Someone once referred
to John Shirley as "John the Baptist", crying out in the wilderness
of what science fiction
had degenerated into during the '70s. While most of the talentless hacks
out there at the time were still trying to catch up with Harlan Ellison
and Robert Heinlein, John was breaking barriers that nobody even knew existed
with novels like Transmaniacon and City Come A' Walkin'.
The legends surrounding the man are numerous--he discovered William Gibson,
he was challenged publicly to a duel by Ellison, he was a punk singer by
day and a writer by night, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for
The Crow, the Zapruder film for goth children everywhere John is
truly larger than life. His new novel, Silicon Embrace, is an odd romp through the conspiracy world--it blends Area 51, the gray aliens, and even (in my favorite sequence) Chris Carter and his show The X-Files into a wild ride. John seems to be getting more and more philosophical--a trend which, in many writers, produces pedantry. But there's none of that here--John has a genuine thoughtfulness to his work. In this interview, our own R.U. Sirius talks to John Shirley about the aliens, McDonald's commercials, and some possible paths to enlightenment. P.S. If you're interested in hearing more about John Shirley, check out his website at http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley.html --Josh Ellis-- |
Subconscious of Our Times
| RU: Do you make a distinction between what is the product of the
unconscious and what might be a part of an objective but invisible reality? JS: I increasingly make a distinction. Most of it is a mental phenomenon--a combination of projections--the sort of Joseph Campbell process--whatever Joseph Campbell process goes on in your particular culture. That's all a mental process but a lot of people mistake it for a supernatural metaphysical process. But I'm convinced that there's an invisible universe that has a metaphysical reality that we sometimes apprehend in ways that we can't describe in ordinary language. So we use inadequate symbols to describe it and in this way we muddle the metaphysical universe with all the claptrap and accessories of our subconscious. RU: Much of your new novel Silicon Embrace seems to be a parody of the zeitgeist--where the public subconscious is right now. There's the conspiratorial, X-Files type thing, and there's even a sort of new age tinge to some of it. In public statements, you've been very critical of the whole new age mentality. What distinctions do you make between authentic and bullshit metaphysics? Were trying to show some of that in this book? JS: Yeah. You notice that I ridicule things like channelers in the novel. I take some of those ideas that are in the air and play with them, expose them, bring them out in the open. And if there's any truth in it, try to define what that could be, and strip away the rest of it. And some of my discussion of this in the novel uses a symbol that for me is purely metaphorical--the gray alien versus a kind of supernatural alien. The gray aliens are just a metaphor for a human state of mind. I also play with some ideas that are bubbling up on the Internet. For instance the idea that all of the UFO imagery and ET imagery and ideas used by Star Trek were planted into our culture either by people who are preparing us for ET's or by the ET's themselves. This isn't something I literally believe. But I play with it to draw attention to the symbols and ideas that are buried in pop culture. We can take these things as sort of a Disneyland ride or we can parse them--take them apart and find the pearl that's inside the nasty little oyster of the idea. I try to use the familiarity of these ideas to sort of backtrack through the pop culture trope, back to the actual unconscious apprehension of what the idea really meant. I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by using pop culture images. RU: Didn't the Gray Alien, Jaron (snicker), get pissed off about the Star Trek references? JS: The gray alien was pissed off about the alien autopsy film. I said what I actually think about the alien autopsy film. I think it's funded by a government agency for disinformation purposes. What they're trying to do--what they're trying to distract us from--I'm not sure. RU: It's not just some English dude making money? JS: I think there's a group of British guys who worked on the film, but I think they were put up to it and they don't even know it. There's a guy named Shnabel who has connections to the CIA who's involved in a ring of people who created the alien autopsy film. The film is completely fake. I'm convinced of that. RU: Did you investigate this? How'd you reach the conclusion? |
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JS: I read some articles about it that more or less come to that conclusion
and, to me, they have the ring of truth. Also, there's a lot of indication
that the whole UFO thing has been used as part of a mind control or social
control system experiment, and this theory of the alien autopsy film fits
in with that pattern. Jacque Vallee claims that the French intelligence
service admitted to him that they staged an alien abduction using drugs
and flashing lights. They drugged a guy and planted suggestions in his
mind about what happened. It's part of a bigger test to see how they can
manipulate the sense of what is real and what isn't real on the part of
any given subject--and then allowing that to bleed into the consensus mind.
They create a staged scenario in the mind of one faux abductee. So they
have somebody who really thinks they've been abducted. And then, via that
one person, the idea sort of infects the consensus social mind sort of
like a computer virus. When people accept the UFO explanation for abductions,
they'll either write abductions that they here about off as unreal because
they associate them with ETs, or they'll blame it on the ET's rather than
the people who are really doing it. That would be the successful conclusion
of an experiment in social control. It's just one explanation, but there's
a document you can read in a book called Above Top Secret. (The
book is uneven in its quality. The author believes some things that he
shouldn't believe. He's a little bit too credulous.) There's a photograph
of a CIA document from 1952 suggesting that UFOs and the UFO hysteria could
be used for psych warfare purposes. Stating this in 1952 is quite suggestive. RU: I always wonder about all of these alleged conspiracies that these powers use to stay in control. Why do they really need them? Aren't they always very much in control anyway? JS: Well, are they? Look at what happened in Oklahoma City. How much in control were they? See, I don't take the assumption that many conspiracy theory aficionados make that the conspirators have it together. My assumption is that they're bungling idiots. My assumption is that the people at the top are a bunch of Homer Simpsons. And they're constantly going "Doh!" and covering up. For example, in the Gulf War they exposed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to nerve gas. They gave them a pill that was supposed to protect them from it that probably actually made it worse. And there was already some studies to suggest that would happen that they ignored. The callousness of using hundreds of thousand of American soldiers as nerve gas guinea pigs is incredible in itself. And the stupidity of thinking that they could get away with it is astonishing! They're constantly doing enormously stupid things at the top level of government. As Robert Anton Wilson says, if there was one conspiracy controlling things in an orderly way, the world would make sense. But there's a lot of competing conspiracies. What I would add to that is that most of them are made up of stupid shortsighted people, like the people of the CIA. We know how stupid they are because of this guy Ames who was there for years. I mean, my nine year old son could have figured out this guy Ames, who was driving a car he couldn't afford and living in a house he couldn't afford, was on the take from the Soviets. Anybody in their right mind would be able to see it. But these morons in the CIA couldn't. They're stupid. |
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RU: Well, it's because their real concern is hiding stuff from the American
people, and hiding stuff from their bosses, or their competition in the
FBI or whatever . . . JS: Yeah, exactly. Making sure people don't realize that they had a hand in killing Kennedy along with the Mafia. That's a lot of work (laughs) RU: I always thought the CIA-Mafia explanation made the most sense. But then, one afternoon recently I was thinking, what if somebody put a gun to my head and said, "Do you think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or do you think it's a conspiracy, and if you're wrong, we'll blow your head off"? And I have to say under those conditions I might say, well yeah--it was probably just Oswald. About a 50-50 chance. JS: Well, we weren't there. And so many things have been blurred and distorted. I think it's quite likely that there were other gunmen. But I don't know that the government was involved. It could easily have been Mafia. RU: But how could they keep the secret for so long? JS: They didn't! It really bugs me when people ask that. They didn't keep the secret. Everybody knows about it. Everybody talks about it constantly. RU: In Silicon Embrace, the meta seemed almost like the perfect new age dream of the cosmic savior that heals us and sets things right. JS: What they did in the book was close the wound that the gray aliens had opened in us. But they still left us to our own devices. Ultimately the message was that you're thrown back on your own resources to try to become more conscious. Because only by becoming more conscious can you rise up against the automatic reactions that make us automatons. The meta are a metaphor too. I was aware that they were something of a new age symbol. There again, it was a matter of using a pop cultural symbol in order to draw somebody into the heart of an idea. And hopefully, I'll get them to engage the idea and take it the next step into something much more interesting than benevolent ETs--or in the case of the meta--benevolent interdimensional entities. I do think that if we are being visited by aliens, it's equally likely that they're from other dimensions of reality, or higher planes, or they're time travelers. It's just as likely as the extraterrestrial explanation. By the way, I started working on this several years ago, and then had to stop to work on scripts. But I started before this whole wave of UFO hysteria hit . . . before the X Files... way before Independence Day. But then, as I wrote the book I incorporated some of those references so it would resonate with people's pop cultural template. I try to take a banal pop cultural symbol and then connect it with another one and another one. And then the original trappings of the pop culture fall away and, in what's left I've hopefully tinkered together a more interesting idea. Aside from the obvious satiric aspect of it. RU: Were the militias a major factor in the world already by the time you started writing about them. Had the Oklahoma City bombing happened yet? |
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JS: Yeah, by the time I was writing that part of the book, that had
already happened. it fit into my original scenario. I wanted to write about
a new America civil war. I first started thinking about that eight years
ago. I didn't want to just do another post-holocaust kind of scene. I wanted
to come up with a schismed schizy United States. As the militias came up,
it reinforced the whole context. So the backdrop of this book is a second
American civil war slightly in the future. It creates a crises that generates
the government attempt to use the ET phenomena to unite the country. RU: Was The Crow fucked with badly? JS: They tried to. It was subjected to the usual studio producer notes sucking all the life out of it. And after me, they brought in another writer [splatterpunk writer David Schow--eds.] who was going to be more malleable to those notes. He produced many drafts of the script. And ultimately a lot of what he wrote wasn't used in the shooting script. And then most of the rest of it wound up on the cutting room floor. What was finally produced and appeared in the theaters was the story in the comic book that the movie was based on because that archetype kept reasserting itself. It was the only way the story would work. Sometimes the story is so stark and the archetype is so stark they finally have to admit that the only thing that works is the story that should have been all along. And they return ultimately to the first draft. Many times, I've seen protects go through 20 drafts and then return to what was the first draft, after all. RU: [William] Gibson complains bitterly about how Johnny Mnemonic was destroyed by the studio executives. The movie that was shown was not the movie they made. JS: Of course not! The studio wouldn't let them make a good movie. And now they say, well "Cyberpunk movies don't work." But that's because they made bad ones. RU: What did you think of Strange Days? JS: It was better. It was a better movie. It at least had the right feel. |
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RU: The Crow has become a sort of goth cult thing. JS: Well, it's a goth movie. It's goth image. Goth is tragic romance and The Crow is tragic romance. All teenagers feel tragic at some point. They all yearn for romance. They go through this period when they realize that this is what life is and this is what's coming and these are my limitations and this is the person that I've found that I must be. The struggle with accepting what they are. And they have a tragic sense of being who they are and of being satisfied with it. Other people won't let them be satisfied with it. RU: You were talking about some of the young rockers and how self-consciously they manipulate street cred. And I'm thinking about how well advertising itself does that now. The speed of coöptation has accelerated to an incredible degree to the point where you'll get like a black neo-beat spoken word poet in a McDonald's commercial almost the second it becomes a trend. Now, some of your stuff is really extreme. For instance, some of the stuff in New Noir. There's the piece where this guy is getting head and the girl dies and he winds up with her head on his dick. Can you ever imagine that stuff becoming coöptable? That something on that level could become comfortable entertainment? JS: Not in the near future. That's one of the reasons I sometimes write extreme stuff, just so it can't get coöpted. What happens in that story by the way is this guy is shooting speed while she's giving him head. And she chokes to death and he doesn't realize it. And there's this sort of rictus effect and she gets trapped on his genitals. And so the only way he can remain mobile is by cutting off her head. So then he's going around with her head on his genitals. I don't know. It might have something to do with my having been divorced five times (laughter). I'm sure it's highly politically incorrect.
JS: I think all men... it's sort of like being a Vietnam vet. I wasn't in Vietnam, but I understand that they have a post-traumatic stress thing that happens . And coming out of relationships with women, there's also a post-traumatic syndrome. I think it goes both ways. Women have the same thing. Women are misanthro... whatever the female equivalent of misogynist is. It's not quite misanthropy... RU: I think that literally, that's what it is. (With mock piety) Which just shows how damned sexist the language is... JS: Appalling. Anyway, your original question... all the people in advertising and media... they were doing acid twenty years ago so they're much more flexible about these kinds of arty protest roles. It's easy for them to visualize making those things mainstream. But what happens is that instead of making those things mainstream, they've only mainstreamed the images, and mainstreamed themselves. They've made themselves impotent. RU: In the process, perhaps even making subculturism itself impotent? JS: Well, there's always going to be new reactions. I mean, a subculture is by its nature reactive, which is one of its limitations. If you're always reacting, you're limited in how much insight you can have, and how much objectivity and how conscious you can be. Usually, when you're reactive, you're a little bit less conscious than you might otherwise be. But sometimes it's valuable to be consciously reactive or rebellious. There'll always be those currents. They perform a useful social function. The fringe becomes the mainstream sometimes. Even where it doesn't become the mainstream, the social organism feeds from the fringe in some way. It's like a starfish. You have these weird little tendrils on the exterior of its body that takes in little bits of things and eventually it metabolizes the little pieces into the heart. The social organism is almost that cohesive and organic. It's horrible to contemplate sometimes how much like little cells in this amorphous social organism we are. But when you're in a high place looking down on the corpuscular movement of cars down the arteries of the freeway, the analogy can't be missed. RU: What about the possibility that the coöptation of all these hipster themes by advertising could be another part of that MK ULTRA social control brainwashing experiment you were talking of earlier? JS: Well, I don't think they've got it that together in the intelligence circles. RU: Who does it really sell to when they put Burroughs in a Nike commercial or I once saw a commercial for Goodyear tires that used the first minute of "Venus In Furs" by the Velvet Underground (laughter). JS: No! Well, I was glad that there was that commercial that used "Search and Destroy." Iggy deserves to be rich. But those Nike people deserve to be jailed. Not for their offensively patronizing commercials but because they and Adidas and Spaulding have their manufacturing jobbed out to overseas sweatshops staffed by children. And in certain countries the children are sometimes abducted to these sweatshops. These kids have no schooling, no contact with their parents, and they're often beaten into high production. Then we wear the tennis shoes that these kids make before they die of despair. They're starved too. You know, we take part in that every time we buy a product that knowingly uses sweatshop labor from overseas. I think it should be strictly against the law. I'll tell you what I think. For years, I struggled with the basic political issue--which is the individual versus the state. On the one hand you need to be part of this great organism because it feeds you too, it nourishes you too, it protect you too, and it protects a lot of innocents. On the other hand, one is digested and coöpted and you lose individual freedom. And while I object to knee-jerk libertarianism because it doesn't take into consideration the many things that need to be regulated like environmental laws, I'm beginning to feel that there's too much damn restriction on us. We're being strangled. I've come to the conclusion that we need to maximize freedom by having a few fundamental rules that are universal, fixed and absolute. These fundamental rules would make freedom really possible. And those rules are basically the rules of human rights and the rules of environmental rights--it should be absolutely illegal to pollute on any kind of a large scale anywhere. And to make that a rule is to restrict somebody's freedom. But there are some areas where freedom needs to be restricted. It should be globally illegal for one country to invade another or to use military force in the engagement of an atrocity as in Bosnia and Rwanda. The rules against those things need to be much more strictly enforced. But once those fundamental rules are in place--everything else should be nobody's business at all. So, even though--in a sense it would be trampling on somebody's sensitivities for you to screw your girlfriend on the sidewalk, they couldn't stop you... RU: How could they? JS: Right (laughter). How could they . . . but that would be outside the scope of the fundamental laws, the laws of human rights, environmental protection, reasonable wages, and reasonably safe working conditions. JS: Silicon Embrace is a transitional book for me between cyberpunk--incorporating cyberpunk--but it's an attempt to build a bridge to a sort of greater awakeness to life. It's a bridge to metaphysical, philosophical issues. It goes from the specific of an individual man's struggle in a cyberpunk story to the big issues of why we're alive, what's the point of life, and where do we go from here? RU: The end got very didactic. JS: Yeah, I was trying to bring people in whatever way I could--narrative, humor, satire, fun with conspiracy and paranoia, social issues, to draw them into what seem to me to be the higher questions. I think some of the greatest satirists did just that. Jonathan Swift did that. And Kurt Vonnegut. It's something to aspire to. Reprinted by permission of 21·C Magazine |
