Interview with Dan Simmons

Q: The Time Traveler short story which appeared on your website last spring created quite a commotion and repercussions of that uproar can still be felt today. People accused you of isolationism and calling for the genocide of the Muslims in the Middle East. Your subsequent post did little to assuage the flaring tempers of many readers. Looking back, are you still shocked by the response this short story generated?

The Time Traveler essay on my web site was not a short story and anyone accusing me of "isolationism and calling for the genocide" of anyone would be too stupid to be allowed out of his or her room, much less onto the Internet.

The essay, as my readers and any regular web site visitors understood at once, was not a political statement or prediction but was a cautionary tale to provoke conversation, in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. The only "flaring tempers" were from hotheads in the blogosphere who came ranting and roaring in without knowing the context of the essay or anything about me or my work.

The Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways – my January ’07 Message from Dan on my web site discusses how it’s the major part of the future that no one predicted in decades past, and expresses my real pleasure at knowing some of the first prophets of cyberspace, people such as Bill Gibson and Bruce Sterling – but the Internet and its blogosphere spawn is also too frequently a shallow, tendentious place because it combines two very dangerous attributes: anonymity and a total lack of consequences for the most extreme sorts of shallow thinking and rhetoric.

Q: In retrospect, knowing now that The Time Traveler short story would engender such outrage among the online community, would you do things differently if you could do it all over again? Conscious that this issue remains a bone of contention between you and some of your readers, is there anything you wish to add that would perhaps clarify certain points in the presumed stance ascribed to you by your detractors?

See above. There is no "bone of contention between [me] and some of [my] readers." There is no "online community" any more than there is a "highway community" or "sidewalk community," only people using those spaces – and the outrage you’re talking about is as useless as "road rage" on the highways. It doesn’t take content to trigger it, only the pathology of the road-rager and an opportunity for the person to express that rage, either with a 2-ton vehicle or via extreme postings on forums.

Those screamers and saliva-splatterers and fatwa-announcers who came galloping in from elsewhere, and who’d misunderstood what they’d misread out of all context in the first place, are gone now (and were shortly after the essay and its follow-up explications appeared.) Back to their all-think-alike forums and extreme chat rooms where they can scream bumper-sticker slogans to their angry, narrow hearts’ content. They had no interest in discussions of any issues – a discussion that still goes on across a wide range of topics, most of them related to literature, on my rather interesting and generally extremely polite forum.

It’s silly to be proud of anything so diverse and out of one’s control as a web site forum, but it’s true that I’m proud of the general mutual respect, civil tone, and high-level of discussion that is the norm on my little forum. The people who tend to come back to the dialogue again and again tend to be capable folks who know things and – perhaps even more important in the age of anonymous Web attacks and expletive-ridden pronouncements of the Absolute Truth – are curious about others’ opinions and know how to discuss things.

It’s what I encouraged as a teacher for 18 years (I actually created a curriculum on how to come up with great questions and follow up on them in creative dialogues) and I don’t think it’s condescending to say that I’m delighted that the vast majority of visitors on my forum, many of them readers of mine, understand the need for context, civility, and restraint when it comes to discussing difficult topics with strangers.

Q: Once again, I wish to thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I wish you continued success in your writing career and best of luck with the release of THE TERROR.