You should give your son a small and harmless dose of religion, lest he discover one day that he had no natural defenses against it. I imagine they were afraid that otherwise I would show up and say I’d decided to become a monk or something.
So they gave me a generic, white-bread religious education, dragging me to a Presbyterian Sunday-school in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Naturally I ended up believing. How could I not? This was suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s. God was the default assumption. God in the air. God was in the water. I never thought of God as a thesis, a hypothesis about how the world works. I thought of God as a fact. Adults seemed to agree on this fact, and adults don’t lie, so they?
Luckily, back then suburban Presbyterianism was a pretty tepid thing. It was not salvationistic. It did not threaten us kids with images of eternal damnation and fears that our sins would catapult us into the fiery abyss. But I do remember assuming that God was behind it all, and I know I prayed for good fortune in my own life.
My inverse road to Damascus was the World Literature course I took as a tenth-grader. Those of us in the honors English class at Abington Senior High School found ourselves suddenly confronted with the miracles and splendors of Western literature: plays and poems—and especially novels—that were alive with ideas, usually subversive and skeptical ideas. We learned that novelists were often people at odds with the received wisdom of their day. They were contrarians. These voices stood outside of their cultures and critiqued them—and, above all, they were honest voices: at least, that’s what I found in Voltaire’s Candide and Camus’s The Stranger and Kafka’s The Trial and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Even a believer like Dostoyevsky—we did Crime and Punishment—even Dostoyevsky dramatized belief as something that is troubling and paradoxical and terribly complex.
The honesty of these writers—the voice of an anguished atheist like Camus—that struck a chord with me. It really was a kind of revelation. It garnered my respect in a way that my Sunday-school teachers never did. The Presbyterians seemed to dodge all the hard questions. They weren’t liars, exactly, but intellectually, for me, they left much to be desired. Gradually my faith evaporated.
Of course, it also helped that I’d never had an experience with the supernatural. I’d never encountered an angel or witnessed a miracle.
Q: How do you think you’d respond if you did?
Morrow: [Laughs] That’s a really good question. I’d like to think that, if I really believe my own worldview, my first question would be, “Might I account for this angel, or this out-of-body experience, or this miracle, or whatever, in strictly material terms?” But, sure, okay, if my supernatural experience was something utterly unequivocal, fine, I guess I’d try to swallow it.
But let’s remember that most religious arguments about the world are far more optimistic and soothing than the secular-humanist view. We’d all like to believe our deaths aren’t synonymous with oblivion. We’ve all got a built-in—and highly suspect—motivation to believe in the miraculous. We’re predisposed to embrace supposed evidence for the supernatural simply on the grounds of our mortality. Religion solves the death problem, so of course it’s always going to win the battle for the private human psyche.
So I like to think it would take more than one angelic visitation to convince me that angels are factual. It’s often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I hope I would spend a lot of time worrying about whether I was deluded, whether my angel was entirely subjective, whether he was just wishful thinking, whether this was incipient schizophrenia.
I am continually struck by the fact that, whether the argument is coming from the New Age camp—“crystals heal,” “astrology works,” that sort of claim—or by those with conventional religious views—I am struck by that fact that the main thing that’s going on in every such instance is a person, a mere human being, standing in front of you insisting that the supernatural is the case. That’s it. Period. A person. Nothing more, nothing less.
At the last Conference on the Fantastic in Fort Lauderdale, I noticed that our pathetic little convention was happening alongside a presentation attended by thousands of people who all wanted to hear this guy talk about life after death. He had lots of messages from beyond the veil that he wanted to share. The crowd lapped it up. Nobody seemed to notice that all they were actually getting was a person very much like themselves, and in many cases probably better than themselves—more honest, less egomaniacal, less publicity hungry—doling out the inside dope on the afterlife.
There is nothing you can go out and do yourself to corroborate the worldviews of charlatans. In those few cases where those of New Age or supernatural persuasion have allowed a test, some tentative attempt at falsification, their claims and beliefs have always come a cropper. Every systematic investigation of astrology or ESP or prayer suggests that there’s absolutely nothing happening there. This malarkey is not a new understanding of reality. It’s wish-fulfillment at best. It’s stuff that we’d prefer to be the case. But it doesn’t seem to be the case—not in this life, and not in this universe.
[conducted at Readercon, 2007]
JACK DANN
Q: Let’s start with what you’re doing now. The last book of yours I am aware of is the one about Leonardo da Vinci. I am sure I missed something. There was a book about the Civil War I saw you showing around earlier this afternoon.
Dann: The da Vinci book was The Memory Cathedral, which I’ve had really good luck with. It was about the time that the book came out in the States that I moved to Australia. HarperCollins Australia also bought the book, and it was a bestseller there. It topped the bestseller list on The Age magazine. The other big surprise was Germany, where it sold heavy-duty numbers—for me anyway. The cover price was 49.5 deutchmarks, which is about $50 Australian. When I heard what the price was going to be, I asked, “Are people going to pay $50 for a hardcover book?” I guess they did. So that book went into about ten languages. The next book was a Civil War novel called The Silent. It isn’t a genre novel. It was published here, and it was also published in Australia and Germany. While I was writing The Silent, I was also editing Dreaming Down-Under with Janeen Webb. That’s the Australian anthology. Again we were lucky. It won a Ditmar Award in Australia and the World Fantasy Award here. One of our purposes in doing the anthology was to try to get Australian genre writing noticed in the States and Great Britain. I think we succeeded in our small way. I’m still doing the Magic Tales anthologies with Gardner Dozois. Those are still coming out at the rate of about two a year. And I’m working on a big James Dean/Hollywood novel that I sold to HarperCollins US. It’s basically the story of James Dean after his accident. So I am doing this as a mainstream, alternate-time novel.
Q: You seem to be moving very much to the fringes of traditional science fiction, or beyond it completely. Is this an intentional career strategy, or are things just working out that way?
Dann: I think it’s just things working that way. When I’m told I’m this kind of a writer or that kind of a writer, my response—like Harlan Ellison’s—is that “I’m a writer.” I guess a politically correct way of saying it is that I write “across the genres”. That will probably translate into “out of genre.” This Quixotic course is a marketing nightmare. I’ve actually been very lucky in Australia, because HarperCollins has been publishing me there as a Flamingo author—that’s their literary line—and they have also been pulling in my science fiction readers. My early science fiction novels such as Starhiker and Junction and The Man Who Melted were on the far-out edges of the genre. Junction was a weird, fringe, where-do-you-put-it novel, although The Man Who Melted was a straight science-fiction novel. (I thought so, anyway!) As for The Memory Cathedral, some people are calling it fantasy, some are calling it SF, and some are saying that it isn’t genre at all. So I just don’t worry about it. I think of my novel-in-progress about James Dean as mainstream in intent, but it really is an extrapolation of what could have happened if James Dean had lived. He goes into politics. He hangs around with the Kennedys. He beats Reagan in California.. I wanted to play around with the idea of cultural icons and myths. If Dean had lived, would he have the same iconic stature that he does now? I don’t think so. Look at Brando. If he had died young, he, too, would have become a cultural icon. So I am dealing