AFM: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? HVH: I'm your average Zen Born-Again Catholic Quaker Pacifist Anarchist with a strong interest in the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud, and the Koran. Alternatively, I'm a balding, bespectacled, bearded middle-aged married guy with a Bachelors in Biology, an MA and PhD in English lit, a sometime college professor who also writes science fiction novels, or a science fiction writer who sometimes teaches at the college level. Alternatively again, my recreational interests include backpacking, cycling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, whitewater rafting and technical rockclimbing. My books include four sf novels (Lightpaths, Standing Wave, Better Angels, Empty Cities of the Full Moon), a nonfiction book on landscape irrigation for gardeners (Reliable Rain) and a scholarly nonfiction work on apocalyptic literature, as well as myriad articles of science fiction literary criticism and occasional political essays. AFM: Your dissertation was titled, "The Ecstasy of Catastrophe: A Study of the Apocalyptic Tradition from > Langland to Milton." This is a fascinating subject. Can you tells us a little bit about this? HVH: The two-headed title -- ecstasy, catastrophe -- comes from the two-headedness of the apocalyptic tradition. The Greek verb apokaluptein means "to reveal" -- an ecstatic revelation in the sense of "lifting the veil of this world" to see beyond our illusions. From its beginnings, however, the idea of apocalyptic vision (even in pre-Christian apocalyptica like the Book of Daniel) has gotten all tangled up in visions of the end of time -- usually visions of destruction, of a catastrophic "rending of the veil of this world" destroying the old order of the world to make way for the new. In my dissertation and the later sholarly book of the same title derived from it, I examined the way in which the double nature of our understanding of apocalypse affects the production of apocalyptic literature. I also tried to untangle the two meanings of apocalypse from each other, in order to understand the whole of the apocalyptic tradition in a new way. AFM: As you know, Apocalypse Fiction Magazine deals specifically with fiction set in the post-apocalyptic genre. Could you tell us a little bit about you decision to set your novel in this genre? HVH: Through my first three novels I had already explored the idea of apocalypse as ecstatic individual vision. It was almost inevitable that, when I began a new and parallel universe in my fourth novel, I moved on to explore the idea of apocalypse as global catastrophe. As a result of the biotech pandemic in Empty Cities of the Full Moon, I was able to explore a world gone truly mad or truly visionary (take your pick) which as a result suffers an enormous die off/transcendence (again, take your pick) and see what affect the death of the old world would have on the survivors or preterite who remain among the ruins and the rust, vines and weeds of the world after the end of the world. Essentially, I lopped back the Babel tower of human civilization to its hunter-gatherer roots and examined what might grow from there. Partially too, the book was a thought experiment investigating whether either high civilization or the supposedly greater leisure time of the hunter gatherer (at least according to the anthropologists and paleontologists) was all it was cracked up to be. For me, the apocalyptic/eschatological has always been concerned with teleology, with the goals of human existence. A post-apocalyptic setting allowed me to look at those goals more clearly. AFM: What do you think that the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction is for readers? HVH: That appeal is made up of a lot of different factors. The post-apocalyptic milieu is simpler, closer to the bone, and I think that speaks to a desire for a more authentic and more immediate way of living than the supposedly civilized world we currently inhabit. There's a certain element of wish-fulfillment and power-fantasy too in identifying with the characters: the whole world has gone smash but hey, I'm okay. (The same sort of thing underlies the smugness of those who presume that they will be saved, raptured out, among the Elect, etc. -- alas!) It also allows one to feel a nostalgia for the present, since the world we know is gone. At the deepest level, however, I think the appeal of post-apocalyptic literature is much more than mere survivalist fantasy. Post-apocalyptic literature allows us to question and critique to its very core the world we live in and experience daily. Post-apocalyptica allows us to say, "If we continue doing X, then the destruction of the world we know will come about as a result of doing X." Much secular, science fictional post-apocalyptica tries to warn us away from the catastrophic apocalypse. In the very act of prophecying a particular post-apocalyptic world, it is trying to prevent that particular apocalypse from "coming true." Secular post-apocalyptica is the opposite of self-fulfilling prophecy -- it is prophecy intended to prevent itself from being fulfilled. In this way it differs radically from religious post-apocalyptica, which is all about how the chosen will live in perfect harmony in the Kingdom of God and the apocalypse is something to be desired, not avoided -- no matter how much pain and suffering the "unsaved" have to suffer during the Tribulation times. The difference is seen in the fact that religious _post_-apocalyptica is much less common than religious apocalyptica, the latter of which is in many ways about sacrificing the world for the self and is at core selfish. AFM: Can you share with us some of the fiction (or nonfiction) which has inspired you and your writing? HVH: In the realm of science fiction postapocalyptica, books and stories like A Canticle for Liebowitz, Hiero's Journey, Alas, Babylon, and By the Waters of Babylon -- as well as apocalyptic thrillers ranging from King's The Stand to Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer -- all affected me. I was also an anti-nuclear arms activist during the 1980s, so books like Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth were important to me. Books like Stewart's Earth Abides -- an eco-apocalypse -- were also formative. In more mainstream lit, the apocalyptic elements not only from Langland to Milton but also from Pope to Pynchon helped shape my thinking on the subject too. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation I read scads of literary critical and historical analyses of apocalyptic literature and historic apocalyptic movements -- all of which are chronicled in the bibliography of that dissertation -- and they undoubtedly have affected my thinking too. AFM: Apocalyptic fiction can often be seen as having a sort of 'predictive quality', either a warning to humanity, or a return to nature--a glimpse of things to come. How (if at all) might this apply to your work? HVH: As I said earlier, when I write a global catastrophe novel like Empty Cities of the Full Moon I'm basically engaged in a sort of "If this goes on. . ." warning. I'm a canary in a coal mine. Through fiction I try to warn people away from things that I perceive are deadly serious in fact. I want my prophecy not to come true, but fear that it will. AFM: How do you think recent world events--specifically the tragedy in New York City, the attacks on the US, the current Anthrax/bio-warfare scare, and the war on terrorism, will affect the entertainment industry? Specifically the genres of science fiction and post-apocalypstic fiction?How have the recent events affected you and your writing? HVH: When I first learned of what happened on September 11 and saw the World Trade Center towers falling I had a weird sense of deja vu. Not only because we'd seen stuff like this before -- not in science fiction, mainly, but in action adventure movies, and we were all waiting for Arnold or Bruce or Sly to save the day -- but also in my own fiction. If you look through my first three novels, which take place in our universe, there is no mention of the World Trade Center. If you look at my fourth novel, Empty Cities of the Full Moon, which takes place in a parallel universe close to our own, you'll see there a mention of the World Trade Center as rusting away half a century hence. The parallel universe of Empty Cities is a bio/eco apocalypse -- biotech pandemic, massive global depopulation -- a world of rot and rust, vines and weeds. Our actual world, and the world of my first three novels, seems more inclined toward explosion, fire and rubble than gradual collapse. In both universes, however, I have speculated on the rise of a repressive theocracy in the United States, creating a Christian States of America arising from the serious erosion of the boundaries separating church and state. At the moment this seems entirely too plausible. My fear is that in the post-September 11 world, science fiction and the entertainment industry generally will hunker down in an Us versus Them knee-jerk nationalism and militarism all too characteristic of bad action adventure films. Science fiction at its best has always been more thoughtful, and would do well to examine how America as a nation might change course so as to overcome its fossil-fuel addiction -- especially given that most of the world's oil reserves lie under a Petrol Crescent stretching from West Africa on the Atlantic to Indonesia in the Pacific, and most of that Petrol Crescent lies under Muslim countries. Good thoughtful science fiction is about thinking critically -- not just buying into the major media's daily churn and burn, its fear-machine noise about plagues and pestilences. Post-apocalyptica gives us thought experiments so that we might more effectively examine what's a genuine danger and what's hype. Most of all, thoughtful entertainment at this time in history should be about getting beyond reflexive reactions -- the knee-jerk lust for vengeance, racism, unthinking nationalism masquerading as patriotism, and the like. Post-apocalyptica has a place more than ever in that critique. Science fiction helps us examine the way in which everything has embedded in it an element of its opposite -- attack embedded in defense, self-destruction embedded in self-preservation -- and how technology plays into that. For there to be jetliners commandeered to serve as bombs, there must first be jetliners. For there to be catastrophic skyscraper collapses, there must first be skyscrapers. For there to be terrorist events with global media reach, there must first be global media. The events of September 11 arose not only out of the confluence of social and geopolitical currents, but also out of the confluence of technological currents. The ecstasy of technological progress always has embedded within it the horror of technological catastrophe. Science fiction and post-apocalyptica continue to be powerful tools for examining that relationship. We're all science fiction writers, now. AFM: What's next, in terms of your writing career? HVH: I may do a sequel to Empty Cities called Gleaming Islands of the Night Sea, or possibly a quantum computing/quantum cryptography novel currently titled either The Artifice of Eternity, or All's Well At World's End. I haven't yet decided. Right now I'm working on my short fiction, a collection of which (twelve stories written between 1985-95, ten previously published and two unpublished, all newly revised, with general and specific introductions and afterword) releases as an ebook in late October 2001 under the title Mobius Highway from Scorpius Digital. I have short stories forthcoming in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the Gregory Benford-edited anthology Microcosms in 2002. Whatever I'm up to, though, you can bet that the ecstasy of catastrophe which is the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genre will be a part of it. Read the First Chapter of Empty Cities here on AFM Order Empty Cities of the Full Moon on Amazon.com Visit the Howard V. Hendrix website HOME CONTENTS