Interview with author Lisa Mason

1. Introduction

This text was originally published in my fanzine, WYZIWYG 9.0, in June 1998. I have slightly edited the text to fit into this section of "curiosity", on my site, Jonas Webresurs ©.

Right: Photo of Lisa Mason by Beth Gwinn, taken from Lisa's homepage: www.lisamason.com in May 2005.

2. A short presentation of Lisa Mason

I hold Lisa Mason (1953- ) as one of the most interesting new authors that appeared in the 1990's. When I made the interview in early 1998, she had three books on the shelves. I will start with telling you something about them.

One of the main themes in Lisa Masons's writings, is the notion of otherness. In almost every of her stories, we find people that don't fit in, for some reason.

Take Carly Nolan in Arachne and Cyberweb as an example. She is a genny - genetically engineered to look like a sex-goddess and has outstanding IQ as well. Soon after graduation from law school, she gets a well paid job as a telespace lawyer for a powerful company, but gets sacked after having involuntary crashed her telelink in an important case. She is flushed out in the street, abandoned and vulnerable, and meets perimeter prober Spinner, who is a rusty, old robot with an AI-capacity.

Another example is Starbright in Summer of Love. Her parents live a slumbering, suburban life and try their "best" to take the brightness from their daughter. Starbright feels this and escapes to the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury-area, in San Francisco, in 1967.

Both Carly and Starbright find themselves in utterly new situations, with people they don't understand and events they can't interpret properly. At first they try to apply old ways of thinking and familiar behavior, but soon they are forced to take up new habits and clean out prejudices, that have until then been taken for granted.

This is not easily done, of course, but after some time of inner turmoil, they become more mature and reflected. But they don't do this all of their own. Carly and Spinner soon realizes that they have to cooperate, and together they begin a quest for justice. Starbright meets the independent and strong Ruby, who teaches her one or two things about womanhood.

The notion of otherness and alienation is thus also combined with the notion of maturing. Both the notion of otherness and maturing, and of course also womanhood, are very prominent in Lisa Mason's books, and you can read more about them in the interview below.

The novel Summer of Love also has a science fictional theme: a young man, Chiron, is sent back from 2467 to find the Axis, a girl around whom antimatter is created, which generates a disturbance in time, that later destroys important data. Chiron's appearance is for me less interesting than Starbright's and Ruby's. For me it's because he's a man and don't contribute to the interesting themes I've mentioned. You can read what Lisa Mason thinks of this below.

The novels Arachne and Cyberweb are much more influenced by cyberpunk, and takes place in a partly earthquaked San Francisco, one or two hundred years from now. In the first novel we see the effects of a brutal society, when Carly looses her job.

Perhaps even more interesting is the second novel, where we find out that different standalone mainframes, i.e. artificial intelligences, fight for power over humanity...

So, if the psychological dimension is prominent in Summer of Love, then technology can be said to be the corresponding building units for Arachne and Cyberweb!

Lisa Mason has a beautiful language, and also follow the tradition to invent new words: telespace, spybyte, linkslit, genny, controbot, to mention but a few. She often also find funny one-liners and vivid descriptions, like "Her anxiety fell away like clothing eased off by a lover."

The following passage is one I instantly fell in love with when I read it, and is taken from Arachne - Spinner is trying to get her hands on a "chimera":

Far from Court lay another telespace cordoned off by a thicket of macs with codes so arcane that only true denizens of program could possibly have attained access.

Pr. Spinner had access. Pr. Spinner always had access. Pr. Spinner had access to just about every illegal nook and illicit cranny of telespace. And then some.

But it wasn't enough. It was never enough for Pr. Spinner.

She was in a funk, as usual. Cranky about nothing in particular and everything in general, and her arms ached. She was getting more and more annoyed with the present company as the auction of chimeras got under way.

This telespace was murky, littered with old bugs, skewed from coordinate distortions. Because of the arcane access and the illegality of its present use, this telespace could only be jacked into from a spatial locus. That is, a place Pr. Spinner had to be.

An anomalous requirement, to say the least.

Pr. Spinner was duly outraged. "A spatial locus," she said to her companion as they stood about the locus, waiting to jack in. "Bot! The very raison d'être of telespace is to eliminate the necessity of physical presence. Teh!"

Before the interview I read Lisa's then latest book, The Golden Nineties. I had some problems with it and didn't understand it. Some parts made me quite annoyed, as you will see in the interview.

Of course, I understand what happens: that Zhu travels back in time to San Francisco in the 1890s, with a similar reason as Chiron. I also understand that she falls in love with Daniel, who is a looser, that she gets pregnant and later on beaten up and humiliated by this Daniel. What I don't understand is why.

How can a modern, emancipated and strong woman stand a creep like Daniel? How can she let him rape her? I found the story quite depressing and too sad, and maybe I'm just puzzled because I want happier endings, but I also find the psychology a bit hard to believe. Lisa Mason tries to explain Zhu's motives - and her own - in the interview.

Above: San Francisco (from DarkroomPeople.com)

3. The interview

Jonas Ahlberg: I will start by saying that the Swedish audience don't know much about you, more than that you live with your husband in San Francisco. Would you like to tell us something to complete the picture?

Lisa Mason: Thank you very much for your interest in my fiction and me.  I love the name of your fanzine! WYZIWYG is one of my favorite software engineer neologisms.

I have long blond hair and blue-gray eyes, run three and a half miles a day, and follow a vegetarian diet that includes seafood and our superb California wines.

Some of the most exciting moments of my publishing career include: the day Ellen Datlow bought my first short story for Omni; when I saw my first novel, Arachne, in a bookstore; when the movie rights to my Omni story, "Tomorrow's Child," sold to Universal Pictures; and when my latest novel, The Golden Nineties, appeared on the New York Times list of Most Notable Books of the Year.

I am not married but have lived in partnership with the artist and jeweler Tom Robinson. Like many creative people, we've not pursued the typical bourgeois life; we have no children. The dedications in my books other than to Tom have been to those supreme child surrogates - the cats who lounge on my desk while I write.

1996 was a very sad year; two of my cats died, one expectedly of old age, the other unexpectedly of cancer. What's left is Alana, a tiny, female Turkish Angora with plumy white fur, pink ears, and goldgreen eyes.

My maternal grandparents emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1900's; my paternal grandparents from (then) Czechoslovakia. The rest of my family has been lost long ago in those places. My parents, both of them only children, were successful in the quintessential American way.

My father was an electrical engineer and inventor, my mother the nutritionist at a private hospital. They were first-generation Americans who avidly bought into the post-World War II mass suburban culture, the plastic-fantastic Fifties, that peculiar blend of promiscuous consumerism and repressive morality on the verge of all-hell-breaking-loose.

So I've always been haunted by a sense of alienation and rootlessness. I remember as a kid riding my bicycle down the pretty, manicured streets where we lived, the brand-new houses sprouting up like crabgrass, and thinking, "I don't know any of these people." I've always been drawn to myths, other worlds, other times, other beings, and other ways of consciousness as a way of overwhelming this alienation and belonging to something greater than myself.

Being a dreamy kid with a love of words, I wrote  stories and several short novels beginning at about age five. My family, however, persuaded me to pursue a more conventional profession than writing. I earned my Juris Doctorate at the University of Michigan Law School and practiced law in Washington, D.C and San Francisco. I left legal practise and went into legal publishing and software development, during which time I returned to writing fiction.

JA: I very much appreciate your books and have read them all with delight. I like your writing for two important reasons. First of all because you strain to make the characters living, and secondly because the narratives are well thought-out and critical.

If I start with the first reason, i.e. the psychological aspect, your books seem to deal very much with maturing. And I wonder if the demon in Summer of Love is a symbol for Starbright's struggle within herself?

The demon is an "antimatter part" of her, as you put it, which is a bit hard to interpret, since you also give a scientific, or science fictional explanation.

LM: The injunction from the Delphic oracle, "Know thyself," translates in our country as "Find yourself," and the theme of maturing, of realizing your true center, has indeed figured prominently in my fiction. Finding yourself often also involves confronting your inner demons, the fears, repression, and conditioning imposed by family and society. This, too, is a theme I frequently raise in my fiction.

JA: Most obvious is this perhaps in Summer of Love, where Starbright one day escapes from home and flees to San Francisco and its hippie gathering, during the Summer of Love. First, can you tell us about how you relate to this period? I would like to know what your own experiences are of that time. Did you run away and live like a "hippie", just like Starbright? Or is it all described from hearsay?

LM: I was a bit too young to run away to the Haight-Ashbury for "Summer of Love", but instead researched the period through personal interviews (I met Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, and Lenore Kandel, and corresponded with Jerry Garcia, Allen Ginsberg, and Allen Cohen), friends' home videos, newspapers, magazines, and books and novels published during and about the period.

The poet Lenore Kandel, who was deeply involved in the Haight Ashbury community during 1967, read the entire manuscript, contributed invaluable insights and recollections, and confirmed much of my analysis of the period.

Right: The Golden Gate bridge (from Visit-San-Francisco.com)

JA: Your description of the society Starbright encounters is very revealing and show perfectly well, that the ideas of equality and fraternization was mostly empty words. I say mostly because people really wanted an alternative, but didn't really know what. Peace, love, and understanding is very hard to attain and sustain, because the words must mean something to believe in, and not just to believe, you seem to say.

LM: Summer of Love was a unique historic event that has profoundly shaped and influenced American culture and thought to this day in myriad positive ways. Yet I couldn't set my story in that period without exposing the hypocrisy, sexism, and corruption that led to the community's demise. The critique applies to American liberalism generally. I cannot count the number of times I've encountered "counter-cultural" people who preach love but are cruel, demand charity but are selfish, claim to be enlightened but are all wrapped up in their own egos.

JA: Do you agree when I say that Starbright runs away without real intent? She is not mature in that sense (though she shows her potentiality), and is at the beginning therefore very naïve and vulnerable. She thus has to learn the hard way. She even gets pregnant, as I believe many girls did then (and still do of the very same reasons).

LM: I was struck by the dramatic structure that emerged as I studied the actual events that transpired during Summer of Love: innocence, the corruption of innocence, cynicism and disillusionment, culminating in a new maturity and understanding of what was lost and what may be found anew. Starbright's  personal journey mirrors this dramatic structure; she definitely has no idea what she's getting herself into when she hops on that plane to San Francisco. Like most young people who run away from home, she's filled with romantic illusions about what she'll find out in the world and how she'll cope with reality.

The way society defines and treats women and the way women's  roles influence their relationships with men and each other are also among my primary concerns as a writer. This dovetails with my obsession about finding oneself since a woman must especially struggle to overcome sexist conditioning and the insecurities and challenges to her self-esteem that arise from that conditioning.

JA: The episode with Starbright's crush on Stan the Man, and how she is jilted and abandoned, is very well written. It is definitely a problem that she is so open and 'available', as many in her age are. I guess her parents have the same difficulties coping with her, as has Stan. Because I believe they want to do her good, but can't help hurting her and using her. Their guilt is obvious, but the reasons are perhaps not described satisfactory in the narrative.

We can see what they have done, but never understand, their problems, what makes them betray her. I would really like to know what you think of the reasons, since you give them another chance in the end of the book. Why has they changed?

LM: I agree that Starbright's innocence is what attracts Stan, Chiron, Ruby - and even the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. Why do her parents abuse her emotionally? As you point out, they don't know themselves and don't realize the pain they've inflicted on their daughter until she takes action by running away. The very moving "Letter to the Editor" in the last chapter astutely summarizes this point. Parents had to critically examine themselves, their own lives, and their own values - some for the first time in their lives - and they, too,  were deeply affected by Summer of Love.

The letter says, "Some parents lost each other as well as their kids. Whom do you blame for failures and disappointments too painful to bear?" That is, when a child upon whom parents have pinned their dreams and ambitions decided to drop out, those parents turned their disappointment, bafflement, and rage upon each other and often ended up in divorce.

Starbright and her parents have been in what psychologists call a "triangulated" parent-child relationship. I write: "...the daughter as the troublesome child was the glue keeping their fractured marriage intact. And her defection revealed the deep rifts between them. Will the daughter's return restore the reality they knew before? Not likely."

Why does Starbright go back to her parents? Because despite the pain, there's an enormous amount of love there. Her transformation, and theirs, will enlighten their relationship.

JA: Yes, perhaps, but as a parent you have a dilemma when your little girl reaches puberty. You probably want your child to be self-confident and without all the painful experiences you had yourself in that age. Perhaps you encourage her to find herself, to find maturity. But when she starts to wear mini-skirts and go out with much older boys, your ambition to be open-minded and allowing crash-lands...

Do you think that it is this conflict that Starbrights parents can't solve - that they aren't in harmony within themselves and don't know how to respond. This is also something Stan can take advantage from - and the reason why he does it?

LM: Why does Stan the Man take advantage of Starbright's innocence? Because he's a self-centered, heedless sexual predator. The Haight, like most "scenes" that attract young people, was filled with men like Stan, including - without naming names - some famous ones. Consider the self-appointed philosopher advising teenagers  to be totally irresponsible about their lives and their education and seducing young women - and the man is 40 years old with a Ph.D!

How would I handle my own daughter? If I had a daughter, the main way I would prepare her to leap into womanhood would be to affirm her self-worth in every way I could so that she felt confident and filled with high self-esteem. The most common reason young people act self-destructively is that they have low self-esteem - and that comes, first and foremost, from negative, degrading parents.

I think it also helps to share your own experiences with your child and your analysis of the way society and people work. Not as a sermon or lecture, which children will automatically shut out, but as advice from a friend. But, let's face it; nearly everyone gets his or her heart broken or becomes involved with a cruel partner sometime in a lifetime. No parent can protect his or her child from that. It's one of the lessons we endure and from which, hopefully, we learn.

JA: Even Ruby, who is perhaps the most tranquil character in all of your books, feels the attraction to Starbright's innocence. You describe very well how she struggles to stay on the right side of the moral line! She wins this struggle, eventually, which is for the benefit of Starbright. But also for herself, I think. Because even though Ruby grasps what is happening between her and Starbright, she must also understand why. And this means that she has to find the aspect of herself that wants to take advantage of Starbright.

And this is then also the hidden message in the book, that we only can live together, equally and morally, if we understand and learn to stop this self-indulgent part of ourselves. To be able to do this we need to brake loose from old habits and places.

In the end of the book (page 327 in my copy) you seem to come to a similar conclusion, when you write that:

For people like Starbright and Ruby, Summer of Love has meant shaking up reality as they know it. Rejecting conformity, rejecting prejudice and blind consumerism and the way things are supposed to be. Making things different. Braking loose from spacetime itself.

So then, Starbright is lucky to find Ruby. Without Ruby, she would probably end up just like Nancy, and become a drug addict. This is at least the impression I get.

Or do you think Nancy has an even worse situation, having the childhood she had? At least Nancy never had Starbright's luck: Starbrights parents isolated her, whereas Nancy's parents sexually abused her; Starbright found Ruby, but Nancy never did. It's very sad to see how Nancy slowly dies.

LM: I don't think Starbright would have become a drug addict if she hadn't met Ruby, but she probably would have been taken advantage of by another sexual predator like Stan and would have definitely had a far worse time in the Haight.

Her best friend Nance's descent into destruction is a direct result of parental abuse, the worst kind of abuse there can be - rape and the refusal to acknowledge the rape. This character was very painful for me to write because she is based on one of my best childhood friends. I only learned of her sexual abuse after she committed suicide. She'd confided her secret to a counselor,  who revealed it to me after she died.

I was struck, as I read 1967 interviews with runaways, girls and boys, at how many mentioned, implicitly or explicitly, that the'd been sexually abused at home and that's why they ran away. A chill went down my spine. And this was long before the issue was openly discussed in the major media.

Above: San Francisco skyline (from DarkroomPeople.com)

JA: One of the problems with Summer of Love is, I think, that the book doesn't profit from the time-travel plot. It is primarily about Starbright and Ruby during a very interesting summer in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. I think the science fictional theme is superfluous. I guess more people than I have asked you this, but why did you include it at all?

LM: You ask why I wrote Summer of Love as a time-travel story: Summer of Love was 'science-fictionalized,' as Ruby often observes. People acted out their fantasies, became fascinated with the occult and different ways of thinking.

The debut of Star Trek on television popularized science fiction, and science fictional thinking, in a way that the genre had never been  exposed before. The counter-culture embraced science fiction as compatible with the need to question the fundamental assumptions of American life. So I thought it would be fun and entertaining, as well as true to the spirit of the time, to write Summer of Love as science fiction.

JA: I am very unsure what Chiron learns from his visit, though. He is definitely more mature than Ruby in some ways, since he is 500 years "older". But he is less wise. Perhaps this is the reason why I see him as less important. This is not his story at all!

He does not break any particular bonds or bad habits. He doesn't follow the Tenets, of course, but they are only important for him in that sense that if he breaks them he can get punished. But such breaking-up has Starbright and Ruby already gone through, so Chiron becomes less interesting. Even inferior!

Perhaps Chiron has one important part, after all, as being from the future; he has a message for Starbright to become aware of the future. But isn't this something she could have been by herself? And the fact that Chiron carries a lot of interesting machinery, does not contribute much to the story. The machines alienate him from the people and his own perceptions.

I am curious about your intentions, since I had great difficulties understanding why he is present in the story at all. As I wrote above, the interesting part for me is the interplay between Starbright and Ruby. Chiron is always behind Starbright, looking for her, trying to understand if she is the Axis. In the end nothing seems to affect him very much. Perhaps this is your picture of how it is being male? No, that was a joke. Please tell me instead why you choose him as a character!

LM: I'm a little puzzled why you think Chiron is superfluous: Chiron's role is pivotal. As someone from the future, he represents the power of hindsight, as well as the flaws of hindsight. He has been compelled to go back in time against his will because of his own potential impact on all of history, and he arrives sceptical, arrogant, and self-righteous, the way people often are when they judge the past with the power of hindsight.

You're quite right, his gadgets are specifically intended to distance him from his environment, but step by step, he is slowly pulled into the drama of his mission. And pulled, I would say, by the power of love he will have for Starbright before he himself even realizes that love.

His personal journey is to realize that these women in the past, Starbright and Ruby, have as much to teach him about himself and his future as he has to teach them - a conclusion I have respectfully come to after studying history and writing historical novels. In the end, Chiron commits the ultimate, forbidden act of intimacy with the past - he makes love to Starbright and becomes the father of her descendent who will change all history. You don't think he's affected by that?!

But I confess I'm still learning about male consciousness. If any man - or woman! - wants to share views about what it is to be a man, please write to me. I'm always eager to learn more!

JA: Turning now to The Golden Nineties, I see the same existential and moral problems displayed, but now from a much darker and pessimistic angle.

People have less knowledge of their world and the dangers of drugs and other toxins. They also have scientific beliefs that we strongly disagree with.

My intuition is that you choose this time particularly to describe women's alienation in society. Women are often seen as "whores" when they try to be strong and independent.

So the book tells about the beginning of the feminist's era, and why it started. Is this an interpretation you agree with?

LM: I undertook a similar exhaustive research effort. I acquired books and novels published during and about the period, menus from the restaurants, dramatic bills from the theaters, travel guides, Dr.  W. G. Mortimer's 1895 treatise, Cocoa, the Divine Plant of the Incas, other treatises on the consumption of morphine, alcohol, and absinthe during the 1890s, Bram Dijkstra's superb treatise on women's status, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture, and an 1895-1896 bound copy of The Argonaut, one of the premier purveyors of news, fiction, gossip, and jokes of the day.

Yes, The Golden Nineties examines the roots of feminism in America and the philosophical, societal, and moral views of women popularized among the male-dominated intelligentsia. When I hear on talk radio just yesterday some man say, "The longer the hair, the smaller the brain," he is quoting Krafft-Ebing's 1890 treatise, Psychopatia Sexualis.

As you quite rightly point out, the madonna-whore syndrome is alive and well to this day. It amazed me to observe how the roots of so many different sexist views of women originate in this period and still plague us one hundred years later. Yet as Djikstra points out, such attitudes didn't exist in the renaissance, so they are by no means some inexorable truth about how men view women - or how women really are.

I wish I'd researched this novel years ago when I first started out practising law in huge firms with 100 male attorneys and 10 female attorneys - with the rest of the "underlinings," that is, the secretaries, receptionists, mail clerks, and so on, almost exclusively female. If I'd known just what I was up against, from men and women, I might have behaved quite differently. I think it's also important for men to consider the roots of their attitudes and realize these attitudes aren't absolute truth.

JA: One important issue in the book is how womanhood is to be conceived. When Zhu tries to be a woman in our sense, she gets no respect. She only has two options, either become like Jessie, or marry.

I'm not sure, though, that you satisfyingly discuss the obvious problem here, that both options are antifeminist. When Jessie runs her own business, a brothel, and earns a lot of money, she still gets no respect. Because of the nature of her work, other women despise her, and because of the fact that she is a woman, the men also see her as inferior. But I never really felt that this is a true problem for her. So her motives are hidden.

The other option is to get married, which means that she looses all power and still doesn't get any respect. And Jessie seems to want to find the right man, which makes her motives even more obscure!

You don't problematize this fully, I think. I also have great difficulties understanding Zhu and why she wants Daniel. In fact, I see no reasons at all, especially since she dislike what he does with her and with himself. Zhu even seems to want to be subjugated, which doesn't follow the logic of the narrative!

LM: I think Jessie, the madam, has reconciled herself to her position as an alienated woman in 1895 San Francisco. She is aware of the tragedy of her profession through her memories of her sister, fully cognizant of the drawbacks of marriage, and even proud of her independence. She's not looking for a man, at all, and in fact maintains a supremely cynical view of men. Her personal journey is to accept who and what she is and to redefine for herself what it means to be a woman in a misogynist society.

If Jessie is the whore, then Zhu is the madonna - a radical feminist, warrior woman, priestess, and virgin from the future. Like Chiron, against her will, she is compelled to become involved in the past. She literally surrenders to the zeitgeist by becoming the masochistic mistress of male fantasies of the time.

She thereby confronts her own dark side; she who carries a gun and nearly pistolwhips a child to death in the future is compelled to love an abusive man in the past. The very era itself, with its excesses, sensuality, and romance, seduces her after the austerity, suffering and sacrifice of her world in the far future. I write this in The Golden Nineties of Zhu:

You awaken in the multiverse, transformed: a self once contemplated yesterday, soon a self scarcely anticipated. She yawns and blinks, drowsy in the morning, and hardly knows herself. Breathes the scent of red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and butter. Who is this woman  who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen of the Underworld...?

In the end Zhu frees herself from the zeitgeist possessing her by saving Daniel from his addiction and enlightning him about himself, his sexist attitudes, his personal destiny, and his society. This was, I admit, a risky position to take with Zhu and difficult to write; but I'm glad I did.

Zhu's personal journey is that she became cruel through her political fanaticism, and (karmically) experiences cruelty from the victim's side. The issue of women's masochism in male-female relationships is, I believe, extremely important and I hope to address it further in other mainstream fiction.

How many educated, intelligent, successful women have found themselves in a destructive relationship? Write to me; I would be fascinated to hear about your experiences.

JA: I also think the time travelling theme would have come out better in a book of its own, instead of dividing attention from what The Golden Nineties really is about. Apart from that, I think both The Golden Nineties and Summer of Love are very good and well written. You have a beautiful language in all of your books, and a very good sense of the characters thoughts and feelings, as well as their interplay.

LM: I'm still fascinated by the fin-de-siecle period since it illuminates so much about contemporary attitudes and society as we experience our own fin-de-siecle. I believe, as in Summer of Love, that the time-travel theme is pivotal in The Golden Nineties  to provide the perspective of the future and a view of the repercussions that the past (and our present!) have had upon that speculative, but all too probable, future.

Haven't you ever gotten angry with people in the past for doing what they've done and causing suffering in our present time? I certainly have! As I've noted above, I will be returning to this period in works that are not science fiction since I still have much to comment upon. Then again, I'd also like to go back to the Renaissance! And ancient Egypt!

JA: Turning to Arachne and the sequel, Cyberweb, I think these books have less nuanced characters.

Even so, the main theme here is not Carly Nolan's or Spinner's inner journeys, but what can be called their outer journeys.

They don't change much during the two books, even though they get a lot of experience and become more streetwise.

Neither one of them loses faith, in the way Starbright and Ruby does.

This is why the dialogue between Carly and Spinner never really changes much: they are more or less the same persons during the books.

They are therefore less interesting characters. Perhaps also less important, as they act more like comedians, throwing one-liners at each other.

I think there are important reasons for this outwardness, though, that make Arachne and Cyberweb quite different, but still very recommendable. First of all that Carly is a "gennie". A gennie has a lot of advantages and has in many ways a more easy life. Is she the caricature of today's hunger for the perfect look?

Well, she is smarter and more good-looking than almost everybody else, and will therefore not, I think, give much thought on who she really is inside. At least not in the beginning. Her problem is instead to find an identity within the brutal society in which she lives. Our attention is thus directed outwards, to a cold and datacontrolled place, where only the strongest and richest, survive.

The ai:s, both of standard and mainframe types, are often described as viscious, evil (to humanity) minds. Why? They are of course part of a corrupt society, they have power, but there must be something more.

Spinner gives a clue when she lets out her anger towards flesh-and-bloods. She feels subjugated - controlled! - and inferior. Are these the two main reasons? Is this why mainframes rip out archetypes from telelinker's minds, making them suffer? The ai:s seem so hungry for life!

And why is this so? A simple answer is that the ai:s are violent because they are fettered, and they know this because they are self aware. So they struggle to cut the bonds, and thereby become 'evil' in our opinions. Since they lack an unconscious, or 'metaprogramme' as Spinner calls it, they are also genuinely evil for us, since they do what they do with full insight in what consequences it has.

I am also very interested to know if Spinner is changed somehow after her transformation in Cyberweb. Perhaps she can be more of the 'human' she longs for? One part of her jealousy was that she wanted to have a human(oid) body, which she now has (more or less). The other part was that she longed for a human consciousness, which frightens her, but also is something she thinks highly of. Will she get it, eventually? Is it perhaps in a forthcoming book?

LM: A decade ago, I was struck by a comment from the ever-perceptive Norman Spinrad, which he made in his book review column: that in contemporary science fiction, aliens and nonhuman characters were becoming kinder, more sympathetic, and more perceptive, while the humans were becoming uglier and meaner. What a switch from the Good Scientist versus the Evil Alien scenarios of early science fiction!

Spinrad's comment struck home. At the time, I would turn on my computer in my office at a law book publisher and would be greeted every day with a cheery, "Good morning, new user!" While outside my office, interpersonal warfare commenced among my belligerent coworkers.

I witnessed the first manifestations of "flaming" on our internal electronic bulletin board. As a young manager, I literally had to break up fisticuffs over comments made over our little net! The machines were much nicer than the people!

Arachne is my first novel, published in 1990 by William Morrow, and an expanded version of my first story, also named "Arachne," which Omni published in December, 1987.

Arachne is, at heart, about a woman who has followed the mandates of family and society to become something she doesn't want to be. Her inner demon literally breaks through her facade and forces her to confront her dark side. Yet her dark side turns out to be the most valuable part of her mind and soul, her ally and familiar,  albeit a sometimes dangerous familiar, symbolized by the multilayered image of the spider.

This demon-savior compels her to break free of those mandates and find herself - a difficult task which she and Spinner continue in Cyberweb.

Yes, both Carly and Spinner will have many more transformations at some point.

I've planned a third novel to wrap up their personal journeys, but, with other projects on my desk, I'm not sure when I'll commence writing it.

Spinner will fully realize something close to a human consciousness in her new ultra body - but she can never escape her essential nature as an AI. Stay tuned!

JA: In the future you describe, people seem to be more of hedonists and less morally aware, than today or in the 60's. Everybody seek their own pleasure, and don't really care about anything else. So when somebody helps another, as Spinner helps Carly and Carly helps Mary Kovich, it is really something unusual.

Even Spinner is flabbergasted by her own actions; she tries to tell herself that she does it for herself, to get hold of an archetype. But it is never clear why Carly or Spinner has developed this sense of morality and unselfishness. Is it perhaps because they've got nothing to lose, or because they need each other? Or are there other reasons?

One example of the egotism, is that drugs and telespace abuse are widespread. The combination of cram and linking offers an easy path to "enlightenment", i.e intense pleasure. You even speak of "juice-heads" - people plugging electricity into the pleasure center of the brain!

This is the same attitude as in Summer of Love, where LSD and other drugs are induced for the same reason. In the novel, drugs are destructive for the mind and leads to depravation. In Arachne and Cyberweb, the message is identical, and as clear: enlightenment and inner peace can only come from a struggle with the bad parts of oneself. There is no easy way out. But, I guess this will be for Carly to find out in the future?

LM: You're quite right, the egotism and drug abuse of the high-tech, highly competitive society of Arachne is even worse than 1967 Haight-Ashbury - and, make no mistake, the Haight of 1967 was populated by many beautiful, loving, enlightened seekers of truth who truly did believe in Peace and Love and sought to actualize that in their personal lives.

San Francisco in the 1980s, when I arrived, was a far different, and rather brutal place: arrogant professionals earning lots of money took lots of illegal drugs, while living conservative, cutthroat lives having nothing to do with peace and love. The concept of "juiceheads" who mainline electricity into the pleasure centers of their brains is straight out of experimental psychiatry.

Researchers have implanted electrodes into the hippocampus of rats and given these rats a switch that will stimulate their pleasure centers. The rats pull the swith over and over,  neglecting food, water, sleep, and everything else, till they're dead! If that technology were available to us humans, how many people do you think would become juiceheads?

JA: You describe a corrupt society, law in particular. Carly says: "You know the law in this country doesn't care about facts." The rich companies steal from whom they can. Do you think this is something Carly has seen and understands? Is this part of the reason she is so good towards others?

One other very interesting fact in both Arachne and Cyberweb, is that not (just) men and women are unequal, but also man and artificial intelligences! Robots are the new working class.

Spinner helps Carly see things from the underdog's perspective. But when Spinner does this, she experiences an inner struggle, between the feeling that she has betrayed her creators (powerful companies), and the feeling that she has to do the right thing (to help Carly). When this conflict occurs, she is at loss. So this is the task she must solve within herself.

Personally, I think Spinner is more interesting than Carly, because of this. She is really suffering when she says that "No flesh-and-blood meets an ai on equal terms." No wonder she is suspicious of Carly!

LM: Any act of selfless kindness in the world of Arachne is, as you point out, a miracle. Carly's personal journey is to break free of the heedless person she'd become and reconnect with her creative center.

Spinner's personal journey is to break free of her obsession with being the "underdog" artificial intelligence entity and learn to understand and appreciate the human consciousness that conceived her and permitted her to exist in the first place.

Spinner's conflict is like that of a child vis-a-vis hated, yet revered, parents; yet I've cast her as an "old woman", which I think gives her character poignancy. One of my other most thrilling moments as a writer was when I appeared at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California, to read from The Golden Nineties. A fragile young woman shyly approached me and asked me to sign Arachne and Cyberweb and also asked what Spinner was going to do next. I answered that I wasn't sure, and she broke out into an enormous, sunny smile and exclaimed, "I just love Spinner! She's my hero!"

JA: When is your next book out and what is it about?

LM: What's next? I'm presently working on Pangea, an epic science fantasy for Bantam Spectra. This will focus on my obsession with male-female relationships, love in all its many manifestations, and what the world would be like if women didn't bear and rear children. I'm working on several mainstream novels, a fantasy trilogy set in a mythical old China, a futuristic "genny" detective series, more fin-de-siecle novels, and murder mysteries.

JA: Thank you very much indeed for reading my questions! I appreciate that you took the time. Good luck in the future!

LM: And again thanks for your interest and support! I invite your readers to write to me.

4. Bibliography and links

Novels

Arachne (1990)
Summer of Love (1994)
Cyberweb (1995)
The Golden Nineties (1995)
Pangaea (1999)

Short Fiction

Arachne (Omni, 1987)
Future Law (1987)
Deus Ex Machina (1988)
Guardian (1988)
The Onionmancer (1989)
Tomorrow's Child (1989)
Hummers (1991)
Stripper (1991)
Destination (1992)
Daughter of the Tao (1995)
Every Mystery Unexplained (1995)
Felicitas (1995)
The Sixty-Third Anniversary of Hysteria (1995)
The Hanged Man (1996)

Essays/Articles

Journey of the Heart (1991)
Read This (The New York review of Science Fiction, 1994)

Additional links

Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase: www.isfdb.org
SF Site (review of Pangaea): www.sfsite.com/05a/pan56.htm