Interview with Douglas A Van Belle . . . Posted 09 July, 2008

Doug Van Belle has appeared thrice in ASIM's pages, with the stories 'A Small Blue Planet for the Pleasantly Insane', 'Slag Fairmont - Psychic Zone Ranger', and 'The Jackal's Waltz'. He's also featured in the 'Warrior Wisewoman', 'Ruins: Terra', and 'SF Waxes Philosophical' anthologies, and he's been the recipient of the Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand's SF fan award, in 2007 for 'Best New Talent'. Simon Petrie recently asked Doug a series of questions about his short fiction, his novels, and his politics textbooks .

(SPOILER ALERT: this interview doesn't really contain any spoilers, unless you're Rush Limbaugh, which I'm guessing you're probably not. In any case, I just wanted to use the phrase 'spoiler alert'. Sad, I know.)

1) Doug, first question: where are you from?
Well Psi, that's something you really should have figured out by now, but I guess better late than never. Okay, when a mommy writer and a daddy writer want to have a baby writer they share a very special hug.

2) No, really, I mean, where are you *from*?  I've heard the cover story, but I think our readers deserve a better answer than "Not Canada."  You're among friends here, what's the real story?
The real story? I'm not sure if you're ready for the real story, but if you insist.the real story is that sometimes daddy writers need a little pill to make the special hug work. That's not the greatest thing in the world, but mommy writers like that better than when a daddy writer hires a ghost writer on the side. Of course, some mommy writers do a little plagiarizing of their own.

3) Well, if you're going to be all coy about it ...  I don't suppose you'd like to explain what you're doing here?
I'm trying to explain where writers come from.

4) Alright then.  This is obviously going to be one of *those* interviews.
Obviously.

5) That last one wasn't really a question, was it?
No, but that was.

5b) And *that* one was rhetorical.
Geez, you sound like you want me to play nice or something.

5c) If you wouldn't mind.
Really? Well, fair enough I suppose. It's your interview.

5d) Is it?
If it was my interview I would be asking you about the real scientist and science fiction thing. Or maybe, just for fun, I'd ask you about Hal Spacejock just to see how annoyed you got when you thought I had you mixed up with Simon Haynes. Or, if I really wanted to mess with your head I'd ask what you thought of the fact that since quantum mechanics insists that error is inherent in ALL measurement, we can never be certain that we have falsified any hypotheses therefore quantum mechanics nullifies the central premise of the philosophy of science that underlies the conduct of the modern scientific inquiry that led to quantum mechanics.

5e) All I know is, quantum mechanics are underpaid and overworked.
They get to wear nice overalls, though.

6) That last one wasn't really a question either. What's your opinion of non-questions?
It's really important to confront non-questions with long, intricate and nearly coherent non-answers because most writers don't appreciate how sensitive the creative process is to a balanced and diverse diet high in antioxidants which are abundant in red wine and beer which was first brewed by the Egyptians as a high-carbohydrate dietary supplement for the men who built the pyramids, who were not, latest research indicates, slaves, but instead were the beneficiaries of a public works style scheme to keep skilled craftsmen employed as was done in the US during the great depression, the results of which are still apparent in the massive hydroelectric dams that, while carbon-neutral, disrupt natural fish habitats and are a mixed blessing for the environmental movement that started with the effort to clean up the Hudson river in New York, which was originally called New Amsterdam by the Dutch who settled there and in ...

7) I've recently read your twice-unpublished novel, Barking Death Squirrels, which seems to dwell in equal measure on the pulp SF staples of man-eating aliens and female underfashion.  What led you to write BDS?  How would you describe the book to our readers?  And how has it come to be twice-unpublished?
Hah, you know, until you put those two things together like that, I'd never thought of how pulpy BDS could sound. With the kitschy title and with a nuanced exploration of the social dynamics of fancy lingerie poetically juxtaposed against an invasion by giant man-eating squids, I guess it's fair to go there, but I really don't think pulpy fits. Maybe classic? If you don't mind me dropping a name and trying to act all important for a minute, Stephen Donaldson called it classic problem-solving science fiction and I think that really fits the feel of the story. Don't get me wrong, I like pulpy. Sometimes I go seriously pulpy, like I did with Slag Fairmont, but BDS isn't pulpy. Actually, given where some of the parts of it have been published, you might even call a little bit philosophical, though we should tread lightly there. We wouldn't want to detract from the literary impact of the women's undergarments.
That said, I'm not really sure how I would describe BDS for your readers. I've called it a collection of short stories that fit together to form a novel, but I don't think that does justice to the way it keeps a tight focus on a novel's narrative throughout. And turning it around to depict it as a novel with chapters written like short stories isn't quite right either because with just a bit of rejiggering to add background bits carried in from earlier chapters, I think all of the chapters can stand on their own as short stories.
Maybe the basic premise is the best way to describe it. The BDS universe is a pretty nasty place dominated by massive predatory species, the big uglies, that have built something approximating a civilization around an idealized conceptualization of the predator. Humans are the rodents infesting that galaxy and BDS is the story of when some of the big uglies decide to invade one of the corners that the humans thought was safe.

8) Is this a worldview that just congealed all at once, or was there a progression to it?
There are a lot of ideas that converge in Barking Death Squirrels and any one might reasonably be called the start of it all, but I would have to say that what led me to write it was a weekend in Las Vegas. I was cutting through the Venetian on the way to a poker tournament and I realized that I was walking through the architecture of space colonization. Cosmic radiation is the often unmentioned bane of colonizing space and building underground is the only realistic way to deal with it, but how do you live with living in a hole? That fake bit of Venice, including a canal.on the second floor of a casino.with the fake sky and the fake building fronts was about the best way I could imagine for people to cope with living under a hundred meters of regolith. So I started writing about someone suffering on the ass end of building and maintaining that kind of environment as a way of telling a story with the details of that place. That story didn't work very well, but a lot of the detail I developed for it fit with another idea about humans as rodents infesting the corners of a very unfriendly galaxy, and that connected with ideas about a galactic civilization that arose out of the idealization of the predator. Add an invasion by one of the most alien of the alien species I've dreamt up and that's what became BDS.

9) And, like I already asked above a couple of questions back, how does it get to be twice unpublished?
Twice Unpublished pretty much says it. BDS has been picked up, twice, by small presses--one even gave me a small advance--and both times the imprint has crashed and burned in the month or so between page proofs and printing. In one case the editor's ex-wife got the name of imprint in the divorce and she turned it into a soft-porn romance line just to torture him. I felt so sorry for him that I sent him back the advance, in vodka of course. I gave up on small presses and gave it to my agent, so it should actually be out reasonably soon, but it has been an adventure.

10) You seem to drift mostly towards the longish end of the short fiction spectrum - novelettes and novellas.  (Or should that be novellae?)  Any particular reason?
Can we go back to the mommy writer and daddy writer bit? Just for a minute. Got a good one about mommy writers not appreciating daddies who always write flash fiction.

10b) I'd rather we didn't.
Just as well, I suppose. Simple answer—I suspect that my short fiction tends toward the longer end of the range because I really don't give a crap about selling it. Short fiction outlets will seldom even consider thinking about maybe looking at anything over 7,000 words and the next real publication option is the 90,000 word novel, so a rational writer who want's to sell his or her work would avoid writing stories that fall in that dead zone, but I've never been much for rationality, especially when I write.
It might sound a bit cliché, but I write fiction purely for the fun of it (and, of course, to win the really cool little trophies that come with the New Zealand Sci Fi and Fantasy awards). So when I write I just go where the story needs to go. Combine that with a personal preference for stories that are made up of a couple of twisty, intertwined stories and I end up with more novellas than flash fiction.

11) Is 'just going where the story needs to go' why there seems to be quite a diversity to your fiction, ranging from hard-edged SF action to surrealistic, off-the-wall kind of stories like 'Clonehenge'? Or is the diversity a matter of conscious or subconscious exploration and experimentation, a desire to avoid pigeonholing, or something else?
Uhhm, yes? Some of the diversity is unconscious, just sort of a discovering the story as I write kind of thing and letting the story become what it is. And some of it's intentional. When it's intentional its usually because I have a story that I know should be good, but it just won't cooperate and I have to try a few things (or a lot of things) until I find a way of getting it to work. I worry a little bit about getting pigeonholed with the novels, but not too much.
The down side of that is that I end up with a lot of manuscripts buried in shallow graves in the garden.

12) You've written other material in the BDS universe, such as The Jackal's Waltz in ASIM 35, and some chapters of BDS have done double duty as the novella The Squirrel That Didn't Bark in Ahmed Khan's anthology Sci Fi Waxes Philosophical.  Is there more to come in this vein?  And if so, any hints as to direction?
There is more. In fact, there's already a full draft of a second novel, Dances with Squirrels, which is set inside the walls of one of the big uglies' ships. It has a more traditional novel structure, and undergarments are a bit less prominent, but it's actually got a bit more of a pulpy sarcastic touch to it. I'll toss you the first page or so when we're done with the questions so you can take look. I suspect, however, that it will be a couple of years before we see Dances. Two fantasies are ahead of it in the queue. Rabid Pixies of Doom, a return of magic kind of story, and The Care and Feeding of Your Lunatic Mage, a warped take on traditional fantasy. I'm also toying with the idea of opening up the Barking Death Squirrels universe to other writers. In the handful of weeks since the novella came out in Waxes Philosophical, I've had two people email and ask if I would mind if they played in my sandbox a bit. One was a no way in hell, but the other had a really cool idea that I kind of want to see.

13) You actually have four novels in the queue?
Not counting the ones in shallow graves in the garden.yes, three ready to go and a full draft that won't need too much more editing.

13b) Seriously? Four?
That's what happens when you just write for the fun of it and don't really try too hard to sell stuff.

14) How was it to write a story (Ungraceful Cliff Dwellers) for an ostensibly female-focussed anthology, Roby James' Warrior Wisewoman (Norilana Books)?  Did you feel as though you were somehow the wrong side of the chromosomal divide?
I didn't write the story for the anthology, and when I was writing I never even thought about the femaleness of the protagonist, so there was never any thought of "writing the woman" or anything. I was writing a character who had to be strong when she had every excuse to be weak and a young girl just seemed to be right for the story. And I have to give the editor some of the credit for making that story what it became. Roby spotted the hollow spot in the story and asked for a couple hundred more words worth of detail that really made a big difference. So it was just a story that happened to fit.
Still, my wife fell on the floor laughing when I showed her the description of the anthology, and I have to admit that I would have thought that I'd be the last person to be the sole bearer of a Y-chromosome in an anthology about empowered women, but it was the right place for that story.

15) We've seen a couple of your more humorous offerings in ASIM, i.e. Slag Fairmont, Psychic Zone Ranger (ASIM 27) and A Small Blue Planet for the Pleasantly Insane (ASIM 16).  What motivates you to write humour?  And did you have any *particular* politician in mind, in Clonehenge (from the Ruins: Terra anthology)?
There is an honesty to humour, a kind of truth that you can't put anywhere other than satire and I think that I have always loved that. Plus, I'm pretty much a jackass at heart and admitting that was really what transformed my writing into something I was willing to share. Imagine the jackass, embrace the jackass, set the jackass free.
My brother (a poet of all things) is the same way and when we get on a roll, I honestly think there is a bit of a psychic connection where we keep setting each other up. In the Van Belle family, getting our mother laughing so hard she spits mashed potatoes out through her nose is pretty much par for the course. So my motivation for writing humour is largely just expressing who I am And, No. It wasn't a politician, it was Rush Limbaugh.

16) Continuing in that vein, I've encountered a copy of A Novel Approach to Politics, a textbook which you co-wrote with Kenneth M. Mash.  This, in my view, has to be the Michelangelo's David of humorous politics textbooks.  How has it been received by its intended audience?
That is a totally cool quote. I'm going to put it on the back cover of the second edition.
As far as reaction, that depends on who you think the intended audience is. If we're talking about professors trained in a British-style university, I would say that *Despised* is probably a safe first guess, but I take that as a compliment. Humans tend to appreciate it and occasionally say nice things and it sells quite nicely. It's already in its third printing and the publisher has committed to not just a second but also a third edition already.

17) Do you ever dream of earning enough through lecturing that you don't need to supplement your earnings by writing science fiction?
Sad thing is that a professor wouldn't have to make that much as writer to make the university salary a supplement to the two-for-one McDonalds Happy Meal coupons that most publishers use as royalty checks. 

18) So, do you think you might be likely to find one style that more-or-less fits your worldview, or are you keen to keep trying different things?  And are there any other stylistic variations you'd like to bring to our attention?
If I had my druthers.OK, I don't actually know what druthers are, or why I would want them.Hell I'm not even sure that druthers is plural, but if I had them.or it, I'd combine a bit of a surprise in the style of every story or novel along with something intangible that felt familiar.
I think I've got the bit of a surprise in style working pretty well just because of how I write. BDS isn't just a collection of stories woven into a novel. The point of view in those stories runs the gamut from first-person-insane, to a fairly flat omniscient third. Rabid Pixies of Doom is not quite a standard third person point of view. The POV is attached to characters and the texture of the prose shifts to fit those characters as POV shifts. Lunatic Mage is another collection of short stories novel, but the tone in the stories varies far more than BDS. Dances With Squirrels shifts back and forth between a very crass and sarcastic human and a rather droll alien point of view. And my latest big project Burning Epiphanies that's something completely different, and I've written the screenplay for a film adaptation, and the film actually tells a different story than the book even though they're kind of the same thing. I'm holding back on that book until the film is far enough along to be sure it's coming out, but I can't wait for that combination.

19) What (or who) got you started on writing?  Who are your major influences?  Where do you get your ideas?
Oooh, the where do you get your ideas question. That's just begging for a sarcastic answer. How about outsourcing from India?

19b) Or maybe one last real answer?
As you are undoubtedly aware, working as an academic is often far from tranquil and writing fiction was, and is a pretty good way to escape from that. I started writing fiction as a way to keep sane, and keeping someone like me sane a pretty big job, so I wrote a lot of fiction. And I was influenced by what I read and I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. The usual big names are all in there, with Larry Niven as my favourite as I grew up and, in my humble opinion, Vernor Vinge as the best living science fiction writer. Ursula K. LeGuin needs a mention in there and, rather than Douglas Adams, Monty Python.

20) And what can we expect from you in the future?
To be honest, I really don't know. Where ever the story goes.

21) Doug, thanks for your time.  (That's not a question, by the way.)