Discovering Mary Doria Russell was one of my defining moments. I devoured the sequel, "Children of God", and then I kind of waited. Where the hell was the next book? Where did she go?
In '99 when Children of God was released, the Internet was still a new phenom. But, I remember coming across Mary's website while looking for updates. I discovered her numerous scholarly accolades, and immediately raced to re-enroll in college to earn a degree in anthropology (nevermind my previous endeavors had been focused on English and Theatre). I remember saying: "If Mary can do it, so can I. She's not releasing anything new, but I will write a book that is research heavy and rivals 'The Sparrow'!"
Needless to say, this never happened. And my book, "Naked Metamorphosis", in no way rivals my favorite all-time read.
In 2004, Mary returned. I nearly missed it, because I was expecting another Margaret Atwood religious-based sci-fi story. What I got was "A Thread of Grace", which quickly creeped up into my ten-favorite books of all time.
Regardless of what I wanted to see from Mary contrasted to what I got, Mary Doria Russell was back. I admire and adore her. Her meticulous research is something to behold. And her ability to find humor in the most depressing of moments is to be rejoiced.
The chance to interview her is one of my greatest moments. I've looked forward to this for years. And, by far, Mary is one of the most fun interviews I've had. Enjoy.
**At the time of this interview, Mary Doria Russell's next book was entitled "Eight to Five, Against" (which I quite prefer). The book will be released under the revised title: "Doc".
Eric Mays: Mary, The Sparrow remains one of my favorite books of all-time, and I think I’ve converted several others to that line of thinking.
Mary Doria Russell: Thank you, dear. I hear that quite a lot, actually. The Sparrow seems to make people's top three and I always try to be very gracious when I'm told that, but inwardly? I'm snarling. It takes iron restraint to look flattered and humble while thinking, “So? What are the first two? Because if either one of them is The DaVinci Code, you are so dead.”
A little window into the inner world of the artist... It's not pretty.
EM: Thanks for agreeing to the interview. Let’s just start off with The Sparrow, shall we?
MDR: I'm beginning to understand how Woody Allen felt in the '90s when everybody told him how much they loved his early comedies... Course, now that he's shacked up with his stepdaughter, even his comedies seem kind of creepy--
Sorry. You were saying?
EM: You took one of the most simple concept pieces – first contact with alien life – and made it transcendent. What was it about the alien life that captivates us so?
MDR: The answer I like best is Stanley Schmidt's: human beings have always told stories about alien life, but in the past, the aliens were called nymphs and centaurs, elves and goblins, angels and demons.
In my opinion, anthropology and religion and alien contact stories share common questions. At heart, those questions are always about what it means to be human in a big, dark, scary universe. Are we playthings of the gods? Are we battling malign forces? Are we the purpose and pinnacle of creation, or just another species on a crowded little planet?
And underlying all those questions is, “Hello? Is anybody home?” Am I all alone in this big, dark, scary house? Is Mom down in the basement doing laundry, or will a bad man jump out of the shadows with a knife?
That said, I suspect that alien contact stories are primarily interesting to American and European readers. I freely admit that I don't know jack about foreign literature, or the lack of it, on this subject, so I am totally gassing off here. However, I have this little theory that alien contact stories reflect lingering cultural guilt and anxiety about what white folks did to red and brown and black and yellow ones during the age of imperialism, the consequences of which we are still unraveling in the 21st century.
Now there's a thesis topic for some graduate student to investigate...
EM: The Jesuit missionaries and the questions of faith are really what, in my opinion, separates The Sparrow and Children of God from the library of other “first contact” stories.
See, God has experienced a lot of mission creep since the old days. (Pun intended, I'm afraid.) Yahweh starts out as a pretty standard thunder god, and then goes along for the ride when Jews begin wandering. The god of Abraham does battle with the gods of Egypt; sets up shop on Sinai; relocates the franchise to Babylon during the exile but declines to get involved when the Romans decide to kick some Middle Eastern ass on the far end of the Mediterranean. Then he sets his son up in the family business and moves to Europe. He changes his name, like a lot of immigrants, and starts getting His personal pronoun capitalized....
So, 3500 years on, it's not Yahweh, the god of that mountain over there, but ADONAI, melech ha-Olam: the Lord God, Ruler of the Universe, and people are writing all this great music for Him and standing up to sing the Hallelujah Chorus, calling Him (or Them, depending on how you look at it) “Wonderful! Counselor! The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace!”
To me, the next logical step in this theological Odyssey is that He is revealed (or recognized or declared) to be the creator of life on other planets, not just ours. That's what I was playing with in The Sparrow.
Seriously: back in 1995, when The Sparrow was already in production for publication, it was announced that a Martian rock found in the Antarctic showed evidence of ancient microbial life. Within five hours, I heard someone on BBC asking, “So, what does this imply about Genesis?”
If we can confirm life on Mars, devout readers of the Bible will have to ask themselves, Was Mars just a rough sketch? Did God screw up there and move the whole idea to Earth? Or maybe Earth the screw-up planet, given that some believe its sentient inhabitants require divine redemption and salvation.
There are still a lot of Christians who are still shaken by the implications of “discovering” two whole continents right here on Earth that were inhabited by people, plants and animals unmentioned in Genesis. (That's what the evolution controversy is really about, not biological science.) Finding life anywhere else in the universe is going to be a WAY bigger theological issue than meeting llamas and Aztecs.
EM: But faith plays a prominent part in your entire body of work, not just in The Sparrow and Children of God.
MDR: In A Thread of Grace, the subject was more ethics than faith. And I got into the history of Middle Eastern religions in Dreamers of the Day. But, yeah, I take your meaning.
EM: Why is faith important in literature? Why should it be?
MDR: Two things exist in all human cultures, around the world, past and present, going back at least 60,000 years: music and religion. Music and religion are, together and separately, more diagnostic of our species than opposable thumbs or bipedalism. Not every human being is religious: there are congenital atheists, just as there are people who are tone-deaf. But the larger culture always has some kind of music and a religious default setting.
So, if you're writing about human beings, religion or a lack of it is an important part of character development. I don't usually write a biography for each character, the way some writers do, but I do need a clear idea of who each character is. Understanding a character's religious background is crucial to developing a character with psychological integrity, one who will come alive and linger in the reader's mind.
Now in entertaining fiction, as in fun movies meant to sell popcorn, you can have an unexplained villain. He can just be bad; she can just be a bitch. But you're asking me about LIT-ra-chur, and in that case, any character who faces an ethical challenge has to be given a moral core. You have to know why that core is strong or weak, or lacking, or poorly thought out, and how it comes to be denied or abandoned, or what it costs the character to act honorably or cravenly.
Why is The Merchant of Venice still so riveting, hundreds of years after it was written? In a poor or even okay writer's hands, Shylock could have been an odious bad guy, ripping a pound of flesh off a hapless aristocrat's thigh, and when Hollywood optioned the story, it would become Saw IX: This Time It's Jewish!
Shakespeare made Shylock enduringly, heartbreakingly comprehensible: all his pain and humiliation and rage and despair are there to be understood. Watching Shylock's capitulation at the end is like watching a magnificent wolf gnaw his own leg off in a steel trap. You feel ashamed to witness it. Shakespeare (and a good actor) can literally change your mind. You start with one attitude, and at the end, you see the world differently.
The greatest challenge I've taken on personally was creating a character who could become a doctor in his youth, and then wind up on the side of the railroad tracks at Auschwitz, pointing right and left. The task when I was developing Werner Schramm, the Nazi doctor in A Thread of Grace, was to make him comprehensible and even likable, to the point where you kind of forget that he is personally responsible for the deaths of 91,867 people. He isn't psychotic. He isn't amoral. Schramm didn't start out being evil. He is mediocre, and he started his journey to Auschwitz doing what he honestly believed was morally correct. He makes decisions that any of us might have made under similar circumstances. I'm not forgiving him. I'm elucidating him.
The essence of tragedy, I think is not that evil people deliberately do detestable things, but that ordinary people -- who mean well – do detestable things for reasons that seem right to them, at the time.
Money may be the root of some evil, but good intentions account for the rest of it.
EM: What do you have faith in?
MDR: Human folly. I count on it. Occasionally, my faith is shaken by someone who fails to make the kind of boneheaded decisions that inevitably lead to tragedy or farce, but that is a rare event. Generally my faith in folly is restored within an hour or two.
As my husband often says, “Never attribute to malice what is easily explained by stupidity.”
Goodness. The aphorisms just keep on coming...
EM: I went back to school, briefly, with the ambitions of studying anthropology and linguistics after reading The Sparrow--
MDR: BWAH-HAHAHAHAHha....That's my nefarious plan: to generate income for my former colleagues by tricking students into signing up for anthro courses.
Wait. What the hell does nefarious actually mean? Got to look that one up…
Okay: it's from the Latin nefas, an offense against divine or moral law. Hmmmm. Good word, but in English it's been co-opted by melodramatic villains who twirl mustaches.
EM: I was determined, because that was your background, that I was going to gain the know-how, and write something that rivaled The Sparrow. Ambitious, right?
MDR: Personally, I recommend stealing from the best. The Bible, Shakespeare, and pretty much anything in Greek is fair game.
EM: I did steal from Shakespeare. But, while that academic effort did not last, what remained was the desire to create fleshed-out alien races. It’s impressive that you created a race --
MDR: Two, actually. Runa and Jana'ata.
EM: And you created them from an anthropological standpoint.
MDR: Well, of course! What else can you do with a doctorate in anthropology?
EM: What all did you combine to make the environment of Rakhat?
MDR: First off, I recapitulated Genesis. I divided the waters from the dry land. Frankly, I didn't want to deal with marine aliens even though Earth's octupi and dolphins are very bright: too much boring exposition about how the Jesuits suffer from prune-y skin and so on.
I wanted bipedal land animals because freeing up the hands allows for manufacturing (Latin: manus, hands, same root as manual labor) and the development of an interesting material culture. Then I stretched Earth biological history juuuust a little. Bipedalism has developed repeatedly on Earth in widely divergent biological lineages: dinosaurs and their bird descendants; kangaroos and wallabies; and primates.
--SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT--
When II came across Dougal Dixon's notion of predator mimicry, I found it very interesting, and posited two interlocked species: predator and prey. I decided that the predators had long ago domesticated their prey species, as humans have: horses, cattle, sheep, goats, etc. They began to select for a variety of intelligences and relative docility, as we have with dogs. The main difference on Rakhat is that the predator cultures are based on biological and genetic sciences. The Jana'ata don't manufacture their tools; they breed Runa. The Runa are their tools.
The model for the primordial Jana'ata-Runa biological relationship is cheetah and Thompson gazelle. The cultural model is Romanov Russia, where a tiny elite creates a gorgeous high culture of art and beauty that rests on the backs of an immense population of suffering serfs. Both of those relationships are inherently unstable. If anything were to wipe out Thompson gazelles – a plague or something -- cheetah will be extinct within the month. And we know what happened in Russia once the serfs realized, “We are many. They are few.”
MDR: -- and centuries, and genre, and tense, and style. Sorry. Go on...
EM: This is fiction, but you say that this is based on the accounts of actual survivors of the Holocaust.
MDR: My rule of thumb for readers is that if the anecdote sounds completely impossible to believe (like the Baby on the Bomb episode), it's real. I made up the plausible stuff to hold the narrative together.
EM: Was there one compelling thing you stumbled on that gave you that “I have to tell this story” moment?
MDR: The bare fact that 85% of the Jews of Italy survived the Holocaust.
On September 8, 1943, there were approximately 50,000 foreign and native-born Jews in Italy. After twenty months of a brutal, vindictive occupation by Nazi Germany, 43,000 of those Jews were still alive. That's the highest survivorship in occupied Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Italians were involved in a vast conspiracy to protect Jews, and the penalty for getting caught was not just torture and death for the individuals involved, but often the reprisal deaths of several hundred people in the vicinity. And yet, Italians from all political parties and across the economic spectrum did the right thing. Why?
Italy was a fascist state. Italy was Germany's primary ally for the first three years of the Second World War. Italy had anti-semitic race laws. Italian Catholics heard the same Christian liturgies as those in Germany, Austria, Poland, France... and yet they didn't take home the ugly Christ-killer mythology. Why not?
For sixty years, we've asked, “What went wrong in Germany?” To me, it was equally important to ask, “What went right in Italy?”
The answers to that question are multiple and complex, but historically and ethically important. I'm a scientist trained in Popperian logical positivism, and disproof is the most powerful element of scientific inquiry. So it's significant that so many blanket statements about the Holocaust can be contradicted and disproved by what happened in Italy.
EM: Random House just released Dreamers of the Day, which revolves around the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference.
MDR: Yes. That was when Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and a handful of British diplomats and oil men invented the modern Middle East. It's their world. We just live in it.
EM: This is a vital piece of history that most people either overlook or were not aware of.
MDR: Ah, “most people” in the West don't know about it, but in the Middle East? The 1921 Cairo Conference is a live issue. It's reality, every single day. In 2001, when Osama bin Laden took credit for the attacks on 9/11, he said it was in part “revenge for the catastrophe of eighty years ago.” Do the math.
EM: If nothing else, what do you want readers to take with them when they read this novel?
Somebody recently protested to me that there are almost no Arab characters in Dreamers, to which I replied, “Exactly. There were no Arabs at the table during the conference. Brits drew the lines on the maps and handed out real estate as they saw fit.” Just one example:
Want to know why Iraq has Sunni, Shia and Kurds, when they obviously can't stand one another? To make the world safe for British Petroleum. Gertrude Bell figured the Sunni, Shia and Kurds would never make common cause and throw the British out. So she drew a line around Mosul, Baghdad and Basra and called it Iraq. And it worked the way she anticipated until the 1950s. In pragmatic terms, Gertrude Bell served her empire well.
Dreamers of the Day is the archeology of our present political moment. The conference took eleven days, and Winston went sightseeing for two of them. People have been dying for his sins ever since. There is a direct historical line between the one Gertie Bell drew in 1921 and the fact that my nephew was commanding a platoon of Marines in Al-Anbar Province on the banks of the Euphrates while I was writing Dreamers of the Day.
EM: Now upcoming, you tackle another piece of history – the American West. Why a western?
MDR: Well, I didn't start out thinking, I'll write a Western next. I started out thinking, Let's see, now... I've done a first contact SF novel that's really a courtroom drama: The Sparrow is The Caine Mutiny meets The Mission. Children of God is a three-generation family drama -- with three species on two planets. A Thread of Grace is a World War II thriller. Dreamers is a geopolitical romance novel...
Obviously, I'm a genre slut, so what haven't I done yet? A murder mystery!
That was just a joke I made to my husband, but then a while later, I was watching the movie “Tombstone” on TV and thought, Hey... Doc Holliday was a dentist! What if there was a murder and he had to identify a body from the dentition? It was just a passing thought, but eventually that was the seed for what grew into "Doc".
EM: What has compelled you to write about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday?
MDR: I saw “Tombstone” again a while later and got interested in the history behind it. The movie's remarkably accurate; where it deviates for dramatic effect, I applaud the decisions. And there are so many contemporary issues in it: gun control, armed gangs smuggling contraband across the Mexican border, women's rights, Americans feeling threatened by the Chinese, etc.
What really hooked me, though, was Karen Holliday Tanner's biography, Doc Holliday: a Family Portrait. She had access to her family's private papers and revealed something that was hidden as shameful in the 19th century: John Henry Holliday was born with a cleft palate and a harelip. It was repaired in his infancy by his uncle, Dr. John Stiles Holliday – as far as I've been able to ascertain, that was the first surgical repair of a cleft in North America: 1851.
That was the “I'll be damned!” moment, when I got totally engrossed, but everything about the real John Henry Holliday was compelling and so much more interesting than the characters who've borne his name in movies. Although Val Kilmer's portrayal was very good...
Anyway, I fell totally in love with that boy, and because of Karen Holliday Tanner's research, I was able to write about Alice Holliday's son, not about the legendary Doc Holliday (“a cold and casual killer, always dressed in black, as though for his own funeral”). John Henry Holliday's life was just heartbreakingly sad, and I am hoping that Doc will win him the compassion and respect I believe he deserves.
Bat Masterson is the source of most of the slander about John Henry Holliday, by the way. Bat was a lying little weasel. Just my opinion, of course.
EM: Is this the ultimate historical bromance?
MDR: It's Hollywood's ultimate bromance. In reality, the friendship was between Doc and Wyatt's younger brother, Morgan. Doc and Wyatt were never really all that close – they had very little in common, and were mainly connected through Morgan, the only one of the Earp brothers who made friends outside the family. Morg was just a sweetheart. He was also a reader and he liked talking about books. He and Doc were very close. Doc was shattered when Morgan was killed. Morg was buried in the blue suit Doc bought for him.
After Morgan's assassination, Doc and Wyatt shared one thing: a deep desire to see Morgan's murderers dead in the dirt. When that was accomplished, they split up and never saw each other again -- contra that lovely scene at the end of “Tombstone.” And the Earp brothers split up as well. Morg was the glue who held that family together. When he died, there was no center.
EM: Mary, you are known for your research. I’ve often said that research is why I write. I love it. I can’t get enough of it.
MDR: I agree. That's the best part of the job. I start digging into old sources and period literature, and contemporary reconsiderations, and just get lost in it all.
EM: There’s a bit of a difference between Jesuits making first contact and Jewish faith and Wyatt Earp. What things fascinate you to the point of needing to research and then tell that tale?
MDR: It's generally something in history I learned about as a child and hadn't questioned or thought in decades. I'll stumble across something on The History Channel, or I'll hear something on the radio, or read something in a book, and get curious about the political and historical context and start reading. I like to reconsider things I accepted as a child, now that I've got decades of adulthood behind me.
Sometimes I don't go very far with a topic. For example, when Fess Parker died, I got interested in Davy Crockett. My brother was exactly the right age for the Disney show in the 1950s and he ran around with a “coonskin” cap and all that. I read a couple of biographies and Crockett's own memoir. He had an interesting voice, but it turns out that he was the precise 19th century analog of Sarah Palin. The parallels are just amazing on so many levels. There's a good novel there for somebody, but it won't be me who writes it. I just didn't like him, or anybody around him.
I have to fall in love with somebody if I'm going to spend 3-7 years in their company. I love John Henry Holliday and Morgan and James Earp, and I'm very fond of Wyatt and Kate, even though they were both much more difficult to like. I didn't love David Crockett. Not even a little.
EM: What’s the most fascinating thing that you’ve uncovered – unintentionally or intentionally – while researching?
MDR: I gave the two examples above: 85% survival in Italy, and John Henry's cleft palate. Those two facts just opened up worlds to me. Example: John Henry's mother was a piano teacher, and he played very well, so I while I was writing Eight to Five, Against, I immersed myself in the 19th century piano repertoire. I started out as a big Van Halen and Def Leppard fan, but now I can't get enough of Chopin.
I actually began piano lessons two months ago! Never had any music lessons before, so I'm starting from absolute zero. It's like sounding out Hebrew on the treble staff while sounding out Russian on the bass staff. While juggling. And dancing – I just started pedals this week.
But I'm playing simple little waltzes now and love practicing.
EM: Doc is coming from Random House in 2011.
MDR: Yep. May 3, 2011, to be precise.
EM: Love to have you back for that…and I’d love to review the book…
MDR: I'll have Random House put you on the ARC list.
EM: What else can we expect from you next?
MDR: It looks like I'm doing a follow-up to Doc, entitled "Wyatt". This seems to be my pattern: two novels in each genre. Doc is set in Dodge City in 1878, four years before the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In that one year, Doc met Kate, they moved to Dodge, where Doc made his last serious effort to establish a dental practice, and that was where they met Morgan Earp.
I thought that too much already had been said about the O.K. Corral and the vendetta that followed Morgan's death, so I really resisted the idea of doing a book about Tombstone. Then I came across a memoir by Josie Marcus, who met Wyatt in Tombstone and who lived with him for 49 years after the gunfight.
I generally commit to a novel when I can hear dialog. The dialog comes first, for me. Then character, then plot. Listening to dialog in the middle of the night is how I begin to find my way into the characters. I hear their voices first. Recently I started hearing Josie Marcus's voice... She made me laugh twice -- at two in the morning.
What hooked me was her combination of charm and selfishness. And there was a remark by one of Wyatt's nephews. “You'll never convince me Wyatt was a killer. He lived with Aunt Josie for almost fifty years.” She's never been well-portrayed and I think I can do better by her and Wyatt.
EM: And after that?
MDR: A couple of spy novels! One set in the American Revolution, but not about Benedict Arnold, and the other set in WWII Germany, Russia and Britain. That takes me up to age 70, when all bets are off.
Ah, I'm going to say nothing. I'm simply going to bask in the afterglow of such an intelligent mind. Ah!
Besides her talent, Mary's also extremely down to earth. She chose a family vacation (much needed, I believe) over meeting Brad Pitt to discuss, in some respect, adaptations of "The Sparrow" to film. Mr. Pitt just has no luck with authors; he was also turned down by Chuck Palahniuk.
Next week is epic. Okay, not epic. Epic in my mind, sure. The Women of Paranormal Fiction. The genre is taking the bookshelves in the Fantasy sections by storm. And, interestingly enough, it's dominated by women. Marjorie M. Liu, Kelley Armstrong, and Samantha DeSilva join us.
Until then, keep reading.
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