And there’s yet another connection between the John Brown Committee and the John Brown book. I wrote the first two chapters while I was in federal prison.
For fighting the Klan?
For refusing to testify before a Grand Jury. The feds were looking for some folks who were still underground. Several of us in John Brown were subpoenaed and were jailed for contempt when we refused to talk. Not that we knew anything. We had a principle of non-collaboration — following the lead of the Puerto Ricans who had refused to “cooperate” with the search for the FALN. I only did three months; several others did more. But it gave me a start on the book, which was the most complicated thing I had done so far. I had to read a lot of history, and make up a lot more.
So it’s not exactly a Science Fiction novel.
Sure it is. It’s an alternate history, a what-if.
Plus I threw in a lot of wonky technology and even a trip to Mars. I even swiped a device from SF’s famous alternate history, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which is about a post WWII America occupied by Germany and Japan. Dick has a novel in his novel about what might have happened if America had won the war. I have a novel in my novel, a right wing fantasy in which capitalism gets a new lease on life and America becomes a world power. A tragedy.
Alternate history has a long and respectable tradition in SF. Much of it is dystopian: The south wins the Civil War, the Nazis conquer England, etc.
Philip Roth wrote a cool one, The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh and not FDR is elected president and the US becomes an anti-semitic fascist state. He didn’t even know he was writing SF!
After that you ran a business called Jacobin Books.
Back in the 80s. My wife and comrade Judy and I ran a mail order business that catered mostly to prisoners. We would buy revolutionary books in English from Africa, Ireland, the Caribbean and here in the US, and mail them in to prisoners. Political prisoners like David Gilbert and Mumia Abu Jamal wrote reviews for our catalog. In those days prisoners had access to a little spending money, so it was a break-even operation. Not so easy today. The prisons are tighter than ever, and I doubt we’d even get the books in past the mail room.
All political books?
Mostly. Though Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog was a big seller. Assata’s bio was big. Our bestseller was Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat. Every student of labor history should find and read that classic.
Have you ever been a union member?
I tried the National Writers Union (NWU) once. But alas, free-lance scribblers are independent contractors, including myself.
Do you miss your time as an activist and organizer?
Not so much. I was never good at mass work. I finally had to face the fact that I am, in fact, a petit bourgeois intellectual and make the most of it.
Have you written any traditional SF? You know, with a rocket ship on the cover?
Absolutely. Time travel, first contact, little shop stories, space travel. Even a robot or two. My latest novel, Planet of Mystery is about the first landing on Venus. I believe in knowing and respecting the conventions and traditions of your field, whatever it is. I think every rock band should be required to work up a version of “Johnny B. Good.”
As a matter of fact, my next book after Fire on the Mountain had a BIG rocket on the cover. Voyage to the Red Planet is pretty standard space travel stuff with some elements of political satire, I suppose. In it, the first trip to Mars is financed by Hollywood.
Do you work on a regular schedule?
I try to; mornings. My novels have never made enough so I have always had to do pickup writing and editing on the side. What I call afternoon work. I wrote a bunch of novelizations (making a film script into a book, which is sort of a backward project) and packaged a goofy series called The No-Frills Books. I did a car book with Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers (NPR). Working with them was fun. They hired me because I had mechanic experience and because I had once played in a bluegrass band, the Allen County Jumper Cables. I also wrote a biography of Nat Turner for “young adults” whatever that means. I’m still fond of that book, which is found in most libraries.
And you wrote a biography of Mumia Abu Jamal.
Ona Move. Mumia’s title. That was a labor of love, though it paid well too. I was lucky enough to meet Mumia back in the 80s, through a friend who was in prison with him. I visited, and we became friends. I helped him get his first book, Live from Death Row published. We still are friends, though I have seen him only once since I moved to California. He wrote the introduction to the new edition of Fire on the Mountain which PM is bringing out. He has been in solitary confinement for over twenty years.
And yet he continues, though his radio work and his writing, to be the “voice of the voiceless.”
And he is innocent.
And they know it. That’s the most shameful part.
Perhaps your most widely-read story is “They’re Made out of Meat.” It’s often found on the internet.
That’s cool. I like writing all-dialogue stories. I have done several. They tend to be short, although one of them, “macs,” was longer. There is something about stories in which everything is revealed in dialogue that appeals to me.
Like a radio play?
Exactly. I have done several radio plays, and even got one produced at Radio City. But it’s way too hard to get anything produced on the radio. It’s a perfect venue for SF, but it seems all anyone wants to do is jokey retro stuff like Garrison Keilor’s “noir” detective. It’s a drag.
You worked as a mechanic. Was that a stretch for a literary guy?
Not at all. I have always loved cars, even big evil American cars, and I got back into working on them when I lived in the communes. There are always plenty of cars to fix. When my wife and I left the Southwest and moved back to Kentucky (she’s from Tennessee) I found myself working as a tractor mechanic, and then as a transmission man. I still do it but not enough. I miss the problem solving involved. It’s more intellectual than writing, which is a lot of guess-work.
Did your parents read to you?
Never. They were middle class but not bookish. There were no books around our house. I read to myself from an early age. I was lucky. I was taught to read before I went to school by a “colored” babysitter, Lily Mae, who helped me work out the words in Captain Marvel. Shazam — it made sense immediately. I went straight from comics into the Oz books, all thirty-some- odd of them, then on to science fiction, which was easy to find on the drugstore racks. I remember getting a chill reading “Surface Tension” by Blish, probably my first genuine literary experience.
I still think On the Road is a great novel. Other early influences were James Ramsey Ullman and his biography of Rimbaud. A teacher gave me Walden and another turned me on to Beckett. All this was like honey to a sixteen-year-old in Kentucky.
Do you still regard yourself as a Southern writer?
Not really. Some of my early work was set in the South, particularly Talking Man which is about a hillbilly wizard, and “Bears Discover Fire,” a sweet little tale set in Bowling Green that won me my only Hugo. I still love and identify with the South, particularly the Upper Redneck Nascar South.