JOHN SHIRLEY: I have been living in the suburbs for awhile now, after years in New
York and LA and San Francisco, but I'm still adjusting. Maybe that's why on a walk between endless split levels and ranch style homes I imagined an ordinary old man I saw in a yard suddenly climbing up the outer wall of his house on weirdly extended limbs, piston-like metal parts splitting his arms and legs and his head turning around on his neck as if on a turntable, while metal fibers fibrillate from his mouth...I had this image and then made up the story to justify it. But of course this story is about going too far with technology, until, as Thoreau put it, "we become our tools". So underlying the image of the Crawlers is the recognition that in the service of entertainment and consumerism we've become isolated from each other, too often only making contact through the electronic media, losing some of our humanity. And it's about how young people, teenagers, are coping with this, and with their shattered connections to family and society.

SW: I understand that besides your writing, you also play and record music. When you are writing do you listen to any specific type of music to help jumpstart the process, or do you just sit down and let it come to you as it will?

JS: It depends on mood, but I often do, indeed, listen to music while writing--something where the words aren't too intrusive. I couldn't listen to hip hop while writing (my son Julian is a hip hop fan and quite an expert freestyler) because I'd start typing up the rap without intending to! But I listen to things that help create the right mood and that soak up the distracted part of my mind. I don't necessarily hear it consciously while really involved in writing, but I soak up rhythms and energy and feel. William Gibson once said he could "hear the guitars" in my writing--especially in the cyberpunk novels like Eclipse and City Come A Walkin, I assume--and that's what I want. I gave lists at the end of some of my books of what I was listening to while writing or editing them.
Lately Monster Magnet (a favorite band) has been pretty ideal for books like Demons and compilations of goth bands and electronica was used for Crawlers. Sometimes the Velvet Underground is just right. The Stooges. Rocket from the Crypt, recently. The Pixies. I like riot grrl bands like L7, too. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Classical too, like Beethoven, and writing a horror story about teen suicide recently --trying to craft a message to the reader against suicide, because it's scary how much teen suicide and depression there is--I listened to the string quartets of Bela Bartok. I admire Nick Cave's Murder Ballads and find that inspirational at times.

SW: Crawlers builds tension all the way up nearly to the very end, adding a note of suspense that most sci-fi stories lack. Was the choice of building up the tension in this way a nod to the other influences of Crawlers, specifically 50's horror/sci-fi movies like Invasion of The Body Snatchers?

JS: It's just good story telling to build tension that way, and it's probably learned from people like Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison and writers like Len Deighton. There's a filmic influence too--Hitchcock, for example. But certainly Crawlers is part of the sub-genre of pod people stories, so-called, of all kinds, Body Snatchers, etc, etc, and there's a bit of Night of the Living Dead too maybe, though the Crawlers are not shambling corpses. They can seem like you and me. That's some of the point--that metaphorically we are in fact in danger of becoming crawlers--not in the literal robotic takeover way I've described here, that just symbolizes how we surrender our freedom as we get older. There is intelligently choosing responsibility, in a selective way--sure, that's wise--and then there's becoming a drone, a thing that's just a set of mall-friendly reflexes. And someone like that seems like a fully functional human being but is actually just programmed and mindless--and that's in real life. The mystic G.I. Gurdjieff said you would be horrified if you knew how many of your society's leaders were COMPLETELY WITHOUT SOULS.

SW: Your characters, the teenagers especially, speak like most kids of today. Writers generally stay away from utilizing speech patterns, as it can "date" the book later on. Was it a conscious choice to utilize modern language to make the characters seem more realistic?

JS: It's a risk to use contemporary slang, and I used it only as much as I felt necessary. I could've used it a lot more as I'm close to teenagers. I have a teen son and two sons in their early 20s. I know his friends; I study these things. I listen, I find places to check it out, I research, I stay close to the alternative rock and art scene. But I know it dates the work. I just felt it was a risk or sacrifice for the sake of reaching a contemporary audience as very few people were really trying to evoke their lives and I wanted to try. It was about verisimilitude and authenticity and honesty. I also tried to give a sense of what I call Instant Messaging culture; it has its own language and social rules and dangers and a life of its own; my son's friends spend a portion of their day IMing in groups and it's important to understanding their scene I think...

SW: I'm a big comics fan. I know you were one of the principal writers on the film adaptation of The Crow. Do you keep/ follow comics, and if so, which ones?

JS: I follow them sporadically, but there are too many to keep up with, and I'm a bit outraged at the prices, although I can afford them. Obviously there's some very adult, intelligent stuff out there, Allan Moore and Neil Gaiman and the better Hellblazer comics and so on. There's also some interesting underground stuff--I like Optic Nerve for example. And Clowes, people like that. Attempts to reinterpret life, existential dilemmas, in graphic storytelling. I do have a weakness for the more serious Batman stuff and now and then try to catch up with him. I'd like to write comics sometime, given the chance.

SW: The comics question leads me to another. A lot of comics creators, musicians and authors use the net as a way to get their work seen, even going so far as to post whole albums and books online as free downloads. Do you think that this is where the net as a communications tool is eventually going?

JS: My son usually finds out about bands and rap artists he likes online first. Atmosphere, for example, and Deltron. It's going to be a part of the mix, a major factor, for good. As eventually the net becomes indistinguishable from television there'll be channels which are basically like public access but uncensored stuff put up on the net--channels within channels, in fact. Sites and channels will be all mutually interchangeable, sort of like the hypertext concept. But of course you can also put great stuff out online and hope people will dig it and you'll get an offer for some kind of commercial backing and it can be either ripped off or ignored, too--that's a risk. There's SO MUCH out there it's easy to be lost, overlooked--it has to 'catch fire' and that's something impossible to control, same phenomenon that has always been around, the mysterious nature of word-of-mouth but it happens faster in the age of the net...I use this stuff myself, have been lead singer of lots of bands and at this location there are free downloads of my stuff going back to old punk bands, up to recent acoustic recordings with very dark lyrics...

SW: How long is the writing process for you from start to finish, and what are some of the problems you have to work through while writing?

JS: There is no set length of time. It varies with project. Some are harder than others and take longer. I am though a fast writer by nature, almost compulsively so, and while I do research I don't do so much it interferes with getting the work done. I TRY to write at last four hours a day starting around 11 AM. Sometimes I do more, sometimes a little less.
Problems can include pleasing editors while staying true to my vision, avoiding scenes and dialogue and characters that seem too familiar--I may work in a set form like in Crawlers but I try for a fresh spin, always--and the distractions of life. Sometimes I have to make myself work--I don't have a boss looking over my shoulder. Writers have to be self disciplined. Fortunately I don't drink or take drugs anymore--those things interfere with getting good work done, especially drugs. I mean--some people may do some work on some drugs, but dope of any kind is like a loan shark--it gives you a hundred bucks and then quickly demands five hundred back from you and it'll break your legs to get it...So I write sober to have full access to my energy and brain function so I can deal with any problems without panicking or getting writer's block. Confidence is another problem; I have to have confidence to write and that's something you have to psyche yourself into sort of like an athlete getting their game on, getting in the right frame of mind...

SW: Science fiction, especially cyberpunk, extrapolates the novum quite a bit. Cyberpunks coined the term virtual reality; you yourself predicted the advent of the ATM. It’s one of the things that always attracted me to science fiction, the way that technology always seemed to be playing catch up to these writers. How far away do you think we are from head jacks and mirror shades?

JS: Some things are coming true I predicted--my Eclipse books are in print (from Babbage Press or Amazon.com) and never more relevant, since they predicted a “new Soviet" which is what's happening in Russia now with Putin, a Christian-right theocratic takeover, which we're at risk of--check with Ashcroft for starters--and neo-fascism, which is rife in real life in Italy and France and in the Neo confederacy in this country.
Technologically, there are some things happening that are setting the stage for "head jacks" and the like--some are discussed at my Edge Trends site (johnshirley.net)--as for example microchips designed to interface with nerve endings. The brain is being mapped with detailed new MRI-related techniques, opening all its secret cabinet drawers to us, so to speak, and that will lead to new interfacing possibilities. But things like immersive Virtual Reality also have risks--I mean, if you think CRACK is addictive, wait'll immersive VR adventures and porn is available. We're not all that far from a Matrix-like scenario. Something else I predicted in the Eclipse books--that you won't be able to tell real television footage from something cooked up CGI style--is obviously coming to pass, and in time that'll be used by governments to manipulate the public. Fake footage could be used to justify a war. If Bush'd had something like that he could be showing "footage" of weapons of mass destruction now and if the full capability of such tech was kept quiet most people wouldn't know that such footage would be fabricated. This in turn relates to the message of Crawlers which is in part that technology is good but we should be skeptical of it too--we should be in control of it, not it in control of us.