Gripping science fantasy, Shakespeare in Russian, working with editors, and the Moomins. What else could it be except one of our mega-interviews? Today we feature the erudite John Guy Collick – author, scholar, cinematographic critic, lecturer and a man who bought us the odd pint in the late seventies. That last one is perhaps the most important fact. John has just completed his four volume epic The Book of the Colossus, and it seemed a damned good time to corner him…
greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, John. This is an unusual interview for us, because it’s also a sort of reunion. So we’ll start with John Guy Collick the person, and shift to your own fiction a little later on.
We knew each other on and off in the eighties, as part of the venerable and vocal Leeds Science Fiction movement – some of whose members were a moving force in the creation of the SF magazine Interzone. Do you have fond memories of those days, or was it all a terrible dream?
john: Fantastic memories, especially of Friday nights in the West Riding pub. I used to get there about 7-ish so the only other fan around was D. West who we sadly lost last year – who used to sub me with his somewhat scrawny rollies and the occasional 50p for fish and chips on the way home. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that Leeds SF made me what I am and it’s great to be in touch with the other members again after so many years via Facebook. Of course the two crowning achievements of Leeds SF when I was around were Yorcon 79 and the film Invasion Des Bollardes Enormes, which would have re-written Indie fan film-making if it hadn’t been stolen the night after it was completed, probably by powers who Did Not Want The Truth To Be Known.
greydog: D was a hugely talented artist, and a great loss. And we still remember the shocking Bollardes incident. Now, you’re a scholarly sort compared to us grizzled old dogs, and you lecture. Tell us a bit about the subjects you cover on the podium.
john: In the old days I used to give lectures on literature and philosophy in Japanese to an audience of up to 450 students at Waseda University in Tokyo though whether I made any sense or not is still up for discussion. These days I go to conferences and give talks about education and technology, which I usually cunningly twist round to the themes of cyberpunk, science fiction and futurology. Outside the UK these subjects are taken far more seriously, and that’s very gratifying. Recently I’ve been talking quite a bit about using SF to install a sense of wonder in kids so they get fired up about science and the universe etc… and this is getting a very positive response from teachers and Ministry of Education experts, especially in the ex-Soviet bloc countries. It’s a buzz to spend twenty minutes blathering on about H. G. Wells, Asimov and Tarkovsky to the Russian Minister of Education.
greydog: And you have an academic background in Shakespearian studies. This gives us an excuse to say how much his play Hamlet annoys us. Hours of watching a privileged ditherer wonder what to do and then get it wrong anyway (it did at least give us the line in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, where the protagonist looks at his tortoise Pat, and says “Now might I do it, Pat.”) Do you think we’re too harsh?
john: Watch the Russian film of Hamlet directed by Grigori Kozintsev – it’s a true masterpiece with a 100ft high ghost, loads of Eisenstein montage and tons of Kruschev-era Soviet politics chucked in. That’s how the play should be done, not as an introspective study of a procrastinator with his head up his bum but as a vast, brooding Piranesi-esque Gothic tale of politics, double dealing and passion. Olivier mangled the play in his film, turning it into a self-absorbed essay in cod psychology, and we’re still recovering.
greydog: You’ve sold us on that one. Can we also address the Moomin in the room while we have you here? You’ve also written about that Bohemian and unusual writer Tove Jansson. The Moomin stories, for us, were full of threat, mystery and strange longings, hardly kids’ tales. Do you feel she intended that, or was it a by-product of her own nature?
john: If I remember rightly, the Moomintroll started off in Jansson’s paintings as a symbol of encroaching Nazism (Watercolour with Black Moomintroll, painted in Germany in 1934), round about the time Tove Jansson fell out with her dad, who’d turned into a bit of a fascist. So she’d already created him as a conscious symbol of menace before putting him into the books and comics (she transferred that original negativity to the character of the Groke).
As a kid I always thought there was something oddly melancholic about the later Moomin books, and towards the end they got downright weird. Instead of going off on adventures the family spent more and more time sitting around moping existentially, and then in the last book Moominvalley in November, they completely disappeared.
Jansson herself battled with the frustration of trying to be an artist while at the same time dealing with this immense fame and attention the books brought her. She wanted to go live on an island with her girlfriend (on whom Too Ticky is based) and just paint, but people followed her in boats so she had to throw rocks at them to make them go away. In Moominpappa at Sea, Moominmama goes and hides in a painting because she’s sick of everyone – and I think Jansson really identified with that – and probably wrote the scene deliberately. When you read her non Moomin writing and about her work in general it’s clear she was a very canny artist, so yes, she knew what she was doing
greydog: It seems that film has always been a great part of your life. In the eighties we remember you making those short films, and you’ve written many critical pieces in this area. Share a bit of your passion with the listeners.
john: On no account whatsoever read the book The Guerrilla Film Makers Handbook by Chris Jones and Genevieve Jolliffe, Continuum Press 3rd Edition, available for £32.99 from Amazon. It is a truly evil tome that should be destroyed – even worse than the Necronomicon. On the surface it looks like a simple collection of interviews with all the people involved in making an indie movie but it worms under your skin until one day you wake up and find yourself in the all-consuming horrendous other universe of film production.
That’s what happened to me in Tokyo. I ended up writing and co-producing a movie (Let’s Do Talk) which was reviewed as ‘The Most Offensive Film I’ve Ever Seen’ in The Japan Times, although what happened off set was infinitely more lurid than what ended up on camera. One of the highlights was when a main actor came up to me and said ‘John, you have inspired me so much with your passion and creativity in making this film that I’m going to leave my wife and kids and become a writer!’
One of these days I’ll blog about the whole sorry tale, probably when the other production members are safely dead. Yes – film has always been a passion since my mum introduced me to Kurosawa, Bergman and Eisenstein in the days when BBC 2 showed classic foreign films instead of mindless rubbish.
greydog: You also seem to have a love for the pulps, and the era of Edgar Rice Burroughs – Barsoom and its wonders. Another friend, Neil Baker of April Moon Books (see once in an april moon), is seeking to put together an anthology of SF which captures the old joy of just ‘getting out there’. Have we lost some of that sense of open, go-for-it adventure in science fiction and fantasy?
john: I have a soft spot for ERB and the Barsoom series. I cut my teeth on A Princess of Mars as a kid and Warlord of Mars is the only book I ever read that had me on my feet and breathless at the end. Seeing the movie was a dream come true. Once in a while I enjoy reading swords and planets tales, though nothing comes close to 14-year old me, John Carter and Dejah Thoris. I don’t think we’ve lost that wild imagination and gripping sense of adventure in modern SF. Iain Banks certainly hit it for me with Consider Phlebas, and I’m working my way through Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt which is huge swashbuckling fun. I do love the old pre-Golden Age pulp tales though – you can’t beat Professor Jameson and the Zoromes, or early Clark Ashton Smith.
greydog: Huge fans of Neil R Jones’ Professor Jameson here (and CAS). Does anyone stand out for you in modern SFF?
john: At the moment – Adrian Tchaikovsky as I mentioned above, Gareth Powell and Gaie Sebold. I have a big stack of books I need to read through, Neil Asher, Charlie Stross etc. I find that reading another writer’s novels gets in the way of my own work when I’m actually writing, unless their style and approach is similar to what I’m trying to achieve, so I go through phases of reading comics, or classics that are completely different in style and setting to my own books. At the moment I’m working my way through Jodorowsky’s Incal series – I became a fan of his after seeing the documentary about his failed movie of Dune.
greydog: On to JGC the writer. You began your major work The Book of the Colossus with Thumb in 2013. When you drafted Thumb, did you do so in the knowledge that this would be a lengthy four book arc?
john: In the very beginning, no. It started as a germ of an idea from a dream I had in the early 1990s in which I saw a man in a blue robe in a desert standing in front of a vast body. People had been building this monster to save them but very quickly society had degenerated so that those who built the head fought the ones who’d crafted the hands etc. The story developed in my mind (and the body got bigger) and pretty soon I saw it as a four-book series, mainly because my favourite writer at the time was Gene Wolfe and I wanted to write something as weird and intriguing as the four volume Book of the New Sun.
The Thumb I published is version 3, with about ten false starts and a couple of very bad complete manuscripts before. Now that I’ve created the setting I can see there’s a lot more material I can turn into stories, though probably not with Max and Abby as their arc is pretty much complete. The other day I had the wild idea of another seven books about the Colossus, like Wolfe’s Long sun and Short sun series, but that would be another seven years of my life and I’ve probably come to this too late.
greydog: Is there a market or genre definition for Colossus with which you feel comfortable? We would settle for science fantasy, but we’re not entirely sure what that means. SF which isn’t tech-heavy? Fantasy with a harder, futuristic feel?
john: I saw it as Science Fantasy similar to Moorcock’s Hawkmoon/Count Brass books (another massive influence) – books set in a universe where the science is so advanced or outré that it’s indistinguishable from magic. I guess The Book of the Colossus is an extreme Dying Earth series as in Gene Wolfe’s Severian novels, or Jack Vance’s Rialto and Cugel books. John Jarrold told me he thinks it’s Space Opera.
I also wanted to write it as an ‘Indiana Jones meets Franz Kafka’ book – a straight forward action tale set in a fundamentally absurd universe. The setting is extreme to the point of semi-surreal, but the characters behave and act as if everything is perfectly normal. A couple of readers have found this disorienting – in Thumb people smoke cigarettes and listen to jazz in a fantasy Prague at the end of time in the shadow of a marionette half a million miles long. But the vast majority of readers have been overwhelmingly positive, so I think I managed to get it to work.
greydog: There’s another nostalgic blast, finding out that you’ve worked with John Jarrold, the agent/editor who is another old bar-friend from SF convention days. In general terms, what did you get out of working with an editor that made the process worth it – as opposed to doing it all yourself?
john: I couldn’t have got to the point I’ve reached without John’s coaching and editorial input, for which I’m eternally grateful. Even though the books were self-published I wanted them to be the same quality as a good professionally published series. John was (and is) utterly ruthless and tore the first version of Thumb to bits, which was exactly what I wanted and needed. With his help I think I’ve now got the basics under my belt and all I need to do now is constantly practice and experiment. In general terms, everyone should work with a good editor if you want a professional book at the end, and if you’re serious you need to pay for the best. You also need someone to tell you like it is (and be prepared to take criticism on the chin) and not what they think you want to hear.
greydog: And now the quadrilogy is complete, with the launch of Dark Feathered Hearts. Here’s a typically unfair poser – tease us into wanting to read the conclusion (if we didn’t already).
john: Everything’s bigger. If you’ve read the other three then in this last book the threats, twists and encounters increase exponentially to encompass the whole of humanity’s future. Is it actually possible for humanity to build a God half a million miles tall who will carry it into the next universe, or is it all a deranged, desperate fantasy concocted by a species on the point of extinction? For the first time the price of Max and Abby’s failure really will be the destiny of mankind. If you haven’t read any of the books then think Indiana Jones meets Kafka, and also that several of my readers have told me that the story has given them disturbing dreams – what more could you ask for?
greydog: This is a good time to mention the covers as well, which are very striking. The covers of Thumb and Dark Feathered Hearts in particular are reminiscent of the work of Bruce Pennington and other artists of the eighties. A deliberate choice?
john: Yes – Chris Foss and Bruce Pennington were the two giants of 70s/80s UK SF covers for me. I wanted to recreate the feel of a NEL or Sphere paperback from that era and Pennington’s work is so wonderfully exotic – a fantastic blend of the baroque and the semi surreal with a very distinctive and bold palette. Even his simplest paintings (for example his cover to Van Vogt’s The Silkie) carry this wonderful fin de siècle vibe. The cover to Dark Feathered Hearts is a deliberate tribute to his work – the floating tetrahedrons in the sky are taken from his cover to Brian Aldiss’s Space, Time and Nathaniel. I also wanted each cover to illustrate a key scene from the book, rather than be just a more generic mood-piece SF or Fantasy painting.
greydog: We must end with our usual question – where next? Sit back on your laurel wreath and watch The Book of the Colossus work its way across the world, or grapple with new fiction?
john: I’ve got decades of ideas stacked up so it’s no rest for me. Like I said I feel I came to this a bit too late so it’s a race to get them all down on paper. I’ve worked out a system using Scrivener and top-down planning which should allow me to write a book a year, though I’d like to go faster. I’m working on the next one now – it’s a completely different setting to The Book of the Colossus – a bit more down to earth but still SF. With a fair wind behind me it should finished by the start of next year.
greydog: Many thanks again, and we wish you good fortune with Dark Feathered Hearts.
john: Thank you!
You can find John at home on his blog here – john guy collick and his books are on Amazon. Here are quick links for the first and the last volumes of The Book of the Colossus –
dark feathered hearts on amazon uk
dark feathered hearts on amazon us
Coming up next week: An introduction to the greydogtales family of little donkeys (dogs, to you), a feature about Clark Ashton Smith and a new film, plus lots more…