by Rod MacDonald. David Conyers is an Australian Science Fiction and horror author residing in Adelaide. With John Sunseri, he is the co-author of the Lovecraftian spy thriller collection ‘The Spiraling Worm’ and the author of the sequel novella ‘The Eye Of Infinity’. He is the editor of the anthology ‘Cthulhu’s Dark Cults’, with Brian M. Sammons the editor of ‘Cthulhu Unbound 3’ and a contributing editor for ‘Albedo One’, Ireland’s longest running magazine of speculative fiction.

David’s short fiction has appeared in various magazines including ‘Jupiter’, ‘Book Of Dark Wisdom’, ‘Midnight Echo’, ‘Innsmouth Free Press’ and ‘Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine’. He has also appeared in over a dozen anthologies including ‘Monstrous’, ‘Through The Wormhole’, ‘Cthulhu Unbound 2’, ‘Best New Tales Of The Apocalypse’, ‘Horrors Beyond’, ‘Award Winning Australian Writing 2008’, Scenes From The Second Storey’, ‘Macabre’ and ‘The Black Book Of Horror’.

He has been nominated for several awards including the Aeon, Aurealis, Ditmar and Australian Shadows, recently made the preliminary ballot in the Bram Stoker Awards and is a winner of the Australian Horror Writers Association’s Flash Fiction and Short Story Awards.


Photo © Olivia Kernot / Spinifex Photography
Born in Sydney and growing up in the Adelaide Hills, David graduated with a bachelor of civil engineering from the University of Melbourne. He worked on several remote projects in outback Western Australia, including the construction of a gas pipeline and the commissioning of a mine processing plant. Afterwards, he backpacked through Africa and Europe before returning to Australia where he worked in marketing and corporate communications, eventually managing a marketing services department for a global engineering company. Today, he works in marketing management role, again in construction but for a much smaller local company. He lives in Adelaide with his wife and daughter.

During the 1990s, David was bitten by the travel bug, his first venture overseas was not enough to settle him, and since then has explored six continents and over twenty-five countries, all of them providing inspiration for his writing. His website is www.david-conyers.com

SFCrowsnest: You've got a book on the market at the moment called ‘The Eye Of Infinity’, published by Perilous Press and on sale at Amazon. This publisher specialises in Cthulhu Mythos. For the uninitiated, including myself, will you explain the origins and meaning of this type of fiction?

David Conyers: The Cthulhu Mythos originated from a series of horror stories penned by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s and 1930s. Lovecraft adopted a different approach to the genre than what had come before, postulating a universe where horrors existed everywhere and that humans were the abnormal. Being not of this Earth, Lovecraft’s monsters had no interest in any of the emotions, goals or aspirations that make us human, and so were utterly alien to us. A vampire or a ghost feels the same emotions humans do. Lovecraft’s aliens felt nothing even remotely akin to human emotions. Even trying to understand these aliens would drive us mad and, when we encountered them, they would destroy us easily and without a thought. Humanity is likened to ants, squashed under the feet of an elephant that is not even aware that it is destroying so many lives with each step.

It is a rather bleak setting, but it did spawn some amazing tales that even today are considered classics of the horror genre, such as Lovecraft’s ‘The Call Of Cthulhu’, ‘At the Mountains Of Madness’, ‘The Shadow Out Of Time’ and ‘The Whisperer In The Darkness’. Lovecraft never had a great style, his prose is a hard read, but his ideas were vivid and unsettling. He accomplished a rare honour in his writing, creating a genre called ‘cosmic horror’ much as William Gibson defined ‘cyberpunk’ or Tolkien defined ‘high fantasy’.

‘The Eye Of Infinity’ is a story taking place in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos setting (of which there are thousands of published stories penned by hundreds of authors, such as Stephen King, Charles Stross, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, C.J. Henderson and Neil Gaiman). I took the ideas from Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’, concerning an university expedition into Antarctica which discovers an alien city dating from a billion years ago, now buried under the ice. This city was once home to intelligent space-faring creatures called Elder Things and their shape-changing, house-sized tentacled horrors called shoggoths. A few shoggoths had survived into the present and these creatures systematically wiped out half the expedition as they explored the city. The story set the template for movies that followed such as ‘Aliens’, ‘Predator’, ‘The Thing’ and others, although very few people realise this.

SFC: Lovecraft was not Australian, of course, but do you find that certain types of Australian culture lends itself to this type of work? For example, I often found a similarity between Lovecraft's environments and the outback in Australia.

DC: While most Australians live in an urbanised environment and our culture is not too dissimilar to US or British lifestyles (more or less), the situation changes somewhat the further inland one travels. My country is about the same size as the United States, minus Alaska, and most of that is comprised of large arid deserts. I’ve spent my time working in outback Australia, so I’ve experienced that alternate culture first hand.

When I started out as a graduate civil engineer, my first job was on a remote construction project for a gas pipeline crossing some 250km of desert in the Pilbara Region near Port Hedland. Out there, it’s hot, dusty, the air is thick with flies and everyone drinks beer and eats red meat with every meal. The landscape is something to behold. At sunrise or sunset, the desert changes through a broad spectrum of earthy colours until settling into the iron rich reddish tinge during the day that uncannily resembles images of Mars.

When I was in the Pilbara, I remembered that Lovecraft set a story here, ‘The Shadow Out Of Time’, concerning another alien city buried beneath the desert. I can see why he set his story outback Australia, because it is exactly the kind of landscape where humans would rarely find themselves and alien horrors might. There is no water, it’s dry and hot, home to poisonous snakes and no discernable landmarks or even shade for hundreds of kilometres. There is a vastness about the Australian outback, a suggestion that anything is possible here, which I guess is very Lovecraftian. I’ve set many of my Lovecraft stories in outback Australia, including several Major Harrison Peel tales, the protagonist from ‘The Eye Of Infinity’. In fact, outback Australia is where Peel first appeared.

SFC: Tell us about your protagonist in ‘The Eye Of Infinity’, Harrison Peel, who you have written about previously in several short stories?

DC: Much of the Cthulhu Mythos is written using the investigative narrative, with private eyes, police officers, lawyers and journalists uncovering a mystery and exploring it to its horrific conclusion. So it is not much of a stretch to have spies - who have the same role as far as the requirements of telling these kinds of stories go - becoming involved in the same kind of investigations.

I also believe that if the horrors of Lovecraft’s creations exist as written, then they have to encroach upon the world in their various guises to a point where the world’s governments (at least governments in the developed world who have the resources to notice these things) would have learnt of them by now. But because the general public knows nothing about their existence, there must be a conspiracy to why these horrors are kept secret - other than just to ensure that the whole world does not go mad knowing the truth of their existence. Spies are the instruments for hiding state secrets and uncovering the secrets of enemy nations. Hence, I decided to create a character who was a spy.

Major Harrison Peel is a former Australian Army intelligence officer turned NSA consultant who fights the good fight to stop cosmic horrors from destroying the world wherever they appear across the globe. He has appeared in at least twelve short stories and novellas (about half of them are collected ‘The Spiraling Worm’ published by Chaosium in 2007). All of them pit him against the various gods and monsters that H.P. Lovecraft created.

Unlike the majority of Cthulhu Mythos investigators penned by other authors who concentrate on stories set in the US and the UK, Peel’s missions often send him to various unsavoury locations across the globe, such as the jungles of Cambodia and the Congo, outback Australia, into the wastelands of Antarctica and Pakistan, the mountains of Tibet and Peru and so forth (another advantage of using a spy character is that exotic travel is expected of them). As a soldier and spy, Peel is proficient in combat and deception, but he often finds the only way to survive through any adventure is to think his way out of it. His ability to pre-empt what these alien horrors are planning is often the only thing that saves him from a horrible death.

‘The Eye of Infinity’ is set directly after the events of my first Harrison Peel collection, ‘The Spiraling Worm’, which I co-authored with U.S. horror writer John Sunseri. In ‘The Eye’, Peel is no longer with his Australian Department of Defence employers or based in Australia (having been disowned for doing something rather unpopular), rather he has moved to America where he consults to the National Security Agency, shares an apartment with his girlfriend, Nicola Mulvany, and for the first time it looks like he might be ready to settle down. Then he is sent on a mission to the radio telescope arrays in New Mexico, where an astronomer has seen ‘something’ in the cosmos that has caused him to develop an infliction that soon becomes known as multi-eye syndrome. From there, it gets weirder and Peel finds himself on Mars and much stranger places.

Peel stories are written in the style of thriller adventures, a little bit like what a James Bond, Dirk Pitt or Jason Bourne novel might be like had it included alien monsters. There are exotic locales, villainous characters, deceit, deception, excessive amounts of military hardware and lots of action. Its pulp, I know, but if readers like that kind of thing, then hopefully they’ll get as much fun out of Peel’s escapades as I get out of writing them.

SFC: Would you consider yourself a horror fiction author, a Science Fiction author or both?

DC: I’ve always considered myself a Science Fiction author. I read Science Fiction. I don’t read much horror. When I do write horror, it tends to contain Science Fiction elements or it is all Science Fiction. That’s not to say I’ve never read or enjoyed horror, but only some elements, such as the Cthulhu Mythos. I’m not into gore or slasher type horror and I’ve never been particularly fond of zombies, vampires, serial killers or werewolves. That eliminates me from writing in much of the genre.

That said, when I was reading Science Fiction genre as a teenager and in my twenties, a time I guess when I was to be most influenced by what I read, many of the authors I encountered presented some very scary ideas. Brian Aldiss’ ‘Hothouse’ created an Earth billions of years from now where humans had reverted to primitives in a highly dangerous world that was slowly driving them to extinction. John Wyndham’s ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ always stuck in my mind, partially because it was one of the first apocalyptic novels I read, and while the carnivorous walking triffid plants were scary enough, it was the idea that the whole world could go blind that really scared me. Philip K, Dick sent me on an unsettling mind trip into some just plain weird and frightening realities that a human mind, if tormented enough, might conceivably create. H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island Of Doctor Moreau’ presented the idea that humans could be ‘changed’ into monsters using science and I’ve already mentioned Lovecraft, who I was also reading at the same time. So, I went from reading optimistic authors such as Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven with high frontier futures where humans were the master, to a whole new catalogue of authors who were saying the exact opposite.

Those latter authors must have left a lasting impression, considering the style of stories I produce today. But I also like to think that I have optimistic themes in my stories. While horrible things happen to my protagonists, they mostly come out the other side as better, more learned and complete people. I have had feedback from readers that they find my writing inspirational, which is nice to hear. If so, I think this can only be a good thing.

Today I’m really into the British space opera, penned by authors such as Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Ken Macleod, Peter F. Hamilton, Neal Asher and Charles Stross, all of whom incorporate some pretty dark content into their stories. Their genre is the genre I’m aspiring to, in a space opera novel I’m attempting to write currently.

SFC: I believe you have been doing some work on ‘Midnight Echo 6’. Can you tell me a little about this special edition which will come out in November?

DC: ‘Midnight Echo’ is the official fiction magazine of the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA), which is similar to the Horror Writers Association, but for Australians only. ‘Midnight Echo’ is published twice a year, featuring horror and dark fantasy short stories from predominately local authors. To keep each issue fresh and the publication schedule consistent, it is managed by a different editing team each issue.

Approximately two years ago, I was in discussion with the then President of the AHWA, Marty Young, and the topic came up as to whether I would edit an issue. I’m not really a horror writer - as I said earlier - and because there are literally zero opportunities for Science Fiction short story publication in Australia, I suggested a Science Fiction horror special. Marty liked the idea and so I went with it.

I approached two talented writers to help me, David Kernot, an up-and-coming sci-fi author and editor with ‘Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine’ and Jason Fischer, who recently won the Writers Of The Future contest. We all liked the SF horror idea, developed and released the guidelines together specifying that we were particularly seeking far future, deep space tales with horrific elements, and then the stories came rolling in.

We selected some excellent contributions from talented local authors such as Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Joanne Anderton, Alan Baxter, Andrew J McKiernan and a brilliant tale from Californian weird fiction author, Cody Goodfellow. We’ve got stories featuring a strange world with a planetary ring forged from organic matter, bizarre aliens cataloguing and collecting humans to populate their idea of paradise, cybernetic monsters hunting humans in the hull of an abandoned star ship and many others.

To give the magazine more of an international appeal, we sought out interviews with authors and sci-fi artists at the top of their game and then secured interviews with our first choices, Charles Stross, who writes both Science Fiction and horror with his Laundry series (‘The Atrocity Archives’, ‘The Jennifer Morgue’ and others), and Chris Moore, whose amazing cover illustrations will be immediately recognisable to anyone interested in the SF Masterworks series, because Chris did the majority of them. Both interviews offer frank and detailed accounts of their respective careers thus far.

We also secured a beautiful cover illustration from regular ‘Interzone’ cover and interior artist, Paul Drummond, which perfectly captured the theme of the issue we created.

‘Midnight Echo 6: The Science Fiction Horror Special’ will be released in November 2011 and will be available for purchase both in print and e-copies from this site http://www.shop.australianhorror.com/

SFC: Some of your Science Fiction paints an uncertain future for mankind. For example, in ‘Black Water’, pure water has become a very scarce commodity where people will kill to obtain it. How do you see the next 50 years progressing?

DC: I’ve never been of the school of thought that technology and scientific discovery improves the world. Technology and science is plagued by the same problems that have always plagued all aspects of human creations: that they are controlled by human beings who are emotionally driven creatures equally capable of doing good as they are doing bad. Nuclear power is an example of what I mean; it is neither good nor bad in itself (the sun is nuclear power after all), but nuclear fuel can be used to create energy for a needy planet or can become weapons of mass destruction. When I image future technologies or scientific discoveries in my stories, I try to image every possible way it could be used, positive and negative. The negative side is often where the ‘story’ is.

‘Black Water’ was one of my first serious attempts to write a near future Science Fiction short story. The tale, concerning a poor African man’s attempt to steal pure water in the hollows of his cybernetic limbs, was heavily influenced by the cyberpunk genre and my experiences backpacking in Kenya. William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ left a lasting impression when I read it in the early-1990s, presenting a world where technology caused as many problems as it solved. My other influence - backpacking in Africa - well there are cars, medicine, electricity and computers there, but many Africans are poor, live in slums or in other subsistent conditions and don’t have access to any of this. It doesn’t matter how advanced the world becomes, not everyone is going to benefit, and some regions of the world are going to be left behind completely. This is particularly true for Africa. It will be the same fifty years, one hundred, maybe even a thousand years from now, that technology and science will only be for the wealthy. ‘Black Water’ was my attempt to get this idea across.

Despite ‘Black Water’ being an early piece, it did well for me. The story came seventh place in the 2007 Aeon Awards sponsored by ‘Albedo One’ and then after languishing in an anthology for many years that never saw print, it was finally published in Ian Redman’s ‘Jupiter’ magazine, issue 24. It was then shortlisted for Australia’s Ditmar Awards and the team at ‘Albedo One’ liked it enough to ask me to join their editorial team as a contributing editor, writing reviews and interviewing top Science Fiction authors for their magazine. All in all, I consider it to be one of my most successful and popular short stories, and a personal favourite.

You can read “Black Water” online here http://www.albedo1.com/highlights/davidconyers.html

The biggest uncertainty I see for humanity is unprecedented population growth. It seems to drive all our problems: economic collapses, wars, environmental degradation, depletion of diversity and so forth. Eventually, our massive population will cause many of our systems to break down, such as food distribution, or fish levels in the ocean, air quality - perhaps they already have - and until we can solve the population problem, I do see a worsening future for all of us.

SFC: ‘Emergency Rebuild’ was a short story that appeared in ‘Andromeda Spaceways’ about the after-effects of a crash landing on the planet Mars. What it is to be human? Do you see a future of humans amalgamating with machines?

DC: Fundamentally, I believe humans define themselves through their physical-ness as much as they do through other human characteristics, such as our feelings, memories, the environment we live in, our culture and so forth. Our body is the vessel through which we interact with the world and without it we don’t exist. To take away the physical is to progress down that path of dehumanisation. Most of us like being human and define ourselves in part by our bodies. But many of us do want to change our bodies, because we feel our bodies aren’t really representing who we ‘should’ be, they aren’t good enough and that they must be better.

We already add machines to our bodies through necessity, such as pacemakers, artificial hips, hearing aids and so forth or extend our lives or to live life with more options and mobility for longer. Or we do so to improve ourselves cosmetically, through Botox injections, hair transplants or breast implants to meet a need to see ourselves to as ‘ideal’ humans, but really we do this only through insecurity. Then there are tattoos and body piercings, which are a response to obtaining an identity - the complexities of why I’m not certain I feel equipped to answer.

As technology improves and we develop artificial robotic limbs and organs that function as well as the organic body parts we were born with, I believe people will want to adopt amalgamating with machines, but our reasons won’t change. What is more preferable? Life in a wheelchair or cybernetic legs? Ageless artificial skin or wrinkly liver-spotted skin? And what about tattoos that are animated, like watching a movie or have skin that washes up and down constantly like the wave motion at the beach, that’s a cooler way to define yourself than what is possible today? Someone out there is going to want some or all of these body modifications. The technology might always be improving, but the reasons behind amalgamation will remain the same. I suspect for most of us, though, myself included, remaining entirely biological and original will be just fine.

I think the real interesting ideas behind human-machine amalgamation will occur when we move off the Earth and start colonising other worlds within the Solar System or extra-solar planets orbiting other stars. The alien worlds being discovered today demonstrate that planets are more varied and diverse than we’ve ever imagined, even in Science Fiction. We’ve discovered gas giants orbiting close to suns that are boiling away, worlds with highly eccentric orbits causing temperature fluctuations of thousands of degrees on one orbital year, planets orbiting cool dim red dwarfs that are more than 10 billion years old, super-earths with gravities 2-3 times that of home, massive water worlds with floor beds of hot ice and many other examples. These planets aren’t going to be easy to terraform - which for many decades has been the traditional approach adopted by colonial-style Science Fiction writers. I think it will be more realistic (and more of a necessity because it will be cheaper energy-wise) to modify our own bodies to adapt to the shear diversity of planets out there awaiting us. There is the option of pantropy modifying our bodies through genetic engineering or through cybernetics making us part-machines or we will use a combination of the two. More body options provides us with a greater range of conditions in which we will be able to survive. Humans could become as diverse and bizarre as the worlds’ we are discovering today.

In ‘Emergency Rebuild’, published in ‘Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #43’, I had a character amalgamate with sentient machines out of necessity, because he would otherwise die, exposed as he was injured and maimed on the frozen surface of Mars. The situation for the character continues to deteriorate as the story progresses, to the point where he can only continue to exist by ceasing to be human and become something else entirely, a full machine. This is also the moment where the character gives up their fear, and transcends to the point where they can make decisions that are no longer generated by self-interest. That point, ultimately, was the question I was asking myself in ‘Emergency Rebuild’, will we change ourselves enough to the point where human identity is no longer important and when we do, how do we react next?

Pantropy, cybernetics and humanness are big concepts of interest to me, ideas I plan to tackle in my space opera novel that I mentioned earlier, when I find the time to write it.

SFC: You have been around the world exploring this planet. Does this sense of exploration extrapolate to other planets in your Science Fiction writing? In other words, you are now exploring the universe by writing about it? Would this be true?

Since I was very young I always wanted to explore the world. I had an early fascination with Africa and while all my friends were heading off to Europe, I decided to head much further south first and backpacked through Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia. I was in my early twenties at the time and the trip proved to be one of the most memorial, life enriching moments of my time thus far, but also one that really opened my eyes to how the world works beyond the lifestyle and privileges we take for granted in the developed world.

While I was in Africa backpacking with a friend, I did all the usual tourist things, like going on safari, swimming in the Indian Ocean on Islamic islands that seemed unchanged from the 10th Century when they were founded and staying overnight in a Masai camps watching some pretty amazing tribal dancing. But I was also chased by a lone bull elephant along the Zambezi, accidentally wandered into a police camp that ended with me to be escorted out again by a soldier causally waving around an M16 and attended a Koffi Olomide concert with machinegun fire into the air to control the crowd. But all of these events paled to the duality of Africa that I witnessed. On one hand Africa is vibrant and exciting and full of life, on the other there are so many very desperate people. The poorest people in Africa live in slums and when you see the conditions these people live in, it doesn’t take long to realise it is almost impossible for any of them to escape their impoverishment.

My first day in Nairobi, I remembered walking from the hostel into the heart of the city. There was a beggar seated on the road, burning in the hot sun with only a pair of shorts and a small wooden cup with a few coins in it. He had no water, and he was bone thin. He was there when I came back again, after a long day exploring the city. But what I remember most about him was that he had no hands and no feet.

How did he survive? Was he a war victim? (I was in Africa not long after the Rwandan genocides and there were many refugees in Kenya as a result.) Had he been mutilated by criminals hoping to use his disfigurement to gain more donations from tourists? Where did he go when he wasn’t begging? How did he feed and clean himself? Most often, I kept asking myself, did he want to keep on living?

I realised he had no hope and I had no idea what could be done to help him. African countries are by and large dictatorships, so there is no social system to protect the weak and misfortunate. I realised this man would never have hope. This was the other side of Africa that you don’t hear a lot about in polite conversation, the other side of the developing world that most people don’t want to see or know and the reason why so many of us travel only to Europe or North America, or Australia instead. But I’d seen it and it left a lasting impression.

So to come back to the original question, yes I am exploring the universe through my writing, by using the experiences I’ve gained in seeing both sides of our one world and extrapolating it into worlds we only visit in our minds. One day I’d like to think that the human race will live on other planets, perhaps even around other suns, because to ultimately survive for the long term, we need to. But I don’t think it will be easy and I don’t think science and technology is going to save us from ourselves. We are human, we are the best and worst of what we can be and if we can imagine it, we can do it, and probably already have somewhere in the world. So I postulate that some of those worlds will be colonised successfully and become ‘developed planets,’ but some won’t fare so well and they will become the new Africas in this new frontier.

Until humanity becomes better than what it is today and does away with the need for conflict, then there will always be stories to tell, here or on other imagined worlds, because what is a story if it is not about resolving something, even resolving big insurmountable problems such as global poverty, starvation, over-population and destitution?

SFC: Thanks, David, and good luck with the new book.

© David Conyers, Rod MacDonald and SFCrowsnest 2011-08-25
all rights reserved