Jack Dann

Jack Dann.

Jack Dann (born 15 February 1945) is an American science fiction writer living in Australia.

Life and Career

Earlier Life

Jack Dann was born in New York State in 1945 and grew up in Johnson City, New York. His father was an attorney and practiced as a Judge. Dann describes himself as having been "a troublesome child in a very small town" and in his teens associated with a local gang of youths. Following an incident during which gang members let off fireworks leading to injuries, he was enrolled in a military academy where he remained for two years.

Subsequently he commenced theatre studies in New York City, however in 1965 contracted peritonitis after a poorly performed operation for appendicitis. He was considered unlikely to survive by his doctors, and spent four months recovering in hospital, sharing a ward with members of the Mafia, who had been injured in a gun battle. Dann attributes a major change in outlook to his survival, and began a search for a fulfilling and meaningful vocation, which eventually lead to a shift from acting to writing.

Following discharge from hospital, Dann moved to Binghamton, New York where he completed his studies and was awarded a BA in 1968, and where he remained for much of the next 30 years, although he also spent considerable time outside of the US during this period, including three years in Malaysia.

In the late 60s, Dann encountered a number of now well known writers and editors, including George Zebrowski, Pamela Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Jack Haldeman and Joe Haldeman, two of whom, Zebrowski and Sargent, also lived in Binghamton. Dann was soon collaborating with Zebrowski, "sitting on opposite sides of a table in his dining room and writing on old manual typewriter" and in 1970 sold two of these collaborations, "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps," to the magazine Worlds of If.

Initially he combined continued sales of his stories with work as a salesman, which began after a commission for his first novel, Starhiker, was not honoured by his prospective publisher and he had accrued considerable debt in anticipation of receiving payment for the piece. At the time he had started a family and had recently purchased a house. While continuing his writing, he moved on from door-to-door sales to a highly successful career as a businessman, starting companies in the advertising and insurance sectors, among others. He became a Member of the Board of Directors of the National Home Life Assurance Company, and Principal Partner of Aultman Robertson and Assocs, a public relations and advertising firm during the early 1970s.

He was married to editor and writer Jeanne Van Buren from 1983 to 1994, with whom he had a daughter.

Move to Australia

From 1993, Dann became a part-time resident of Australia and moved to Melbourne in 1994 to join Janeen Webb, a Melbourne science fiction critic, academic and writer, whom he met at a conference in San Fransisco and married in 1995. He has since collaborated with Webb on a number of writing and editing projects and the couple are well known in Australian, and particularly Melbourne speculative fiction culture.

Dann currently lives on a farm overlooking the sea in the Gippsland region of Victoria, but also typically spends some period of each year in Los Angeles and New York.

Writing Career

Dann has written or edited over seventy books, in the majority of cases functioning as editor or co-editor, but he has also published several novels, novellas, numerous short stories, essays and poetry. His books have been translated into thirteen languages.

Short Stories

His short stories have appeared in Omni and Playboy and other major magazines and anthologies and have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. .

Novels

• Starhiker (1977)

• Junction (1981)

• The Man Who Melted (1984)

Robert Silverberg provided an introduction to this Science Fiction novel, which also has definitive elements of Cyberpunk. The narrative is set in the 21st Century, and presents a post-apocalyptic world, in which telepathic shock waves - an outbreak of collective fear from the unconscious of millions - have led to widespread destruction and the reduction of many human beings to inhuman "screamers." The protagonist searches through this shattered world for his wife, whose absence from his life he is aware of, but whose actual presence in his memories has been erased by the "Great Scream." The novel also imagines a future where unfamiliar forms of consciousness, forged by a new telepathic reality created by the "Great Scream," have altered the nature of humanity and questionable moral practices have become common, including the commercial availability of suicide in scenarios such as a reenactment of the sinking of the Titanic and the option of gambling with one’s organs. It is notable for extrapolations such as a precocious vision of the world wide web which may seem familiar to contemporary readers, but was not a reality at the time of publication.

It was nominated for best novel in the 1985 Nebula Award, and Best Science Fiction Novel in the 1985 Locus Award.

• High Steel (1993) with Jack C. Haldeman, II

Set in a 22nd-century Earth overshadowed by mega-corporations, the novel follows John Stranger, a Native American who is forced from his reservation home by the Trans-United company to work in orbital space construction. Stranger’s shamanistic skills become prized by his employer to assist in a race against rival companies to decode an alien transmission containing blueprints for a faster-than-light space drive.

• The Memory Cathedral (1995)

Dann's major historical novel depicts a version of the Renaissance in which Leonardo da Vinci actually constructs a number of his inventions, such as a flying machine, whose designs are well-known from his surviving sketches, and later employs them during a battle in the Middle East, while in the service of a Syrian potentate - events which Dann projects into a year of da Vinci's life about which little is known. The novel also presents a detailed imagining of the life and character of the inventor and painter during this period, and includes his encounters with other historical characters residing in Florence including Machiavelli and Botticelli. The title refers to an ancient system of memory recall, or Mnemonics, in which a building, such as cathedral, is imagined and objects are placed mentally within its structure to assist in later recall of associated memories. It is used in the narrative as a device through which da Vinci, nearing the end of his life, reviews his experiences.

It was first published by Bantam Books in December 1995 to positive reviews.,Vorlage:Fact and has been published in ten languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award in 1997, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and in 1996, a novella based on the novel, "Da Vinci Rising," was awarded the Nebula Award for Best Novella. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the 1998 Braille & Talking Book Library Awards.

• The Silent (1998)

Dann’s second historical novel adopts a first person perspective, and the form of a journal produced by Edmund “Mundy” McDowell, a teenager in 1862 during the American Civil War, who writes as a form of therapeutic reflection in adulthood. After his home is razed, and his mother raped and murdered by Union looters, he embarks upon a journey across wartime Virginia. The trauma of his experiences has rendered him mute, hence the title of the piece, and also colours his journey - which depicts the battlefield horrors of the American Civil War and its impact graphically - with delusions and hallucinations, including ghosts and an omnipresent spirit dog with symbolic resonances of the essence of warfare.

• Bad Medicine (2000)

Variant Title: Counting Coup (2000)

• The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean (2004)

Following on from the secret history and alternate history approach used in The Memory Cathedral and The Silent, The Rebel supposes a version of the 1950s in which the actor James Dean survived his car crash, and goes on to become a major star, film director and later Governor of California. As with The Memory Cathedral, the novel includes encounters with a number of other iconic figures of the period, including Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys and Elvis Presley.

This novel is published by HarperCollins Flamingo in Australia and Morrow in the U.S. Locus wrote: "The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann’s growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference." A companion volume, Promised Land, appeared from PS Publishing in 2007.

Collaborations

Since his initial collaborations with George Zebrowski, also forming his first published work, Jack Dann has undertaken joint fiction projects with a number of authors, including Susan Caspar, Gardner Dozois, Jack C. Haldeman II, Michael Swanwick and his wife, Janeen Webb. A number of these projects have received awards. Most collaborations have been in the short story form, but he has also written one novel with Jack C. Haldeman II, High Steel (1993). The majority of the book length publications with which he is associated are editorial collaborations.

Writing Technique, Style and Themes

Dann is known for his meticulous and extensive research of his subjects and the period in which they are set, which has been a salient feature of his alternative history novels such as The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean and The Silent. In the case of The Rebel, novel, he read over 100 books relating to the 1950s setting. In keeping with a traditional scholarly approach, he has expressed a preference for consulting original sources, wherever possible. He has also suggested that the antidote to ‘writer’s block’ is to conduct more research, either through academic channels, or through gathering and processing further life experiences.

He is an advocate of learning and developing writing technique in group situation where writers engage in intense work shopping of one another's pieces, and attributes much of his development as a writer to his participation these types of events.

Major Themes

• Memory
• Myth
• Psychological reality as magical reality
• The Holocaust
• Transformation

Genres

While Dann is primarily known as a science fiction writer, his work has spanned a broad spectrum of genres. Many of his novels, while often using tropes familiar to fantastic or speculative fiction, have real world or historical settings and do not include literal fantastic elements, rather they use fantastic elements to dramatise the inner landscape of his characters.

Work as an Editor and Anthologist

Jack Dann was editor of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Bulletin from 1970 to 1975.

His first published anthology was Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction (1974), collecting stories by Jewish Authors and/or relating to Jewish themes. It was one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970s, and was later followed by More Wandering Stars: Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction (1981). Dann has a Jewish background, and although affirming an affinity with the cultural aspects of this, has distanced himself from the theological aspects of Judaism.

His most extensive anthology project has been the multi-volume "Magic Tales" series, co-edited by Gardner Dozois. Across nearly 20 volumes, this series collected and republished short stories centering around a number of imaginative and speculative fiction themes, such as aliens, mermaids, dinosaurs, dragons, and clones. The "Magic Tales" series ended in 1995, but Dann and Dozois have continued in a similar vein with further themed anthologies.

In August 2003 he published Gathering the Bones, as co-editor with Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison, a collection of horror stories from the United Kingdom, The US and Australia, which was included in Library Journal's "Best Genre Fiction of 2003" and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award.

He has also published, as editor, two volumes of Australian speculative fiction, Dreaming Down Under and Dreaming Again, an anthology of Nebula Award winning stories, and a number of other anthologies, both singularly and in collaboration with others. He is a consulting editor for Tor Books.

Contribution to Australian Speculative Fiction Culture

Since his move to Australia, Dann has become a major influence and much respected figure in the speculative fiction field in Australia. He has frequently attended conferences and conventions, and has played an active role in encouraging the development of the field including running and contributing to workshops such as Clarion South.

Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy has called "the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia."Vorlage:Fact It has won Australia's Ditmar Award and is the first Australian book ever to win the prestigious World Fantasy Award.

More recently, Dann edited Dreaming Again, a second anthology of Australian fantasy and speculative fiction, which was released in Australia in July 2008.

Awards

• He is a recipient of the Nebula Award
  • 1997 for the novella "Da Vinci Rising"
• The Australian Aurealis Award
  • 1996 for the novel The Memory Cathedral
  • 1997 for the short story "Niagara Falling," with Janeen Dann
• The Ditmar Award
  • 1997 for "Niagara Falling"
  • 1999 for Dreaming-Down Under with Janeen Dann
  • 2002 for "The Diamond Pit"
• The World Fantasy Award
  • 1999 for Dreaming-Down Under with Janeen Dann
• The Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award
• 2008 - Dann was awarded the Peter McNamara Convenors' Award for Excellence in the 2008 Aurealis Awards

Dann has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). He has been shortlisted for major science fiction and fantasy awards on numerous occasions.

Reference Works

As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography & guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who's Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who's Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who's Who in the World.

'The Man Who Melted Jack Dann'

The Man Who Melted Jack Dann is the name of a word game inspired by Jack Dann's book The Man Who Melted (1984). The aim of the game is to place the writer's name in front or behind the title of one of the writer's book and see if you get a funny sentence. Extra credit is given for shifting a word's part of speech entirely, or appropriating part of the name as part of the sentence or phrase. For example Two Sisters Gore Vidal, The Joy of Cooking Irma S. Rombauer, Captain Blood Returns Raphael Sabatini, Flush Virginia Woolf, Paradise Lost John Milton, Clans of the Alphane Moon Philip K. Dick and Contact Carl Sagan.

References

• Leigh Blackmore, Ellison/Dowling/Dann: A Bibliographic Checklist (R'lyeh Texts, 1996).

External links

• Leigh Blackmore. "Time and Memory: An Interview with Jack Dann" at tabula-rasa.info
• Jack Dann Website
• Vorlage:Isfdb name