10 Questions with
James Morrow

James Morrow is best known for his magnum opus, the Godhead Trilogy. The first installment, Towing Jehovah, winner of the World Fantasy Award, recounts the efforts of a supertanker captain to entomb the corpse of God in an Arctic glacier. The sequel, Blameless in Abaddon, tells of a small-town judge who prosecutes the Corpus Dei before the World Court. In The Eternal Footman, God's skull goes into geosynchronous orbit above Times Square, causing a plague of despair. A collection of shorts, The Cat's Pajamas and Other Stories, was published last summer by Tachyon Books. Delirium Books has recently issued the Godhead Trilogy in a deluxe slipcased edition, including a chapbook of one-act plays on the theme of the Deus Absconditus.

Jim’s long-awaited postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, is now available from William Morrow. Other James Morrow novels include This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), a Nebula finalist, and Only Begotten Daughter (1990), winner of the World Fantasy Award. His early short fiction is collected in Bible Stories for Adults, including the Nebula Award-winning fable, "The Deluge.” City of Truth, his one and only novella, also received a Nebula Award.

DM caught up with Jim by phone and email earlier this month.

DM: Of all the novels you've published to date, which one is your personal favorite? Why?
JM: My favorite James Morrow novel happens to be the one that occasioned this interview. Whatever its flaws, I think The Last Witchfinder makes an honest effort to address a problem that almost nobody is willing to talk about in our culture. Namely, do we really want to keep pretending that organized religion, Christianity included, doesn’t have a dark side? Do we really want to abandon Reason and the Enlightenment altogether, subscribing instead to the principle that nothing matters more than feeling good about ourselves?

The New Age fringe seems perfectly prepared to follow that path. Witness the astonishing success of pseudo-quantum-physics cinematic drivel like What the #$!%* Do We Know? and the recent expanded version, What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole.

Scorched-earth postmodern relativism isn’t helping much either. Consider the fetishizing of tribalism that occurs within certain sectors of academia, and the celebration of “alternative ways of knowing” that passes for intellectual discourse in so many college classrooms.

The Bush Administration, of course, wants to dodge indefinitely any serious public discussion of religion. Here’s a towering irony for you: the Bushies would evidently be perfectly happy if tomorrow or the next day a smiley-face Evangelical Christian theocracy descended upon this republic, even as they hope against hope that something vaguely resembling a secular, rational, neo-Enlightenment state will emerge in Iraq.

DM: If you could re-write any of your works, which one would it be? How would you change it?
JM: I’m pretty satisfied with the first volume of the Godhead Trilogy, Towing Jehovah. It’s your standard story about a supertanker captain who gets hired by the Vatican to tow the corpse of God to its final resting place, a hollowed-out iceberg in the Arctic. But even though the plot is old hat, the execution boasts a certain élan, and the jokes haven’t gone stale yet.

The sequel, Blameless in Abaddon, is probably my favorite James Morrow novel after The Last Witchfinder. It was exhilarating to put God on trial for crimes against humanity, and to deconstruct the many “theodicies” that clerics have spun over the years to rationalize the Almighty’s apparent indifference to suffering.

Some readers regard the third Godhead book as the best of the lot, but I’m not one of them. The Eternal Footman is definitely the Morrow novel I would rewrite. The theme is death, and if you look very carefully between the lines — beyond the busy plot and the extravagant metaphysical conceits — you may notice that the author doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the subject. If I had that novel to do over, I would research thanatology as systematically as I looked into theodicy for Blameless in Abaddon.

DM: You did your undergraduate work at a modest little Philly institution established by Ben Franklin, and he is a key character in your most recent work, The Last Witchfinder. In researching Franklin, what did you find oddest or most intriguing about the man?
JM: Not only did I study at Penn, I grew up in the Philly suburb called Roslyn, two experiences that combined to give me good feelings about Ben Franklin before I began serious Witchfinder research. But I came away admiring the man more than ever.

We’re continually told that the secular, irreverent, freethinking worldview that Ben personified leads to immorality, so we’d all be better off reading the Bible than, say, Poor Richard’s Almanac. And yet poor old contrarian Ben was the only Founding Father who stood unequivocally against the slave trade, and it’s difficult to find any truly dirty laundry in the numerous Franklin biographies, which is more than we can say for most other politicians.

The Religious Right keeps trying to cast the Founding Fathers as orthodox Christians, when in fact they were mostly deists, freethinkers, and philosophical eccentrics. Near the end of his life, Franklin plainly declared (in a letter to a prominent clergyman) that he doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t sound like Christianity to me.

DM: How do you develop your characters?
JM: I recently ran across this quote from the Theo Cuff, one of Voltaire’s English-language translators: “The Enlightenment disliked story for story’s sake, so it invented a kind of story whose inventions are officially in the service of an idea.” What gets me showing up at the word processor every morning is the central concept behind whatever novel I’m writing — say, the birth of the scientific worldview, which is the subject of The Last Witchfinder. Truth to tell, I tend to regard characters largely as a necessary evil. You need them to dramatize ideas, but they aren’t good for much else.

That said, I try to give my confected human beings rich inner lives, complete with angst and eros, and I usually end up believing that they are real people. In most cases, the character has both a colorful occupation and a philosophical obsession, attributes that help me to delineate his psyche. So Martin Candle, the man who puts God on trial in Blameless in Abaddon, is a small-town, small-time judge whose courtroom is the scene of many bizarre and lurid cases. The Last Witchfinder centers on a woman who makes it her life’s mission to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act of 1604.

DM: Here's a hypothetical sich: a major romance imprint is considering paying you mega bucks to help launch its new sci-fi line. What storyline do you pitch?
JM: I guess the storyline I would pitch is, “Once upon a time there was a major romance imprint that hoped to recruit James Morrow for its new sci-fi line, and then one day both parties found themselves admitting that this was a monumentally terrible idea.”

God knows, every so often, I make a genuine effort — at least it seems genuine at the time — to do something really commercial with my writing abilities. I mean, Jeez, I’m as fond of groceries as the next man. After my third novel, This Is the Way the World Ends, got lots of review attention, I found myself in Hollywood talking to Leonard Nimoy about a movie premise he wanted my help developing: something about Earth scientists receiving a signal from outer space (this was years before Contact). I tried to get excited about the idea, but eventually I had to look Mr. Spock in the ear and say, “This isn’t going anywhere.”

About six years ago, I noticed that a very minor Star Trek Voyager character sported the name “James Morrow”. In a subsequent e-mail, Brannon Braga revealed that he had indeed named the character after me, that he admired my first two novels, and, hey, why don’t I pitch him a Voyager storyline or two? I sent Mr. Braga a couple of treatments, but they were hardly my best work, and nothing came of it.

A couple of years ago, Dark Horse Comics invited me to write a novel centered on the Universal Studios monster of my choice. I picked the Bride of Frankenstein, then sent them a treatment. Once again my heart wasn’t in the project, and I allowed the negotiations to disintegrate.

Please believe me, I keep trying to become a hack. But it never seems to work out.

DM: What novel by another author - in any genre - do you wish you'd written?
JM: I wish that, instead of “Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov,” the cover of my favorite novel read “Lolita by James Morrow.” The writing is drop-dead gorgeous, Humbert Humbert is an amazingly complex monster, and the subject is transcendently transgressive.

DM: Our sources tell us you are editing a sci-fi anthology featuring international talent. Can you give us a sneak peak at its contents?
JM: My wife Kathy and I have been working on this project for four years, and it’s finally coming together. Using a grant from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, we have liberated sixteen “contemporary classics” of European science fiction into the English language. From Denmark comes Bernhard Ribbeck’s “A Blue and Cloudless Sky,” a time-travel story unlike any you have ever read. Our Polish selection, “Yoo Retoont, Sneogg,” takes the reader into an amazing community of post-holocaust mutants. Our Finnish writer, Johanna Sinisalo, contributed “Baby Doll”, set in a near-future dystopia where consumer culture has destroyed the concept of childhood. We’ve got equally provocative visions from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, and the Czech Republic. The tentative title is SFWA European Hall of Fame, and Tor Books will publish it in the spring of 2007.

DM: You've recently completed your next novel. Tell us about it, and when we might be able to get our grubby little hands on it in bookstores.
JM: Prometheus Wept is ostensibly about genetic engineering, but it’s real subject is the mystery of morality. A failed philosophy student, Mason Ambrose, gets hired to install a conscience in Londa Sabacthani, a young woman whose mind, owing to her cloned condition, is a tabula rasa. The baroque plot also concerns Londa’s egomaniacal mother (she has made three recombinant-DNA duplicates of herself), hordes of militant fetuses, and an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the demons that doomed R.M.S. Titanic. I describe it as a cross between Frankenstein and Lolita. It won’t be in bookstores for at least two years, I’d say.

DM: Are there any new/up and coming sci-fi authors you are really excited about?
JM: My fiction-reading of late has been focused on other novels that, like Prometheus Wept, use the Frankenstein myth in an oblique fashion.

I’m halfway through Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, in which academics devise a computer program sophisticated enough to write literary criticism. And I recently finished a more obscure book, Harry Mulisch’s The Procedure. One plot thread concerns Rabbi’s Löw’s efforts to bring the Golem to life in 16th-century Prague. Mulisch cleverly counterpoints the Man of Clay legend with the aftermath of a contemporary Dutch scientist’s success in wringing life from the same substance.

The Golem also figures in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a moving, complex, and non-condescending epic about the early days of superhero comic books. Not for nothing is one of the main characters named Clay.

DM: We’ve already established that you attended Penn. The other minor institution you attended that DM readers might have heard of is called Harvard. When the two play each other, who do you root for?
JM: You must understand that I’m one of those introverted, reclusive types who spends his day in a garret composing fiction. I don’t have cable television. I don’t keep up with the culture. Might I surmise that you are alluding to an athletic competition of some sort?