| Interview: Interview with Hal Duncan, Part II |
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Page 3 of 4
I mean, there's two things to bear in mind here. One is a practical matter of what actually happens in the story. You have to remember that the unkin's identities are defined by their gravings and that Seamus is being royally fucked over by Metatron during the second half of the book. He's being turned into Prometheus because Metatron wants access to the knowledge only Prometheus possesses, who or what is capable of bringing down the Covenant. I can't say too much without giving away spoilers for INK, but it's not as simple as Seamus "turning out" to be Sammael; in the same way that Phreedom and Thomas have their own identities, their own gravings, overwritten with those of Inanna and Tammuz, Seamus's history is tweaked and twiddled so that Sammael is made flesh again in him.The second thing -- and I can imagine some readers may well have problems with this -- is that if you look at it from a comparative mythology standpoint, I think there's a fair argument that the Lucifer/Sammael of the Apocrypha can be seen as another version of the Prometheus myth. He's the Godfather's right-hand-man. In some Gnostic or apocryphal legends it's actually Sammael who created the world and humanity, just like Prometheus. The Garden of Eden, with the serpent offering humanity wisdom, is a close parallel to Prometheus's gift of fire. Both tyrants, Deus and Zeus, are afraid of being usurped. Read Genesis without the Sunday School blinkers on and you'll find that God exiles Adam and Eve not for being disobedient but because he fears them eating the fruit of the tree of life and becoming as powerful as him. Explicitly. It's there in black and white. Prometheus is credited with bringing medicine and magic, all the arcane sciences to humanity. So are the fallen angels of the apocrypha. God turns against humanity and sends the Flood to wipe them out directly after the fallen angels start cavorting with them. Similarly, Zeus can't stand to see humanity thriving with these wonders gifted to them by Prometheus, so he sends the Greek version of the Deluge to destroy them all. If you look through the propaganda, Lucifer is the rebel hero of the story. He's just been given a bad press. Myth is written by the victors just as much as history is. To me it seems self-evident, to be honest: if Seamus is Prometheus, then he's also Lucifer. Two of the characters are gay. What has been the range of reactions that you have heard from people in regards to this, especially considering how these characters are portrayed throughout the novel? Also, how would you say the overall climate among readers is in regards to receptivity for homosexual characters? The reaction's been overwhelmingly positive. I can't think of any responses I've seen that reacted against the homosexuality, and there's been plenty that have picked up on it as a good thing. The nearest thing to a negative reaction was a passing remark in John Clute's review, but that was because he saw the sex as self-indulgent, I think, a bit too redolent of authorial wish-fulfilment for his liking; it certainly wasn't about being uncomfortable with the characters being gay. Instead, where reviews or comments have mentioned the homosexuality it's largely been to praise the characters as rounded individuals; readers, gay and straight alike, seem to have felt that I've succeeded in elevating Jack and Puck out of the realm of stereotypes and tokenism -- which is truly gratifying. I really wanted to drive a big monster truck over the cliches, to blithely ignore any idea of what can or can't be done with gay characters, most of all for their sexuality not to be the be-all and end-all of their purpose in the narrative. I mean, yes, there's an element of the classic Gay Victim in Puck, and of the eternal Repressed Gay in Jack, but those cliches are set-up in order to be soundly thrashed, smashed apart. Yes, there's a part of the book which is about homophobia and its victims, but that's only part of a wider story about persecution in all its forms. And readers -- especially gay readers -- seem to have recognised the straightforwardness of this approach -- they're gay; big deal -- and found it... refreshing. So, I'd have to say the climate seems pretty receptive. The field of strange fiction has always been pretty accepting of difference, I think. You do see a tendency to exoticise, fetishise, infantilise or demonise these differences -- to render them Other -- and a market for those works which is therefore receptive to gay characters as long as they fit into certain roles. The fetishisation of homosexuality in certain types of vampire fiction -- all those mooning sensitive poseurs in shirts with frilly cuffs, making doe-eyes at each other's luscious lips -- is something that particularly irks me; it's fricking softcore porn for Goth girls as far as I'm concerned, no better than having a faggot flouncing about for a few cheap laughs. But that Othering isn't the whole story. In a field of fiction largely written by geeks for geeks, I think, as often as not we identify with those outsiders. We write and/or read those works and see ourselves in the characters -- strangers in a strange land. That's me, we think, and I ain't no Other. Many of the most popular writers in this field, gay or straight -- Samuel R. Delany or China Miéville, Clive Barker or Neil Gaiman -- have quite happily placed gay characters right at the heart of their works, and nobody bats an eye. Speaking of other authors, what changes have you seen in recent literature of the weird or fantastic? I’m wondering if there could be a strong case made for today’s SF reflecting the conflicts of the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s-1990s. Possibly so, though I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask here as I'm pretty out-of-date in my reading. As cyberpunk, after the initial boom in the Reagan/Thatcher era -- when it was so pertinent, so relevant, to the nascent culture of consumerism and global capitalism -- seemed to gradually become genrefied and formulated into a set of noirish tropes and stylisms, co-opted into a superficial style which was all mirrorshades and technotoys, I have to admit I drifted away from the field for awhile, lost touch with what was happening. I spent a long time reading more realist or non-fiction works, ancient classics or marginal contemporaries, than I did reading within the field, so I'm not really in a position to pontifcate on the changing face of SF. I'd be liable, I think, to unfairly neglect writers from the not-quite-so-recent past simply because I haven't gotten around to them yet. What I will say, kicking off your question is that there definitely seems to be an engagment with large-scale political and cultural issues in a lot of the work that's coming out now, which really interests me. In SF, you have writers like Geoff Ryman and Iain Macdonald looking to developing countries -- India, Cambodia, Brazil -- for stories of the future, which strikes me as an admirable sense of perspective, looking beyond the narrow Anglo-American worldview, focusing on something beyond one's own backyard and the same old junk scattered around it. My fellow GSFWC member, Gary Gibson, has a few timely things to say about religious zealotry and military prisoners in both his novels, ANGEL STATIONS and AGAINST GRAVITY, and I'm sure he's not alone in picking up on the current climate -- Richard Morgan being a case in point. Then in Fantasy, you have China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, both of whose work deals with political issues far more complex than how the poor dispossesed prince needs to be restored to his throne. VanderMeer's SHRIEK, in particular, with the pointless war that blasts right through the centre of it, strikes me as pretty pointedly relevant -- though it's by no means a cipher for the War on Terror. |
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