After his first novel, the Nebula Award nominated Frontera (1984), Lewis Shiner branched out beyond his cyberpunk roots and established himself as a literary writer with the groundbreaking works Deserted Cities of The Heart (1988), Slam (1990), and the World Fantasy winning novel Glimpses (1993). As happens far too often to acclaimed wordsmiths, Shiner disappeared into the literary fog except for the occasional shorter work and his 1999 novel Say Goodbye. In a blatant attempt to jumpstart his moribund career, Shiner launched the website Fiction Liberation Front. Recently, Shiner sat down with RevolutionSF Contributing Editor Rick Klaw to discuss the new venture, short fiction, the Wobblies, and other pertinent topics.

What is the Fiction Liberation Front and why the provocative title? What is a Creative Commons license and why offer your shorter works under that license?

You could think of it as an online magazine with regular updates, devoted to presenting new and reprinted works by me.

I have to give credit for much of the tone and presentation of the site to my friend Richard Butner, a brilliant and underappreciated writer here in North Carolina. When I said I was thinking of putting all of my short fiction online, he was the one who suggested I make as big a splash as possible, with a deliberately provocative name, a manifesto, and the Creative Commons license. All of these things, he felt, would appeal to the folks in the Internet fast lane -- the Boing Boing readers, EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] fans, and so on, and therefore would generate the biggest buzz.

I don't mean for this to sound completely cynical, because my sympathies lie with those folks. I'm pretty much an anarchist at heart. I like, for example, the things the Creative Commons people are doing, that is, trying to come up with a rights management scheme that isn't repressive and greedy, that respects both the consumers and the producers of art. I like the idea that somebody could download a bunch of my stories in PDF format, print them out and bind them up nicely, maybe even make several copies and give them away to friends. The Creative Commons license allows somebody to do that, without weakening my copyright protection.

What was the so-called "straw that broke the camel's back" moment that lead to your decision to provide your works for free?

Interestingly, it was a story called "Straws." I wrote it as a sort of cri de couer after I had come up with a really clever solution to my job woes and had it fail. I wasn't thinking about markets, I just had to get it out of my system. When I was finished, I started wondering what to do with it. If I were able to sell to The New Yorker I would have sent it there, but they've never given me the time of day. My options were pretty much limited to SF markets like [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] and Subterranean, where the editors have always been really supportive of me. The problem is, you can read the story two ways: either it's SF, or the protagonist is nuts. In the context of an SF mag, you would read that story differently than you would at The New Yorker, and I didn't want that.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought, what difference does it make anyway? It's not like the money that I would get for a short story would let me quit my job. I might as well just put it on the Web and not have to worry about the heartbreak of rejection (which I've never taken well). Once I started down that path, I thought, why not just make my Web site the preferred destination for any damn thing I feel like writing? Not any damn thing -- I'm not going to inflict a blog on people -- but any short piece of writing that I wanted to do for its own sake? There was a purity to that idea that appealed to me.

Ultimately, what works should we expect to see on the Fiction Liberation Front? Will it include some of your works with other writers such as your stories with Joe R. Lansdale and Bruce Sterling?

I don't have a lot of collaborations, so it's not a big issue. Both Bruce and Joe have liberated a lot of their own work on the Web, and I can't imagine they'd object, though I haven't formally asked them yet.

What you'll see is more of what's already up there. I hope to put all my published short stories up (with the possible exception of a story I sold to Mike Shayne [Mystery Magazine] long ago on a bet with Joe [Lansdale] (I bet him they'd never publish it because it was too stupid, and he won). I just got some decent OCR software so I can scan the stuff that's not in digital files, which is a lot of it, actually. Both my unsold screenplays are now up there, and if I finish another screenplay (which I might; I have a couple in various stages), it could end up there too. I just wrote an appreciation of the 60s band Autosalvage, much the way I wrote "Straws." It was just something I wanted to say, and this time I knew from the first that it would go straight to FLF.

Why will the Mike Shayne piece never be published on the site?

Hey, it's my site and I don't like the story. It's dumb.

Any plans to publish on the site some of your other works like novels, comic book scripts, and/or essays such as your controversial "Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk"?

Anything is fair game, in theory. I am tempted to put my novels up there, as there really is no money in a backlist unless you're a bestseller. One problem is I don't have electronic versions of the first three books. However, I have started scanning them, just in case.

The comic scripts would only be of very specialized interest, I think. I might eventually do it, but it doesn't seem urgent.

The cyberpunk piece is a dead issue to me. I have always struggled with genre characterizations, and I really don't want to make an issue of it. On the other hand, I do take requests, and if people really wanted the thing up there, I suppose I would give in.

Are their plans to publish other authors at the Fiction Liberation Front?

Nope. It's a worthy idea, but I have a full time job, plus researching and writing my next book, plus scanning old stories and formatting them for FLF, so there's simply no time for me to serve as an editor as well. I see myself as a content provider, not a filter.

What is the ultimate purpose of the Fiction Liberation Front?

Somewhat to my surprise, the purpose seems to be to make me happy. Early in my career I tried to sell out, but nobody was buying. So I ended up writing only those stories that really mattered to me. I'm proud of a lot of those stories, sold and unsold alike, and it makes me really happy every time I put one of them out there where somebody might find it.

What has been the reaction to the site from your peers and others?

All the reactions I've seen have been extremely positive. People keep telling me what a great move it is career-wise. I've yet to be convinced that it's not career suicide. It certainly hasn't made it possible for me to quit my day job, and it hasn't generated any publisher interest in my unsold literary suspense novel.

The publicity, however, has worked. I got over 1500 unique visitors the day Boing Boing gave me a really flattering review. But I find that I'm not as excited about that as I am about the stories themselves. Which is nice. It's getting me back to what should really be important about writing, the work itself.

When you first emerged on the literary scene in the early 80s, you were lumped with cyberpunk movement. Do you think this old label colors potential perceptions and expectations of the site?

I don't think so. I do think that most of the people who read my work are SF fans, even though most of my work is not SF. But SF fans tend to pay attention, and I think most of them know now that I write Lew Shiner fiction, and that's the only label that really fits.

What is your response to Howard V. Hendrix and others who claim that that posting works for free undercut those "who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for [the] hard work."?

I think trying to get publishers to do anything is futile, especially when the writers have no clout. People aren't paying to read short fiction, so of course the writers are not going to get paid more for writing it.

He used a lot of emotional language to get people stirred up. No one likes to be called a "scab," for example. But we don't have a situation where Howard is refusing to sell to Anthology X because they have a lousy contract, and I stepped in and said, "Here, buy my story instead of Howard's, I'll take your bad contract." I was one of the few guys who took a beating for refusing to sign the lousy [Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine] contract back in the 80s, when SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] was too busy worrying about who was on the Nebula ballot to get involved, so I'm particularly sensitive to this issue.

If Howard is a union man, I invite him to do what I did, which is join the IWW, the Wobblies. Their dream of "one big union" would really give workers power, even in entertainment.

What is the IWW?

Industrial Workers of the World. They were very big in the 30s, during the depression, and you hear about them in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, for example. Everybody assumes they're long gone, but they're not. They've been helping organize workers at Starbuck's, for one recent high-profile example. We need unions more than ever these days, and the strongest, most effective union would be one that united all workers, which is what the IWW is all about. I recommend everyone learn about their history and what they're doing now.

The ACLU, which used to be a major force for good, has pulled its own teeth and is wasting its time doing idiotic things like sending petitions to George Bush. Has any president ever cared less what his constituents think? But the IWW could really make a difference, if people would just wake up and act in their own self interests, instead of doing everything they can to help out the rich.

What do you think is the biggest literary change brought about by the advent of the Internet?

I don't know if it's literary, but the whole blogging business has really changed the cultural landscape. I think people have become distrustful of newspapers, especially after the New York Times and the Washington Post both failed to call Bush on his lies about Iraq, or complain about his stealing two elections. On the other hand, blogs have no editors, no fact checking, and no accountability. It feels like we're going through a phase now where people just want to read things that confirm their own prejudices. Rabid right wingers, many of whom (like our president) don't read, have Fox News, which likewise has a very loose relationship with the truth and has no accountability (except to the White House).

What about literary changes in general?

The blockbuster mentality that has taken over publishing the same way it took over Hollywood and network TV. If it's not sure to be bestseller, they don't want to touch it. The US has become a cultural McDonald's. Small presses and the Internet have had to take up the slack in terms of publishing anything that isn't a blockbuster, and those books are hard to find, don't get reviewed as much, and tend to disappear without a trace. And, of course, without making any money for their writers.