LANCE OLSEN

March 24, 2006

Lance Olsen is the author of eight novels (most recently Nietzsche's Kisses), one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two and lives somatically with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, in the mountains of central Idaho, digitally at http://www.lanceolsen.com.

Introduction

This morning at the Samuel R. Delany Critical Symposium, we heard some talk about science fiction and speculative fiction, but much more about troubling and blurring such borders and boundaries in a variety of ways. The question that drives that investigation—a question of genre really—is pressing not only within the sphere of sci-fi however. The fundamental issue at work points to a larger question—how do we identify a genre when we read it? What distinguishes one genre from another? Put another way: how do we identify a fiction when we see it? What differentiates it from fact? And are those distinctions ever reliable?

Lance Olsen is a writer we can consistently turn to for precisely this kind of serious examination of the role fiction takes within an ever-increasingly, fast-paced, multiply-mediated environment. He has written what he has described as "speculative fiction," "magical realism," and "criti-fiction" (to use Raymond Federman’s term). As he notes, his work takes many forms: "cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, avant-garde, transgressive, hypermedial, avant-pop, etc."—work that, he qualifies, "both resists the blandness of the literary mainstream (the narratological equivalent of Britney Spears' music, let's say) while trying to capture the complex, conflicted, disorienting sense many of us feel inhabiting these first few seconds of this fast new century."

"What's especially wonderful about speculative fiction, at least for me," he remarks elsewhere, "is how it functions less as a crystal-ball prognostication into tomorrow than as a warped-mirror metaphorization of today. It defamiliarizes who we are and where we are and when we are so that we can view those things from angles we perhaps hadn't thought about before."

Good fiction, in other words, speculates about what we don’t know. Perhaps can never know, but only imagine. And this is precisely the exceptional terrain that Lance Olsen stakes out in his very different books. As the author of 8 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5 works of non-fiction, Olsen treats his readers to an extended investigation of what we might call our "interface with the real" at a number of different levels. In his most recent work, Nietzsche’s Kisses, we spend time in the mind and memories (these not being the same thing as we learn all too quickly) of Friedrich Nietzsche, or Fritz as he’s known to his friends and family. In Girl Imagined by Chance, we encounter a couple who invent an imaginary daughter only to discover that she is all too real. In 10:01, we pan through a series of vignettes that reveal the consciousness of about 50 characters who are all connected by virtue of a film they’re watching together at an AMC Theater #10 at the Mall of America, the largest mall in the country. <

In this age of "truth-i-ness," when our leaders at the highest levels get to say things like "We stand for things" (Bush, Aug. 5, 2004) and "I don't do nuance" (Bush, Feb. 15, 2004), Olsen counters that a good fiction writer asks the toughest of (the most nuanced of) questions: What and why do we believe what we believe? How do we know what we know is true? What are the best ways of representing reality?

Lance Olsen takes us just about as close as we can get to the truth of that reliable uncertainty.