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An Interview with Norman Spinrad, Anarchist by Cat Rambo
American science fiction writer Norman Spinrad described himself as an anarchist and a “syndicalist” in a 1999 interview with Locus. His work challenges and provokes, whether it’s The Iron Dream starring Hitler as a speculative writer or the more recent Osama the Gun. He’s just as outspoken when answering questions, as this interview proves.
Q: The Iron Dream, an alternate history novel about a writer named Adolf Hitler, was banned for eight years in Germany. What drew you to that story and why did you describe the writing of it as “unpleasant”?
NS: Try reading everything Hitler ever wrote for the purpose of being able to channel him and write in his turgid style and see how you like it! I didn’t really know what I was into until I was into it. By the time I finished the novel, I hated it. Only over a few years of awards, world-wide publication, good to rave reviews, did I realize it was the process of writing The Iron Dream that I hated, not the novel itself.
What drew me to write it was that the economic and political reasons for the rise of Nazi Germany never convinced me. Hitler was a media genius, and Nazism a psychosexual phenomenon. … Like a certain species of “heroic fantasy.” Hitler was a big fan of Wagnerian Opera at a time when “Space Opera” had a big fandom too. “Homer Whipple’s” afterward sort of tells the tale, and was the only part of the novel I really enjoyed writing.
Q: Osama the Gun is an experiment in e-publishing and also a book you describe as “literarily and politically important.” Is the impulse behind that book similar to the one behind The Iron Dream? What makes it politically important?
NS: Osama the Gun is indeed literarily and politically important, but not like The Iron Dream, where the importance is literarily and politically historical. Osama the Gun is currently politically, socially, psychologically and spiritually important, for the same reasons that it has been rejected by so many American publishers, which The Iron Dream never was, why one rejection letter, foaming at the mouth, declared that no American publisher would touch it...
Jerome Winter interviews Norman Spinrad
No Political Naïf: An Interview with Norman Spinrad
Spinrad has published over twenty novels in the last fifty years. He became affiliated with science fiction’s New Wave when he began to contribute to Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine during the 1960s. His 1969 novel Bug Jack Barron, serialized in New Worlds, provoked a firestorm of controversy for its forthright depiction of sex, drugs, and radical politics. Spinrad continued to push the satirical envelope with The Iron Dream (1972), written in the persona of an alternate-history Adolf Hitler who, having failed as a dictator, becomes instead a bestselling heroic fantasy writer, author of a series called “Lord of the Swastika.” Other major works include the space operas The Void Captain’s Tale (1983) and Child of Fortune (1985), which infuse the subgenre with an erotic edge. His novel Mexica still has not found an American publisher, and the future publishing prospects of his next two novels, Welcome to Your Dreamtime and Police State, are also uncertain.
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I’m no political naif. I’ve lived in France for over a decade. I’m rather well-travelled. For a non-Muslim, I’m well-grounded in Islam, having, among other things, read the Koran twice, if only in English translation. I am something of a political figure because I am not exactly an apolitical writer, having, after all, been denounced in the British Parliament over political issues however well-concealed, having had The Iron Dream semi-banned in Germany and liberated from the German Index only after an eight-year legal battle that I followed in my lousy German, having been a political columnist for a major Underground newspaper, and so forth. I’ve worked as a literary agent, I’ve been President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I had my commercial viability destroyed when Sonny Mehta, the Grand Poobah of Knopf, torpedoed The Druid King, to the point where Mexica, a best-seller in Spanish translation in Mexico, still hasn’t been able to find an American publisher.
So I knew the score. I knew what I was getting into. I knew what the political tea leaves said. I knew that one reason no one had published a novel like Osama the Gun was because, as one rejection letter would say many tries later, “No American publisher would touch a novel like this with a fork.” Still less if written by someone without the bottom-line power of a Stephen King or Philip Roth.
But I also knew that the very reasons why Osama the Gun was going to be so difficult to get published were the reasons I had to write it. Because someone had to write it. Because things being what they were, the Western body politic, indeed the Islamic body politic, the Umma, needed to read a story like this. And since no one else seemed to be willing to take on the task, and I at least was under no illusion as to what that literary task was, like it or not, and my practical publishing street-smart self certainly didn’t, it seemed I was stuck with it.
Sympathy for the Devil, as the title of a Rolling Stones song put it, and that was what I was compelled to write. Sympathy for the Devils. Both of them. The Great Satan was what the United States had become for the Islamic Umma; indeed Osama bin Laden had in effect quite deliberately created that identity for America and the West in order to marshal up a Jihad that would restore the long-lost Caliphate of his fever-dreams. And America had fallen right into the trap, demonizing Islam itself, not merely bin Laden and the jihadis, creating its own Great Satan, and thus perfecting the Jihad, the apocalyptic clash of civilizations that Benjamin Barber called Jihad vs. McWorld.
English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English
From Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad
Order is the enemy of Chaos. But the enemy of Order is also the enemy of Chaos.
Star Trek Phase II To Produce Lost Norman Spinrad Script + Watch Teaser For “The Child”
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