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Picture this: you're outside on a cigarette break. It's too hot. You're cursing yourself for wearing a suit and you're
cursing the weatherman for always giving you bad information. You see something moving inside a broken air conditioner unit and move to take a better look. All of a sudden, you're face to face with a
black, hairy spider the size of a beach ball. Then the spider talks to you.
I'd pee myself.
Such is the unlikely situation in which the character known only as Kyle finds himself in Biff Mitchell's new novella
Smoke Break.
The action takes place over a series of days in which Kyle, whenever he takes a break from work for a cigarette, engages
the smart-assed spider in conversation about what it means to be human.
The harder Kyle fights against the conundrum that the spider presents (as it asks, simply, "what are you?") the
more tangled he becomes in the logical fallacy that is to be human. The spider unerringly points out flaw after flaw in his answers, until -- well, read the book.
Mitchell, a Toronto native living in Fredericton, describes Smoke Break as a satire in which "the lead character is
devoured by his own lack of conviction." It's an anti-philosophical book that makes you wonder through wry, bitter laughter, why the hell anyone does anything, only to realize that wondering why is
the most pointless endeavour of all.
One of the more interesting aspects of Smoke Break is the fact that you can't get it in a bookstore -- it's only published
as a computer file, an e-book, only available online.
Mitchell is one of a growing group of authors publishing content electronically via the internet.
Using your credit card, you can buy Smoke Break, as well as dozens of other books, starting at about $1US from such
publishers as Echelon Press. You simply fill out the little form and submit. Then about a day or so later, you receive a compressed attachment in your email, which you simply unzip and voila! You're the
proud owner of an e-book.
I had a chance to ask Mitchell about Smoke Break and about e-publishing.
IB: I know this isn't a philosophical book -- but each character does seem to have a certain philosophy. Is your personal
philosophy more like one or the other?
BM: You're right, it's not philosophy. It's a warning. The most serious problem facing the survival of our species is not
greed, war, famine, nasty aliens, disease, or global warming -- it's complexity.
Our world has become so complex, I'm not sure if there's anything we can do to stop doomsday from saying, "That's it!
You're too damned complicated. I'm shutting you down." In Smoke Break, Kyle seems to think this is great, that there's all these people with their own little part to do and everything works
beautifully like a well-oiled machine. The problem is, the machine doesn't work well at all and there doesn't seem to be anybody running it. I have friends who talk about conspiracy theories, about small
groups of people running the world. Bullshit! Nobody's running it. Those small groups are hanging on for dear life just like the rest of us. The web of complexity we've spun is probably going to destroy
us just as Kyle's web of excuses destroys him in the end.
So, I guess I'm on the spider's side.
Smoke Break is very funny. Is humour important to your writing? Why?
When the last human stops laughing, the meter on humanity will be switched off.
It's the one truly redeeming human quality that runs through everything we do. I've tried writing serious shit, but it's
all so insanely funny that I keep coming back to humour and satire: humour when I just want to tickle the reader's head; satire, when I want to use humour to talk about something that bugs me.
Humour runs through everything, whether we're inclined to laugh, or not.
That's been true since the first primate dropped a club on his big toe, screamed and ranted, and then laughed and said,
Good thing we don't have guns yet.
Why did you publish Smoke Break electronically?
My writing is never going to have mass appeal. My audience will always be a small group of people who like to read
something intelligent and weird as opposed to that vast trash heap of gibberish spewed out by the traditional publishers.
The e-publishers are just beginning to head in that direction, but they're not there yet. They don't have the same
distribution and set-up costs as the print publishers, so they're willing to take chances on writers who may have limited audiences.
Some of them even have online group sites for their authors, where the writers can exchange marketing tips, and work
together to get their books noticed.
Echelon Press is like that.
Do you think that e-publishing is something that's likely to catch on?
Here's the way it should pan out: The people who make the e-book readers should start selling them in stores like Wal Mart
and Zellers, right up front by the checkouts, just before Christmas.
The reader should be loaded with a couple of classics, a set of reference books, a current best seller, and maybe a couple
of e-zines. Beside the readers, there should be packs of disks, each containing several novels, each pack offering a separate category like romance, suspense, horror, mystery, weird stuff like Biff
Mitchell writes. Perfect stocking stuffers.
Are you concerned that people will copy/distribute it? Or is that part of the point?
Not at all. It's going to happen. It happens with movies and music, why not books?
I realize that the potential for distribution is greater for digital material, but we can't bring digital literature to a
halt because we haven't worked out ways to prevent illegal copying. Controls are on their way, but for now, some people are going to get something for free. Nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, they'll burn in eternal hell and demons will rip their eyes out . . . but if they try to see the humour
in the situation, I think they'll be OK.
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