Suzy McKee Charnas - Vampire Tapestry
and done to death long since. Fine if you're into gothic-style decadence (or wish you had the nerve to be, in reality) but only of passing interest to me, when I was a lot younger and still figuring out what I liked and didn't like. So I *had* to take a different tack when I wrote about my own vampire: if what I'm writing doesn't interest me, it sure as blazes isn't going to interest anyone else. Besides, part of the whole idea was to challenge the stale model that so many writers were using and come up with something fresh and original.
In VAMPIRE TAPESTRY you have carefully given a scientific explanation for the evolution of your vampire under the guise of Weyland giving a college lecture. Did you envision him as a genetic fluke, a mutation of humanity that proved to be a successful predator, but because of the mutation, sterile? Or as a different species, relatively few in number?
I've always had the notion that he was a mutation not of humanity but of the dinosaur line -- something ancient, saurian, and predatory -- that lives for millennia by slowly changing its own form, rather than reproducing in order to create changing young. It's a very different model of evolution: periodic restructuring of the self to meet new challenges -- which is one take on immortality. The restructuring takes place during the long sleeps between waking lifetimes. So yes, a genetic fluke -- but not among humans. He's become more human-like as he's gone along, but he's really an outrageous sport in terms of how life on this planet actually evolves: by profligate reproduction over time. He doesn't reproduce at all; he retools *himself* repeatedly over time instead. He might even be an alien to earth, his uniqueness is so basic and so extreme. I think that's why Joanna Russ once wrote that this book is more science fiction than fantasy.
Will you write any more Weyland stories?
You never know; I used to say that his story was told, complete and rounded by a sleep as is entirely appropriate. The story told in the novel is to be thought of as the way he lives each of his waking lifetimes in turn: he gets along pretty well until he makes mistakes that lead to him becoming too humanized by intimate contacts with his prey. Then he makes the same
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