Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.
Recently, we talked to Dana W. Paxson about his writing and recently released book, Descending Road and its World, a sweeping novel that provides a profound and often unsettling exploration of societal norms, power dynamics, and human nature. (Read the review here).
Dana Paxson writes science fiction and fantasy. His stories were published in Science Fiction Age magazine and in Scorpius Digital Publishing’s online venue. His book “Brain Wrecks” offers readers the best of his tales.
Dana is digital. He wrote assembly-language code for second-generation mainframes, with punched cards, big tape servos, and big cold computer rooms, where each bit of memory was a magnetic donut on wires. He’s worked his way through all the generations of computers. He speaks their languages. He holds five patents in e-book innovations, and shares his ideas freely.
Some stories in “Brain Wrecks” take place in the world of Dana’s science fiction novel “Descending Road”. The novel kicked off his textual, programming, and graphic design work, in electronic publishing and also in virtual worlds Second Life and Kitely. The novel is up on his Website, it’s up for sale online, and he shows interactive settings from the novel in his Kitely virtual world of TarnusCity.
Dana is writing a book on the harmony of science and religion. He is a member of the Baha’i Faith. He writes essays on its themes, topics, and connections with science and society. He’s got a book of those too. He writes hope.
Dana holds an M.A. and a B.A. in mathematics from SUNY, and a B.S. in Design (art) from the University of Michigan. He taught online courses on Cubism, on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and on how to think like a Leonardo da Vinci. He’s a Hobbit person.
He has worked as a patent clerk. He studies mathematics, medieval and modern poetry, astrophysics, molecular neurobiology, genetic engineering, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cryptology, and a few languages. He has acted, sung, and danced in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and he has created and shown abstract-constructionist works of art. Boredom is not in his repertoire.
Dana and his wife Fran live in Irondequoit, New York, next door to Rochester. They’ve been happy here for 27 years. He loves the quiet, the greenery, and the gardens, and the easy paths to Lake Ontario, to the Genesee River, and to Irondequoit Bay. He embraces happily the amazing varieties of people and pizza.
Website: https://danapaxsonstudio.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dwpaxson (personal)
What does literary success look like to you?
I’ll feel successful in the literary world when readers of my work come awake with hope, possibility, knowledge, and the hunger to make the world better.
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
Writing is my life. It vitalizes me even when it tires me – my body works to keep up with my thoughts and feelings – and fingers.
Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?
I have no idea what readers want. I write stories, poems, lyrics, novels, specifications, novelties, mottos, graffiti. Readers can always choose what they like and don’t like, and readers change those things as they grow. If my work doesn’t fit publishing genres very well, that’s just the way it is.
Have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction?
Everything I’ve ever read has changed the way I think about fiction. The biggest jump came from immersion for years in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. He broke most of the rules for fiction writing in his time, revitalized and transformed medieval storytelling into a whole new genre, created and played with language itself, and weathered modern criticism to produce a global classic. That was one big jump that changed my thinking.
I got teased into reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It woke up in me the possibilities for unlimited play of language.
When I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the social and fantastic dimensions of writing opened doors for me.
There’s a lot more, but these examples give an idea.
Were your parents interested in literature? Did they read a lot? What books did you have in the house?
My mother read to me before I went to school. We had a lot of kid books in the house, a lot of art books, and a lot of adult literature. My favorite childhood book was Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand the Bull. I read all the Oz books. I was reading like an adult even in my early grades. My grandma’s Bible gave me a lot of wonder and language beauty (I learned to read the King James Version well before I was a teenager.)
What in particular attracted you to this genre?
What genre? I don’t believe in genres. They’re for shelving and selling, not for writing and editing. To twist an old military saying. “Write ‘em all. Let the publisher sort ‘em all out.”
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a writer?
Biggest challenge? Believing enough in my writing to ignore pressures to change it to fit the expectations of those with motives of their own.
Is there anything you want to unlearn?
There is no such thing as unlearning. There is only learning better.
Tell us some more about your book.
“Descending Road and its World” wraps itself around our thirst for justice, hope, and peace. That is a big wrapper. It confronts us with ourselves: Do we engineer deracinated subhumans to serve us? Do we submerge ourselves in the violent temptations of supremacy? Do we enslave and exile and extinguish whole communities to maintain our power? Do we poison our lands and drive out or murder their custodians? Do we conjure and deploy destructive weapons to set communities warring against each other? Do we breed generations of cast-off savages living forgotten at our fringes like vermin?
Yes, we do. We do all these things, here, now, in our own real world; we have done them for a long time; and with science unbridled by moral force we may well continue to do them. The cries of rage and longing and grieving we read and hear every day need more power, more impact, more uplift for us all.
“Descending Road and its World ” isn’t simply science fiction. It is a sweeping and damning social critique, set in a world removed from our own but all too familiar. It shares this terrain with epic works such as those of George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, and even Dante Alighieri. It’s a feast of cultures, science, romance, war, tragedy, and victory.
As we reach its conclusion, “Descending Road and its World” gives us an emergence of hope, of good potentials, of reconciliation, justice, harmony, grieving, and healing. All of the harrowing tales woven into it move to a full and satisfying completion, just as when Vergil and Dante emerge from the Inferno and see at last the stars.
How many rewrites did you do for this book?
I’ve lost count of the rewrites. Thirty years is a long time.
Tell us a little about how this story first came to be. Did it start with an image, a voice, a concept, a dilemma or something else?
It started with a desperate character in an underground city looking for revenge. He was eating a burger and watching cops pull dead bodies from a hole in the wall.
How do you come up with names for your characters?
I don’t know. They just appear in my head. Sometimes I change them to tweak associations with other things in the story.
Which character was most challenging to create? Why?
The magnate Arlen in “Descending Road” acted in ways so evil that I recoiled from what I wrote about him. I had to do some lightening up of his parts of the story. I realized that such ways lie buried in every one of us, but we learn very early on that they must be rechanneled into good acts.
What’s next for you?
Coming up are the following projects:
Other lesser projects – I do many things in parallel.
A novel, “The Cold Romance of Sleep”, telling the tale of how humans reached the world of “Descending Road.”
A narrative nonfiction work titled “Out of Plato’s Cave”, telling the story of a traumatized soul’s dream voyage of science and spirit.
A narrative nonfiction work titled “Vagabond Mind”, narrating the experience of an inventor.
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