SF as “thought-experiment”—although mostly in a social and personal sense. I like trying to figure out what it would feel like to be immortal, for example, or to live in a society with dramatically different values and ideals than our own.