Geoff Ryman
Date: June 2006
Interviewed by: Carolyn Hill for the Chronicles Network
Part Three of Four: Recurring Themes Recurring Themes Theme: Childhood and Home CN: Much of your writing deals with children, the importance of childhood, and how childhood experiences--in particular, parents or lack of parents--affect adults. What drew you to this theme?
Ryman: Oh, it was something I was into at the time of
The Child Garden and
Was. I'm not so into it now. It was something that was in the spirit of those times; lots of people wrote about it, and I got caught up in it. It was interesting if you took a child-centric view of things, say on airplanes.
Say that you just let children play in the space around you in the airplane. Very quickly, an officious adult, nothing to do with the airline staff, would come up and tell them to get back into their seats, talking slowly at dictation speed. 'Now I want all of you to go back to your seats...'
Why? Does the adult think they'll grow up to be gangsters if they hang around with each other? It was something that was very clear to me at the time. Less so now. You see what you look for. Since then I've become very aware that often people who appear to be child-centric turn out also to be paedophiles, so I'm much more cautious about how I think about these issues.
CN: Many of your books and your novella 'The Unconquered Country' depict characters who are searching for a home (one they've never had, or one they've lost). Why is this theme so powerful for you?
Ryman: Oh dear, I can't answer that. I have no idea. It seems to me that home is such a universal theme that it's in many, perhaps even most stories to a certain extent. People need a home, where they can be themselves. To have a home they therefore need to have a sense of who they are. A sense of self that is the real home they carry round with them. At the end of the
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book, Dorothy actually says, 'It's so good to be AT home.' Which just means feeling comfortable where you are.
Theme: The Coexistence of Past, Present, Future, and Absolutely Everything CN: A major philosophical theme in your writing is the coexistence of the past, present, and future or of reality, fiction, and dreams. Drawing upon quantum physics, you emphasize the point at which everything exists all at once, in a realm without time, where gravity is thought, and where anything is possible. What drew you to this theme?
Ryman: Hard work. It's a theme I came up with for my first unpublished story after a lot of thinking. To an extent,
Air and
The Child Garden, with just a bit more work and tweaking, could have been made part of the same universe. I then got validated by reading
The Four Quartets over and over, which says more or less the same thing and even uses the still dimensionless dot at the heart of the universe around which everything spins. It's not a trope I will be working with again. It's served me well, but I want to move on.
CN: Your quantum philosophy states that anything is possible, that the world is 'a story, twisted by gravity out of nothing' so that a character can 'take the story into her hands' like 'mere fiction' and tear a fence with her mind (Air 214). Is this philosophy at odds with mundane science fiction, which says that some things aren't possible, or, at least, aren't likely?
Ryman: That's a different trope than the 11 dimensions meaning everything happens at once and in one tiny dimensionless dot. It's that kind of stuff, along with the pregnancy, that means
Air is not quite mundane. Quantum mechanics works at a quantum level. It doesn't work on ours. I don't believe in a parallel universe being born every second. It's so wasteful, and it's another wonderful out for storytellers. It came along a while before Mundane.
CN: In your novels, events occur that, despite their scientific underpinnings, look much like magic, which blurs the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. In a sense, your novels themselves demonstrate the coexistence of genres: fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, realism. Are you consciously playing with genres in this way?
Ryman: No. I think playing with genres is a really boring thing to do. It means you're making art about art. In my own mental map, SF is a subbranch of fantasy. But it has great potential to be something completely valuable, particularly for a world being so jerked about by change.
CN: Because the coexistence philosophy recurs in your novels, I found myself trying to make a consistent whole of the various statements. I notice that being without time, experiencing connectedness and coexistence, is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. Memories and dreams and stories, which require time in which to occur, seem generally palliative or instructive but can become overwhelming and harmful.
This simultaneity of valuation fits the philosophy: good and bad exist in one. But then I get tangled up. 'Bad' seems defined by a lack of change or inability to deal with change, as implied by Milena ultimately rejecting the Consensus because it places too much constraint on the individual selves and prevents them from changing, or when Mrs. Tung's memories overwhelm Mae and prevent her from dealing with the changing present. And yet Heaven and Hell, outside of time, are 'where nothing ever happens' (Air 381), where nothing ever changes. So Heaven and Hell are bad? The point at which all is connected is bad?
I've just deleted a bunch of quotes here . . . maybe it all boils down to choices and taking responsibility for one's own life, as Michael does when he twists reality to resolve his personal issues, or as Milena does when she creates the Eden-like garden of light out of herself rather than by Consensus or by virus. Would you please clarify whatever I've fumbled here?
Ryman: Any reading is what the reader makes of the book for her own ends. It seems to me you are doing a pretty good job here on your own. Any intervention from me at this point would bust what I think books do, which is provide a platform for the audience to tap their own dance.
It's not a philosophy; it's related to what those characters are feeling, how life seems to them at that time. If it is moving, that's why, it comes out of someone's loss or regret or joy. It's not meant to work out of context as a logical argument that builds up step by tested step into a coherent philosophical statement.
CN: Although your books don't seem to take place in one single universe or timeline, several of them reference one another or interconnect. Are you just having fun, winking at your readers, or are these interconnections an extension of your philosophy that absolutely everything is connected?
Ryman: I sit writing these things. It takes years. They stay in my head. They echo. They echo into the other stories. They add a little flavouring to the stew. They hint at other images, avenues, feelings. They are there for the reader to play with.
Theme: Commenting on Fiction CN: In several of your works, you comment directly on the nature of fiction. In 'Reality Check' at the end of Was, you write: 'I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth--history.
I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.
Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don't. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.
Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history--our own personal history, our country's history. Where we are deluded by fantasy--our own fantasy, our country's fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy whenever possible.
And then use them against each other.' (Was 369)
Was certainly deflates American myths such as delusional fantasies of manifest destiny and upstanding pioneers and easily separable good and evil. And it encourages us to imagine a better life--indeed, makes us long for that better future.
But as the reader progresses through the novel, it's difficult to distinguish between history and fantasy (as witness the necessity of 'Reality Check' itself, to explain where historical fact leaves off and authorial invention begins). I'm not complaining about the difficulty; it's part of the novel's delightfulness. And I love the book; I was deeply moved and cried all the way through the last eighteen pages. I'm just wondering: when you were writing, was that difficulty on your mind, and looking back, do you perceive any tension between your intent, the book's strategies, and its effect?
Ryman: To an extent
Was is about that tension. I don't think it resolves, it just peters out, like a tornado whirling itself out of existence. I think it's good to leave readers as clear as possible about what came from history books, and where you started to make stuff up. That's just serving truth, which is why you write fiction.
I've just had a very similar interview to this one with someone from
The Cambodian Daily. She's trying to pinpoint where my detailed picture of the Angkor Wat era left this historical record and started making up things about the life of Cambodia's greatest king, Jayavarman VII. It's quite taxing because I worked very hard to stick to the history as we knew it, and then fill the holes in the record with stuff I made up.
There is a lot we know about the Angkor era, and a lot we don't know. I had to decide/make up how old Jaya would be at any point. I had to, for example, come up with a story as to why it took him so long to make himself king. It was interesting that it was so very vital for the journalist to understand what was historically True. I'm pretty sure that's part of the Cambodian situation at the present. They've been so comprehensively ****** by foreigners that they need to know I'm not ******* them over too. But they also need to see Angkor and Jayavarman, and so they like I've done all this work to flesh out Jaya and his famous wives, and desperately need to know what is not true, is just a story.
They would also want to know how credible the made-up stuff was. It was amazingly hard work for me to sort this out for her. I'm not a scholar, I don't provide footnotes, I don't keep a reference of sources. I sometimes just have to improvise or make things up, particularly in Cambodia where it's difficult to get a completely consistent view on so many things. For example, one scholar was sure the royal palace had a lead roof, another equally sure it did not.
That goes for the modern story as well. My Khmer teacher told me that women always adopt their husband's family name. Then I meet a family in which not only did she not adopt her husband's name, but her sons get to choose whether they use her family name or their dad's. To backtrack a bit, the journalist for
Cambodia Daily is of French extraction, but she clearly was feeling what many Cambodians feel, and was very searching indeed about the distinction between fact and fiction in the novel.
CN: In Was, Jonathan's mother appears in a vision and says that 'there are only two genres that can deal with family life. One of them is comedy [ . . . ] and the other is [ . . . ] horror' (282). She says that biographies 'never tell you much about the adult's relationship with his parents' (280) because 'people are embarrassed by it' (281), and that you should 'always pay attention to embarrassment' because 'it means there is something too tangled to deal with. And humor, when people turn things into a joke. Or when they make them weird and spooky. It means that there is something people cannot face' (282). But you are dealing with family life and its attendant embarrassments, facing them squarely in your works, which are neither horror nor humor (despite the subtitle of The Child Garden: A Low Comedy). Do you disagree with Jonathan's mother?
Ryman: I think I disagree now. At that point, as a vision, she's really coming from Jonathan, and the riff is an image of his own guilt and mixed feelings about ending up a horror star, and quite why he's so good at playing Mortimer. He'd rather be the scarecrow, a comic turn, and he loves
I Love Lucy. I'm not sure I agree with the vision about biography not dealing with how the child related to parents in later life. Certainly biographies of Judy Garland, to take one example, always do.
CN: Have you ever considered writing a horror novel?
Ryman: Yes. One hasn't come. I worry about a genre that tries to scare people. Scaring people is the best way to control them.
CN: Does Milena's speech as People's Artist in The Child Garden reflect your view of your own work? Is your work, too, 'not much different from a virus,' making 'people feel and think in the ways' you would like them to feel and think (295)?
Ryman: Milena's speech is about her not me, and about the whole grammar of making a speech in a socialist society about art. I do think that if you try to be political you won't write literature, you'll write propaganda.
Theme: Commenting on History CN: You received an A.B. in history and English, and your interest in history is evident in your work. Mostly, you seem mistrustful of history and its constraints: history fools your characters (as in 'O Happy Day!'), or your characters become mired in history, incapable of change or incapacitated by its weight (as in The Child Garden and Air). But you also seem nostalgic, aware of the value of what we've lost in the past and of the instructive warnings history can offer about the present. What drew you to study history?
Ryman: That degree... the story behind it is that when I was at UCLA I took as many courses as I could in everything from physics to African Tribal History. And they were going to throw me out without a degree because I'd taken too many courses, without taking what I needed for any one degree. Somebody kind in registry was able to fix a compromise where I got a mixed degree in both.
In all those examples you give, you first have to decide what the word 'history' is being used to mean. Sometimes it just means all the stuff that's happened in the past and sets the context in which you have to operate. Sometimes it means the story we make up about history, the record we construct and how that controls and shapes us.
I guess it would be fair to say that one of my riffs is history, the gap between that reality and the stories we tell that we call history, and the effects these stories have on us.
Theme: Imposing One's Will on Others CN: Your books and novellas take a stand against individuals, corporations, and governments who impose their will upon others without (or even with) the others' consent; that sort of imposition invariably leads to harm or stagnation. Your works suggest a healthier, more equitable distribution of power: 'It wasn't enough to have love. You needed to have power. The two were so much alike. Love and power only exist between people. Both come from inner liveliness. Perhaps they were the same thing, since to fail at one seemed in some way to be bound up with failure in the other' (Lust 301). Does this theme come from your study of history, your observation of the present, or personal experience?
Ryman: First off, I hope that this is coming out of Michael's point of view at the time, and maybe not so much from me. My novels are meant to be about particular areas of concern without coming to any conclusions for the reader. They are not exactly, I hope, mouthpieces for me. This quote comes from a man who is impotent. He has a high sex drive but can't get it up.
He lacks this basic power and for him, love really isn't enough. He lacks the necessary power. And to fail at one for him, really is to fail in the other. At this moment, he's seeing the broader implications of his conundrum. But you are free to find this poignant or funny self-aggrandizement; something worth thinking about (or why waste so much time on an impotent man); or simply muddled thinking.
Theme: Death CN: People die in your works. A lot. Important characters die, minor characters die, masses of unnamed characters die. Sometimes the dead come back to life. Why so much death?
Ryman: We tend to forget that dying is the one thing that absolutely everybody does. We forget it, because we don't like to think that we will die.
Lord of the Rings would have been a better book if more of the Fellowship had died. You can't have a credible action fantasy without a lot of people dying. You don't need death in comedy (though many of the funniest, say
The Ladykillers or
Kind Hearts and Coronets, are full of death). When someone dies, you see more clearly what is precious about them. So it clarifies your perspective and brings you closer to the truth. People almost always talk to their dead in my experience, so that's why I have ghosts and visions or new forms of revenant.
CN: Even animals die. In fact, for some readers, the animal deaths will be more poignant than the human deaths. Do you have any theories about why animal deaths affect some readers more emotionally than the death of human characters?
Ryman: Absolutely none. I've never thought about it. If people do care more about the deaths of animals than people, I'm not sure it's something I would admire.