First published in Interzone, Issue 227 (March/April 2010).
From your 1983 story Fire Watch to the novels Blackout and All Clear, you’ve frequently written about the London Blitz. What is it about this period that interests you?
I’ve been in love with the Blitz ever since eighth grade, when my teacher read aloud Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, about a little girl who makes a garden in the rubble of a church which had been bombed-out in the Blitz. When I went to England for the first time I especially wanted to see the tube stations where people had sheltered, and the shrapnel marks at the V&A Museum, and St Paul’s. I’d read about the volunteer fire watch which had slept in the crypt during the day and guarded the roofs from incendiaries at night, and I couldn’t wait to go up to the dome. When I did, it was a total letdown — nothing but modern gray concrete-block buildings and car parks on every side.
Then I realized that was because every building around the cathedral had burned down, and that it was utterly impossible that St. Paul’s had survived. From that moment on, I wanted to write about the fire watch and how they’d saved St. Paul’s, and I started reading everything I could about it.
The more I found out about the Blitz, the more there was to find out — and what had started as research for a story turned into an obsession which continues to this day. Like the sinking of the Titanic, which I’m also obsessed with, the Blitz has everything — comedy, tragedy, irony and all of people’s worst and best qualities on display. It’s all of life — only compressed and intensified and heightened by the life-and-death nature of the situation.
Do you think the Blitz has been mythologized or romanticized too much, particularly in Britain?
On the contrary, I think that there’s been an attempt in recent years to over-demythologize it and pretend the Blitz wasn’t an extraordinary period in history. The thieves and cowards we always have with us; that kind of behaviour’s to be expected. It’s the heroes who are the miracle. Any way you spin it, the Blitz was full of heroes — vergers and choristers who put out incendiaries on St Paul’s roofs, young girls and old men who drove ambulances and patrolled neighborhoods in the middle of raids, aristocrats and servants who took in children, Thames paddleboat captains who went back to Dunkirk time and again — under heavy fire — to rescue soldiers stranded on the beaches.
It really was Britain’s finest hour. As Churchill said: “Everyone behaved splendidly.” And managed to keep their sense of humour in the bargain — an even more remarkable feat. One reason I wrote the book was that I wanted to remind everybody of just how splendid they were. Well most of them, anyway.
In SF, travellers from the future usually remain ‘different’ from the ‘contemps’ because they know what’s going to happen. That’s something you deliberately take away from them during Blackout…
I think the hardest thing of all to do when you’re writing about people in the past is to put yourself in their place. We know how it all turned out; we know Hitler didn’t come rolling into London, but the Londoners living back then didn’t. They’d just seen European cities flattened, armies surrendering, Germans marching down the Champs Elysee — and there was no reason to think it wasn’t going to happen to them next.
I think that’s one reason we like time travel stories; we can feel smug because we know who won at Trafalgar and Gettysburg, what happened to Julius Caesar and Archduke Ferdinand. It gives us a feeling of security and superiority that we know how it all came out. Which is never a good thing. Wars are only won and the world is only saved till the next time — and nothing lasts forever.
It also occurred to me, over the course of writing my time travel books, that the notion of my sending people to the past and of that not changing anything — when history is so clearly a chaotic system, with events constantly balancing on a knife’s edge — was the height of arrogance!
As a professed lover of the short story, was it a challenge to devise such a large two-book narrative?
Writing this book nearly killed me: partly because, except for Doomsday Book, which has two main characters, the only multi-viewpoint thing I’ve ever done was a novella, Just Like the Ones We Used to Know; partly because, halfway through, I changed the ending and had to write it all over again.
It took me eight years. For most of that time — up until the last few weeks, actually — it looked like it was going to kill me, and then they’d hire somebody horrible to finish it.
I now plan to write a bunch of short stories, which I love, and then start on my Roswell novel, a romantic comedy about UFOs, alien abduction and Las Vegas. It only has one viewpoint, and I’ve already figured out the ending.
Should we read Blackout before All Clear or do the two books operate on their own?
Blackout and All Clear are one book; it was just too long for my publishers to bring out as a single volume. The two shouldn’t be read independently. I talked to a guy once who’d picked up “the oddest book” in an airport newsstand. He said it sort of started midway through the story and then just ended abruptly. He then told me it was called The Two Towers — the middle volume of The Lord of the Rings. I can’t even imagine how he made any sense of it, though he said he sort of liked it.
I hope Blackout’s readers will read All Clear too; and I’d like to apologise to everybody for the books being so long. If it’s any comfort, it used to be three volumes!
You’re known for the whimsy and humor that emerge from your narratives–be that in terms of character or situation. Is that how you see the world?
I’ve always thought the world was a hilarious place — except for a period of eight years there, which I’m still not certain Americans are going to survive — and it’s much easier for me to see the ironic side of things than the earnest side. That’s why I hate the musical Cats and love Shakespeare and romantic comedies. One of the reasons I love science fiction is because it’s one of the few places I can write romantic comedy.
There was an internet rumour going around for a while that there were two Connie Willises — one who wrote comedy and the one who wrote the more ‘serious’ stuff. I don’t personally see any divide. Shakespeare managed to have comedy in even his most fraught plays — Polonius is actually quite a funny old bore and there’s an element of farce to a busybody getting himself stabbed while hiding behind a curtain eavesdropping. Shakespeare’s comedies are actually quite serious; Viola has to disguise herself as a boy because she’s in enemy territory, while Malvolio’s “I’ll be revenged on the lot of you,” is about as serious as it gets.
The Second World War was deadly serious, but it had lots of funny moments, too — British Intelligence inflating rubber tanks to fool Hitler, evacuated slum kids wreaking havoc on the bucolic countryside, London shopkeepers putting up signs in their blown-out windows that read, “You should see our branch in Berlin!” — and there were transcendent moments even in the midst of possible death and destruction. I wanted to capture both the fun and the horrors of that time — and of every time.
Why is science fiction important to you?
It confronts the question of how to be human in the modern world, and has the courage to deal with science and technology — the two great realities of our time — directly and in depth.
An even greater quality is its ability to make us look at ourselves. Rod Serling spent years writing teleplays too controversial to produce. Then he began writing and producing the ‘harmless’ science fictional Twilight Zone — where he wrote episodes about racial prejudice, nuclear disarmament, politicians, and the nastier side of human behaviour. He successfully fooled television executives and the unwary viewer; he got them past their prejudices and preconceived notions so they could see things in a whole new light.
Doing stories about sign-language-speaking apes and the Blitz also makes it possible for me to get past my own prejudices and certainties, to get past what I think I think about something to what I really think.
I think science fiction’s important simply because no one takes it seriously. Everyone thinks it’s children’s literature or video-games-in-print or harmless escapism. Which means that, just like Miss Marple, we’re constantly underestimated and ignored — and in a great position to do all kinds of subversive stuff.
© paulfcockburn
