Claw! / FAQ
F.A.Q.
Who are you?
Chris Lawson
Tell me about yourself.
I'm a writer.
I mean, describe yourself.
According to my inbox:
I need life insurance. I need a low-interest home loan. I need a 17% dividend. I need $2000 a week working from home. I need urgent refinancing. I have friends in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa who would like to help. I need to lose weight. I need to gain muscle mass. I need HGH. I need Xanax. I need Viagra. I need Ativan. I need Diazepam. I don’t need a prescription. I can quit smoking in two weeks. I can quit smoking TODAY! I want cheap DVDs. I want cheap cable. I want cheap golf clubs. I need non-slip grip pads. I need a child support detective. I need cheap inkjet cartridges. I need to CHECK IT OUT! I can find secrets on the internet. I am being watched. One form is ALL IT TAKES! I blocked your email. I blocked your ICQ. I lost your MSN. I still can’t find it. I missed the meeting. I can’t believe I forgot. Please respond! I want a foreign bride. I am just the sort of man she’s looking for. Divorced, horny, and looking for revenge. I need a bigger penis. I need bigger breasts. I need to satisfy my woman. I need a university diploma. I need a better spam filter.
What do you look like?
Vaguely like this.
Why don't you put up any real photos of yourself?
It has come to my attention that even if 0.1 percent of the population has a deranged worldview, that's 20,000 subcerebrates in Australia alone. And every one of them seems to be online. If you want to see what I'm really like, then come to a convention.
Is this really an FAQ page?
Actually, I'm just guessing what you might want to know.
Where can I buy your stories?
Check out the bibliography page. It lists every publication I am aware of, including some that are available free on-line.
When did you start writing?
When I was eight years old I wrote the primary-school War and Peace: an eight-page story with aliens, a motorbike chase sequence, and (according to memory) lots of mud. I decided then I wanted to write stories. What was your first published story?
"MetaCarcinoma" in Eidolon in 1992.
What is your latest story?
Check out the bibliography.
What is your best story?
I guess most people would point you to "Written in Blood" or "Unborn Again". I have reasons for liking everything I've published, but some of those reasons are personal and won't necessarily translate into your enjoyment.
Have you written a book?
Bill Congreve of MirrorDanse Books published a collection of my short stories and a few essays called, naturally enough, Written in Blood. I am working on my first novel.
Where can I get a copy of Written in Blood?
MirrorDanse Books is small press, so you won't find it on the shelves of your local chainstore. You can buy it from local specialty SF bookshops such as Slow Glass Books in Melbourne (they even have some signed copies) or Galaxy in Sydney. Or you can buy direct from the publisher here. What's the novel about?
It's called Proof of Concept and it's about a smallpox outbreak in Cairns, viral lifecycles, personal identity, anger, terrorism, insect societies, information theory, and human rights failure in Africa.
Isn't that too much to squeeze into one novel?
I'll answer that as soon as I finish wrestling the secondary characters and reverse engineering the plot...
I heard you were writing a novel set on a spacecraft.
I was working on a short story set on a spacecraft, and made the mistake of saying so when the French magazine Galaxies asked me for a quick bio. That story is on the back burner pending conceptual difficulties. I have plans to write a novel on a relativistic spacecraft, but that would be about the fourth on my list of potential novels. I heard you were writing a dinosaur time travel novel.
I was, but Michael Swanwick wrote a very good dinosaur time travel novel in 2002 called Bones of the Earth and it had a number of similar themes (although a very different plot and central idea). I didn't want to write a book in Michael Swanwick's wake. At the same time that I heard about Swanwick's book, I also discovered that one of the "speculative" concepts I had been mulling over for Proof of Concept had been published in the scientific literature. When I looked around, I realised that a lot of the things I was planning for my smallpox book were either coming true or just around the corner, so I'd better get that book nailed down first.
Why do you want to write a dinosaur time travel book? Hasn't that been done to death?
There's always a new way to use an old concept. Michael Swanwick, for instance, wrote Bones of the Earth to explore of the place of humanity in the universe. My interest is in playing with evolutionary theory. With dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs.
What do you think of collaborating?
I love it. I worked with Simon Brown on a story called "No Man's Land" that we both enjoyed so much that we decided to write another few stories with the same motif.
If you like collaborating, I've got this great idea for a story...
Stop right there! I collaborated with Simon because I knew him well and respected him as a writer and knew we were in sympatico. I had an image in my head that I couldn't turn into a story and Simon came up with the thrust of the story. That is, I needed to collaborate on that story; I couldn't have done it myself. I don't want to pick up random collaborations from other people who are having trouble turning ideas into stories. I can't even get through the stories I want to write by myself, let alone stories that other people want to write. If you really need someone to collaborate with, choose someone you know well. If you don't know any writers well, then join a writing group or come to some conventions.
What are all those images on your home page?
This is Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein. Judging by its impact on popular imagery, Bride could be the most influential movie of all time. You should see this movie and then catch Gods and Monsters, a flawed but touching film about James Whale, the director of Bride.
This is detail of a painting/collage that Shaun Tan made to illustrate "Matthew 24:36" for Eidolon On-Line. It's a great piece of art. Shaun has a number of superb books in print. They are nominally children's books, but don't be fooled by the marketing niche. You should look at The Rabbits, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree first.
This is a mock-up of a letter from Stalinist Russia and another from Nazi Germany with their respective rhetorical leaders at loggerheads. I had originally planned to substitute Lenin and Hitler's heads for loudhailers, but it looked stupid. The Lenin stamp and the Sputnik stamp are real stamps.
The Hitler stamp is real, but reversed for dramatic purposes. The cropped stamp next to Hitler of the Nazi cadets is not a stamp. It is an old propaganda poster showing two slim, muscular, clean-shaven Aryan youths who been digging (perhaps a mass grave). Despite their pretensions to physical exertion, there is not a drop of sweat to be seen, their trousers are clean and pressed, and their caps are fixed at such a jaunty angle that they must have been nailed on. Meanwhile, our post-adolescent friends look towards each other while avoiding eye contact so they can keep up the appearance of gazing sternly into the distance and by implication the future. Hmm... Igor? Remind me. What's the Deutsche word for subtext again?
You will have to figure this one out for yourself. It is The Claw's policy to neither confirm nor deny...
This is a fistful of crisp new twenties. And it's US currency. Forget tech futures and high-geared real estate loans, writing is the easy path to wealth and fame!
This is Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel cieling depicting the creation of Adam by God, with a couple of cupids looking over his shoulder as if thinking, "Our Lord made Adam darn buffed, but what's that pathetic little slug of an appendage?"
What is the Frankenstein Journal about?
When I started it, the Frankenblog was meant to be a treasure trove of interesting scientific stories. After a while I realised that (i) there were plenty of established sites with big budgets and professional reporters providing this service, and (ii) I was more interested in editorialising, reviewing films, writing parodies, responding to reviews, and generally doing whatever the heck I want. So it's not really about anything except whatever mental baubles take my fancy.
Why do you call the Frankenstein Journal "an irregular pseudoblog for both cultures"? "Irregular" because I don't do it every day. "Pseudoblog" because it's not fully interactive like a proper blog. "Both cultures" because of C.P. Snow.
Who are all those other people who write material for the Frankenblog?
Ask the Internet Anagram Server.
Do you really think the universe is a disturbing place?
The universe is a disturbing place if you approach it from the perspective of a rigid ideology. What we know about the universe has a terrible habit of changing, and not along party lines. One of the biggest causes of the anti-modernism around the world (including in "modern" societies) is the wholesale destruction of cherished fallacies under the influence of modern science and philosophy. Psychologist Leon Festinger invented the term "cognitive dissonance" in 1957 to describe the process of becoming even more devoted to a cherished belief when confronted with contradictory evidence. It is a normal human trait. We all do it to varying degrees. Because we all do it, and because our understanding of the universe changes constantly, it follows that we all find the universe disturbing -- and I'd hazard a wager that the few people who don't find the universe even a little disturbing are those whose cognitive dissonance is so powerful that they are quite literally incapable of acknowledging contrary evidence.
Are you really a doctor?
Yes.
I have this pain in my nostrils whenever I face east with a cup of spaghetti in my left sock. What could it be?
It's probably a lethal disease. It usually is.
Why can't I think of any more questions?
There are many known causes of dementia.
Last updated 2 May 2004
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