just because the first anthology worked commercially. Then Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison approached me with an idea for an international horror anthology, using really powerful writers, putting the bar very high. Dennis would edit the American portion. Ramsey would edit the British portion, and I would do the Australian. So we would cover a good portion of the English-speaking horror genre. The idea was that it had to come out simultaneously in the US, Great Britain, and Australia. Tor is doing it in the US, and HarperCollins will publish it in the Australia and Great Britain. The anthology will be called Gathering the Bones, or maybe just Bones; we’re not sure yet. It’s another one of those big projects editor/writers do out of love.
Q: You must have a better sense of this than most editors. What differences in approach do the Australians have toward fantasy or horror?
Dann: That’s a difficult question. It was interesting to see the American reviews of Dreaming, which were very good. Again we were lucky. But reviewers seemed to think that Australian fiction would be about place. In other words, Australian geography would be the great influence. There are stories in which geography is very important, but I don’t think that is at base where the difference lies. I think it’s in the language and culture. You could almost say that Australian English is built on irony. I often tell tourists that all Australians know about ten thousand jokes and anecdotes. When they’re chatting with you, they’ll use these anecdotes and bits of wonderful irony, but they’ll only tell you the punch line. You’re supposed to know the rest to ‘get it’.
Australian English sounds like the same language we use in America, but I often find that when I’m just having conversations with my wife, who is Australian, that we can think that we’re saying the same thing, yet we’re misunderstanding each other because the words don’t mean the same thing.
I think, however, that in the genres there is a commonality that runs among English-speaking writers. In, say, science fiction, in the States, in England, and in Australia it’s not the place that makes the profound difference, because I think we’re all dipping into the same wells. We’re all cross-fertilizing each other. There is that difference of perspective and geography which every once in a while makes you say, “Ah....” But I think it’s the quality of the work that is important, and the fact that a given location has a number of writers who are doing really interesting work. If you look at the stories in Dreaming, you wouldn’t necessarily look at them and say, “These are Australian.” You might look at them and say that this or that story is wonderful.
Q: I’d think that the one thing the Australians would have in common with the Americans is a sense of frontier or at least a memory of a frontier. You go to Britain and you get the sense that every clump of trees has a name that’s probably recorded, with the name of a forester, in the Domesday Book. But in Australia and in the United States there is empty land. In that geographical sense, I would think that the U.S. would have a lot more in common with Australia than with Britain.
Dann: I think one of the differences between Australia and the United States is that in Australia there is still the sense of frontier. It’s very strong. You can move. You don’t have to be near people—your closest neighbor can be a hundred miles away. Yet you’ve also got this wonderful frisson, if you want to use the word, of world-class cosmopolitan cities such as Melbourne and Sydney.
I think that in the States we are starting to feel a limitation on Manifest Destiny, an end to the frontier. I don’t know that this is necessarily real, but I think this sense of limit is becoming part of the emotional consciousness. I think Americans perceive Australia to be what America once was. Again, it’s the idea of the frontier. When I first got to Australia, for the first number of months, I felt a crazy sense of freedom, that I could just go out on the road and never stop.
Q: Is that any different from, say, Arizona or other parts of the U.S.?
Dann: Probably not. The Outback can be like the Gobi Desert; so if you’re going to go from X to Y, you’ve got to know that you have enough water and such, because if you get stuck, you could be dead. The U.S. is almost completely habitable. It’s a big country with a lot of people. Australia is a big country that is not completely habitable. You can basically only live around the edges. The interior is like the Red Planet. The Outback...where the myths reside.
One of the things that I’ve noticed as an ex-pat is that Americans look inward. It’s the idea that everything is right here and available in the United States, and to a certain extent everything is here. We produce what has become world culture. We radiate our culture out. Also, in terms of military might, we are very secure. The major superpower.
By contrast, Australia is a country that looks outward. Australia is always looking out at what is going on in the world. That is why you see Australians everywhere—they are always traveling. That’s a big difference, culturally, in the way people perceive themselves and perceive the rest of the world. Americans take it for granted that they’re from a place that is powerful, central. We assume that as Americans we’re in control, that most countries can’t screw around with the U.S. and, indeed, must make accommodations. In many ways, we Americans really are insular...insulated. You can get an idea of this by comparing news in the States with news media in Europe or Australia. Again, it’s a question of how we sense ourselves and our place in the world.
Q: The perspective I had going to Europe for the first time was an appreciation of how much older European cities are than American cities. In Rome you can see what New York will be like in two thousand years. I coined the term “the layercake of history” because you see layers upon layers from different eras. Australia is even younger than the U.S. and has even less of this. My favorite symbol of it all is in Rome: a seventeenth-century marble elephant by Bernini, with an ancient Egyptian obelisk on its back, and a papal cross on top of that. It’s as if time-travelling aliens had just grabbed all this stuff and assembled it at random.
Dann: Well, cultures subsume each other. If you conquer a country, you tear down its places of worship and build your own mosques or churches over the sites. I think you’re spot on about the U.S. and Australia being new countries. I have a friend who is a Brit, one of my dearest friends in Australia; he moved there about fifteen years ago. He tells me that when he was living in England, he could feel the accretion of history, almost like weight. There, you could be walking along the street and come across a thousand year old cairn. When you’re living in all that antiquity, the past can seem more important than the present. One of the reasons that my British friend feels such a sense of freedom in living in Australia is because everything isn’t mired in the centuries past. There is a different energy. The U.S. and Australia are similar in that respect. I think one difference between the US and Australia is that Australians still perceive England as the mother country. There is still a sense of deference here toward Great Britain, even though the majority of the people want a republic. Americans don’t feel that kind of deference, perhaps because we shrugged Great Britain off during the Revolutionary War. Australia simply wasn’t in a position to do that, primarily because communications technology had changed, allowing easier and faster communication between the colonies and the mother country. The advent of telegraphy, perhaps more than anything else, allowed England to maintain a firm hold on Australia. Before that, it could take months for messages from England to reach Australia. They left quite a bit of leeway for independence and self-government. There was a small rebellion in Ballarat, which is not far from Melbourne, after the United States declared independence, but it failed. So although the idea of a republic is very much in the public mind in Australia and it is debated constantly, the relationship between Australians and the Brits still feels to me to be somewhat colonial.
Q: This is the sort of thing you can write straight mainstream fiction about, or historical fiction, or we get back to the idea of transmogrifying the experience and writing about another planet. You’d have even greater freedom on another planet, where everything would be absolutely fresh, particularly if it was far enough away that you couldn’t get back to Earth.
Dann:
