Venita Blackburn, whose debut novel 'Dead in Long Beach, California' spins sci-fi on its head, talks to fellow author Rita Bullwinkel.
deploys Blackburn’s signature, crystalline, time-bending sentences to heart-stopping, stay-up-all-night-reading effect. The narrator ofis a collective, non-human “we,” an imitation of human consciousness after all humans are gone and the material world is only a digital memory. The “we” of the book remembers everything and everyone that ever existed, including Coral, our witty, funny, obsessive, graphic-novelist protagonist who finds her brother, Jay, dead by suicide in his apartment.
BLACKBURN: I don’t think about genre like that, so I don’t approach any kind of work with one tone or angle as the goal. I have to have the voice that matters to me. But for this one, Ihave this intention of doing this sort of high fantasy sci-fi, speculative kind of world that was tethered to our current modern world in a way.
the gun at any moment, so it created that world. But also, it’s not that far away from how we live, right? BLACKBURN: It is an invention, and it’s a complicated invention. It’s the hammer, the light bulb, the gun, the concept of property. It’s just one of those things that we’ve made up and it sticks with us. Once you have it, you can’t let it go. And also, when a culture encounters another culture that does not have that, it’s about trying to convince each other that this is a better way of life. Of course, whoever has the most physical might will be the one that absorbs the other.
BULLWINKEL: That drive to the casino to meet Summer totally had heist energy to me. Another thing I’m dying to ask you about is how you understand narrative time. One of the things that I’ve always admired about your work is the way you dissolve and bend time back on itself and seem to compress it and expand it in this completely insane suspension-of-physics way. So I’m interested in your perspective on linear time.
BLACKBURN: I think we just probably don’t articulate it as much, but it’s definitely there. I would call this one kind of a love story on top of a grief story. There is that thing that happens to the body when you’re getting close to death—you reach for life, you reach for something that’s going to feel electric, and of course, sex is an obvious way of doing that. Expectations of grieving and the real thing are very different.
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