IGMS - Issue 19 Read online

  SCHWEITZER: Did you hear any ghostly stories too?

  DUNCAN: This is interesting. I was thinking about this tonight. I was thinking about going to the ghost-story event, but I didn't get a chance. I got waylaid. But I've never had a ghost experience. I don't recall any of the immediate members of my family telling of any. But my mother -- I know of no other way to say this but that my mother had psychic abilities for many years, at least up until menopause, anyway. I got very used, growing up, to the fact that my mother could read my thoughts. I know that everybody's mother can read his thoughts to some extent when he's a kid, because mothers aren't stupid, but it was a different way.

  There's a story I always tell because it makes vivid how mundane this ability was, how we just took it for granted. The short version is that we had been planning a family trip, and we were looking over the atlas at where we would stop for this or that night and who we would visit on our summer vacation, and then I excused myself and went into the other part of the house to do homework, or work on something. I was there for a couple of hours, and then I got to daydreaming and thinking, "I can't remember where we said we'd stop on the second night." I wondered if it would be here or there. So I went to ask. I walked through the house to where my mother was sitting reading a book in the den. I walked in and opened my mouth to ask this question, and she looked up at me and said, "I don't know where we're going to spend the second night," and continued talking in that vein. She genuinely thought that I had asked the question, but I had not. I had merely thought it, and opened my mouth to speak it. But she had received it already. She had caught it like an expert outfielder. To her that was just like normal conversation. She had heard me speak it and so she responded.

  That sort of thing happened all the time, when I was growing up, and it continued when I was living on my own. There were stories in the family about occasional premonitions my mother had had that came true. She was taking a nap one afternoon and dreamed that her brother was face down in a rowboat, and she got alarmed and started calling around. It turned out that he was indeed face down in a rowboat, dead. He had gone fishing and had had a heart attack while he was out there on the pond. So it didn't take too many occasions like this for word to get around in the family that my mother had the sight. She would periodically see people walking through the house, out of the corner of her eye, people who weren't there, and she'd say, "Did you see that?" Or she'd look around, and I never saw anything. But this was the sort of atmosphere I was raised in.

  But this seemed to stop about the time she reached her late forties or early fifties. Much of it seemed to go away, or at least she didn't talk about it anymore. So I had that growing up. I don't recall any ghost stories per se, although we did have a cousin, who's dead now, who vowed that he had picked up a hitchhiker once, and that the man has told him about the imminent second coming of Jesus, and then vanished from the car. He was convinced for years that he had been visited by this angel to bring him the word. This was an utterly, completely matter-of-fact individual, who was not prone to outbursts or rants or anything, a completely prosaic, blue-collar guy, who just had had this one incident that he was adamant about. He vowed it had happened. It was not a hallucination or anything. So I guess there was more than one weird thing going on, although I myself never directly had any experience like that.

  SCHWEITZER: The fantasy writer, of course, deals with things that are intentionally made up. So, was it a natural extension from such a background to make this sort of story up?

  DUNCAN: I think it was. I think what you hear so much when you go into any writing workshop, and I started hearing it even in grammar school, is "Write what you know. You can't write about it if you haven't experienced it." But I got to thinking that there are all sorts of ways to experience something. You can experience it by reading about it, studying it, learning about it, talking to other people about their experiences. Early on I got fascinated. I wanted to hear people's ghost stories. I wanted to hear about these uncanny things that happened to them. I to this day remain fascinated by people who claim all variety of paranormal experience, from UFO abductions to sightings of the Mothman or Bigfoot or whatever. I even go to gatherings of these people and just sort of sit and listen in, because it just fascinates me. Even as a kid I would press people for details. They'd say, "Oh, you're too young," and I'd say, "No! No! Tell me." Eventually, of course, because people want to tell you, they would.

  So I guess it was only logical -- I had not thought about it before -- that when I started to tell stories, to write them out and overtly fictionalize things, that I would draw upon all of this and write about characters that were having these experiences that people I talked to or people I knew had claimed to have. Even though I had not had them myself, it was a way of having them vicariously, I suppose. Of course now that I am older and set in my ways, that is the only way that I want to have them. [Laughs] I would rather hear about someone's chilling Ouija-board experience than have one of my own, I think.

  SCHWEITZER: But the difference between what you're doing and what they're doing is they're implying belief. Fantasy may be neat, but there is a contract between you and the reader that you made it up. Do you have a sense of being deliberate?

  DUNCAN: I do think that's crucial. That is why I don't consider the Left Behind series either fantasy or science fiction. I think it is written by people who devoutly believe that these events that are depicted in these novels are scripturally determined and will happen, and that the books are reasonably accurate prophecies of our near future. While not all the readers of those books share that belief, I think the core readership does. I think that's very different from reading an Ian McDonald novel and thinking, "Oh, yes, this is the future of India." We might think it is very plausible. We might even share his view of the future of India, but it is not that same sort of belief. It is far more distanced. That's equally true when you're reading Lovecraft or a Jeffrey Ford collection, or Joe Hill's collection, 20th Century Ghosts. On some level, Joe Hill may believe in ghosts. I have never talked to him about it. I have not read interviews with him. But it's part of the contract, that when you sit down to read the title story of that collection, you the reader do not necessarily believe that ghosts haunt movie theaters like this. You also believe that Joe Hill himself does not necessarily believe it, but you share the mutual conceit. It is a game. How plausible can he make it, and how convincing can it be for the duration of that story? I think that's part of the pleasure of it. When I read the writings of people who genuinely believe this stuff, like a lot of the paranormal investigators, the John Keels, you know, it just does not satisfy on the level that the artificial creation does. I guess that as I get more immersed in this and write more of it, the more skeptical I get. [Laughs.]

  It's not quite like the Amazing Randi and the professional illusionists who are very hard to fool by the pretend mind readers and clairvoyants and mediums, but I do think it is something similar. We hear these stories that people try to pass off as true, and we say to ourselves, "Well that would be a lot more convincing if they would do this to it." Or, we can spot the ways in which they are making up a story, just to add conviction.

  SCHWEITZER: I suspect that a science fiction writer reading a UFO book is sort of like an automobile engineer walking through a junkyard and seeing beat-up and degraded parts of things that he usually works with. He says, "That's a part of this, and I know where that goes."

  DUNCAN: Yes, exactly. Two of the books that in hindsight -- I did not realize it at the time -- were preparing me for my future career, that I read as a kid, reading everything at the public library that had the science fiction stamp on the spine, were two books by Gene DeWeese and Buck Coulson that were set in the science-fiction subculture, Now You See Him/It/Them and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats. I had never heard of Charles Fort or Bob Tucker or Poul Anderson or Gordy Dickson or any of the people that showed up in those books, so I should have been mystified by them, but I was instead enchanted. It
was clearly about this loony world that I knew nothing about but that would be a lot of fun. I remember that the plot of Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats was based on the assumption, as it turned out the erroneous assumption, that people going to a World Science Fiction Convention would be incredibly gullible and would fall for all this UFO stuff, when in fact they turned out to be the most skeptical possible audience for such things. So the plot does not go the way the plotters expected, for just that reason. The further I get into the field, the more this seems to be so.

  But still I love all the stuff. My paranormal bookcases are groaning, because, hey, it's a business expense. I am always up for buying UFO books and Bigfoot books and things like that, ghost story books. But it fascinates me increasingly as a sociological or anthropological or literary enterprise, and not as anything that I believe anymore. When I was a kid I believed it, but I don't now. Not really.

  SCHWEITZER: What are you working on these days?

  DUNCAN: I am working on several stories for anthologies that people have in the works. I also have some long-term book-length fiction projects -- I hate to say the n-word, but novels they would be eventually -- that I have been working on for some time. It's about time to let others in on the secret too and show them to people and get some suggestions. None of them is finished yet, but they are outlines and big fragments and chunks. I have two new stories out at the end of 2009: "The Dragaman's Bride," a 1930s Appalachian dragon story, in The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, from Ace; and "The Night Cache," a supernatural geocaching romance set in modern-day Western Maryland, which is a standalone novella from PS Publishing. PS also will be publishing my second story collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, in 2011.

  To some extent, I have never felt especially prolific, and sometimes I wish I wrote more and had more stuff out there; but on the other hand I am very happy with the stuff when it does come out, however slowly. The writing has never been full time for me. I have always been teaching or doing journalism or something for the day job. So the fact that I just keep emitting this stuff periodically, and coming to these events [e.g. the World Fantasy Convention] and actually having something to show for my labors, and having people coming up who have actually read the stuff and getting autographs is just an ongoing delight. Ted Chiang has always seemed, I think, somewhat bemused by the attention his stories get when they come out, and I know how he feels. I sometimes feel that way.

  But I guess the next step, the one thing I would like to achieve that I haven't done yet, is to get at least a couple novels out there. At least to be circulating them and know they are done, even if they don't get accepted anywhere or don't make much of a splash. I would at least know, okay, I have done that, because I remember vividly the happiness I achieved in the early '90s when I realized that I had actually written a short story that I was happy with completely, and that I was done with it. Now I could send it out and put a stamp on it, and I thought, well clearly I could write another of these, having done it. I need to reach that point with the novel now, which I haven't reached yet.

  SCHWEITZER: Then you will go on to epic trilogies, and bug-crushers . . .?

  DUNCAN: [Laughs.] I used to be very snobbish about series, and then I took a hard look at my bookshelves at home, at all the books that had really inspired me, that I really enjoyed as a reader, and I realized how many of them were series books, from George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels to, my gosh, Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. There is a great deal of honor in a good series set of characters that one explores. Like anything else, it can be done well or ill. I remember during that orgy of reading in junior high, reading some Tolkien imitators that were merely imitating. Then I read Stephen R. Donaldson's first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant trilogy, and I thought, okay, here's somebody who is clearly influenced by Tolkien, but who is bringing new stuff to the table, who is not just going through the motions. I think there are a lot of people now who demonstrate that you can do series books and giant, thumping trilogies and decologies without just going through the motions. I loved the Harry Potter series. I don't think it's the best fantasy novel there ever was, but, my God, it's a five-thousand-plus-page fantasy novel that is good and intelligent and witty and pays due homage to its predecessors, that also had millions of Americans reading it simultaneously as it was published, which I would not have thought possible, if you had suggested it to me twenty-five years ago. It's astonishing. So, who knows what's going to come along next? There's life in the old forms yet.

  SCHWEITZER: Thank you Andy.

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