I read an incredible book called HEARERS OF THE CONSTANT HUM by William Pauley III recently. I dug it so much I had to have him come on here for an interview, which after several attempts to bug him to to do so and many threats, he naturally succumbed to The Cockroach’s great will. It was an incredible honor and I think it came out to be quite the excellent read. I hope you enjoy it!
(We suggest a coffee, shots of whiskey, or both before this one…)
Kafka Review: How did you get into writing the genre-breaking fiction you do?
William Pauley III: I’ve never really looked at it like that. You’re not the first to say it, so clearly it’s something I do, but subconsciously. I just write about things that interest me, and I’m interested in many things across the board.
Kafka Review: Biggest inspirations? I personally see a modern William Gibson and William Burroughs in Hearers of the Constant Hum. Holy shit. You are the third William. It’s probably destiny or some shit, or just another word virus.
William Pauley III: Hahaha. I wouldn’t say that I’m influenced by Gibson or Burroughs, although I do have a deep respect for both. My main literary influences are Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Mark Z. Danielewski, Franz Kafka, J.G. Ballard, William Golding, J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, Joe R Lansdale, and Philip K Dick. There are a million others I should probably list, but I won’t. I will say though that David Cronenberg’s films are my biggest influence overall. The Cronenberg brain and the Pauley brain are made of the same electric human lunar shit.
Kafka Review: Interesting. I pictured a semi-cross between Neuromancer and Naked Lunch while reading Hearers. The Naked Lunch feeling I got from it was naturally accompanied by the styles of Cronenberg’s film adaptation. Hearers of the Constant Hum would definitely make an incredible Cronenberg film. We have a lot in common in some perspectives, as JD Salinger was one of the first authors to ever inspire me to read a whole bibliography. Franny & Zooey put me on track to study quite a bit of history and most religions for a couple years there. House of Leaves by Danielewski also changed the way I look at the formats of writing. Kafka naturally had a great effect as well.
On the other hand, I’ve been reading a lot of modern writers who seem to be writing a lot of ground-breaking stuff and these names in sci-fi constantly come up. What books from the likes of Bradbury, Asimov, Ballard, and Dick do you consider the most influential? Or would give the highest recommendation to for others new to sci-fi?
William Pauley III: Bradbury and Asimov had a knack for taking simple concepts and writing them in such a way that it moves within you, becomes a part of you. They were geniuses in that way, because they were truly the only ones that could have ever written their stories. Had anyone else written The Martian Chronicles, it would have been forgotten. Bradbury knew how to work your emotions. He could play you like an instrument. I recommend starting with The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451 with Bradbury and for Asimov, I recommend The Caves of Steel and I, Robot.
Ballard and Dick took a different road on the map of science fiction. They were gritty, and definitely darker. Newcomers should check out Ballard’s High Rise, Crash, and a collection of his short stories. I’ve read a few of those collections and have yet to read a bad one. If you’re interested in checking out the work of Philip K Dick, I would suggest starting with Valis, A Scanner Darkly, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? His short story collections are also fanastic.
As far as the ones that influenced me the most, all of the above.
Kafka Review: I haven’t read the collection, The Brothers Crunk yet (I have it though and love the Nintendo cover). Are the brothers featured in the Hearers of the Constant Hum the same?
William Pauley III: The Brothers Crunk is a novella about two traveling breakfast burrito salesman that come into contact with a disabled alien robot in the middle of the desert. By touching it, one of them begins to slowly transform into something else entirely. Yes, they are the same brothers from Hearers of the Constant Hum. The events in The Brothers Crunk take place much later than Hearers, and there are a few stories between the two that have yet to be written. The worlds in those books couldn’t be any more different, and I plan to explain that in future books. The brothers also have a small role in the third Doom Magnetic book.
Kafka Review: I was impressed to find the level of scientific philosophy behind the text and how it was snuck into the dialogue. The conversations between the brothers seem necessary to the reader for them to reach the same level of understanding before the novel progress to the next level. I loved it because it seems to be a conversation I have with all of my intelligent friends. It’s like a logical understanding of the vast universe versus the constant way we are told how to feel in morality, but later both sides stand in awe of the genetic human predisposition to protect the truly innocent. I find this weaved into the story really well and somehow dismantles both sides of the argument into something inarguable. Was this intentional from the start, come together slowly, or a complete accident?
William Pauley III: Hearers of the Constant Hum was carefully plotted. I knew exactly what was going to happen in every chapter before the first word was even written. In recent years I’ve become obsessed with the idea of progress. The word ‘progress’ doesn’t seem to be the right word to use when we talk about advancements in technology, yet we use it anyway. I come from the first generation of the technology wave. I grew up in the eighties and nineties, so my entire life I’ve been programmed with the understanding that things are only useful for a short window of time. Every couple of years, there comes a wave of new technology that renders all previous technology useless. As an adult, it’s troubling to see the world we’ve created with this new technology. Yes, there are a million advantages to having all the information in the world right in the palm of our hands, but we’re also losing things that make us uniquely human in the process. People are different now than they were thirty years ago, and I’m not so sure it’s a positive change either. In my book I wanted to explore two things regarding technology: 1) How technology affects our day-to-day living and interactions with other human beings, and 2) How technology will eventually affect the human race at large. Personally, I do not think humans will survive their own inventions, however I think the book makes convincing arguments for both sides of the fence. I want the reader to understand the pros and cons of new technology, and the dangers we’ll have to face if we keep ‘progressing’ at this speed. The ultimate fate of the hearers in the book may be a little extreme, but it gets my point across.
Kafka Review: I’m curious after reading this book if you find science to be repeating things already said in various forms of mysticism centuries prior. Do you think humanity is on an endless cycle when it comes to obtaining so-called knowledge?
William Pauley III: No, I think our quest for knowledge has a definite and abrupt end.
Kafka Review: I suppose what I mean would be better expressed through the work of others. This reminds me of writing from Alan Watts on technology: He once said something along the lines of how it was a great advancement when artists began to paint portraits of people. Then the camera was invented and it was black & white, but it began to improve in quality with filters until finally in color. Since reaching color it has been in a perpetual state of improvement until the high definition of today. Much of the same could be said of technology in regards to video, VHS/ Technicolor evolving into the higher definition disks of today. He goes on to speak about, what was in his time pure science fiction, in regards to our next level of emulating reality. Today it’s nearly a reality when we have such highly complex gaming worlds online, technology forming like Oculus, and scientists translating the chemical processes of the human brain into binary. His meaning was to point out how a small portion of the human brain in which the language-based thoughts we are using to communicate with each other now, is simply trying to create what already exists if a person is present in the moment. That is, living in the optical and being aware of the interconnectivity between their body to everything else on Earth. The end result being the majority of people filter reality through only a small portion of their brain and live in a constant state of confusion, attempting to emulate reality and stimulate emotions in our prescribed entertainment. I’m sharing this information only because it sounds like you might share a similar sentiment when it comes to the constant violence that must be perpetuated in the name of “progress.” I think Hearers is most interesting in how it puts this idea against what seems to be a more popular (and convenient to those living in capitalist societies) of futurists like Ray Kurzweil who believe one day humans will be able to live forever through technology and will act in each moment with the every bit of knowledge to ever come out of humanity (the final frontier of thoughts being translated into binary and supercharged with processing power). It seems to me to be a huge possibility of the future. I mean we are almost there. What I find the most strange, however, is how seemingly easy it is to imagine thinking every possible thought in each instant having the same results in human action as living in the present giving flight to a thought. I wonder if we will see such a thing become a reality in our lifetime and I’m curious if humanity will begin moving backwards, away from technology and advancements in knowledge to something simpler. I do, however, share the idea you are expressing about it having an abrupt end at some point. It being the destruction of the planet or some sci-fi level of mass awakening, I do not know. As anything to reverse the behavior of people now still leaves the question of whether the damage caused by it all is in fact still reversible. Wouldn’t it be quite the paradoxical spectacle to see the final frontier of technology being to live without it? Do you have any thoughts on the scenario from the extremes of these perspectives?
William Pauley III: Those that think we will one day live forever by downloading our consciousness into machines are as blind as the people that one day believe they will be reunited with loved ones in heaven. It’s a pipe dream. Will humans ever solve the mystery of consciousness? Yes, I am sure they will. Will they one day be able to replicate that consciousness and install it into machines? Yes, definitely. Will there come a day when there are machines with memories of once being human? Yes, but the key word here is ‘once.’ These machines may be the future, but it is not our future. It is the beginning of a new, far-superior species. Post-human. We will have rendered ourselves obsolete. If humans survive artificial intelligence, then the future of the human race would likely result in a Matrix-type scenario where humans are desperately trying to remain human and carry on, possibly in hiding, and likely failing. The machines will have no use for humans.
Kafka Review: I’m a bit of a weirdo (obviously, I started something called Kafka Review) when it comes to science in my daily life. After reading a hundred books on neuroscience and the physics of the mind, I see talking with others a little different. It’s all sort of fragmented particles breaking down from the molecule expressing a feeling being sent to the brain from the needs of an organ. I didn’t always see the world this way, but it seems to cut through the constant illusions others are trying to purvey. Anyways, I pictured an invisible field of particles between people in the air as they connect with one from another person to form a thought with protein molecule to be broken down into more particles and cast out into the world. Something I loved about Hearers of the Constant Hum was the way it compared this to insects and parasites. I mean, if someone thinks about it we only call things parasites, “parasites” because they are malicious to us and we don’t take into account the things in our general biology malicious to other creatures. Do you have any games of the imagination like this to keep the concept close throughout your daily life (at least while working on a novel with a concept like this)? I ask because it seems it would take a similar thought process to come up with the idea of the Constant Hum. I think for fun I will always attach little legs and wings to the molecules I picture now, which I think is okay so long as I don’t start swatting at them.
William Pauley III: There have been a couple of books that have really changed the way I think in regards to how humans interact and share thoughts and ideas: Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The latter is what influenced the idea of what the hum was to represent in my story. Dawkins introduced the theory of memetics, which very basically is the idea that all thoughts are living things, parasites if you will, jumping from host to host to host. He called these little parasites memes. These parasites had me thinking of little insects crawling around inside our brains. So when I was working out just how I was going to structure all my thoughts and obsessions into this novel, I thought it only made sense to incorporate insects into the mix. They are everywhere: the hum, the recordings, the cockroaches in Krang’s apartment, the dead honeybee, Jubilecide, Della’s nickname, so of course explaining the hum as a natural exchange of memes from insect to human seemed like not only the proper way to tell the story, but really the only way.
Kafka Review: I’ll have to add Consciousness Explained to my reading list. I own The Selfish Gene, but haven’t opened it yet. This is certainly an interesting theory, especially when looking at the evolution of ways to communicate like social networks. The thoughts literally trend now and spread like parasites, with each interacting with the individual’s cluster of parasites in their head created out of their current stimuli, their interpretation of the information, and what they hold onto as a personal identity based on their environmental influences of the past. This is a complex explanation for there being so many differences in opinion. I’ll definitely have to dive into the biological science side of this further, as I’ve only focused on work by physicists for the most part. David Bohm did a book called On Dialogue, which was his progress in physics being applied to the ideas on human thinking put forth by Hofstadter’s work, I Am A Strange Loop. A brief overview of the ideas represented by these books was how language, be it in words or mathematics, is represented by an image in memory. This means every piece of knowledge runs into the problem of being a 2-dimensional thing trying to explain the 3-dimensional. This theory in other words, questions if human thought can ever come to a perfected, concise theory of everything in universe while not completely disowning knowledge in the way observations of cause/effect have furthered our survival at an individual level. Recently, a new generation of physicists using Bohm’s, Quantum Trajectory theories also formed a new model of universal theory without the big bang or an end. I can’t imagine it becoming a popular theory, but it definitely seems to go with the infinities of everything else. It’s certainly interesting how pictures can be painted differently, but often create the same parable behind it, regardless of form or subject. This is my personal reason for interest in so many subjects and the arts which incorporate them. I look at physics as the more modern and complex way to understand the interconnectivity of everything. One might think particles forever form from nothing, but it seems we find more ways to put it under a microscope, the more we discover nothing as a myth and the lines brought about by duality seem to blur. There’s a beauty in these perpetual paradoxes that is more broadly expressed to the mainstream through works of art. I think you did an awesome job of this with Hearers of the Constant Hum, while put through the filter of a weird adventure. Should I and readers expect to see more of these complicated influences invoked in future writing?
William Pauley III: Thank you. Yes, there will definitely be more books like this from me. It’s something I think about every day. I don’t feel comfortable living in this world, during this particular time in human history. I feel we’re teetering on the edge of existence and it’s completely out of my control and out of your control. There is a line in Hearers of the Constant Hum that I feel wraps up the basic idea of what I was trying to say in the entirety of the book, my thesis statement, if you will. The line is something spoken by Reynold Crunk during one of his conversations with his brother. He says, “I am a confused animal who fears the idea of progress, not because I do not wish to progress, but because I fear how those in control define progress.” You and I could go back and forth discussing our views on science and the future of humanity, agreeing or disagreeing, but we are not in control and we will never be in control. Our definition of progress is not their definition, and only their definition matters, the ones in control, the ones turning the wheels and pushing the buttons. I am not comfortable with this, and I’m not sure why it isn’t a bigger issue with folks than it has been. Because my mind is consumed with all of this, it is to be expected that it seeps out into all that I do.
And to go back to the first thing you mentioned here, about how the theory of memetics seems to have a role in social networking and the internet—it definitely does. Those little pictures passed around the internet aren’t called memes by coincidence.
Kafka Review: On a lighter and related note, anything new in the works?
William Pauley III: I just finished up stories for a couple new anthologies. The first should be out sometime around Summer 2015. It’s called 555 Volume 1: None So Worthy. Fifty-five of my short stories will be included in this book, each fifty-five words long. There are ten other authors in this anthology and they are all fantastic. This book is going to be something special. I’m glad to have been a part of it. The second anthology is an as of yet untitled Kaiju-themed anthology edited by Doug Gelsleichter. I’m not sure when this will be out, but it’s shaping up to be quite a beast. The authors involved with this project are also fantastic. As for my next novel, Automated Daydreaming: The Five Lives of Bricker Cablejuice, it’s nearly finished.
Kafka Review: Mentioning 555 reminds me, is that interesting fella still digesting your book?
William Pauley III: Yes, he is! For those who don’t know, Joseph Bouthiette Jr has been recording himself eating my novel, Hearers of the Constant Hum. Yes, eating it. The entire thing. I have no idea why he is doing this, but the important thing is that he is doing it. Look it up on YouTube. It’s definitely worth watching.
Kafka Review: Out of the modern writers you’ve found yourself amongst or compared to, who do you suggest the most and do they have any work you credit the suggestion to?
William Pauley III: I would say that, in my opinion, the most interesting author in my social circle would have to be Gary J Shipley. He writes ultra-bizarre science fiction/horror. The books I’ve read of his, Dreams of Amputation and The Face Hole, are complete mind fucks. His books are like watching a film compilation of all the weirdest, sickest shit you can imagine, all out of context and damn near impossible to truly understand. Reading his work feels like reliving your worst nightmares. For some reason though, I can’t get enough of it. Of course, I’m also a big fan of the authors publishing at Grindhouse Press — Andersen Prunty, CV Hunt, Zachary T Owen, Nick Cato, Steve Lowe, Gina Ranalli, Justin Grimbol, etc. Also, Josh Myers, Gabino Iglesias, Grant Wamack, Matthew Revert, Cameron Pierce, J David Osborne, Tiffany Scandal, and Michael Kazepis all put out fantastic work regularly. I don’t mean to drop a million and a half names, but I’m part of a writing community that I feel lucky to be a part of. Interesting things are happening and a lot of great work is being published.
This Cockroach thanks you for finally creating an equal representation of his people in a work of fiction and this has been a wonderful conversation. It looks forward to more of your work.
William Pauley III: Thank you! I agree, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for exchanging memes with me.
Kafka Review 