Bob Proehl on the Lines Between Fiction and Reality in “A Hundred Thousand Worlds”
In what critics are calling “ the Kavalier and Clay for the Comic-con world,” Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds mines the fictional, fantasy, and the super and the ways they influence our understanding of reality. Alex and his mother, a cult sci-fi TV actor, are traveling across the country to reunite with his estranged father, stopping at comic conventions along the way. The people they meet, and the stories they inhabit lay the groundwork to explore a fierce and complicated mother-son relationship and the narratives we create to understand ourselves. A Hundred Thousand Worlds is out June 28 from Viking Books and is available here.
- A Hundred Thousand Worlds follows a mother and son as they travel across the country, stopping at comic conventions along the way. What is your relationship with the world of comic conventions?
One of my first jobs was schlepping longboxes for a comic book dealer back in Buffalo on weekends. These weren’t “cons”, they were just comic book shows. Maybe ten dealers hanging out in the mall on a Saturday. Sometimes there’d be a bigger deal at a Holiday Inn and my dad would take me. For me, these were all about filling in gaps in my collection, scoring back issues of X-Men or Batman that I was missing. There weren’t panels, and maybe there’d be a guest artist or writer, but for the most part it was people scavenging through longboxes.
They were also the only times I got to talk to anyone about comics when I was growing up. None of my friends were into comics, so unless I was at a show, or at the local comic book store, there wasn’t a community for me around comics. This is pre-internet, because I’m old. Conventions provide that outlet, a place for affinity-based community. They’re safe spaces (mostly, sort of. See below, re: jerks) to enthusiastically like the things you like, which is a space the real world doesn’t always provide. Now, when I’m able to go to these bigger conventions, I have this two-fold reaction. The first part is a pure excitement to be around people who are into a lot of the same stuff I’m into. And the second is wishing I had something like this growing up, wondering what it would have been like at fourteen to have a space to be as nerdy in public as I was secretly. It doesn’t make me feel bitter, so much as it makes me really happy to see younger people who have that available to them.
2. In recent years it could be argued that genre fiction — like the worlds of monsters and superheroes explored in your novel — have found a measure of respectability. San Diego Comic Con has become an enormous pop culture phenomenon. What do you think about the rising profile of what was formerly a niche culture?
It has positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, it’s great that people who love comics, or Kaiju, or anime, don’t feel as if they have to hide it. All this stuff is “cool” now. And along with that comes discovery by new audiences. Someone who might have never been exposed to, say Doctor Who, ten or fifteen years ago now gets to find out how awesome Doctor Who is.
And along with that, we get to hear from creators and voices in these genres that are new and fresh. We get characters that aren’t all white hetero and cisgender males. And that snowballs: diversity of voices contributes to diversity of fandom, and round and round.
On the negative side, there’s been a backlash from within the “hard core fandom”, which by the way is a bullshit phrase. For a long time, these niche cultures were the domain of white males. And there are people who are not inclined to share. Who don’t believe that these characters and these stories and these ideas can be and should be for everybody. You get phrases like “fake geek girl” and “fake gamer girl”, or “Social Justice Warrior”, or “appropriating nerd culture”. It’s the MRA movement writ small, and it rears its head around issues of race or gender or religion or orientation probably once a week. My hope is that this is simply growing pains and will go away soon. But I’ve been hoping that about the larger scale political version of this same phenomenon for longer than I can remember, and it’s still hanging around.
3. Frequently fiction focuses on father/son and mother/daughter pairings. Can you talk a little about the mother/son relationship in the novel?
The relationship between Valerie and Alex is drawn pretty heavily from my wife and stepson. I was interested in the pushes and pulls of parenting, particularly at that age. Alex in the novel is nine, and my stepson was eight when I started working on this book. The instinct to protect and the need to start letting go, the physical nature of that bond. I also wanted to look at what someone sacrifices to be a parent, the parts of their professional lives or artistic lives that they give up or put on hold for their kids.
These things aren’t solely about being a mother, they’re at the heart of being a father as well. There’s a whole mess of gender issues you come into with parenting, and a lot of the masculine side of that, the stereotypical dad stuff, wasn’t interesting to me. It still isn’t, as a writer or as a parent. In earlier drafts, Alex’s dad was a lot less present. My editor pushed me to bring him forward more, rather than make him a pure villain, and what ended up happening was that he became the vehicle to talk about that traditional masculine style of fatherhood, and how it can fail.
Val and Alex, as a pair, became this perfect way to explore the world of comic conventions. Her as a bit of an outsider, him as a target market. But I loved writing the way they drift together and apart throughout the book, and the way they’re each constantly present for the other. I see that so much with my stepson, how the way he strides out into the world depends so deeply on knowing he always has this person to come back to.
4. Your book plays with the relationship between fiction and reality, and how we shape stories but also those stories shape us. What does that mean in your life? How clear cut is the division between fiction and the “real world”?
There’s a lot of bleed back and forth. We create ourselves out of a sort of hodgepodge of stories, some of them biographical or genealogical, and some of them fictional. We pick up little shiny pieces from the stories we read and glom them onto our selves, and in doing that, we make them more real. Identity and self aren’t stable things; they shift to fit the situation, according to what’s needed. Sometimes what’s needed can be found in a story.
Kids are amazing for looking at the blurriness of that line, because kids are remarkable at holding fiction and “the real world” together as parts of one thing. There’s a video from awhile back of a kid who got a prosthetic arm made to look like Iron Man. Can we pause for just a second to think about how awesome that is? Robert Downey, Jr. came and delivered it in character as Tony Stark. You can see watching the kid is that he’s seeing RDJ and Tony Stark at the same time. He knows it’s an act, but he also knows it’s Tony Stark. And he is literally physically attaching a piece of Iron Man to himself, even though he knows Iron Man is made up. People think kids have a simple, immersive view of fictions, but that’s not the case. They’re very aware of the tradeoffs and switchbacks between reality and fiction, and they operate them in amazingly complex ways. When people come back to that as adults, they can do fantastic things, like standing in the Superman pose to get confident and bad-ass, or making prosthetics that turn kids into superheroes. And now I’m going to go watch that video and cry.
5. You operated No Radio Records, an independent record store and performance space, in Ithaca, NY and also DJed (under the name AutoMatic Buffalo). How does your passion for music interact with your life as a writer?
The impact of music on my writing varies wildly from project to project. I never listen to music when I write. I can’t do it. Rachel Kushner said in an interview that it was “no different from saying you don’t eat gourmet dinners or play tennis” while you’re writing. But there’s always a constellation of music I’m listening to around what I’m working on. I was at a residency when I wrote the first draft of this book, but I brought my little portable turntable and a stack of records with me for the month I was there. I was listening to a lot of guitar pop. Big Star, Saturday Looks Good to Me. Bright, summery stuff. It informed the tone of the work. Right now I’m working on this historical novel set in Poland in the late 1800s, but I’m listening to mostly NYC punk from the end of the seventies, trying to weld those aesthetics together.
I still DJ maybe once or twice a month (since my daughter was born, my new DJ name is Hipster Dad), and it’s just an excuse to get out. Get out of the house and get out of my head a bit. DJing, especially off vinyl, is such a tactile thing, and it’s so intuitive and specific. It lets me shut off my writer brain for a couple hours. It’s interactive in a way that writing isn’t. A book you work on for months and years and whatever alone in at your desk. But DJing is about being present in a room with other people, seeing how they react to certain songs and letting that push you in different directions. I’m not saying I wish writing was more like that (drunken undergrads making requests for shiny vampires in the middle of a chapter?), but it makes for a nice switch.
Bonus: What books have been rocking your world lately?
I’m at an endgame with edits on a new book, so I haven’t been reading a lot of fiction. It’s tough to read something really excellent when you’re struggling to finish something of your own. That said, Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night was fantastic. So was Emma Cline’s The Girls, and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Ocean Vuong’s book of poems, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is astoundingly good. I should probably throw some comics in here too. Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Ladro’s Bitch Planet is a perfect comic book. I love it so much and I want more of it as soon as possible. Any of the thoroughly weird stuff Rick Remender puts out: Low, Black Science, Tokyo Ghost. And The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, all the time, forever.
Bob Proehl grew up in Buffalo, New York, where his local comics shop was Queen City Bookstore. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books, a DJ, a record store owner, and a bartender. He has written for the 33⅓ book series and worked as a columnist and reviewer for the arts and culture site PopMatters.com. Proehl currently lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, stepson, and daughter.
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