Stanley Lieber writes some weird stuff. Equal parts Henry Miller, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, and cheap military paperbacks, his work defies easy classification–but who would want to classify something about time-traveling drug dealers, cultist comic book writers, and scam-artist child prodigies?
A fellow enthusiast of the weird turned me on to his twitter feed as a font of intermingled fact and fiction, and in a matter of DAYS after reading his tweets I’d bought and started reading his novel, 1OCT1993.
It did not disappoint. After I finished reading, I approached Stanley about doing a Q&A on his novel, and he was kind enough to oblige, responding in a mishmash of words, images, and electronic sound:
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Let’s start with the basics. 1OCT1993 is, I think, a novel about military and espionage operations in an alternate future/past. (I started to call it “science fiction” but that always-reductive term seems especially reductive here.) Can you summarize in a sentence or two how you see your work?
Stanley Lieber:
More like science fact! An early reader referred to the novel as “bureaucracy punk.” It sounds better than “L. Ron Hubbard with comic book characters created in the second grade.” Both are reasonably accurate.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
About these being comic book characters–it occurred to me, as I was reading, that it’d be a lot easier to follow the action if I were reading a comic book–you eschew a lot of scene-setting in favor of dialogue and action, but in a comic book the setting can be conveyed non-verbally, simultaneous with the narrative itself. Did you consider doing a comic book version of 1OCT1993?
Stanley Lieber:
I’ve continued using these characters in both prose and comics during the interim period between the second grade and the second decade of the twenty-first century. Some recent examples:
comics:
The Abandonment of Cruelty
ACTRON (242)
Ensign Smurf
prose:
Crash Origin
Reverse Crime
Mars 2
It’s unlikely there will ever be a direct comics adaptation of any specific chapter of 1OCT1993, but both the prose and the comics take place in what amounts to the same continuity, and some stories are continued in different media than where they began.
Information about my comics work in general is aggregated at massivefictions.com, while prose work is aggregated at 1oct1993.com and textadventure.stanleylieber.com.
As for scene-setting, I’ve noticed that I tend to let the reader draw inferences.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
That’s some truly prodigious intertextuality (“massive fictions,” indeed!) I did get the feeling, with characters like Piro, that here was some narrative close to the author–almost like I was being let in on a kind of private joke (which impression was probably not hindered by the well-baffling medias in res nature of the storytelling). Other characters, though, felt like they had very real-world antecedents–I’m thinking particularly of Albert Lunsford.
I’m going to go out on a limb here: is Lunsford inspired, at least in part, by Dave Sim?
Stanley Lieber:
Yes.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Does Dave know he makes an appearance in 1OCT1993?
Stanley Lieber:
Dave Sim doesn’t make an appearance in 1OCT1993. Albert Lunsford’s character is certainly informed by my experience with Dave, but he’s not Dave.
But, to answer your question, no, I didn’t send Dave a copy of the book. We had carried out an extended correspondence during 2003-2004. Twenty-page letters. I stopped writing to him when he told me I was possessed by demons and started addressing YHWH (“the adversary”) directly in his responses to my letters (some of those responses were eventually published in his book, COLLECTED LETTERS 2004). I told him I didn’t appreciate it and that I didn’t see much reason to keep writing to him if he was just going to use my text as raw material in the conversation he was having with himself. He declined to change his approach, so I moved on.
In 2008, Dave started a new bi-monthly comic called GLAMOURPUSS. I wrote him a short note of encouragement, no hard feelings, and sent him copies of the new comics I had been working on since the last time we had corresponded.
This is the form letter I received in reply.
Yeah, I’d heard about those letters but hadn’t actually read one in full until now. I’m sort of mesmerized by how clearly methodical it is while simultaneously managing to sound completely off-kilter.
Rimbaud, Lunsford’s… foil? is another character that, while not part of the core family-unit of the book (unless I’m missing something) is depicted with a level of crafted detail similar to Lunsford’s. Is he informed by anybody you’ve known? (I suppose the sort of obvious question would be to ask if he’s in any way based on Arthur Rimbaud, the prodigious surrealist poet?)
Stanley Lieber:
No relation to the poet, except that they’re both writers.
The chapter titled SELECTION was dedicated to Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy when it was originally written, circa 2005, but the character of Rimbaud is not really based upon any living or unliving person. I would say he’s more of a generic stand-in for writers everywhere, in every time period. For obvious reasons, much detail readily suggests itself.
I haven’t decided yet whether Rimbaud will figure into the new novel.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Using known names as stand-ins for archetypes seems to be a recurrent theme–on p. 152 of 1OCT1993, you have this long digression on the name “Mozart” and how it’s used to generically reference anybody with certain qualities (genius, or specifically genius mixed with a puerile attitude that may or may not have actually been displayed by Mozart himself). You even go so far as to say that names like “Mozart” are “employed as symbols of narratives larger than the mere facts of their corporeal existence … [rendering] any deeper investigation into the men themselves … an unnecessary digression at best.” How does this mesh with your own decision to use the name “Stanley Lieber”?
Stanley Lieber:
Does it mesh? I receive a fair amount of mail requesting information about Stan Lee, asking me if I am Stan Lee, asking me if I am Stan Lee’s son, asking me if I will evaluate a comics portfolio, asking me what various celebrities are like in real life. I’ve also been accused of intentionally sewing confusion so that I might profit from some perceived association with Stan and Marvel Comics. It seems unlikely to me that the real Stan Lee would conduct himself the way I do on the Internet, but I’ve never known people (the generic “you”) to be at all interested in evaluating ideas prior to committing to them as beliefs. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll answer and I’ll become rich and famous and people will envy me.” Maybe Stan Lee really does curse on twitter and write novels about the President receiving cunnilingus from an unsympathetic protagonist.
I think the “Mozart” example is indicative of how language congeals from clear analogies into seeming gibberish, completely detached from etymology. Perhaps someday people will use the word “mozart” without even knowing that a man named Mozart ever existed. Perhaps then some child will stare off into space, repeating the syllables to themselves over and over, wondering what in the world could be the origin of such a strange sounding word. Then their teacher will snatch the unauthorized reading material from their desk and mete out the appropriate punishment for failing to pay attention in class.
It’s like I always say, “I’m not really Stanley Lieber.”
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
I’m sufficiently ignorant of Marvel comics that, while the name Stanley Lieber rung a bell for me, I initially confused you with Fritz Leiber, which has its own nice set of recontextualized associations.
While it’s very difficult to imagine anyone coming across massivefictions.com or stanleylieber.com and actually thinking that that content originated with Stan Lee, authors do occasionally use–and profit by–appropriating other, more famous names in a sort of memetic SEO (I’m thinking of things like Tao Lin titling his most recent novel Richard Yates, despite the fact that the book had ostensibly little to do with Yates.) So why did you pick Stanley Lieber–or to put it another way, is your use a homage or a subversion?
Stanley Lieber:
Stan Lee is sort of famous for being a credit hog. At various times his face has appeared alongside news stories that conspicuously omitted the contributions of his collaborators. He presided over Marvel Comics during an era when original artwork was not returned to artists, and when generally speaking the creative staff did not participate in the profits of licensing and merchandising.
At various times over the years Stan has told a story about how he changed his name when he started working in comics because he still harbored a dream of becoming a famous novelist, and he was a bit embarrassed about working in comics, and he wanted to save his real name for his real career. That was more than seventy years ago.
Around 1998, I decided to adopt Stan’s real name as a pseudonym.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
All true–so why do you think people still love him? He’s still “relevant” in the sense that people, even new readers, turn into fanboys of him nearly as much as they do with regard to his characters.
Stanley Lieber:
I’ve not seen much evidence that people love other people for sensible reasons.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Well no. Certainly the affinity held by the families of 1OCT1993, Mold and otherwise, don’t always seem to have clearly-defined motives (although you do go a bit into themes of self-preservation).
I think politics is driven a lot by irrational love (of a candidate, of a cause, etc.) To what extent is 1OCT1993 a political novel? You certainly deal in political themes and content, but is there a stance the reader is supposed to come away with?
Stanley Lieber:
On the one hand you have a family of sentient slime molds bent on propagating their half-remembered family legacy and on the other hand you have a family of career spooks with an almost pathological disinterest in their own backstory. The plot of this particular novel encompasses a number of points where the two families’ histories intersect. Because of the nature of their activities, this necessarily vectors into politics.
Certainly, in the book, I’m not advocating for any individual viewpoint. If anything, the intent is to depict the lack of certainty the characters must endure. Depending on the reader, this may seem evasive or it may seem to reflect reality as they know it.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Wait, I thought the Molds were just some guys who’d figured out digital-brain uploading. They’re literally slime molds?
Stanley Lieber:
We don’t really know what they are.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Okay, good then, I feel better about being confused by them.
One last thing I wanted to ask you about–on p. 161, you have this (really stunning) first-person account of a child who hears voices telling him that he is, or has the potential to become, the Anti-Christ. The passage, to me, seemed to have antecedents in Lavengro, or maybe John Bunyan, but given the semi-obscure biblical references you wield elsewhere in 1OCT1993, and the narratives of early-childhood religious upbringing in your comics, and, finally, the fact that the passage rang so true–I have to ask: where were you coming from with that?
Stanley Lieber:
Thomas started out as a child prodigy and ended up as a super-powered smart ass who couldn’t see past the end of his visor. He didn’t so much make peace with the unexplained sensory input as he simply learned to swallow it. Consciousness remained non-consensual, but mostly manageable. In any case, he had more immediate problems to worry about. Namely, the vast amounts of cocaine hurtling towards his present from the end of time. This concern fit with a common narrative that seemed to resonate with his circumstances. Still, it’s far from clear that he viewed his early experiences as an anomaly.
Also, consider his mother.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Indeed. A family upbringing like that is bound to wreak havoc on anybody.
You mentioned earlier that you’re working on a new novel. Before we close, would you care to give our readers a hint at what it’ll be like?
Stanley Lieber:
I didn’t take much of a break after completing 1OCT1993. Immediately launched a series called TEXT ADVENTURE that serialized a sort of lateral prequel/sequel to the first novel. The first several issues of this became ’CRASH ORIGIN.’
After that I detoured into a short story featuring many of the same characters, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and President Obama: REVERSE CRIME.
Finally, the first third of the new novel was collected earlier this year in a volume called MARS2.
It’s another book featuring the same characters, though this time it’s far more linear in execution. We explore some of TAB1 and Piro’s background during their salad days with the pre-war special operations community. Also, Piro’s mother. Also, Piro’s father. Product development on the planet Mars. Some stuff about human trafficking through the basements of corrupt senior citizens.
The new book probably won’t be finished for a couple of years, but, as always, chapters are regularly published at http://textadventure.stanleylieber.com.
Thanks for this opportunity to talk about the books. And thanks for reading.
Caleb Hildenbrandt:
Thank you, Stanley. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
EOF
Previously:
Early Lief: A Conversation with Steve Roggenbuck
Nothing Seems Definite So Far: An Interview with Stephanie Cook
