Терри Биссон - The Left Left Behind

Is writing a political project for you, or an artistic project?

I reject the distinction, at least for fiction. Though I have done a lot of straight propaganda writing. For several years I helped write and edit the newspaper of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. For me propaganda is about One Thing, in that case trying to encourage, indeed to build, an anti-racist resistance among white people. Everything was bent to that end. Fiction writing is by definition about complexity.

How did you get into writing? Was it something you always wanted to do?

Ever since I was a teen. I was seduced by the Beat Generation back in the 50s. They were in LIFE magazine and they were so cool. I wanted to get away, out of the South, out of the suburbs, indeed out of 50s America where I was born and raised.

I was always a reader but now I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. I even subscribed to the Village Voice . I’m pretty sure I was the only subscriber in Owensboro, Kentucky.

What is your personal background?

Pretty conventional, middle class, small town Upper South but a liberal family. I was raised in the suburbs but my mother was one generation off the farm. I’m old enough to remember coal stoves and squirrel suppers, but I was raised in the new post-war suburbs, two cars and skinny trees. My father came from the North (Illinois). I was a TVA baby.

My Kentucky family was (and is) pretty liberal, from the days when the “solid south” was still Democratic. FDR brought them electric lights and concrete roads. Once in my twenties, home from New York, I tried (probably foolishly) to explain to a favorite aunt why I was a radical, a Marxist, an all-round anti-war hippie rebel. She nodded and said, “You are still a Democrat, though?”

I said sure.

Did you go to college?

English major. Very conventional. But committed. Literature was my thing by then. I ended up in New York, trying to sell a Kerouackian novel which never sold, and ended up working for romance magazines, softcore porn mags, astrology and western pulps, Enquirer type tabloids, low-end publishing in general. And discovered I liked it.

No science fiction?

SF was my first literature but I outgrew it, or so I thought. I wanted to be a serious novelist. I was working on a “serious” novel called Eats Corpse for Rare Coin , based on my experiences in the tabloids. The problem was, it kept getting short instead of longer. It was ’68 and things were busting loose all over. I quit trying to write and joined up with the hippie movement in the Southwest.

No politics?

We were all political in those days, or so we thought. I went to all the anti-war demos, but I wasn’t part of the organized Left. That came later. I spent a lot of time in hippie communes in the Southwest, and later back in Kentucky.

I didn’t become actively political, in a real way, until the later 70s. I was one of those who got organized by the Weather Underground, by Prairie Fire and by the groups they organized after they broke up. My wife and I moved to New York and did a lot of work about Puerto Rican Independence. Then the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. At the same time, I started writing again. And it turned out to be Science Fiction!

Go figure.

Ever write for comics?

My first paying free-lance stories were for Creepy and Eerie . I edited a comic mag, Web of Horror , for a while, and even wrote a series for DC. But I never liked the superhero stuff and never passed the “Marvel test.” (Don’t ask.) A couple of years ago I worked on a project with Stan Lee himself, but it came to naught.

Where did you get the idea for The Left Left Behind ?

From France. A French writer and critic, Patrice Duvic, suggested that we work together on a book in which the world is a better place after the Rapture, minus all the Born-Agains. I thought it was a cool idea. Patrice had cancer and died before he could do much on the project, but the idea and the inspiration was all his.

I swiped the beginning of the story, the encounter with the prophet in Israel and the disappearances on the airliner, straight out of the Left Behind movie, then made up the rest. The ending, by the way, the scene on the train, is swiped almost word for word from R.A. Lafferty’s wonderful utopian story “The Interurban Queen.” Find it if you can.

Did you see the movie The Rapture ? Did you like it?

Several times. A lot. It was written and directed by the great Michael Tolkin (who also wrote The Player ). Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, and a great ending. But much much darker than mine because it takes the idea seriously. See it!

You write a novel about John Brown, Fire on the Mountain . Did that come out of your work in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.

Totally. I became fascinated with the old man, and visited Harper’s Ferry and Kansas, where he fought a guerrilla war that prevented Kansas from entering the union as a slave state. Brown was not a nut, as the right would have it, or a martyr (as much of the Left sees him) who sacrificed his life for a just cause. He was in my view a seasoned and effective fighter who might have succeeded. My novel is about what if he had. And the nation of Nova Africa in my novel was inspired by the Republic of New Africa (the RNA), revolutionary Black nationalists dedicated to liberating the Deep South.

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.