Daniel Quinn You mean
the book?
Rob Kall: Yes.
Daniel Quinn One of the great puzzles that people have is that
when they tell someone about the book, they say "Well, what's it about?"
(laughs), and that's really a difficult one.
What people have told me is that it changed their life. Yeah, I've heard this a thousand times, I'm
not making it up. And they thank me for
showing them that they're not crazy, because the people around them have been
telling them for years that they're crazy.
Some people thank me for giving them hope, because it is a message that
has a kernel of hope when I think hope is very desperately needed.
Rob Kall: Well, you wrote the book, and it won Ted Turner's Tomorrow Fellowship Award, and the funny thing is, I remember ripping the ad announcing the contest out of the New York Times. I've had some fantasies of being a Science Fiction writer at different times in my life; I've never really done it, but then the next thing I know, you won that award.
Part of the requirements of that award was that it
be a hopeful vision of the future. Did
you write it thinking, "I'm going to write this for this contest," or -- how did
it come about that you wrote it?
Daniel Quinn It began
twelve years before that. I knew I had
something to write, and that was desperately important. 'Important' means "What I was born to
write." And I wrote a book; it wasn't
what I wanted, and I wrote another one -- call it 'versions.' Over the next twelve years, I wrote eight
versions, each one striving to be the book that I wanted it to be, and I left
behind all seven of them. The eighth one
was Ishmael.
Ishmael was the first
one that had a telepathic gorilla in it.
All of the others were different.
Oh, yeah -- about the Turner Tomorrow Award: that was definitely a nudge
in a direction that I hadn't had before.
My wife had been telling me for years that I should write it as a novel,
and I'd resisted that, thinking that people wouldn't take it seriously if I
wrote it as a novel. But the Turner
Tomorrow Award was looking for a book that described my book very well. So I wrote it for the first time as a novel,
and that's when Ishmael was born.
Rob Kall: Did you
have contact with Ted Turner in response to this book?
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