Stephen King's 11/22/63 was released this week and it involves a man who travels back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This isn't your average Stephen King book and he wants to attract a different type of audience.
He's currently on a press tour and we expect to cover a number of interviews over the next month. In a recent Q&A, Stephen King talks about writing 11/22/63, and discussed time travel, his believe in good/evil, and Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
Q: Errol Morris: Aren’t you going to have to deal with that whole lone gunman versus conspiracy thing? The endless debates about what really happened?
A: Stephen King: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m prepared for trouble when the book comes out. Conspiracy people guard themselves pretty jealously. They have their theories and some of them are pretty complex, and some of them are pretty simple. Some of them have been disproved. But one of the things that sticks in my mind is that none of them has been proved. None of them. So it’s like U.F.O.s… If they’re really U.F.O.s, how come one has never landed, or we’ve never been given definitive proof?
Q: And yet you don’t really believe in coincidences, do you?
A: Yes, I do. The book that I wrote is a time-travel story. The coincidences are minimized by this idea that the past tries to echo itself over and over again. But it’s not fate when somebody wins the lottery. Some guy picks numbers, or the computer picks numbers, and those numbers come up. You know? It’s a coincidental world.
Q: Philosophers have endlessly speculated about the nature of evil. Why there has to be evil –
A: Well, it does seem to me that, without evil, there is no good, because we wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.
Q: But in your novel, history seems to involve a kind of balancing act between good and evil. We don’t know the interrelationship of things. What you call the “butterfly effect”: change one thing in the hope of making the world a better place, and something’s going to happen to make the world even worse.
A: Well, Ray Bradbury called it the butterfly effect before me. It’s also been called the Rube Goldberg effect – where you see the world as an infernal machine. When you pull Lever A, Spring B hits Cog C. The next thing you know, the models are all over the floor. I’m not saying it’s the way things are, but it’s certainly plausible. I tried as much as I could when I wrote the book not to get caught up in any of the paradoxes and things that go along with time travel.
The rest of the Q&A is an interesting read, but be aware that there are some spoilers for those that have not read 11/22/63. The book is now available on hardcover, eBook, and audiobook formats. For more information on 11/22/63, visit: http://dailydead.com/stephen-kings-112263-released-today/
To read the rest of the Q&A, visit the New York Times: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/errol-morris-interviews-stephen-king/
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