This is an interview with Norman Spinrad Made on Dec 16, 1971, in his home at 8463 Utica Drive, Los Angeles, California.

The interview is about 90 minutes long.
James Holmes is the interviewer.

Introduction

Norman is 31, lives in a very nice house in Topanga Canyon near LA proper, has a nice sports car, looks healthy, and is coherent and centered. I really don’t know him. I had just met for the interview. I have not been in contact since then.. I sent him an email telling him about the long ago interview and asked if he wanted a copy or to be involved in any way but I received no reply.

Spinrad is an excellent author. His books are all different, interesting and give an insight into the topics he addresses. My favorites are Bug Jack Barron (of the novels) and Carcinoma Angels (of his short stories) from Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde). Both are extraordinary. This from my memory of my reaction reading them some 50 years ago.

The Interview

James Holmes: — Test, test. (Setting recording levels for the microphones)

Norman Spinrad: Test, test

James Holmes: Okay. I would like you to summarize your writing career. For instance, when did you first start writing?

Norman Spinrad: Professionally?

James Holmes: Professionally, on your own…

Norman Spinrad: Well, I don’t know, I was fooling around a little bit from about the time I was sixteen. I took a couple of short story writing courses in my senior year in college and the last story I wrote for the last of these courses was something that the teacher in question felt I should submit around, he suggested Playboy since that is the ultimate high pay market in the country. And that got me to the idea of actually putting these things in envelopes and mailing them to magazines, which seemed like all of a sudden a good idea to do. This particular story never sold to Playboy. As a matter of fact, the story that started me doing writing that I only sold about two years ago to a very scungy men’s magazine out here. It was a sexy science fiction story or, it had a scene, and the climax of the story was a couple balling in a bathtub full of chocolate syrup as the atomic bomb went off and brought on the apocalypse.

James Holmes: Did you finally sell the story to Playboy, to appease your professor?

Norman Spinrad: I finally did sell a different story to Playboy, but not that story, years later. Then I kicked around for a couple of years. I wrote an un-published novel, an unpublishable novel I might add.

James Holmes: Still yet to be published?

Norman Spinrad: It will not be published. I am not Ernest Hemingway. I don’t intend to have these unfortunate things published after my death, although I won’t care then. And at any rate I then decided I wanted to be a writer. So I am going to be a writer. So when I graduated from college, I kicked around Mexico for a while, came back to New York and just started writing stories and mailing them out to magazines, doing odd jobs and then in about a year, I finally sold a story.

James Holmes: How old were you then?

Norman Spinrad: 21.

James Holmes: 21.

Norman Spinrad: And I finally sold a story to Analog to John Campbell, interestingly enough. Because Campbell has bought the first stories of a string of writers, Campbell, who recently died, bought the first stories of a string of well-known science fiction writers longer than your arms named so called Greats of the so called Golden Age even in the 50s. And Campbell was the guy that discovered all of these guys. Asimov, Sturgeon, Bob Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, myself, but I’m not sure about Frank Herbert, but just endless people. Then I sold some more stories. I went to work for a Literary Agency. I wrote “The Solarians”, my first science fiction novel, and about the point that I sold The Solarians, I left the Literary Agency, left New York, came West and I haven’t done anything but write since, been a full time professional writer since ’65.

James Holmes: Which are the books that you have written? Could you just name off the ones that have been published.

Norman Spinrad: My first novel was “The Solarians” published by Paperback Library, published in France, published in Italy. Second novel was a thing called “Agent of Chaos” published by Belle Montiere in paperback, published also in Italy. Then came “The Men in the Jungle.” It was published by Double Day in a hard cover here, published by Avon in paper back here. Will be published in England by — you want all these credits?

James Holmes: Yeah.

Norman Spinrad: Will be published in England by Spear Books, has been published in Mexico. After that came my most well-known book, “Bug Jack Barron” which is published in hard cover here by Walker. It’s published paperback here by Avon, published in hard cover by McDonald, in England, will be published in paperback in England by Panther, shortly to be published in France by Lefond, which is a hard cover house. Then I have a collection of short stories called “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.” It was done here by the Double Day Science fiction Book Club and by Avon. It was published in paperback by, being done in England by McDonald. I have a book called “Fragments of America,” which is a collection of political essays, which is published by an outfit called Now Library Press, in an expensive paperback format. I have a book that’s just coming out now called “A New Tomorrows,” which is an anthology of more or less avant-garde or experimental post 1965 science fiction with critical comments by myself. It’s published by Belle Montiere. Don’t have an English publisher yet. In addition, I have a mainstream novel called “The Children of Hamelin,” which has not found a publisher in the United States yet. It was serialized in the Los Angeles free press. It’s being published in spring by McDonald, who seems to be my regular English hard cover publisher. I think that’s all the books.

James Holmes: Which of the books do you like best of the ones that you’ve written and published?

Norman Spinrad: I think my best novel is probably Bug Jack Barron still.

James Holmes: Which one sold best?

Norman Spinrad: Again, these figures are so unreliable as to be virtually meaningless getting royalty figures out of paperback houses. Well, I think probably, weirdly enough the thing that sold best is the short story collection, The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. It sold very very well in the science fiction book club edition. Contrary to what most publishers say. I was told by Elaine Geiger (?0 who is the editor there that short story collections tend to outsell novels, at least in the book club. Maybe the attention span of the average reader is decreasing. I don’t know what it is. That thing sold very well in paperback — in the hard cover book club edition. Paperbacks all sold about the same. I don’t have any of the European figures here.

James Holmes: How has your attitude towards your work changed over the years? I mean from when you started writing seriously when you were 21 up until like today, here in Laurel Canyon.

Norman Spinrad: Well, I don’t think my attitude towards my work has changed very much. I was always quite serious about it and I always in any given moment tried to write the best thing I was capable of. However, I think the work has changed. You know, my concept of what good writing has hopefully progressed, some people think it’s retrogressed, the short story collection represented about maybe five years, six years worth of short stories, you know, a span of five or six years. It got good reviews everywhere, but there were some people who said that they liked the earlier stories better. I think they’re out of their minds. I think at about the time I wrote Bug Jack Barron a little bit before, I guess you could date it to a story called “Carcinoma Angels,” which appeared in Dangerous Visions. I suddenly had a quantum jump in my notion of what prose itself was all about as opposed to the story and plot aspect, of how to really make prose work, how to really style prose for given effect rather than to just use it as a vehicle for ideas and characters. That was a big radical change in my writing was.

James Holmes: Does that mean that you became more confident as a writer in terms of what you were producing?

Norman Spinrad: No, I was always…

James Holmes: Cocky, confident.

Norman Spinrad: Absolute arrogance. I think that’s important.

James Holmes: In writing?

Norman Spinrad: Yeah, confidence of — It wasn’t a change in confidence. It was suddenly a quantum jump in consciousness of what prose could do as a medium of… You know I was reading, the time I was writing Bug Jack Barron, which is when this thing really came to fruition, I was at the beginning while I was beginning that book, I was reading “Understanding Media” by McLuhan and that really opened my head up to the whole idea of prose as medium, that the texture of the words, the punctuation, the very pattern of ink on paper had psychological effect on the reader’s mind, and that one could in a very close way use that in the way the poet uses it, to really get images and effects, psychological effects and to conceive of a work of fiction as a series of effects in the reader’s mind that you want to create and to then, to the best of your ability, create marks on paper that produce those effects in the mind rather than thinking of prose in terms of grammatical rules or rules of diction or in that kind of conventional way, the kind of McLuhan, the basic McLuhanistic insight that the medium is the message, which of course became a great cliché. But like all great clichés, it’s a great cliché because it’s essentially true. And I think that was the one big quantum jump in my understanding of what prose fiction is all about

James Holmes: Do you think you’ve reached any kind of — you’ve been able to carry that through in Bug Jack Barron and do what you want to do [cross talking]?

Norman Spinrad: By and large, I was satisfied with Bug Jack Barron, but I think Bug Jack Barron did what I wanted it to do. Today, if I’m reading it over again, again, I haven’t re-read it in a long time because by the time a book of yours comes out, you’ve written a couple of drafts and read it in-between and thought about it, then, you that you’ve taken a look at the copy edited manuscript, and then you proofed the galleys. So by the time the book is actually published, you’ve read it five times already and you can’t stand it anymore. Or anyways, you can’t stand to read through it again. But yet, I did sort of read through it again and I was satisfied with it. I think it’s a successful book. It’s the book I wanted it to be. The effects I was trying to do by and large worked. It was a very experimental book. There were some places where it was more successful than others, but I think on the whole the book is as I wanted it to be and yeah, I’m satisfied with it. I’ve written some short stories that I feel the same way about

James Holmes: You’ve written some TV shows for Star Trek and things like that.

Norman Spinrad: That’s another story.

James Holmes: Yeah and things like that. What is it like to write for TV?

Norman Spinrad: Dreadful

James Holmes: Dreadful.

Norman Spinrad: Dreadful. Dreadful. Very strange how I came to write for TV and it’s whole chain of events. I went to a Milford Science Fiction writer’s conference in Pennsylvania, Damon Knight’s house – it’s an annual event. Arthur Clarke was there talking about 2001 and I had also already read the original book treatment for 2001, because I had worked for Scott Meredith, who was Clark’s agent on the thing. So almost a year later when I was out in LA, I met a fellow by the name of Curtis Lee Hanson who was the Editor of Cinema Magazine. Well, I had seen the Star Trek pilot at that time and was fairly well impressed by it, because Gene Roddenberry is a very good writer and it was a pretty good pilot. It was the first pilot, not the one they eventually went with.

James Holmes: And that was the pilot that had a different — Shatner wasn’t the Captain Kirk.

Norman Spinrad: Yeah. It didn’t have William Shatner. It had the guy who played Jesus Christ. What’s his name?

James Holmes: Oh, I can’t remember.

Norman Spinrad: Oh, this is embarrassing.

James Holmes: Well, he went off on another movie and they had to get someone else to replace him.

Norman Spinrad: No, that’s not the truth. The truth was that they didn’t like him.

James Holmes: They didn’t like him.

David: Jeff Hunter.

James Holmes: Yeah, Jeff Hunter. That’s it.

Norman Spinrad: Jeff Hunter. Anyway, Lee Hanson asked me, “Hey, you know a lot about 2001, that’s going to be the big thing. Why don’t you do a preview article for my Magazine, for Cinema Magazine.” So I did a feature on cinema, on 2001 for Cinema Magazine and I had met Gene Roddenberry at science fiction conventions. I had mentioned something about — I think I tangentionally mentioned his pilot favorably in the article in 2001 and Gene called me up and said, “Oh, thank you. I want you to come in here and talk about writing for Star Trek.” And I don’t know whether he was just saying that as a courtesy to me or… And by that time I was writing, I was in the middle of the first draft about Jack Barron. I had no desire to interrupt that and do a television show, because when I’m doing first draft I can’t write two things at once, especially on first draft. My God, especially a book like that.

James Holmes: Breaks up continuity.

Norman Spinrad: Yeah, you could say I just can’t think that way. Some people could do that. So anyway, I said, “That’s very nice of you, Gene, but I absolutely can’t do it now. Call me back in eight weeks,” which is unheard off. So he called me back in eight weeks and I came in and talked about a story to him and I ended up writing a story called “Doomsday Machine.” I had an idealistic view point of what television was then, which is partly engendered by Roddenberry, who was getting people fired up about this show.

So I said, “Well, for the first show I’ll do something simple because it’s television. I don’t want to freak them out with anything up front. I’ll show them that I can be a professional, that I can write them a show that can be shot cheaply on the standing sets, in other words on the enterprise sets, I’ll give them something simple, not complicated.” I’ll give them a remake of Moby Dick. Basic standard story, Moby Dick, the Captain — had a Captain Ahab figure, had kind of a space whale which destroyed his ship. But what I was really into was this character. It was basically an Ahab type character, kind of a legendary space Admiral who had a mystical relationship to space, had that kind of old antagonistic love/hate relationship with space as a mystical force the way Ahab had with Moby Dick as a representation of God, if that’s the way you can choose to interpret Moby Dick. Or just as the whale, if that’s the way you choose to interpret Moby Dick. I thought that was a pretty simple story, a fairly familiar story, something easy. Well, of course, that got watered down which just amazed me. Here I was trying to be simplistic and I wasn’t…

James Holmes: Yeah, that didn’t come through real strong on the show.

Norman Spinrad: Well no, when you do a television show, you do a treatment, 10 page story outline, then they tell you what’s wrong with that, what they want to change there and then you do a revised story outline, then you do a first draft teleplay and they tell you what they don’t like about that. In this case, this was a 30 page memo from Gene Kuhn, the Producer.

James Holmes: 30 pages?

Norman Spinrad: 30 pages, single spaced for a 60 page script, the memo was longer than the script, literally. And then you do a second draft screen play and then what’s known as a polish. In any case for Star Trek 40 other people rewrote it after you, Kuhn, the Producer, Bill Shatner wanted all the lines, the Director, Gene Kuhn’s secretary, whoever was around just rewrote your script, so what came out the other end was homogenized paff.

James Holmes: You didn’t have any control over — I mean once it got out of your hands.

Norman Spinrad: Zero control. You don’t have any control of it while it’s in your hands. They tell you what they want and if you don’t write that then you know that somebody else is going to do it that way.
James Holmes: So about all you got in the end was your name at the start of the Show.

Norman Spinrad: Your name and lots of money. That’s the way it works, lots of money. So that’s sort of disabused me of the notion that you can do anything on network television.

James Holmes: And television is pretty much like that.

Norman Spinrad: Well, CBC isn’t like that. The educational television aren’t. Network, dramatic, continuing series, that’s it. That’s what it’s like. It’s horrible.

James Holmes: To sort of shift topics.

Norman Spinrad: Yes, I’d be glad to shift topics because it’s very painful.

James Holmes: Could you recreate for us like a typical day that you have for writing. How many drafts do you do, do you work sporadically, regularly that kind of thing?

Norman Spinrad: Oh, there’s no fixed pattern. If I’m writing a novel, I usually work fairly regularly, like I usually work five or six days a week. I’ll get up fairly early in the morning, have breakfast and work till 3 o’clock.
James Holmes: Do you type standing up like Ernest Hemingway or do you have any other…

Norman Spinrad: No, Ernest Hemingway types standing up because he had a bad case of piles. That’s a fact which I fortunately do not have at this moment, although they say that piles are the occupational disease of writers. A lot of writers have rectal problems, because you’re sitting on your ass behind a typewriter all the time. I may break for a small snack for lunch. I work about five hours. If I’m doing a short story or if I’m doing short pieces, it’s unpredictable. I usually will sit in front of a typewriter four, five hours a day if I’m involved in anything at all, you know, I work fairly regularly. I don’t ever set an alarm clock or anything like that.

James Holmes: Do you start off with an idea and then you try to make that idea like reality on paper, and then you start working on it? Or do you sort of sit down and wait for some kind of spirit to possess you?

Norman Spinrad: Oh, that depends. I cannot make ideas generate themselves by an act of will. That’s why it’s easier for me to write one novel than 10 short stories, because you get a basic idea for a novel and you can elaborate it and work your way up to an outline, a firm idea of the book and then you just go write the book. I never had any trouble in the middle of a novel. Once I’m into a novel, it goes. Short stories, I have no control. An idea comes, it develops or it doesn’t.

James Holmes: Does it develop as a short story per se or does sometimes a short story ends up as a novel?

Norman Spinrad: Yes, I had that happen once with The Children of Hamelin, the mainstream novel. I wrote a 5,000 word short story which suddenly I realize is an opening chapter of a novel and then a novel went from there.

James Holmes: How many drafts of a work do you usually do, of a novel?

Norman Spinrad: Well, it varies — at least two. Again, it’s hard to say what a draft is. There will definitely be a rough draft and then there will be some weird kind of work in-between a rough draft and a final draft depending on what it needs and then there’d be a final draft. And then inevitably you end up doing some little additional work between the so called final draft and time the type is actually set and an editor sees it. So it’s two full drafts and whatever it needs in-between.

James Holmes: What are your recreational activities, presumably you don’t just write all the time?

Norman Spinrad: I don’t know. Hobbies and stuff like that, I don’t know.

James Holmes: For the Staff you write movie criticisms, so you must see movies.

Norman Spinrad: Oh, God, do I see movies, yeah.

James Holmes: And you also review books for that.

Norman Spinrad: Yes, I review books. I like to travel wherever I can. I cannot stand being in one city for more than six months without going somewhere else for two weeks

James Holmes: Makes you appreciate the city you’re living in maybe. It helps you appreciate the place where you’re living.

Norman Spinrad: I feel like I’ll go stale unless I go to another environment at least every six months. Well, this has been a bad year for me economically and I haven’t had as much freedom as I wanted, so I’ve only been out of LA — I mean, I go to San Francisco for a weekend, that’s no sweat, or for a week in one case, three or four times a year at least. And I went to Mardi Gras last February, which was really fantastic and I just came back from New York. So I move around and I make a virtue of necessity in LA and I’ve got a nice fancy sports car. I like the ecstatic feel of driving the thing cross country, mountains, things like that. I guess that’s probably the things I like to do best. I also pay attention to what I eat.

James Holmes: To what you eat?

Norman Spinrad: Yes, like I’m into the aesthetics of food.

James Holmes: You are not a vegetarian?

Norman Spinrad: No. No, I’m an omnivore. I like strange foods, new foods, foods I haven’t eaten, especially I like Chinese foods. I cook Chinese food. I don’t know. I don’t have any — I have screwed around with little sculpture, and these things I have here are tactile sculptures.

James Holmes: What are they made out of anyway?

Norman Spinrad: They are made out of a self-setting clay then painted and lacquered with nail polish.

James Holmes: Do you go down on Sunset Boulevard and spread out your cloth and try to sell them? Or are they just for you?
Norman Spinrad: I did try and do that in London, just for the hell of it, selling. They’re just a hobby really. I did have the idea that at one point these things could be marketed, but I carry them around. I still think of it in that sense. It’s based on… The Japanese actually have a traditional art form or something like that, which I’ve never seen just read about. They are called Netsukis I think. People just carry them around and feel them.

James Holmes: I understand that’s declining, the sales.

Norman Spinrad: I have a feeling that there is some kind of relationship between the decline of that and the increase of smoking. I think people might smoke a little bit less if they carried these feeling pieces around in their pockets. You work off that kind of nervous tension that comes out of the edge of your fingers and you just have a pleasant object to feel and hold.

James Holmes: Oh, I think Humphrey Bogart in the Caine Mutiny might have killed that with those rubber, those steel balls.

Norman Spinrad: Yes, I think that in a way it’s a legitimate thing. These things are designed to have some kind of sequences of feel, you know. Sometimes you might say some of them are kind of fecal, but to be — I tried to design them to fit the shapes of your fingers, this is the finger piece where you can see there are all kinds of holes. Fingers, some of these are designed to more or less sit in the palm of your hand like that if you like that. These are, I don’t know, I haven’t really developed this art form very far, but I’ve just played with this here, it fits in here just kind of curve in your hand

James Holmes: Tactile.

Norman Spinrad: Yes, tactile sculpture. I don’t know. I don’t think I have any other exciting hobbies.

James Holmes: I got a little harder question. Do you use drugs? Or did you or?

Norman Spinrad: Yes, yes, I’ve tried almost everything except smack.

James Holmes: Does it help you in writing?

Norman Spinrad: I abominate speed. I don’t think I’ve ever taken downers, which I also think are very bad stuff. Does it help my writing? It’s hard to say. You know you come to a point in your life where you haven’t taken drugs and then you do. You have nowhere of knowing what would have happened if you hadn’t, just as if you make the other decision at that point and never take drugs, you don’t know what would happen if you did.

I think drugs are valuable up to a point. When I say drugs, I’m talking about the psychedelics, the mild psychedelics like pot and hash, the stronger ones like mescaline and acid. Not opiates or speed or downers, all of which I consider dope. I think these drugs, up to a point break psychological set, enable you to have a new viewpoint on reality, and the mere fact of having two viewpoints on reality, gets you into the frame of reference where you can see that reality is a subjective phenomenon and there are many realities. This helps you write, and especially helps you write science fiction, of course. You can see that in the work of Philip K. Dick very strongly. I think the danger with drugs is, that if you keep taking drugs, and you stay stoned most of the time, then again you are not getting more than one reality, you are just exchanging one constant reality for another constant reality and it doesn’t really make much difference then. You aren’t getting dual viewpoint or multiple viewpoints, you are just getting the viewpoint of being stoned.

So I think drugs are valuable to a writer. I know writers who, I won’t mention any names, who really get messed up. I think that people who claim they write on acid, having taken acid, I find this entirely inconceivable. I can’t even, you know, type [laughs] in that state. I think you can get some insights in that state that you can come back with and write about. But I don’t think you can really write coherent things while you are really ripped on acid. It’s possible to write on pot, and traditionally a lot of writers write good and juiced. Who said, D.G. Compton or somebody about how, describing his various books, this took x bottles of gin and this book was a harder book and took 5 more bottles. So I’ll tell you one drug I used to be dependent on for writing, and I only got rid of it in the last two years, was tobacco. My God I couldn’t write without a pipe in my mouth. I used to smoke like a chimney. My endurance at writing on a given day at a typewriter was determined by the state of my mouth, finally. You know you smoke a pipe all day and chain-smoke, in 4 or 5 hours your mouth tastes like a toilet; starts burning it’s horrible. And I was like a slave to that, no question about it, I had to have a pipe in my mouth. I was in Europe, traveling around the continent for about, oh a couple months and suddenly realized, hey I’m not smoking. Because I wasn’t writing. Oh I’m not smoking, don’t need to smoke.

Maybe, I was thinking also of getting an electric typewriter at that point when I came back I said, ‘Wow, my typewriter is always messed up with all this tobacco and gunk in it. I said boy if I have an electric typewriter, it’s going to cost me a fortune. I’ll have to have it fixed every 3 months from all the crap that gets into it from smoking. And I haven’t been smoking for a couple of months. Let’s see if I can write without smoking. It was kind of an ordeal for a while, I was thinking if I could do a novel, you know I was doing short pieces. And yeah well it was difficult but I wasn’t smoking and I was writing. Finally I said, ‘Well if I could do a novel I’ve really got this licked.’ And I did finally write a novel without smoking tobacco. And I licked it, and now I don’t, well I’m smoking a cigar as I speak, but you know I’m not dependent on it and you know I don’t smoke when I write. I may be writing a little bit slower or I don’t know, who knows, but I feel certainly better off without that dependency. I think if I got that dependent on pot or acid or anything else it would be just as bad.
James Holmes: Do you read much other science fiction or do you…?
Norman Spinrad: I read some other science fiction, I read it selectively. Much of it is just dull and unreadable. I will read any Philip K. Dick novel that comes out automatically. I’ll probably read anything that Delany publishes, although he hasn’t been publishing, but not with the same enthusiasm as Dick-

James Holmes: Well you’re not like a, like I think John Lennon doesn’t listen to any other kind of rock n roll until just before he’s going to write a song. Then he turns it on for like half an hour, listens to sort of see where they’re at, and then he will you know turn it off for a while and then write a song. I mean you don’t isolate yourself to try to, in an attempt to?

Norman Spinrad: No, no I don’t do that at all. You know I read what I feel like reading.

James Holmes: Do you have any other recommendations besides Delany and Philip K. Dick, like good science fiction?

Norman Spinrad: The would say that the stuff that Cordwainer Smith wrote was exceptional science fiction, I would say some of William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, starts to wear thin doesn’t it.
[laughs]
I’d say J.G. Ballard is interesting, you can learn some interesting things from reading his stuff. It’s kind of cerebral in a way. I think Brian Aldiss is a fine writer, and then it starts to wear thin after that, I like some of Harlan Ellison’s short stories, not all of it but some of it. Short stories, Carol Emshwiller short stories are interesting, Kate Wilhelm’s short stories.

James Holmes: Well, it looks like it’s pretty thin.

Norman Spinrad: Some of the better Robert Silverberg things are interesting, starts to thin out.

James Holmes: Some of your, what I’m curious about is like, what events in the United States, the political events and things like that, what kind of an effect do they have on your writing?

Norman Spinrad: Yeah, I don’t know.

James Holmes: Are you active in politics? Passively active?

Norman Spinrad: Yes and no. I write a great deal of political commentary and I’m on top of it. I’m not now a candidate for any office. And if offered a nomination I shall probably refuse. In that sense of being active in politics. But politically I’m interested in what’s going on, I write about it, I write political analysis constantly, I even have a book on political analysis published. In that sense I’m active in politics. I’ve spoken before at democratic clubs and political organizations things like that. I’m not a politician at this date but I-

James Holmes: Well like, some of your books seem to be really directed towards, you know, like Men in the Jungle sort of directed towards, you know directed towards power politics things and things like that.

Norman Spinrad: Oh I find the subject fascinating, I think it’s the richest, I think politics, good political fiction is the richest material for fiction in that it deals, I mean if it’s good stuff it deals with human beings en mass and it deals with human beings in the specific and it deals with the relationships between the inner realities of one individual and the outer realities to the political context. I think proper science fiction in a sense should do that, it should deal with real individual human beings in their total context, in the context of their society, the politics of the society, the technology of the society, and the aesthetic of the society. So in a way I think that proper, serious science fiction almost can’t help but have political implications

James Holmes: Are there any overt, in your books, where you are deliberately addressing yourself to political implications. I guess to be more specific was like Men in the Jungle seemed to talk about the United States involvement Vietnam and what happens when someone sort of gets sucked into something like that.

Norman Spinrad: Well Men in the Jungle was about the United States involvement in Vietnam to some extent. It was also about the Cuban Revolution you can interpret it that way, you can see relationships, for instance between Bart Fraden and Che Guevara. Che Guevara was an Argentine, who went as a soldier of fortune to Cuba fighting that revolution and when that was over when to Bolivia. It’s not a one to one correspondence it’s about that kind of thing. That’s what good science fiction should do, it’s about that kind of thing. It’s not specifically about Vietnam, it’s about guerrilla war, it’s about the manipulation of populaces in guerrilla war. And to the extent that Vietnam is a guerrilla war in which populations are manipulated that way, it’s about Vietnam but it’s also about what happened in Cuba, it’s also about any guerrilla war you would care to name almost.

James Holmes: Bug Jack Barron reverses that and follows not on that sort of larger level but more on a personal, just one guy.

Norman Spinrad: Bug Jack Barron is about a much more specific context not set on another planet, it’s about American presidential politics, it’s about television, which these days are about the same thing. It’s about a future in which the movement has kind of been co opted to an extent. It’s about a man’s struggle with his own cynicism and his desire not to be cynical and yet to be cynical. It’s about political cynicism and idealism. It’s a funny thing, you know when I wrote that book I pictured it as being set in the ’80s, but you know it seems much closer to home right now. Yeah that’s a book about a specific political context.

James Holmes: Do you have any plans for Bug Jack Barron?

Norman Spinrad: Well I’ve written a script of the book, an adaptation, the book was optioned to some people and their options left. Now I own the script again and I’m sort of trying to get it produced, may end up producing it. It may end up not being made, I may end up selling it to somebody I trust, I may end up producing it myself, I could conceivably end up directing it. I want to get it made. I think it’s a film that should be made. The way it’s filmed it should have been made in 1968, things might be different today.

James Holmes: If it had been made?

Norman Spinrad: Yeah I think that’s, I was thinking in terms of political affect there to some extent, I think the tragedy of 1968 in a sense was that there were historical forces converging to a point to make a positive change but there wasn’t a man at that point. There was nobody. So we ended up with Nixon versus Humphrey and what we have today. It was like the years from 1968 or from 1965 or so through ’68 were like America building up to a great big political orgasm. And then at the end not coming. Which is always a very unsatisfying experience.

James Holmes: Do you think if that book had been made into a movie back then it could have had any affect?

Norman Spinrad: God only knows. It could have, I think it would have had some effect but whether it would have been, or whether it could have done anything about what happened I don’t know. One of the points of the book as originally written, kind of before it had to be rewritten was that it wouldn’t have made much difference if Bobby Kennedy had ended up being elected president. Of course, that was before Nixon was elected. I mean anything would have been better than what we have now, practically. But it wouldn’t have made any vast cataclysmic difference. I think a two party system is moribund. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to continue indefinitely. Earlier this year I was writing pieces which were aimed at trying to generate some enthusiasm for a fourth party. And in fact there is a fourth party now with Spock, not Mr. Spok, but Dr. Spock. Mrs. Spock would have been a stronger candidate. You know running for president as a proxy for God knows who, Gore Vidal or something. I did not have a low farce of that nature in mind. I was thinking in terms of a serious fourth party.

James Holmes: Well in Bug Jack Barron you had 49 parties there at the end of the book, they were the hyperbole for at least more than two I guess.

Norman Spinrad: Well I mean in the original situation Bug Jack Barron there were 3 parties that came out of the ’70s there were the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Social Justice Coalition which was your, and who actually formed the American Independent Party, the Wallace party. I’m postulating continuing to exist as I think it will. Then when confusion reigns, everybody, when the presidential race looks like it’s wide open then some more splinter parties jump in.

James Holmes: Well how come, that never reached, what happened in the book from when you conceived it as that, as to what actually ended up in the book?

Norman Spinrad: Well Bobby Kennedy was killed in the middle of the writing of the book.

James Holmes: Oh so…

Norman Spinrad: So I had to write him out, it was easy.

James Holmes: It was easy to write him out?

Norman Spinrad: Very easy. The only reason I wrote him in was because I thought he was inevitable. I think if Bobby Kennedy hadn’t have been shot he would have been president.

James Holmes: That’s interesting.

Norman Spinrad: I mean in hindsight you can see that. That he would have swept that convention and he would have buried Richard Nixon. Anybody but Humphrey would have buried Richard Nixon. If there hadn’t been a Chicago, Humphrey would have buried Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon became president by an incredible series of accidents, if you think about it.

James Holmes: I have to find a..

James Holmes: William Atheling in More Issues at Hand called Bug Jack Barron aggressively and second-handedly trendy, what do you think of the more reactionary aspects of the science fiction world? I don’t know whether you read that particular thing but it was on the last page, it was the only referral.

Norman Spinrad: Ah there are much better things than that. Donald Wollheim called it, ‘A vile degenerate parody of what was once a true science fiction.’
[laughs]

Norman Spinrad: I was called a degenerate on the floor of parliament. Believe me it William Atheling, is James Blish whatever that’s worth, which isn’t very much, is the least of it.

James Holmes: Well that was about the only written thing that I’ve seen in any kind of critical science fiction book about Bug Jack Barron, it was kind of a gliding over thing, he was trying to sum up the New Wave writers and its developments.

Norman Spinrad: Well anyone who is trying to sum up the New Wave writers, kind of betrays his ignorance in what the hell is going on at all. Again, I could come up with the old cliché, or the new cliché, which is that there is no such thing as a New Wave. In a sense that’s true but there very much is such a thing as you know the old science fiction.

James Holmes: You mean Campbell and all of the people that he had?

Norman Spinrad: Well not just Campbell, that’s the best of it, I mean. Science fiction started out in these pulp adventure magazines and the guys were grinding it out for penny worth back in the ’20s, ’30s, and early ’40s and the same guys who were grinding out science fiction were grinding out westerns and mysteries and romance novels and all of that stuff. It was commercial pulp fiction. And most of the writers of the so called Golden Age of the ’40s were commercial hack writers who were churning out stuff you know, adventure fiction for adolescents essentially. And then in the early ’40s Campbell came along and improved the standard somewhat, required the stuff to be more logical, slightly better grade of writing on a prose level, it was still bolt and grommet stuff. The idea was important, the characterization was non-existent, the depth of psychological insight just wasn’t there, the prose was simply pedestrian workman-like prose to get you from one point to another, it’s not something anyone would read for its own sake.

Norman Spinrad: Then in the ’50s Horace Gold came along with Galaxy and Tony Boucher came along with Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with more potentially instilled literally values but still the literally values that would be inculcated were kind of rudimentary literacy in a contemporary sense which, God knows science fiction needed at the time but all that really did was bring it up to some, bring it up to the level of what the better mystery writers were writing at the time which wasn’t a hell of a lot.

James Holmes: [inaudible/audio corrupted]

Norman Spinrad: Yes science fiction holds dear basically fiction in which the idea was important, the characters didn’t count very much, trick fiction, puzzle fiction, gadget fiction, fiction-able ideas and then about, oh it’s hard to you know put a day on this but 1965 is a good arbitrary year for the birth of the New Wave. And all that meant was… also you see that these pulp writers were discovered by science fiction fandom, a whole subculture of science fiction groupies grew up around them, so while they were still writing hackwork they were being deluded by these 3,000 fans who exist all over the world that they were doing something important. Which in some ways they were doing some interesting things. And then the ’50s generation, and to some extent the late ’40s generation of science fiction writers, very many of them started out as science fiction fans. So the whole thing became very inbred and they were writing the dominant science fiction of the ’50s became something that basically could only be really entirely understood by initiates, by people who were fans who had come up through that, who were very familiar with it. If some genuinely literate person who had no great experience with science fiction picked up an issue of a science fiction magazine, there would be some good things in it but most of the stuff would bore them to death. They wouldn’t understand what the hell was going on, they wouldn’t care. Which is not to say that the literary form wasn’t always exciting, when you think of how many main stream writers who were known as mainstream novelists made their mainstream reputations from science fiction novels it’s very interesting. You think of Aldous Huxley, the book that pops into your head is Brave New World. Although he wrote a lot of drawing room stuff and other things, you think of Orwell, well you think automatically of 1984. Oh I’m trying to think of some other examples, you think of Anthony Burgess you think of Clockwork Orange or The Wanting Seed, although the bulk of his work is not science fiction. Yet these are the peak books of these people’s careers were science fiction novels.
James Holmes: I think Bruce Franklin had said that every mainstream author had written at least one science fiction book, had at least experimented with it.

Norman Spinrad: Well that’s a rather extreme statement. I’m sure that there are mainstream authors who never wrote science fiction. But the interesting thing is the mainstream authors whose best work was science fiction. That’s what’s interesting. Even though they wrote very little, it was the peak of their careers. Because the literary form of science fiction as opposed to this whole subculture and formula of writing that grew up around it. The literary form of the infinite possible, writing about anything that comes, that you can imagine is obviously a much more powerful literary viewpoint than being constricted to writing about the here and now or historical past. Potentially, it’s wide open.

James Holmes: Do you think it’s the literature of the future?

Norman Spinrad: YES, I think it’s definitely the literature, I don’t think the pulp science fiction that Mr. Blish, and Mr. Wollheim and those people are extolling is the literature of the future or even the literature of the present. But science fiction as a literary form, you are talking about the kind of thing that Kurt Vonnegut is doing and William Burroughs is doing and Ballard is doing. sure, sure. Look at films too, for that matter, big films lately, important films are science fiction. And simply because we’re living in age and it looks like it’s going to continue or change is so fast that the only way you can deal, you can create a historical context for the present, is not by looking to the past which is becoming irrelevant, but trying to fit it into the context of where we are going, of the future. Yeah I think that kind of science fiction is inevitably the literature of the future. If there is going to be any literature in the future at all, if people don’t forget how to read. But even if they do forget how to read the television of the future, the film of the future will be science fiction. What the New Wave was all about, is that the 60’s generation, a group of writers, Harlan Ellison, myself, Tom Disch, JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Philip K Dick who started earlier, Brian Aldiss people like that, started writing science fiction with a different viewpoint. Namely coming to science fiction as an exciting literary form. They couldn’t care less about fans, about the pulp formulas, about writing adventure fiction, about all of that commercial writing aspect of it. I mean obviously sometimes you had to write commercial fiction to make a buck and to eat, but the reason for writing science fiction, let’s face it pulp fiction was a refuge of many writers who weren’t competent to write anything better. But the new generation of writers came to science fiction not because they necessarily couldn’t write anything better but because they felt that was the powerful literary tool of the time. That was the area in which a serious creative artist could most profitably work. That was the essence of the New Wave and there was no school of new science fiction in the sense of a coherent prose style that everybody wrote in or specific subject matter that people dealt with, or ideological content. The only, the thing that distinguished the new science fiction from the old science fiction was that the old science fiction had these things, it had a certain style of prose, pedestrian prose, it had a certain ideological content, it was all implicitly very mindlessly pro science, pro capitalist ethic, pro work ethic, you know you always had a positive clean hero who mopped up a dirty villain. Basically was the ethic that it had the ideology it had was the ideology from commercial pulp fiction. Which is basically that hairy chested super male chauvinist, repressed homosexual number.

James Holmes: Well how do you explain all of these knights in shining armor sort of standing up there and saying the New Wave is dead, it’s all washed up, it’s all over, what do you think about that?

Norman Spinrad: Well in a sense New Wave is all over from their point of view. The writers who, at least, I’m speaking mainly for myself but I can see that other people are going through this process. That we’re not interested in fighting with these people anymore. It’s irrelevant. We had, the connection with what they are doing is really very tenuous. We’re doing our own things and the factional dispute got kind of sterile, and the only importance it ever really had was in terms of who was controlling what markets, what got published and how. That’s what it was really all about. What these people were deathly afraid of and what had them praying to God that the so called New Wave phenomenon was over and why they are doing their best to kill it is because they are afraid of losing their prominence, and losing their economic livelihoods because a lot of people who plainly are better writers than they are, came along. So called giants of the golden age, if you read so called Golden Age stuff and stack it up against modern fiction. I mean there were some good writers, I’m not saying it’s all bad but most of its pretty pathetic. So naturally they are going to say that, and in terms of the New Wave competing for the same market and for the same audience and for the same way of publishing as this old commercial Pulp Fiction in that sense New Wave is dead because who wants any part of being published that way? Who wants any part of appealing to this ugly kind of unconscious repressed homosexuality, you know psychologically Nazi, super male chauvinist Nazi trip, that the worse of that stuff pandered to? Who wants to compete with that?

James Holmes: Yeah but you aren’t necessarily competing with it what you’re doing is, in order to get published you have to go through so many hoops right?

Norman Spinrad: Oh yeah you have to play games with publishers.

James Holmes: If that’s what he thinks the public wants, it may sort of leave you out in the cold.

Norman Spinrad: That’s true. I mean that battle is still going on but the editorial situation isn’t quite as bad as it used to be. In England, that battle is over. And the New Wave such as it is has won. In that Bug Jack Barron was just published as a novel, it wasn’t a science fiction novel or anything of the kind. It was just a novel. Brian Aldiss was just published as a novelist, Ballard is just published as a novelist. So that’s, over there, you can see what the end result is that good science fiction, that is science fiction at its literary quality, well written, psychological depth intellectual meat to it, it gets published along with all the other books that fit into the category of literature. And if it’s competing with anything, that’s what it’s competing with, not with a bunch of pulp and sorcery novels. Here the process is less advanced. The New Wave started, the whole thing started in England. Here the process is less advanced. Many of these, many of the editors came up above a science fiction year, came up through that whole pulp process so they are attuned to that kind of thing. Lately there are some editors who are not, who came into the field with some more serious literary tastes.

James Holmes: Are these editors of magazines you’re talking about?

Norman Spinrad: NO! Magazines here are moribund, they are dead as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing alive being published in magazines, science fiction magazines in the United States. Very few you know, I mean, occasionally good stories crop up but the magazines themselves are irrelevant to modern science fiction, I think. Modern short science fiction in the United States that’s really interesting at all is published in all these original collections of science fiction like Dangerous Visions, and Orbit, and Universe, and Quark, New Dimensions, and the New Worlds Quarterly- there must be a dozen of these books that publish original short science fiction and that’s where the good stuff is. You look at the Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards for the best science fiction of the year. And even though these awards are given out by people for the most part with not very good taste, still even those awards reflect the books and none of them come from the magazines sort of

James Holmes: Yeah, well Nebula works aren’t— those are a science fiction authors and–

Norman Spinrad: Even so the science fiction writers in America has four hundred members on which maybe three hundred of them are fans or published a story once or twice.

James Holmes: Oh.

Norman Spinrad: There are maybe fifty who are really working science fiction writers in the whole country and three hundred and fifty members in that organization, figure it out. That doesn’t reflect very… well awards in general you know, Nobel Prizes get awarded for political reasons too. I don’t think awards are terribly significant. But it is significant and most of the stories that get nominated and have won in the past few years have come from the books not from the magazines. When even that kind of mass mind like that ignores the magazines in favor of the books you know. Pretty well think that the magazines are really dead. I think there’s room for a good contemporary line of science fiction magazine in the United States, just that there is no such magazine at the moment. I think all the science fiction magazines with the possible exception of Analog will be dead in five years and I think at that point somebody may start a new one that is tuned into contemporary science fiction do very well with it once the old rubbish is swept under the rug.

James Holmes: Yeah but a lot of the books like Quark comes out, quarterlies. It’s almost a book magazine.

Norman Spinrad: Yeah it’s a book magazine, Orbit is like that. Universe is like that, New Dimensions is like that, there are several of them. They are paperback book magazines. The advantages are obvious. The paperback books can stay on a stand for a half a year. You can stay on a stand, Quark One can stay on a stand even when Quark Two comes out. Or Orbit One even when Orbit Two comes out. Whereas a magazine is out there for a month and then it gets pulled. So naturally they have a better chance at selling them. There are less taboos. See them as Frederick Pohl once said, not in as many words, he believes that his magazines are read by adolescent, primarily by adolescent boys whose mothers overlook what they read so they got to watch what they print. And that’s a formula for garbage, whereas the books are not operating under those restrictions, yeah. So whether the new wave is— the new wave is dead in the sense that the people who were involved in the phenomenon, that got called the new wave, for the most part, not terribly interested in defining what they’re doing in terms of what these other older science fiction writers doing. We are writing science fiction which is different from that and defining what we’re doing in those terms and say no we’re writing fiction and this is what it’s like and we couldn’t care less about what these people think.
James Holmes: Is that where it’s all going in your opinion? I mean where science fiction is going is towards that kind of an ideal? I mean not science fiction as science fiction but fiction you know— future oriented fiction?

Norman Spinrad: Well I mean that science fiction has always been really, about good fiction.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Norman Spinrad: It’s nice, you know good fiction has always been non-formula individualistic fiction. And what the new wave is all about is that some science fiction writers started writing from that point of view, from individualistic points of view and paying attention to the implications of what they were writing about rather than to commercial forms and commercial formulas. And that’s what the new wave is all about. The ironic thing about the whole stupid business is that while the new wave did not have the ideology and the unity that the older science fiction writers claimed they did in the attack that their stuff does. It’s all very much of a piece for the most part. You’ll notice that the better of the older generation of science fiction writers, the handful of good writers who came out of the ’40s and the ’50s were not at all involved in this attack on the new at all. I think the people like Phillip Jose Farmer, my God, he was ten years ahead of his time in the ’50s and is still writing some incredible things. By the way they’re not very weak he’s not considered one of the top science fiction writers here, in France he’s up there on top with Phillip K. Dick, who also is not considered one of the big names here.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Norman Spinrad: But writers like Dick, Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon and a handful of others. Damon Knight. We’re receptive to the new trends and encourage them and encourage their work to suddenly start growing again after being frozen for years. And yeah, there never have anything bad to say about that you find in the list of the people who spend a lot time attacking newer writers or people that hadn’t written novels for years and been blocked. Like Lester Del Rey has just written his first novel in twelve years and he spent the late ’60s attacking the new wave while not writing any books. Blish didn’t write very much of worth during that period. Isaac Asimov didn’t write anything at all. These are the people who are screaming about the new wave and they weren’t writing anything.

James Holmes: During the entire conversation you haven’t mentioned the person that’s considered the dean of science fiction, Heinlein. I was just curious you know you haven’t even mentioned his name. What do you think of Heinlein?

Norman Spinrad: I don’t know what the dean of science fiction means. If there’s a dean of science fiction like were the biggest… with the largest body of truly impressive work over a long period of time. The dean of science fiction is either Phillip K. Dick, or Brian Aldiss; it’s not Heinlein. Which is not a terrible put down of Heinlein, I think Heinlein has written some interesting books and some good books. But he is not the writer that Dick is, and he is not the writer that Aldiss is, in my opinion. I think his Stranger in a Strange Land was a phenomenally successful book and an interesting book. His earlier short stories were interesting. I think in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress was an interesting book in a way a new wavish kind of book in that he was using the context, an older context of language to get his point across. He was writing it in the language of the future. Which was, you know, what I was always trying to do in Bug Jack Barron. And one of the things that Brian Aldiss did in Barefoot in the Head and it was Heinlein doing it and that was kind of nice in his latest book the less said the better.

[Laughter]

Norman Spinrad: But it was written— in all fairness to Heinlein at this time it was written under peculiar circumstances.

James Holmes: And what were those?

Norman Spinrad: He was very ill and didn’t know if he was going to survive. He admitted that the book needed some more cutting but at that point the— it was either he didn’t know whether he was going to survive to do work himself. He didn’t want anybody else to do it and he wanted to see the book in print before he didn’t have the opportunity to see it in print and he let it go out the way it was. Subsequently, fortunately he seems to be recovering and may yet do another novel. It was an interesting attempt. We’re talking about the I Shall Fear No Evil. It was a courageous attempt by an older writer to really make a leap of a sensibility and to write from the strange point of view of a fused mind of a man. I think he was in some ways an embarrassing failure in that he did not successfully make the empathetic leap entirely but he attempted something very courageous and you got to credit him for that. He— you always got to credit Heinlein for that. He tries things. Heinlein is working every— that’s one of the things that you have to admire about Heinlein, is that work never stultified into formula. Each book attempted something different you know. He went from the book that became kind of a big thing with hippies and with people who like peace and love. Then he turned around and wrote the horrible, what these people would call horrible fascistic book in Starship Troopers. Then turned around and wrote a book about revolution in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and then write this strange book about sex. See you don’t know now what he’s going to do next and you got to admire that in a writer, he’s a writer who after all these years is still capable of throwing a complete surprise at you. And I think that’s a mark of the work of a man who is still evolving even at his advanced age. Phillip Jose Farmer is another example of that. God only knows what he’s going to do next with his outrageous ideas and very often more so than Heinlein has the prose ability to really put him across.
James Holmes: Well you’ve written a new book that hasn’t been published yet. Could you sort of give us a synopsis of that?

Norman Spinrad: Well I’ve written two books that haven’t been published yet and one is a science fiction novel called The Iron Dream, which is a very complex book based on a kind of double alternate universe premise and the premise being that Adolf Hitler left Nazi Germany in nineteen ninetine… Oh left, pardon me, Weimar Germany in 1919. He had to flirting with the Nazi party which seemed kind of silly. Came to New York and through an involved process became a science fiction writer and then wrote a book called The Lord of the Swastika which was a kind of fantasy wishful film of Nazi Germany in a world in which that never happened and in which Hitler just became a science fiction writer and wrote these kind of heroic fantasies and much as certain writers are writing them today. And the only difference being that this one is a forthright Nazi trip. It’s a novel that attempts to exorcise Nazism by explaining. I think by explaining what it was really all about in kind of step by step understandable ways so that the mystery goes out of it so you really understand why the Nazis and how the Nazis and how it works psychologically and it’s a very ambitious book. That’s one of the things I hope to accomplish in it.

James Holmes: How much research did you do in doing it?

Norman Spinrad: More than I care to think about. I’ve read any scrap of anything that Hitler ever wrote because the idea was to write the bulk of the book, Hitler’s book, Lord of the Swastika as if it was Hitler writing it, which meant I really had to get into his prose style which is pretty awful. You know its kind of— I didn’t write it exactly as Hitler would have written it because he was not a very good painter either. But I think I tried to capture the flavor of Hitler’s prose style. The kinds of images that he uses and the kind of words that he uses. So I had to read not only Mein Kampf and other obscure books that he published, as well as the huge book of his dinner conversations which was put together by Martin Bormann who sat in a corner during dinner. A couple of years and he’s taking a little step down [inaudible]. So I really got into the head of Adolf Hitler and I think this book that if it does nothing else will get you into the head of Adolf Hitler quite thoroughly and demystify him.

James Holmes: Which is debatable whether it’s a pleasant place to be?

Norman Spinrad: Oh it’s not a pleasant place to be at all but it demystifies Nazis and Hitler. And it’s also a book on another level about that kind of pathological science fiction novels that appeals to this kind of repressed homosexual phallic fetishism epitomized by the sword, the muscular sword and sorcery hero with his great big phallic sword who slays all these ugly people and in obvious symbolic sexual terms. Here it’s all straight you know. Here it’s kind of, it kind of ends upfront there and it shows the relationship between, the book develops this kind of sword and sorcery ambiance into a super science ambiance much as Nazi Germany’s start as this big Wagnerian trip and at the end was into all these super weapons and a very strange kind of black leather fantasy. It’s a book about fetishism. One of the contentions of the book is that’s basically how the Nazis took over with its display of phallic fetishism and the ideological content was very incidental. There was a media trip. In Hitler’s case, Hitler was a master of media. The media he was using was live flesh and pageantry rather than television. If there had been television he would have used that. And he used the radio, and he used radio very effectively. So did Goebbels.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Norman Spinrad: So that basically he was the selling job and that’s that. I don’t think I’d care to describe it any further. It won’t make any sense unless you read through the whole thing.

James Holmes: Do you have any books on the drawing board now or any–

Norman Spinrad: Yeah, yeah, I started another book called Riding the Torch, which again is… well it’s your classic fleet of giant spaceships leave or ruin solar systems story.

James Holmes: So like the Solarians you mean, going back?

Norman Spinrad: No it’s all sort of like Heinlein’s universe. You know where the solar system is destroyed by various cataclysms and the last remnants of humanity get on a fleet of spaceships going slower than light to get to a new star. But it turns the whole cliché around because instead of forgetting everything, you know regressing the savagery and forgetting that they’re on a spaceship and thinking they’re in the world. They remember everything. They’ve got all the human history on tapes. The society of these ships continues evolving scientifically, aesthetically, psychologically becomes a very high rich civilization just on these ships. They live off the interstellar hydrogen. They have a fusion torches which provide the motive power for the ships and which also convert the interstellar hydrogen into as much energy as they need so they’ve got— and also the interstellar hydrogen combined with the fusion torch is a total conversion of hydrogen ions to, which are out there, to any element they need, So they’ve got unlimited supplies of whatever matter they need and they got an unlimited source of energy. They solved all those ecological problems. They’ve got an open ecological system. Then the system is super abundant and it’s about what kind of culture that would be.

James Holmes: They don’t really ever even need to land anywhere.

Norman Spinrad: No but one of the things that this book is about is the point which the society start to realize that when they make a transition from thinking in terms of finding another planet to being itself. And it’s also about something else. Everybody has a radio transceiver implanted in their skull. It’s keyed into computers so that well for instance, the thing in your skull is monitoring your brain. It’s getting all your sensory input so that can get transmitted through the computer access into somebody else’s head. You can be inside someone else. You can feel the world through their body, their inner body and they can be in yours. It’s an art form. There can be artificial realities created through the computers, like making a film. It also gives you and everybody total racial recall, racial memory. In real time you can experience anything that’s on tape— that’s ever been taped as if it were real. Including unreal art forms, including the surreal art forms, so reality becomes a very subjective thing in this culture. The hero of the book is a guy who is sort of a film director. He makes these real full sensory trips. That’s one element of the book. The other element of the book is that they’re going around and they are not finding any life.

James Holmes: They’re the only ones in the universe?

Norman Spinrad: They begin to get the idea that they’re the only ones in the universe. And the book s about how this rich psychologically rich society, with their vast psychological capacities I mean. These are you know these are very together people. They’re not; it’s not a hollow situation at all. They— in that sense they’re superior beings. How they confront this ultimate horror of the universe.

James Holmes: Man has been hoping for years. I think that he was the only one in the universe. He was sort of God’s little pet.

Norman Spinrad: I don’t think so. [Cross talking] yeah God’s little pet but the implication is you know, ain’t nobody’s little pet. It’s just as they say, just you know, nothing but us and the big zilch. And that’s it.

James Holmes: Hard to handle.

Norman Spinrad: It’s just hard to handle, yeah. The book is— the part of what the book about is how to handle that, come to handle it so it’s a positive book— I’m sure you know it will be interesting to see what kind of reaction the people who attack new wave fiction will attack, it will take a book like this, which fulfills all what they say are the requirements for a proper science fiction novel. You know [inaudible], spaceships. It’s has, you know heroic heroes in a way. People who are positive. It has a positive conclusion of sorts, at least philosophically. And yet I’m sure it will be attacked as negative and nihilistic, which is one of the things above Bug Jack Barron was attacked. A nihilistic, down beat, anti-heroic and negative, which of course whatever the qualities of the book is ridiculous, it is totally far from the truth. And I think these people don’t really quite understand what it is that they object to in some of the things that they know they don’t like. And it has nothing to do with the philosophy or anything like that. It has to do with the closeness of most certain things to read, to psychological reality because most of traditional science fiction is very divorced from any kind of psychological reality. It’s all surface stuff and it gives these people a queasy feeling. And I think getting back to the Iron Dream I think people will read that book, I think will get something of an understanding aside from Nazism, which is what the major element that deals with. Will get an idea of what that kind of pathological science fiction it is all about.

James Holmes: It sounds like you’re almost trying to insult them.

Norman Spinrad: I try to make it difficult but one of the things I’m trying to do is make it difficult for that kind of book to be written. At least unself-consciously the way it is written. It’s like you know, why it’s like what William Burroughs said about what the title of the Naked Lunch is all about you know. For a change take a look at what’s really on the end of the spoon. You may not like it and I think that aspect of the Iron Dream is there. I mean obviously that’s certainly true about Nazis. And I think psychological Nazism, see the key thing is that psychological Nazism, aside from the— Nazism is a psychological syndrome, aside from the political content. It’s very close of the pathological appeal of Nazism to a certain kinds of personalities, very, very, very close to the appeal of that kind of heroic science fantasy. Almost indistinguishable and Hitler, I think Hitler had, you know, not ended up being this Fuhrer and ended up writing fiction for a living, that’s what he would have been like. That’s what Nazi Germany would— instead of Nazi Germany he acted it out.

James Holmes: Yeah but you may be putting, you know trying to put the Gray Mouser and–

Norman Spinrad: No the Gray Mouser, no, no you see the great mouser is different. Fritz Leiber is different because Fritz Leiber is writing about the stuff sardonically. He’s writing about himself self-consciously. He knows what it’s all about and he makes it perfectly clear that he knows what he’s writing about. And that he’s running jokes on him. I’m not talking about Fritz. I’m not talking about Fritz Leiber’s stuff, I’m talking about the second rate stuff. I’m talking about — no I’m also talking about things like Conan. That’s just–

James Holmes: And the Man of Bronze.

Norman Spinrad: Yeah The Man of Bronze, mighty Zeus with his great gleaming sword which is always the biggest strongest, hardest sword around and you know and leave us not be crude.

James Holmes: Well thank you very much. Do you have any questions you want to ask? I’m just trying to, on the ending when it all gets placed together again we’re going to include all kinds of stuff.

Norman Spinrad: Go ahead don’t be intimidated. I can just think of one idea I gave Michael Moorcock which he hasn’t used yet because he writes a lot of that stuff and he knows exactly what he’s doing too. Is you know a magician who has a classical weapon to fight the big swordsmen which is just a noose, which tosses around the great big sword and it wilts.

[Laughter]

Norman Spinrad: I hope this is all clear to whoever’s listening to him. If it got any clearer it wouldn’t get on the air.

James Holmes: [laughter] Probably right about that.

Norman Spinrad: Which is something you can say about a lot of that stuff if— the kind of thing that— that’s the other ironic thing about this whole business of the new wave controversy is that if it was ever made clear what this old stuff you know, what the psychological underpinings of this pulp science fiction really were, they’d look very silly accusing the new wave of being degenerate, my God! It appeals to that kind of very ugly repressed homosexual phallic fetishism which is all bound up with violence and tight black leather, and chrome. I don’t quite understand it at all, what the appeal is. But–

James Holmes: Well if there is sort of system and philosophy for this certain sick world view. Is there a system of philosophy for a non-sick world view, a whole world view? And what is your sort of philosophical or psychological?

Norman Spinrad: Yes just as there are more than one sick world views, I think there are more than one more wholesome worlds because I think the world view expressed in the novels of Phillip K. Dick, for instance, is a pretty wholesome way of looking at things. Kind of the subjectiveness of reality, the complexity of existence. You know the little heroisms of everyday life. I think in a way, in a very different way than the kind of world that you would get in the works of Cordwainer Smith, the kind of positive healthy world view. I don’t know, of course nobody’s going to say that their own world is sick you know. So there’s no point in bringing my stuff into it. I think a lot of the general world view expressed by Theodore Sturgeon is wholesome. But they’re all these things are different. I don’t think there’s any one true world view. I think the only reason, the only reason that I say that this kind of science fantasy heroic figure world view is sick, is that this is all an unconscious thing. It’s an idea, I would say it’s even in a curious kind of way not pathological to write say a straight forward Nazi novel, extolling the Nazi virtues if that’s what you’re doing upfront. But the people who write the kind of thing I’m talking about… don’t know what they’re doing; don’t know what— it’s all operating on this subterranean level. And it’s appealing to— they’re kind of… oh there’s a kind of a repressed sexuality in young adolescents that can easily turn into a kind of— well I… There’s a kind of you know a young boys or young girls for that matter when they begin to have sexual feelings they kind of diffuse general sexual feelings, right? Then maybe what would be called homosexual impulses involved. But it’s not really homosexuality; it’s just kind of pan sexuality. Then as a society kind of, God knows German society was worse in this aspect than ours, that starts repressing natural sexuality. It all gets kind of compacted and warped and twisted and gets kind of— gets to be a kind of fixation at this unconscious homosexual level, which is not really homosexual so much as pan sexuality. Kind of crushed down into this kind of narcissistic phallic fetishism because in a kind of a masturbatory fantasy because sex with women is frowned upon by, with girls as frowned upon by the official ethic of this kind of rigid authoritarian society. And that gets involved with sports and physical activity and finally violence and tight black leather because that way you get a feeling of your body that you can delude yourself isn’t sexual and the whole thing it— by this point the whole sexual impulse is so twisted and messed up that you have a psychological Nazi type to whom you know, killing is an orgasmic act, to whom— you know it was completely twisted inside in that way. And then as somebody who writes a fiction that is in effect pornography for this kind of warped mentality which panders to it, which does not try to illumine to give a person afflicted with this syndrome a satori into his own being but rather tends to keep them unconscious of what’s been done to them by satisfying the warped impulses very often written by somebody who has had the same thing done to them and doesn’t really know what they’re doing. Oh I think that is sick because it perpetuates the warped personality. It panders to it, just as an obvious thing would be a book that really heavily panders to overt sadism and how groovy it is to kill people and jump up and down on them with hob nailed boots would be considered highly perverted by most people and I think basically this is the same kind of thing on a more subtle and insidious level. That’s what Nazism is all about.

James Holmes: What do you think about Willhelm Reich?

Norman Spinrad: Oh yes I went— yeah right I read, I just did a long review on it a few months ago and is a— what is its name— basically a psychological explanation of the fascist personality. I can’t remember the name of the book? Psychopathology of Fascism? Something like that, yeah. I read that fairly recently but it’s basically the same idea that it’s a— that Nazism is a psycho sexual phenomenon. And in that sense so very much alive. It’s no accident that the Hells Angels wear swastikas.

James Holmes: Why do people like Apollo space program?

Norman Spinrad: No I think one of the reasons that the American Space program lost its popularity was that they didn’t pander enough to this phallic fetishism. They didn’t go whole hog. If they had done that, people would really still be gung ho for it. I’m all for the exploration of space. I think it’s a positive thing but isophallic exercise, that’s something else, so much. On the other hand Sigmund Freud once said sometimes a cigar is a just a cigar.

[Laughter]

James Holmes: Completely filled out this tape.

End of Interview
 
APPENDIX

I completed three interviews: science fiction authors Norman Spinrad on Dec 16, 1971 and Philip K Dick on Dec 23, 1971 and the host of the TV show Creature Features Bob Wilkins.

This is a transcription of the tape recording of the interview with Norman Spinrad I made on my Tandberg reel to reel tape recorder in December 1971. The interview was recorded on one 7 inch reels using 2400 foot long 0.5 mil thick ¼ inch wide audio magnetic recording tape.

The technology which was top of the line in 1971 is now obsolete. In order to be able to use and even listen to them I had to get the recordings transferred to mp3 audio. Then I had the audio mp3 files transcribed to Microsoft Word, which is contained in the previous 29 pages.
The mp3 audio files are quite large: the 2 and ½ hour Phillip K. Dick interview is 151.7 MB; the 1 and ½ hour Norman Spinrad interview is 90.4 MB.

The recordings were 45 years old when I had them transcribed in 2016. Surprisingly the recordings had survived the 45 years quite well despite my concerns about magnetic print through on the thin (0.5 mil thick) recording tape.

The motivation behind the interviews was I wanted to do a show on the student radio station KZSU. I imagined my show would include: science fiction topics, reviews of new books, discussions of my favorite novels and short stories and interviews with SF authors and others involved in SF or fantasy whether in publishing, television, movies or radio.

The PKD and Spinrad interviews were the first in a series of science fiction authors , including Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Phillip Jose Farmer, R.A. Lafferty, Roger Zelazny and Robert Silverberg. I had addresses and some telephone numbers for all of them. Others I wanted to interview but didn’t have addresses for included Theodore Sturgeon, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederick Pohl, Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and Bob Shaw.

My intended show was rather different from the typical show on the student station which was mostly rock music and some talk about the music. What happened at KZSU and why I only did the two interviews and only one trial show is for another time. So it goes.

Sometime in 1972 I took all the reel to reel tapes I had recorded (some 18 reels) and wrapped them in plastic bags and put them in a metal foot locker that I then stored in the basement of my parent’s house. There they remained for over 40 years until after both my parents had died. Whereupon I retrieved the foot locker and unpacked the tapes and put them in a storage closet in my house where they sat for another 5 years.

I won’t go into the details of transferring the recordings to audio mp3 files and then using the audio files to transcribe the interviews. Suffice it to say I found excellent companies to resurrect the recordings so the interviews and other recordings can be experienced and enjoyed by interested parties.

As you will see in the interviews, both Norman Spinrad and Phillip K. Dick are very articulate and coherent in their answers so much so that after the Spinrad interview I wondered how many times he had answered the very same questions I asked. I made a mental note to not be quite so predictable when I interviewed Philip K Dick. However the problem is that many of those predictable questions are ones some readers would like have the author answer. After all if you’re totally familiar with an author and his work why bother to read or listen to another interview.

Unless you are a fanatic.

Enjoy

To purchase both interviews + extras on USB click the button below

James Holmes
November 24, 2018
Carmel-by-the-Sea
California, USA