Daniel M. Kimmel is the 2018 recipient of the Skylark Award, given by the New England Science Fiction Association. He was a finalist for a Hugo Award for Jar Jar Binks Must Die… and other observations about science fiction movies and for the Compton Crook Award for best first novel for Shh! It’s a Secret: a novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender’s Guide. In addition to short stories, he is the author of Time on My Hands: My Misadventures in Time Travel, Father of the Bride of Frankenstein and (with Deborah Cutler-Hand) Banned in Boston. He is also a working film critic (NorthShoreMovies.net) and writes the “Take Two on the Movies” column for Space and Time magazine, spotlighting classic (and not-so-classic) SF films.
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If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?
1930s Hollywood. As a veteran film critic and lecturer, I’m well-versed in the history and people of Hollywood’s Golden Age and would love to have been part of it. Who knows? Maybe I’d even have gotten the chance to direct.
If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?
In my first novel Shh! It’s a Secret, the main plot is between a studio publicist and the son of the alien ambassador to Earth who wants to be a movie star. In a subplot the alien and his human female co-star become involved. I finessed the biology by making the aliens humanoid (albeit blue, bald, and with vestigial gills) and made the major challenge the fear that their romance would go public and inflame anti-alien bigotry. The publicist is being purely altruistic in insisting they will have to wait until after the film’s premiere, it’s general release, its overseas sales, its cable/DVD/streaming release, and any sequels. He figures that will take about three years.
If you had to choose between being a time traveler or a space explorer, which would you pick and why?
Funny you should ask. I didn’t intend to make my every answer a plug for one of my books, but I love time travel stories and tried to send up every cliché of the genre I could think of in my second book, Time on My Hands. I hit the obvious time paradoxes, things like trying to prevent the Lincoln assassination or going into the future to get information on the stock market. I played off of pop culture and news events, but my favorite gag is when the protagonist goes to visit his girlfriend twenty years in the past and brings a bottle of 12-year-old single malt scotch with him. He realizes they’ll be drinking it eight years before it went in the barrel.
Mash together two of your favorite SF properties. What’s the new work about?
See? You’re doing it again. My third novel occurred precisely because I mashed together two titles and thought it so funny I knew I’d have to write the story myself. Originally intended as a short story, it grew into my book, Father of the Bride of Frankenstein. In it Frank (the monster) becomes a graduate student in bioethics and falls in love with one of his classmates. Her parents are less than thrilled, but the fun is only beginning when they start planning the wedding.
If you had to choose one of your own fictional worlds to live in, which one would it be, and why?
Now cut that out. I came here to answer questions about myself, and you keep bringing up my books. My fourth novel (co-authored with Deborah Hand Cutler), Banned in Boston, is set in 1980s Boston, when we both lived there. I have sometimes been accused of modeling my protagonists on myself, which isn’t true, but comes closest with a secondary character here. The premise is that an anti-pornography group facing bankruptcy secretly produces their own film so they can reap the profits when their protests against it inevitably fail. The hapless assistant DA handed the case is a First Amendment absolutist… until he actually sees the film in question. While I was not a prosecutor in real life I did work briefly as a lawyer and was poking fun at civil libertarians, like myself, who sometimes have to confront the messy real world.
What Pre-1960s SF television show or movie would you like to see get a big-budget remake, and why?
“The Man in the White Suit” (1951) is a simple and very funny tale starring Alec Guinness as a man who invents a material that doesn’t need to be cleaned and never wears out. The movie is about how that scientific breakthrough completely disrupts the economy from capital to labor. It would take a filmmaker of some talent and vision to figure out how to update it more than seventy years later.
If you were secretly an alien visitor to the Earth, why are you here?
For the chocolate, of course.
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I can’t believe you didn’t ask me about my latest book, Can Your Heart Stand the Shocking Facts? which is a film criticism parody where I offer a “deep dive into an American masterpiece, ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’” It offers such spurious “facts” as Tor Johnson passing up the chance to play Laertes in an all-wrestler production of “Hamlet” and how one of the prior alien plans was to force humans to eat kale and quinoa and contains the complete annotated screenplay.
As for myself, these days I spend my spare time trying new recipes, failing to convince my cat not to lie down between the book I’m reading and my face, and how I got to be the same age as old people.
Fantastic Books: https://www.fantasticbooks.biz/kimmeldaniel
Author page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/316124.Daniel_M_Kimmel
Movie reviews: https://northshoremovies.wpcomstaging.com/
