Men Are from Mars: David Macinnis Gill’s ‘Black Hole Sun’ is the year’s funniest dystopian tale
RSS| Photograph by Brownie Harris |
Black Hole Sun is a zany story about a disgraced teenage soldier who’s hired to save a group of down-on-their-luck miners from a band of cannibalistic marauders. How’d you first describe it to your editor, Virginia Duncan?
The first pitch line was “Seven Samurai on Mars,” and she said, “That’s great. Go for it!”
Were you actually influenced by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven?
Especially Seven Samurai. And even before that, The Searchers by John Ford. My father was a big fan of Westerns. I grew up before cable. On Saturday, you had three channels, and one of them was always showing Westerns. So that kind of mythos is ingrained in my brain. And when I saw Seven Samurai for the first time, it was after I’d been to Japan on a teacher exchange.
Durango and some of the other mercenaries are missing part of their pinkies. What’s up with that?
That’s actually from the Japanese mafia. When you’re crossing the street in Osaka—which is a momentous thing because 10,000 people cross at the same time—there would be these guys in these really loud, brightly colored suits and wild hairdos, and some of them were missing part of their pinkie finger. I asked around and was told, “Oh, that’s the yakuza, the Japanese mafia.” When you get kicked out, they cut off part of your pinkie finger as a ritual.
You wrote seven novels before the first one, Soul Enchilada, was published last year. What kept you going?
What kept me going was that I achieved a lot in my life. I grew up in a very poor background. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My mother never even made it to high school. I’d written literary short stories in the ’90s before I went for my doctorate. When I went back to writing fiction, I knew that this was the last dream that I wanted to live. Even though the novels weren’t working, I got closer and closer and closer.
Have you always written humorous stuff?
Yeah, I think so. I don’t intentionally try to tell jokes, but I say funny things. A lot of that comes from discovering Monty Python at three o’clock in the morning when I was 14 years old. I was watching late-night television and got in trouble for laughing so loud. I started my career as a high school teacher, and I had to keep the kids paying attention, and the way that I would do that was by trying to be funny.
Black Hole Sun is pretty over-the-top. Did your editor ever have to rein you in?
Virginia was always pushing the envelope. “This guy curses in seven different languages” was originally a throwaway line, and Virginia said, “I want more cursing in this book because this is the military—and I want him to do it in seven different languages.”
What’s really funny is that Durango never actually curses in English.
No, he doesn’t. He curses in Mandarin Chinese, Korean, a little Japanese, Finnish, German, and I think there’s Spanish.
I’d ask you to translate some of that, but I have a hunch we couldn’t print it.
The Mandarin you’d never in your life be able to print.
Rick Margolis is SLJ’s executive editor. Read a starred review of Black Hole Sun (HarperCollins/Greenwillow) in the Grades 5 and Up book review section of our November issue.
