Joe Haldeman: The Book and Film Globe Interview

Some readers may think of the legendary Joe Haldeman as a writer concerned with space battles and the struggles of humans and aliens, thanks in part to his celebrated 1974 novel The Forever War. But in his vividly written novels and short stories, Haldeman gave free rein to an imagination that detected the potential for absurd, thrilling, yet utterly convincing scenarios on our planet and in our time. They are not “grounded in social reality.” Rather, they present the wildest iterations of a recognizable reality with total verisimilitude and remind us of the inanity of assigning so visionary a writer to this or that genre.

Following the global success of the film Oppenheimer, millions of people who never gave serious thought to the conundrums of life in the atomic age are now doing so. The famous line, “I am death, destroyer of worlds” might as easily belong to the sinister protagonist in Haldeman’s story “To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal,” who takes the moral dilemmas of living with weapons of mass destruction to a new level with an elaborate scheme to blackmail the nuclear-armed nations of the world into giving up their nukes with the threat of setting off some of the very weapons of which he wants to rid the world. In another story, “All the Universe in a Mason Jar,” an alien’s arrival helps expose the cynicism of a Florida community that quickly gets over its shock and comes to view the other species as the end users of a lucrative new supply chain.

Haldeman’s boldest achievement may be his 1990 novel The Hemingway Hoax, in which grifters in the Florida Keys try to steal their moment in the sun with claims to have discovered a lost manuscript of the canonical author who died by suicide in 1961. The faux Hemingway passages, which Haldeman presents in minute detail, right down to cross-out lines and marginalia, are at once outlandish and mimetic in their imitation of Papa’s style and tone. 

Book and Film Globe spoke with this deeply original writer about his cleverest novel, his experiences as a Hollywood scriptwriter, his thoughts on the recent strike, his literary influences, and more. 

One of your most remarkable books is The Hemingway Hoax. Is this a novel about the sheer preponderance of bad writing that discerning readers must navigate to get to the good stuff? Or about Hemingway imitators? Or is Hemingway himself an overrated fraud? 

 It’s usually hard to say what a novel is “about” without being reductive. The Hemingway Hoax is about many things on many levels—not least, it’s a satirical novel about the intersection of academia and professional writing. It’s also about literary hero-worship, and about sex and the single writer—and the married one, and various states in between.

Novels don’t have to be complex to be good, but, whether or not it is good The Hemingway Hoax is complex on various levels. It can be condemned or rejected on all those levels, too. It’s only meant to be an entertaining science fiction story. But people who dismiss Hemingway as an “overrated fraud” do have to explain a few hundred million satisfied readers. They can be dismissed as well, of course, but after too much of this, the dismisser may be himself judged.

 Back in the days when you worked for the studios, did you feel that they treated writers fairly?

Haldeman: I guess I was treated fairly—not cheated, at any rate. I did join the Writers Guild, which no doubt helped, especially with contracts. But Goliath doesn’t treat David “fairly.”

You said, in your 2006 Gainesville Sun interview, “I think it’s a good thing I wasn’t pulled more into Hollywood.” May I ask why?

Nothing mysterious or even very interesting. My talents lay elsewhere, so I went elsewhere. I suppose I might have been pulled into it if they offered me enough money, but they didn’t. A more complete answer would be that they did offer me plenty of money a couple of times, and I took it, and learned that it wasn’t really enough.

In retrospect, would you like to have written more screenplays?

No; I think I wrote enough screenplays—or possibly enough plus one or two. I’m a prose and poetry guy. A footnote might be that a person who’s a so-so writer but a good actor could probably write a better screenplay than me, at least from an actor’s point of view.

Speaking of fairness, a strike crippled film production for a good part of this year, and it was pretty bitter. Is it fair for writers in Hollywood to insist on better safeguards for their rights to “residuals”?

I’ll be a union man and say of course—writers are workers, and workers’ rights must be safeguarded, and they should get a decent wage for their work.

Could we talk about literary influences, and which writers you turned to most readily in your formative years? 

I was mostly influenced by the basic cadre of SF writers—Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Bester. Outside of the genre, I was influenced by Stevenson, Poe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald—a standard assortment.

Some of my teachers at the Iowa Writers Workshop were influential, especially Vance Bourjaily and Ray Carver. (John Cheever was there, but he was mostly a quiet figurehead.) Stephen King started writing about when I started, and he influenced everyone and everything.

By your own admission, some novels and stories in the sci-fi field are much more literate and worth reading than other work. Why is the genre so uneven?

In any genre from lyric poetry to hardboiled porn, there is a continuum of craft from miserable to expert. You may be seeing SF as uneven because you are privileged to see a large segment of it. If you had to read a lot of amateur lyric poetry, you might dismiss most of it—and possibly go mad!

As someone who has taught at MIT, do you ever encounter resistance or disdain, in the academic community, to what some continue to dismiss as the “ghetto” of sci-fi?

Of course. But their dismissal is evidence of ignorance. So what? We don’t have to please the “academic community.”

Has the field grown more politicized in the years since you started writing?

Science fiction overall doesn’t seem more politicized; the 1960s as an era, when I started, were pretty political in every way. The weird and horror fields may be more political now because they’re taken more seriously than they used to be.

Lovecraft, for obvious instance, seems more darkly relevant than he was fifty or more years ago. People may be more inclined to look beneath his surface weirdness.

 Are there any works of yours that you feel are particularly prescient with regard to AI’s emergence, or drones, or genetic research? 

Maybe Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered. The novelette I had in Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, “Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip (A Play in the Form of a Feelie Script)” might qualify.

Will The Forever War ever be brought to the screen? Or perhaps one of your other novels?  

Haldeman: We’re always hoping, but a movie becomes less likely with each passing year.  A few of my books, like Tool of the Trade, have virtues that I think could transfer to the screen, but I regret to say that it seems unlikely that I will ever find out. The Hemingway Hoax would make a good made-for-TV movie.