An Interview with Jack Dann

by Kilian Melloy

 

 

Many writers who deal with perennial questions of humanity and of our collective  nature and destiny are tagged with the sobriquet of Visionary, but Jack Dann – author and editor of around seventy books, prolific writer of short fiction, and poet – lives up to the name.  Sometimes Dann looks to the future (as with High Steel, written with Jack C. Haldeman II), and sometimes to the past (with the extraordinary novels The Memory Cathedral and The Silent); Dann has even come up with a moving, incisive vision for an alternate history in which movie icon James Dean lived a longer life (with his most recent novel, The Rebel).

 

But for a study in how a book can transcend the too-often shallow genre of science fiction and become a literary case study of the human heart – in terms both individual and universal – there’s no better example than Dann’s 1984 novel The Man Who Melted.  No, it’s not a graphic story of tissues liquefying and skin shedding off in great swaths; rather, it’s a psychological portrait of loss, complex relationships, a culture careering toward annihilation, and a collective unconscious that has begun to manifest itself violently through a horde of “Screamers” – people who have lost all sense of individual identity.  The novel delicately examines the human animal from a vantage that commands a panoramic view incorporating philosophy, religion, psychology, and sociology – not to mention a story so strange and self-consistent that to read it is to experience what Alvin Toffler, contemplating and projecting a variety of trends back in the 1970s, called “future shock.”

 

Though written 25 years ago, The Men Who Melted is decidedly a work of our contemporary times – and perhaps beyond.  Jack Dann granted an interview recently to discuss the eerie ways in which the novel anticipated today’s world, and the disquieting possibility that tomorrow might even more closely resemble the novel’s dystopian vision.

 

 

Kilian Melloy:            Twenty-five years ago, with the initial publication of The Man Who Melted, you predicted the Internet. If you were to write a novel set in a futuristic society today, what social / economic / technological prognoses and predictions would you feel comfortable making?

 

Jack Dann:            That’s a difficult—and dangerous—question. I’m comfortable with extrapolating possible futures and outcomes, but I’d need a crystal ball to predict. I got lucky with The Man Who Melted, in that I extrapolated the internet and also the idea of Crazy States and a “Mahdi” coming to power in the Middle East, that being the Ayatollah. My “prediction” about a Mahdi coming to power was correct. However, the Ayatollah had come to power by the time the book was actually published, and so readers assumed I was just interlarding current events into the book. But them’s the chances you take! The problem with trying to extrapolate a, shall we say, probable future is that it’s always that one little detail that nobody considers that can change everything. In the 1950s, microminiaturization wasn’t at all obvious, but it defined later technology. So anything I might guess — or extrapolate — will probably leave out something which is vital and will be obvious to everyone after the fact. If I were trying to describe what the 1960s might look like from the vantage of 1952, I would probably not have predicted the birth control pill; and if I did, would I have been able to predict its effects on the behavior of teenagers in outdoor movies?

 

            However, never having been known for being cautious, let me take a few guesses. Here are a few... approximations:

 

Virtual reality could change our ideas of space and interaction. Once we have the technology that will take us past the obvious (such as using VR to aid in surgery or to allow virtual sex, virtual conferences, and the like), what we consider human and normal might change considerably. We might spend most of our time interacting with the world in a virtual way. Our sense of space might be defined by the personalized illusions of computer space rather than what’s really there. Eventually, what’s really there might not be a fair question. We could appear in any guise we choose; we could experience the world, and anyone in it, in a virtual room. We would be surprised if virtual reality didn’t become, at the very least, an overlay on every activity and environment in the future.

 

Nanotechnology might enable us to extend life, cure disease, etc., but it might also be used to turn the world around us into an extension of ourselves, spaces that react to and become part of our mental, physical, and emotional selves. We could imagine nanotechnology turning the world plastic. Everything we take for granted, such as the distinction between chair and person, ceiling and person, etc., might not hold true in this future.

 

Biological engineering will allow us to determine how we might evolve, and with nanotechnology and advances in artificial intelligence, allow us to extend life indefinitely.

 

Artificial intelligence might be the next evolution of humankind. There is no reason to suppose that AI intelligence would resemble our own. At some point, when the synergy occurs that we call intelligence, the nature of perceiving might change profoundly. We may be left for dust, or become cybernetic partners. We might exist in a silicon world after we’re dead; our personalities, thoughts, memories, and desires might be as portable as computer disks, and our bodies disposable as paper towels.

 

            But, again, the one profound change that will impact everything will probably elude all of us prognosticators.

 

KM:    Given the level of social chaos in The Man Who Melted, and looking at today's political climate, would you say that America (or the world in general) has lived up — or rather, down — to the book's somewhat dystopian vision of the
future?

 

JD:      I think if anyone reads The Man Who Melted in another 50 years, he or she will probably consider my extrapolations far too optimistic. I think — from the vantage of “now” — that the world is becoming more and more like George Orwell’s 1984.

 

KM:    Many science fiction writers (HG Wells, Robert Heinlein) were proponents of "free love." In The Man Who Melted, your characters not only practice free love without (much) jealousy, they all seem to be bisexual. Do you see universal or near-universal bisexuality as a natural state for humankind — or as a result of human sexual evolution?

 

JD:      Ah, yes, here is a good example of one of those “details” that I missed… AIDS. The 1960s and 1970s were times of experimentation, socially and sexually, but AIDS has certainly had a profound effect on youth culture and sexual mores. I believe it helped shut down those trends toward experimentation and social openness and led to a period of 1950s conservatism coupled with ever more sophisticated technology. It could be argued that 9/11 had a much more profound effect, but I’m not even sure about that. Of course, I could rationalize that the future in which The Man Who Melted takes places is one where AIDS has been cured and isn’t even much of a memory. I believe that humans are sexually polymorphous, and that technology has a profound effect on morality and sexuality.

 

KM:    Another sexually challenging aspect of the novel is the fact that one character has a profoundly powerful, yet incestuous, relationship with a missing woman. Is this another possibility you foresee for human development — that given genetic engineering and screening, and changes in social attitudes, it might one day be accepted for brothers and sisters to marry?

 

JD:      In the Man Who Melted future, birth control is quite sophisticated, thus allowing Raymond Mantle to marry his sister. As long as no offspring are allowed to issue from such a relationship, the law — and society — allows incest. I believe that technology has profound effects on morality, and I was trying to extrapolate one of those possible taboo-breaking effects.

 

KM:     Another major theme in The Man Who Melted is the possibility that there could be some form of telepathic / communally mental existence outside of life as a biological organism. Is this also something you see as a true possibility for human evolution — that we might one day begin to form organisms in which individuals are linked into a larger life form? (I guess another way of putting it is, to paraphrase one of your characters, Do you believe in magic?)

 

JD:      Well, as Arthur Clarke said, any far future technology would seem like magic to us. But, no, I don’t believe in magic. Many of the ideas for the Screamers phenomenon came from my reading of Elias Canetti’s brilliant work on crowd behavior, Crowds and Power. I extrapolated that perhaps we might access a sort of Jungian collective consciousness. Regarding where humans may go from here…I believe that we humans may be on the verge of creating a new species, that being artificial intelligence. I’ve touched on some of this earlier. I would recommend two books by the cyberneticist Hans Moravec: Mind Children and Robot. They are a bit out of date, but I guarantee they will give you an entirely new perspective on the subject.

 

KM:    In the book, the characters' relationships are very complex. Mantle and Joan
are lovers who also hate one another on some level; Mantle and Pfeiffer often
act like enemies, but they are also best friends. As Pfeiffer says at one point, he and Mantle have been through too much together to mind taking advantage of each other.  Are these love / hate connections echoes of your own friendships?

 

JD:      I think all interpersonal relationships are complex. I was trying to describe real interpersonal relationships. More, I won’t say…

 

KM:    The complexity of the characters' relationships sometimes seems so symmetrical and so tightly bound that I wonder if you were playing with the idea that the story might be taking place among multiple personalities contained in a single person's psyche.

 

JD:      That’s interesting that you might think that. Although I believe we all have different guises that we utilize as masks in different situations, I wasn’t playing with multiple personalities in The Man Who Melted. I was describing complex relationships, relationships made even more different, even more complex, perhaps, by future technology, which affects the culture and social interactions. I was trying to mirror interior states of mind as well as tell the up-front external story. For a number of years, I have been writing science fiction as mainstream. I was trying to do that with The Man Who Melted, and, perhaps more obviously, with my James Dean novel, The Rebel.

 

KM:    Many of your books take memory as a theme: The Rebel was, in a way, memories of what might have been; The Silent was, among other things, about the trauma of memory; and of course there's the Leonardo de Vinci novel, The Memory Cathedral. The Man Who Melted seems to concern itself with memory also, in terms of memory suppressed, in the case of an amnesiac character, but also, in a more specific sense, there's a feeling of memory being recycled — on a social level, there's a suggestion of history coming to an end because there are no new frontiers, just an obsession with the past (as when a famous historical disaster is re-created, complete with massive loss of life, as a cultural event).

 

JD:      Most of my work has been an investigation of the nature of memory and consciousness. The overarching trope of The Memory Cathedral is an ancient system of mnemonics that gives the practitioner enormous powers of recollection; and it was also believed that such systems allowed one to travel in time. In both The Memory Cathedral and The Silent I was playing with the nature of memory as a construction, like fiction, rather than what we believe it to be: an accurate mirror of the past. In The Man Who Melted, I was investigating in depth the very nature of amnesia. I must admit that this was a delving into self, as I’ve had my own experience with amnesia, with its effects, and so this novel was my way of working out some of my deepest feelings and fears. I wasn’t intentionally trying to suggest the end of history, but I can see how the novel could be interpreted in that way.

 

KM:    I was interested to read one character commenting on another character's amnesia in terms that anticipated the movie Memento — that he forgot certain things in order to avoid knowing the truth, and so he could create an insoluble problem with which to divert himself for the rest of his life.

 

JD:      There are parallels between Memento and The Man Who Melted. Mantle is trying to find the woman he loves while at the same time being unable to face certain truths.

 

KM:    One major story mechanism in The Man Who Melted is the notion that people with schizophrenic tendencies could become huge, communally-minded mobs.  I have often thought that Western societies are fundamentally schizophrenic, holding out certain sets of values from a religious standpoint, while simultaneously holding out contradictory values from a market standpoint — with the common folk caught in the middle and expected to reconcile the two. Is your novel commenting on just this double set of values, or am I simply reading that into the book?

 

JD:      Well, I was commenting on society as being fundamentally schizophrenic, but I didn’t set out to comment on the values you specifically mention. I have done so in my road novel Counting Coup, which contains a lot of autobiographical material. In The Man Who Melted, I began by extrapolating on experiments conducted on rats in overpopulated spaces. Thus, the phenomenon of the Screamers. Everything else, I’ll just blame on the willfulness of my characters!

 

Kilian Melloy has contributed interviews to SciFi.com, InfinityPlus, wigglefish.com, and many other web sites.  He serves as Assistant Arts Editor for EDGE Publications (http://www.edgeboston.com/)