The Old Gods Return: An Interview with John Shirley
The co-creator of Cyberpunk talks about The Crow, addiction, William Gibson, Blue Oyster Cult, movie westerns and much, much more.
John Shirley won the Bram Stoker Award for his story collection Black Butterflies, and is the author of numerous novels, including most recently Stormland and A Sorceror of Atlantis.
He is also a screenwriter, having written for television and movies; he was co-screenwriter of The Crow with David J. Schow.
His most recent novels include Stormland and Axle Bust Creek. His western Gunmetal Mountain won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. These and other John Shirley novels are available as audiobooks.
He is also a lyricist, having written lyrics for 18 songs recorded by the Blue Oyster Cult (especially on their albums Heaven Forbidden and Curse of the Hidden Mirror), and his own recordings.
John Shirley has written only one nonfiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, published by Penguin/Jeremy Tarcher.
John Shirley story collections include Black Butterflies, In Extremis, Really Really Really Really Weird Stories and Living Shadows.
Alex S. Johnson: Hi, John, and welcome to Dark Entries, my ongoing series of interviews with dark fiction authors.
You are widely cited and known as the creator/"Patient Zero" of one of the most influential fiction genres of modern times, Cyberpunk. What are some of the strands of the creative DNA that you wove together to forge this genre, and who were some of your co-conspirators?
John Shirley: I think that the real antecedent DNA of it probably came from Cordwainer Smith, Philip K Dick, Alfred Bester, Norman Spinrad, William S. Burroughs, JG Ballard and John Brunner’s “Shockwave Rider”. Movies like, The Killing, Performance, Escape from New York, Bladerunner, and A Clockwork Orange were some part of it. But Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Cadigan, Shiner, Kadrey (“Metrophage”), and I had a sort of compact zeitgeist going on between us, and I think we generated much that was later thought of as cyberpunk. The street has its own uses for tech ideas, and all that went with it, was us. It was a time when it had to arise. We sort of channeled it. I was always very influenced by rocknroll energy, by punk rock and by the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and certain hard rock bands, and I think that vibe soaked into me and Lew Shiner a lot. Gibson and Sterling and I were listening to stuff like Sisters of Mercy too. We all read Phil Dick, we all read John LeCarre and new noir stuff and brought in the latest tech and we envisioned tech and wove it in. We were influenced by the avant garde tradition too. And you can’t ignore the late 1960s/ early 70s antiestablishment cultural energy—mistrusting The Man. Bill Gibson went to Woodstock…but he (literally) took the bad acid! I took some psychedelics but also I read tech journals and science journals and spoke to researchers. My novels Transmaniacon and City Come A-Walkin’ and my story collection Heatseeker had their impact on people. Then my A Song Called youth antifascist trilogy, Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona--I’m still getting responses from people about the prescience of those books and they were borrowed-from by the next wave of cyberpunk people.
ASJ: Your novel Wetbones takes on themes of addiction as a subtext for a supernatural Splatterpunk novel. You immerse the reader in the Hollywood milieu you inhabited. What are some of the lessons that you learned about addiction and the lure of the Hollywood dreamworld, both as a person and as an author?
JS: Addiction is more than a subtext for Wetbones, it’s a big part of the story. I was in recovery from a period of drug addiction at the time. Writing the novel was part of exorcising my inner addict. The Akishra, while a fanciful part of the book, are borrowed from Hindu mythology—astral worms that suck up the wasted life force of…the wasted! There’s sex-addiction caricatured in it too. I was the victim of predators myself and that’s found in the book allegorically. What I learned from struggling with and overcoming addiction, is deep self-awareness. Not just introspection but actual self-observation, seeing myself as I really am, breaking free from all forms of lying. And understanding the neurological power of addiction too. The tragedy of that neurological element—of not understanding its mechanisms-- is symbolically explored in this horror novel…The Hollywood milieu –well, I worked in Hollywood, I wrote for television and movies, I pitched and pitched again at meetings, I met numerous producers—and was sometimes ripped off by some of them. I could have sued over the show Heroes as one example, if I’d had the support of the talent agency I was with. Should have done it anyway. So I see many producers as pillagers who prey on artists. Not all of them are, but it’s commonplace. And in Wetbones you see it in symbolic form perhaps…
ASJ: You co-scripted the cult classic film The Crow with David J. Schow. This film, like Wetbones, deals with themes of spiritual corruption and addiction as manifested within the universe created by James O' Barr. Could you talk about those themes and how you yourself have grappled with addiction?
JS: The desire for revenge can corrupt the soul. The Crow is a hero, we’re glad he becomes the agent of justice, but he pays a price—he’s also a lost soul. The urban power of The Crow, the city as a character in the story, should not be overlooked. O’Barr struggled with addiction—few artists haven’t—and he did his own “exorcising” in The Crow. It’s an aspect of the story that touched me, in a personal way, and touched the movie’s fans who saw it around them. How children can be hurt by parental addictions…Definitely happened in my life too, for a time. I mean, it happened to my kids. It happened not with the modern Dickensian urban drama you find in The Crow, but neglect of another kind happened. There are scars all ‘round though we’ve come through it well. I’m several decades clean from drugs now, partly thanks to NA, partly thanks to therapy, partly thanks to the Gurdjieff work’s process of self-observation.
ASJ: Could you talk a bit about why you were drawn to O' Barr's comics, the inspirations (Japanese cinema/noir/Spaghetti Westerns, goth/Deathrock, etc.) that went into both O' Barr's original work and your and Schow's screenplay?
JS: Yes I immediately saw the influence of Samurai films on the comic The Crow, and the influence of the better tough-guy movies generally—O’Barr’s comic book was very cinematic. Looking at the graphic novel was like looking at a movie storyboard. This helped sell it to film—producers could envisage scenes from the movie, right there in the comic. Noir films—absolutely, you can see it in the use of shadow, of city as living personality. Rock was always there—for one thing, O’Barr is a big Iggy Pop fan, and Iggy’s body on stage was a model for The Crow’s form. In my early drafts, Draven played rock guitar and I had a big scene with that on a roof. If you listen to The Crow soundtrack—perhaps the most influential use of rock music in a movie apart from Easy Rider—who do you hear? It was all bands and artists that O’Barr’s graphic work seemed to resonate with.
ASJ: Could you talk about the process of collaborating with Schow on The Crow, the film's enduring legacy, and your thoughts on the remake?
JS: I didn’t collaborate with Schow, sadly. The way it’s usually done in producing films is they take what they can get from one writer and then move on from that one to another and then another. That’s what happened. Dave Schow brought some wonderful imagery to it especially relating to his realization of the villainous street gang. He worked really well with the director. Cannot speak about that further.
ASJ: Could you talk about your friendship and relationship with Wiliam Gibson, and your encouragement of him to write science fiction?
JS: I met him on a panel at a convention in Vancouver BC and he and I had the same referents. Ballard and Baudelaire and WS Burroughs and the darker rock bands of the time, and avant garde film making and art, and we just sort of recognized each other as fellow travelers. So we met afterwards and struck up a friendship and correspondence. I think it was through him I started talking to Sterling and we all were involved in Sterling’s little zine, Cheap Truth, which was a kind of cyberpunk unofficial journal, in a whimsical way. Gibson was a bit influenced by my City Come A-Walkin’ (as he said in writing an intro to a later edition), and my Heatseeker, and he said that if an outsider artist weirdo like Shirley can get professionally published so can I. I read some of his early short stories in manuscript, like Johnny Mnemonic, and very much encouraged him, and suggested to Robert Sheckley that he publish them in Omni and he read them and agreed and that did help Gibson. I promoted him to everyone, because he was such a good writer—the kind of beginning writer you see once in a lifetime. Here’s someone, you say, destined for greatness. He was good like LeCarre at his best, or John D. MacDonald. Bill used to come and sleep on my couch in the big communal house I shared with early punk rockers in Portland. He’d go to punk shows I was in, when I was lead singer. My drug problems led to my sort of fucking the friendship up, later, but he and I are friends again now. Or as friendly as one can be to a superstar type. They don’t trust easily. He’s still a great writer and a good man.
ASJ: In addition to being an author and screenwriter, you are equally well known, in the company of such luminaries as Michael Moorcock and Patti Smith, as a lyricist for Blue Oyster Cult. Tell me about your relationship with the band and how you came to write lyrics for them. Also, please tell me about your own rock and roll projects.
JS: Blue Oyster Cult and I had mutual friends. A lady friend who had, er, dated some members of the fan was a fan of my writing and knew they were looking for a lyricist at a certain point and I gave her lyrics I wrote for them, she gave them to Buck Dharma (Don Roeser). And they were aware of me from my novel Transmaniacon, title taken from a BOC song too. I didn’t hear anything for a couple years—then they put out an album with eight songs using my lyrics, and of course they got in touch and made all the right arrangements. I joined ASCAP and all. I’ve written the lyrics for twenty-three songs by them, including the two singles from their newest album The Symbol Remains, but it was after their period of having radio hits, so I didn’t write Don’t Fear the Reaper or Burning For You. I’m friendly with the band, and they let me and my band The Screaming Geezers open for them a few years ago in a big hall and we killed it and BOC loved what we did. So there.
ASJ: You've also worked in the Western genre. What is it about Westerns that you find so appealing?
JS: I grew up watching westerns. I love the mythic intensity of the form, at its best. I loved Gunsmoke on TV and I loved John Ford movies and Anthony Mann movies and movies like Tombstone and the Leone films. I was into the whole Wyatt Earp thing (partly myth, itself, though he has been unfairly maligned). My first western was Wyatt in Wichita. And finally I got to write a western trilogy for Pinnacle books: Axle Bust Creek, Gun Metal Mountain (which just won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America), and Blood in Sweet River. That last one is coming out next month. I wanted to do classic westerns seamlessly fused with revisionist westerns—realism, grit, honesty about the frontier, yet heroism and…gunfights. The trilogy has a really powerful woman character who’s far more than just the love interest.
ASJ: Please tell me about the genesis of your A Song called Youth trilogy.
JS: The cyberpunk trilogy was inspired partly by having lived in France for a few years and having witnessed the rise of the hard-right there, led by Jean Marie Le Pen. I looked around and saw neo-nazism, as racist nationalism, arising across Europe, partly as a reaction to the influx of immigrants. I was alarmed. I saw that this sick agenda never really went away. It went underground. (Nowadays it’s more apparent than ever.) Then I saw the theocratic version arising in the USA. So I wrote an antifascist trilogy, a cautionary tale to warn people, predicting how the neo fascists might use new technology in the 21st century to spread oppression. I saw that there was still a kind of Stalinist feeling amongst many Russians—not communist, but just right-leaning aggressive expansionism—and I thought a Russian demagogue might lead them into a war with Europe. Hence, the backstory for the first novel predicted Putin and the Ukraine and what may be coming next. I predicted that drones would be used in all this, that private military forces would be employed, that digital video computer innovation, super CGI, would lead to what is now called deepfake. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about deepfake. The heroes of the Eclipse books (now out in a snappy new ebook edition) are the New Resistance, fighting this new hightech fascism. In the USA a puppeted “useful idiot” becomes the permanent president of a theocracy. The trilogy predicted mass media use of misinformation much like what we have now. All of this was, as it turns out, terrifyingly prophetic. It’s coming true. There is a whole ‘nother level to the novels exploring the futuristic demimonde…the underground in arts, in drug use, in the use of technology…
ASJ: Much like your predecessor Philip K. Dick, you are cited as a major influence on other subgenres of speculative fiction, including Bizarro. What are your thoughts on Bizarro, and if you have some favorite authors, who are they?
JS: My favorite Bizarro author is David Agranoff. Bizarro is mostly a niche publishing movement, indie publishers, finding its audience along the fringes—and that’s how it should be. The most creative stuff moves from the fringes toward the heart of multimedia, refreshing it. I love Bizarro’s sense of humor.
ASJ: Tell me about your book on the great spiritual teacher Gurdjieff. What are some elements of his thought you think apply today?
JS: I wrote Gurdjieff: An Introduction to his Life and Ideas, to introduce Gurdjieff to younger people (not that the book is “for kids”), and people just starting to explore spirituality. Gurdjieff brought a deep understanding of what people now call mindfulness—his was more demanding, more powerful than the mindfulness movement now—and he told us that we are asleep when we think we’re awake, and we’re not making conscious choices when we think we are, we’re making reactive mechanistic kneejerk choices. He taught methods for waking up, and learning to make conscious choices so we can be genuinely self-deterministic and also more compassionate. He wanted to wake up the world so he could help put a stop to humanity’s tendency to make war on one another. All that applies today—more than ever. Especially when we think of how mindless people become on the internet, how addicted to mindless social media we tend to be, how vulnerable to manipulation. Higher consciousness, as I point out in my novel The Other End, can have a subversive effect, in the most positive sense of subversive.
ASJ: What are the most essential qualities necessary to success as an author?
JS: It helps to be prolific. Insane self-confidence, justified or not, can help. Being eclectic in one’s reading, in culture, in the sciences, leads to the generation of more ideas. Timing helps—and we can’t really control that. But, the right ideas at the right time. Originality helps—even if it’s only original twists to old genres.
ASJ: What is the best sentence you've ever read? What is the best sentence you ever wrote?
JS: No idea as to either, I’m afraid. Would take me a year’s research to answer either question. Maybe I would find the best sentence I’d read, by my lights, somewhere in Patrick O’Brian’s novels. In mine, perhaps somewhere in Eclipse Penumbra or in my novel A Splendid Chaos.