Deep Time with Caitlin R. Kiernan: An Interview

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (born 26 May 1964) is an Irish-born American paleontologist and writer of science fiction and dark fantasy works, including 10 novels, series of comic books, and more than 250 published short stories, novellas, and vignettes. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.

Alex S. Johnson: Social media controversies play a disproportionate part in the way the public and readers and authors perceive other authors. It feels to me mostly unnecessary in the respect that it dilutes the discourse about literature and makes it more about people’s subjective opinions and knee jerk reactions to false binaries. What are your thoughts on this? 

Caitlín R. Kiernan: Yes, you’re absolutely right. Social media, and especially social media “activism,” is largely responsible for giving us this world where half of us are always at the throats of the other half. A world where it seems almost no one takes the time to read what has been written by anyone attempting a serious analysis, because outrage and dogma are threatened by reason. A world without nuance, where intellectual and political discourse has been reduced to something more akin to rooting for a sports team. I loathe social media. Sure, on the one hand it has brought me readers. But on the other hand, it has brought me almost endless grief and even lost me close friends. I fucking hate it, and I am trying hard to find the resolve to walk away from that idiot tempest once and for all. Leave Facebook and Twitter and LiveJournal, put it all behind me. I never would have imagined that the greatest threat to human civilization would not be the nuclear bomb. 

ASJ: Neil Gaiman famously said that you have a “gift for language that borders on the scary.” To what do you attribute that gift? 

CRK: Well, I am one of those writers who does believe in talent. Some of us know this trick, and some of us don’t, and those who do can get better at it, but those who lack talent will never master it, no matter how hard they try, no matter how many workshops they pay too much to attend. But that’s not really what you’re asking. Since I was a very small child I have been fascinated by language. Using the funny pages and a dictionary, I taught myself to read well before kindergarten. I was reading at a ninth-grade level in third grade. And I think reading has really been key to the development of my abilities, studying how all these other writers do what they do. In my twenties, I devised an exercise where I would write in the voice of other authors – Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Angela Carter, William Faulkner – and I got really good at it. I once included a counterfeit Yeats poem in a story and had to go to a lot of trouble to prove I’d written it. I still don’t know that I’m answering the question. Frankly, I’ve never been entirely sure what Neil meant. But I’d say that it didn’t hurt that my mother is a lover of books, and she read to me constantly. When I was a child, books mattered as much as air. They still do.

ASJ You are equally a scientist as well as an author of dark fiction. What influence does paleontology play in your work? Is writing ever like a dig to uncover bones and identify them? 

CRK: Well, sure. You can look at it that way. A story is this thing that exists in bits and pieces in your unconscious mind, and writing is the process of gathering all that up and filling in the blanks, and that’s a little like putting a fossil skeleton back together. For me, writing is a process of discovery, and paleontology is a process of discovery. On some level I’m doing the same thing with both – except, and it’s a big exception – beyond that superficial similarity my brain is doing something very different when I’m writing fiction than when I’m doing science. In paleontology, and especially in writing up my findings, it’s all economy, saying as much as you can with the fewest words, as clearly as possible. In my fiction, I’m sorta doing the opposite. Objective meaning isn’t high on my list of priorities. In fact, it’s near the bottom. And writing I have this wonderful freedom to use fifty words where ten might do, but would be vastly less satisfying. And in fiction I don’t have to worry about rigor, about multivariate analysis and writing constraint algorithms for phylogenetic analyses and…all that. So, I go to these two very different places and use very different parts of my brain, and they are different enterprises, even though I might be led there by similar initial states. That said, paleontology has played a significant role in my fiction, yes. The sense of deep time, for example. I really let myself start mixing those two interests in Threshold, my second novel, and it’s been there ever since, especially in my short fiction. Getting the chocolate in the peanut butter and vice versa. 

ASJ. You are known for your hard science based yet controversial opinions. Why do you think people argue with scientific facts?

CRK: Am I known for that? I thought I was known for that time in Burbank with the penguins, the hookers, and all that blow. Just goes to show you. Shit, I don’t know. Yes, whenever possible, as a rationalist, as an atheist, as a humanist, as a scientist, whatever opinions – no, whatever views – I may hold are based not on emotion and not on dogma. It seems far more important that I have thought something through, studied a problem, walked around it to see all the angles, before I start mouthing off. Which is alien to the internet, I know. It might be alien to the twenty-first century. Politically, I’m not on anyone’s side, not really, unless a cogent argument can be made for this or that position. And people seem to hate that, which I guess does make my opinions controversial. A thing is not true because someone desires it to be true. There is too much of the Enlightenment in me to buy into that. But as to why people argue with scientific facts, Jesus, look at the sad state of scientific literacy in America, an ignorance of facts and an ignorance of the scientific method. And not just an ignorance, but actual hostility, because science might prove you wrong. So if what matters to you is religion or this or that crusade, obviously science and reason are a potential threat. And that’s why people argue with science, whether we’re talking about climate change or evolutionary theory or – whatever. 

ASJ. Science in horror and speculative fiction have coexisted since Shelley. How do you see new sciences, knowledge and theories being used in contemporary horror?

CRK: Well…new technologies, more often than not, frankly scare the piss out of me. I’ve already talked about the dangers of social media, a Frankenstein’s monster if ever man has unleashed one upon itself. Add to that AI. Those two things alone are enough, more than enough, to topple millennia of civilization. We dehumanize ourselves through shit like ChatGPT and pretend we’re democratizing the written word. We take these goddamn AI graphics programs where we seek to replace skill and inspiration with prompts, all but removing human beings from the process of creating art. Look! Anyone can do it! And they are. Like the plastics fouling the seas, AI generated imagery is fouling…okay, I’m off on a rant. To put it all more succinctly, to sum it the fuck up, here’s one of those places science fucks us over, hard – no, one of those places we do not use science wisely and with foresight. There’s too much, “Ooh, let’s see what happens.” There’s too much, “Yeah, but it’s fun, and I have no actual talent, so…” There are too many lazy students who don’t want to write their own papers and too many internet “content providers” who don’t want to pay a human artist when they can have Midjourney spit out some piece of shit for them virtually free. Now, have I seen these technologies used in contemporary horror fiction? No, not really, because I don’t much read contemporary horror fiction. I don’t read all that much new fiction, truthfully. But if it’s not being used, it should be. Myself, I tend to shy away from it. My nightmares are bad enough already. But, yes, you could not find a better comparison than Mary Shelley.

ASJ. You’ve spoken of the concept of “deep time” in relationship to the work of HP Lovecraft. Could you elaborate on how deep time is implicated in cosmic horror?

CRK: Everyone is familiar with, and probably comfortable with, the idea of historical time, and so they might casually talk of things they consider to have happened long ago. The building of the Egyptian pyramids, the Peloponnesian War, Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, World War I. Events that occurred a hundred or hundreds or even thousands of years before the present. Human life spans are short, and it seems to most people like those things happened a very long time ago. But ever since the great antiquity of the earth was recognized in the mid-eighteenth century, science has become increasingly aware that human history is nothing more than a thin film floating atop the abyss of geologic time. Scientists, and especially geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, physicists – those who routinely deal with objects and events of tremendous antiquity – very quickly learn to think this way. Not in mere centuries and millennia, but in millions or billions of years. It becomes second nature. But to most people this concept of the abyss of time remains unfamiliar, alien, even deeply unsettling. Considering it, many of them experience a sort of existential shock. And it is against this abyss of time that Lovecraft was writing his tales. Lovecraft’s god things, for example, his Great Old Ones and Elder Things, Cthulhu and that bunch, creatures that had “filtered down from the stars when earth was young.” In At the Mountains of Madness, practically a treatise on the power of deep time to unsettle, it is suggested that these beings “concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake.” Or look at “The Shadow Out of Time” or “Dagon.” Lovecraft wasn’t the first to use deep time to unsettle readers, but I think he was the first to do it with such skill. Here we have a sort of Gothic literature where the phantoms do not haunt castles merely ancient by human standards, but by the standards of the cosmos. Ergo, cosmic fiction, using the vastness of time – and space, and spacetime – to convey the weird.

ASJ. Tell me about the relationship and intersections between your work and that of Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. It seems as though there are profound connections there.

CRK: Well, I’ve already gone on at length about Lovecraft, so I’ll focus here on Burroughs. He’s a later influence. I found Lovecraft, as I have written elsewhere, in high school, and I didn’t find Burroughs until college. And I think it’s a little harder to explain, the influence he’s had on me. Lovecraft was about looking outward. Burroughs, reading his work, taking it to heart, that was looking inward. It was also – as with authors like Joyce and Faulkner – something that allowed me to broaden my techniques as a writer. Burroughs had audacity. He was irreverent in a way I’m not sure I’d encountered before, an irreverence that violated not only the strictures of the English language but of society. I was raised in rural and semi-rural Appalachia, and while I’d certainly been broadening my horizons long before I found Burroughs, it was still heady stuff. And his writing led me off into this world of junkies and – well, by then I’d begun using drugs, so nothing will cure you more quickly of romanticizing dope that Junky. In fact, I think maybe that’s the most profound connection I have to Burroughs. He taught me not to romanticize. Anything. Ever. Novels like Silk and stories like “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” that’s me taking what I learned from Burroughs, the squalor and depravity that rules life for so many of us, and using that as my canvas, but never permitting myself to romanticize it. This is not a place you want to be. This is a place where life is cheap and ugly and dirty. Too little science fiction is written from that place.

ASJ. I’m republishing your story “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver” from your Sirenia newsletter in my upcoming William S. Burroughs tribute anthology, The Junk Merchants Volume 2. Can you tell me about the genesis of that story? 

CRK: Well, the story was written about seven years ago now, which means I don’t have a lot of specifics on hand. Those are lost to old notes books and undependable memory.But I can say, there are a number of my science-fiction stories, such as “Hydrarguros” and “Cherry Street Tango, Sweatbox Waltz” and “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” I think of them as a sort of cybernoir. In a lot of ways I suppose they’re very retro, harking back not only the cyberpunks in the late seventies and early eighties but to film noir in the forties and fifties. I’m trying to capture both those aesthetics and blend them. And…it’s not like I can claim this is original. Surely Ridley Scott did this in Blade Runner in 1982 (with its title courtesy Bill Burroughs). No, he might not have crawled as deeply beneath the underbelly of a future society as I’m doing in “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” but he’s in the neighborhood, and that film was a great influence on me. Like I said about Burroughs’ Junky, this is a place where life is cheap and ugly and dirty. This isn’t the sort of SF that wonders at the stars. It’s the sort of considers it very likely that technology will only lodge us more deeply in the gutter. And it’s also violence as a sort of pornography, and decay and violence as art, and even art as crime. See, for example, my story “A Season of Broken Dolls.” Oh, another huge influence on these stories, the tales like “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” is David Bowie’s album Outside. The story’s antagonist – if it actually has one, which I doubt – Belev Andler, is a nod to Bowie’s Nathan Adler.

ASJ. What do you love about the Gothic and Deathrock musical genres, literature and culture? 

CRK: This isn’t an easy question. I almost decided to not even try and answer it. I didn’t become involved in goth, in even the most tenuous way, until I started doing drag in 1990, and by then I was twenty-six years old. So I was a very fucking slow bloomer as for as goth was concerned, to say the least, and I was in the South – Birmingham, Athens, Atlanta – not really a part of the world renowned for having a thriving goth scene. Okay, New Orleans, but I didn’t get down that way much until later on. But, yes, my drag persona, it started there, and then I was writing Silk, which was mostly a book about the tiny punk-goth scene in Birmingham at the end of the 1980s disguised as a horror novel. And while I was writing it I met Billy Martin, who was at the time, a bit to his chagrin, a goth icon, and Christa Faust, who had even less interest in goth, but she was also somehow seen as part of the thing. And it spiraled from there. And it was great for a while, especially getting to know musicians. Forgive the name dropping, but, you know, the night I got wasted on ouzo at the Milk Bar with Voltaire and Lisa Feurer (who was still with Black Tape back then). I became close friends with the members of The Crüxshadows, Faith and the Muse, the Changelings (who were a brilliant Atlanta band), and on and on. I think the climax of my involvement with the scene was when I mc’d Convergence 5 in New Orleans in April ’99. And, kids, if you don’t know what Convergence is, use Wikipedia. I was a music reviewer at the late, much-lamented Carpe Noctem. You know, this has become an absurdly long answer, which I don’t think has even really addressed the question. I was leading up to how I drifted out of the scene in the early 2000s, but that’s not an answer, either. I don’t even know what the scene is these days. I just turned sixty, and I’m just shy of a recluse. Is there still a goth scene? Didn’t emo eat it alive? Okay, sorry, what did I love about the whole thing? I don’t know how to explain that, not really, not in a way that won’t seem precious and pretentious. I loved dressing up, the theatricality, obviously the music, and…you know, I’m gonna leave this one at that. Four hundred words and I still haven’t answered the question, which I’m beginning to think I misunderstood.

ASJ. Whatever happened to your goth-folk blues band, Death’s Little Sister?

CRK: I lived in Athens, Georgia in the nineties, and if you lived in Athens, Georgia – at least back then – and you had anything remotely resembling artistic inclinations, sooner or later you’d likely wind up at least sorta in someone’s band. And I met a lot of musicians as soon as I moved there, and they knew I’d done drag in Birmingham so I had that background in performance. Plus, almost as an afterthought, I could sing, play keyboard, and read music. And write songs. And people in bands, even shitty bands, got invited to the best parties with the best drugs. So, it was almost inevitable. In 1996, I was waiting for Silk, the first novel to sell, and – I honestly do not remember how I fell in with the people who became the band. Someone introduced me to a friend of a friend. And Death’s Little Sister grew out of the ashes of this other band that was imploding. For a while it was fun, but it quickly turned into very hard work, very time consuming work. We’d rehearse almost every night in a converted attic in a house at the edge of town. And then it started costing me money. I was the only person in the band with anything like a remotely steady source of income (that’s a joke; I was selling short fiction), so I kept getting handed the bills for sound equipment and studio time and such. We played a lot of shows in Athens and Atlanta. Our recording of “House of the Rising Sun” got a little airplay on local college radio. People like Michael Stipe and Matthew Sweet came to our shows and said we should keep at it. But. I was bleeding cash. I was drunk or high half the time. I wasn’t getting anything written. I mean nothing. My agent actually finally questioned whether it was worth it. And I saw, no it wasn’t. So, there was a February 1997 show at the 40 Watt Club, our best show yet, and the next day I called the guitarist and quit. And it was a fucking ugly breakup. I tried to find the guys another vocalist, but after a couple more months everyone had walked away. And that is what happened to Death’s Little Sister. The end.

ASJ. What are your current writing projects, if you’re at liberty to discuss them?

CRK: Sure, I can discuss them. But I’ve been having greater and greater trouble writing as the years go by, which is terrifying. So, I can discuss them, but keep in mind when I say “my next novel,” well, I’ve been working on my next novel since about 2015. I’m writing a book called The Night Watchers for Subterranean Press, and I’m about halfway through, so maybe this one is actually going to happen. It better. In a lot of ways, it is the nearest thing to a genre horror novel that I’ve ever tried to do. But it is coming along very slowly, and I’m not going to try and give a synopsis or anything. Bright Dead Star, my next short story collection – my nineteenth, I think – will be out early in 2025. The title could be a description of the way I’ve felt the last few years, but it’s actually stolen from a Current 93 song, from their 2018 album The Light Is Leaving Us All. What I am trying to finish at this very moment – and all this stuff is with SubPress, by the way – is a sci-fi novella, The Sun Always Shines on TV –  a sequel to Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale – and yes, both titles stolen from A-ha songs. Show me a writer who claims they aren’t a thief, and I’ll show you someone who’s either a shitty writer or a liar.

ASJ. Final question: What reading recommendations do you have for my readers?

CRK: Oh, I hate this question. I always hate this question. I have always hated this question. But I will say that Jeff VanderMeer is hands down the best weird writer going these days. Read Area X and Borne and all the rest. Brilliant stuff. And we’ve talked so much about music, so if you haven’t heard Heilung, hear them. There a fucking incredible Germanic-Viking experimental folk thing. And my two favorite film directors these days are Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan, so…there. Recommendations.