| Episodes |
- Drummond, Ron. "The Infrequency of Liberation: A Conversation with Steve Erickson." Steam Engine Time 2 (1997): 12-20.
- http://www.efanzines.com/SFC/SteamEngineTime/SET02.pdf
- Erickson, Steve. "American Weimar." Los Angeles Times 8 January 1995.
- http://www.steveerickson.org/articles/weimar.html
- Erickson charges that the United States' democracy in itself has perpetuated a nation responsible for its own eventual demise. Our freedoms have simply created more oppression than liberty, and we've grown apathetic towards our buckling foundation, facilitating a "growing contradiction between our false innocence and our true idealism." Erickson accuses President Bill Clinton of heading this problem, as being more concerned with his political future than perhaps an unpopular policy. He even goes so far as to claim that although Jefferson would be perceived as socially abnormal in today's society, "no one would have to wonder if he really believed in democracy, or have to ask whether he believed in it more than his own power."
- Erickson, Steve. American Nomad. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
- Erickson, Steve. Arc d’X. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993.
- As Thomas Jefferson rapes his 14-year-old slave Sally Hemings, the repercussions of his actions are felt worlds over—literally. Erickson journeys into Aeonopolis, a city run by bureaucratic priests in which Sally finds herself wreaking havoc on the emotions of men like Etcher throughout the city. From there we jump to Berlin where Erickson himself witnesses a lost day referred to as Day X. He is murdered by a neo-Nazi named Georgie, who travels to a destroyed and abandoned Los Angeles where he enters a door, bringing him back to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in full circle. As Sally contemplates her involvement in this domino effect of events, she returns to the very beginning, where she abandons Thomas, does not afford him the chance to rape her, thereby changing the course of history.
- Erickson, Steve. Leap Year. New York: Poseidon Press, 1989. 90-91.
- Erickson, Steve. "# ARC 'd X [FORMULA]." Science Fiction Eye Summer 1993.
- http://www.steveerickson.org/articles/arceye.html
- Erickson recounts the events of his life that ultimately cause him to be a novelist and serve as inspiration for the themes of his novels. He describes his writings as containing "the oldest themes in the world—love and freedom, sex and history, obsession and idealism, identity and redemption—all threaded by the glue of memory, in which lies the only 'real' time."
- Erickson, Steve. "A battle for the soul of America." Salon 20 January 1999.
- http://www.salon.com/media/eric/1999/01/20eric.html
- Erickson examines the political spectrum from Clinton on one end to Tom DeLay on another in his social commentary on our political state. He denounces their partisan and judgmental natures as one of the main destructive forces against the democracy they are put in place to represent. He does not completely condemn political figures like DeLay, however, in that "only by defending DeLay's right to hate democracy do you defend democracy itself."
- Erickson, Steve. "George Bush and the Treacherous Country." LA Weekly 12 February 2004.
- http://www.laweekly.com/2004-02-12/news/george-bush-and-the-treacherous-country/#
- Erickson admits that he is a traitor to what modern America has become. Today, America's "democracy" is led by advocates of ideology like George W. Bush, whose beliefs actually serve to conflict with the very idea of democracy: "the absolute nature of his religious beliefs, and the way in which they demand that the values of secular democracy ultimately submit to Christian values, inevitably lead him to regard democracy with a latent distrust." Although Erickson cites many secular politicians" Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton" he also notes that their non-ideological values are perceived (perhaps through the agenda of the conservative right) as "an absence of morality." America today, then, has lost touch with its original identity; whereas political supporters of ideology hold positions of absolutes which actually go against what American democracy is founded upon: "Doubt is a critical component of both democracy and its leadership. In the eyes of democracy, doubt is not just moral but necessary; the psychology of democracy must allow for doubt about the rightness of any given political position, because otherwise the position can never be questioned. . . . In contrast, the psychology of theocracy not only denies doubt but views it as a cancer on the congregation, prideful temerity in the face of divine righteousness as it's communicated by God to the leaders of the state." And so, as America continues to shed its founding ideas, Erickson finds no choice but to label himself a traitor.
- Erickson, Steve. "Henry Miller: Exhibitionist of the Soul." Conjunctions 29 (Fall 1997).
- http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c29-se.htm
- While Erickson admits that Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer did indeed turn upside down his perception of many things, he doesn't view that as a negative thing: "after I read Tropic of Cancer as an aspiring young novelist of twenty-one there was no putting everything back where it was. Art was not about rules or formalism or structure or "dramatic unity" or what the literature teacher could diagram on the blackboard, it was about passion and imagination and courage." Erickson then goes on to describe the profundity of Miller's writings and, more importantly, the effects that his novel has had: "On one level this is pure nihilism; beneath that is the level of pure outrage; but beneath that there is the brave Moment in which, when everything else seems shallow and fleeting, all of us sooner or later aspire to live, and end up wondering why we cannot."
- Erickson, Steve. "Let the culture war RAGE." Salon 6 January 1999.
- http://www.salon.com/media/eric/1999/01/cov_06eric.html
- Erickson views the impeachment of Clinton as a platform to discover our national conscience. The result of a trial for President Clinton will in effect be putting ourselves on trial: “In a Senate trial we'll come face to face with the greatest secret of 1998, which is our secret self. As the sanctimony has been ratcheted higher and higher with ever greater fury, one hypocrite after another decrying the president as reprehensible, deplorable, disgusting and sick, a country full of good people with bad secrets has thought to itself: They're talking about me. †And, so, while the nation has shown its disapproval for these proceedings, Erickson supports them, not in defiance of the President, but rather to gain back the national identity upon which we were founded.
- Erickson, Steve. “The New Sanctimony.†Salon 18 August 2000.
- http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/index.html
- On the heels of the 2000 presidential election, Erickson describes the hypocrisies and obsolescence of the Republican camp regarding their impeachment of Bill Clinton. Although they have tried to debase his presidency as “fundamentally illegitimate,†Republicans overlooked the fact that “it gave full expression to the pleasure principle once coined the ‘pursuit of happiness’ by an early American subversive rewriting John Locke's three basic natural rights of life, liberty and property.†Leading up to this presidential election, Republicans had dedicated an enormous amount of time and resources to soil Clinton’s (and, thus, the Democrats’) name, especially in response to his sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky, yet Erickson counteracts their efforts: “Just as the Noonans and the Bennetts and the Lynne Cheneys would have us be an America where making money is more righteous than having sex, so we would be an America more offended by the idea of Thomas Jefferson fucking a black woman than owning one. Bad luck or just plain poor political sense on William Jefferson Clinton's part not to have owned Monica as he diddled her, in which case we might be able to rank him on a more Jeffersonian level.†As “American politics have declared war on the pursuit of pleasure,†Erickson’s goal is to explain how our “relative immorality†is much more relative than we realize.
- Erickson, Steve. “The Violation of Sally Hemings.†Esquire April 1993: 113-20.
- An excerpt from the beginning of Arc d’X.
- Erickson, Steve. Interview in Alan Rifkin, “Soul Survivor.†Buzz magazine
- http://www.steveerickson.org/articles/soul.html
- Erickson, Steve. radio interview
- http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw930621steve_erickson
- Koshikawa, Yoshiaki. “Finding a Way to Obliterate the Barriers: An Interview with Steve Erickson.†Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 143.6 (1997): 294-302.
- McCaffery, Larry, and Takayuki Tatsumi. “An Interview with Steve Erickson.†Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997): 395-421.
- McCaffery and Tatsumi cite one of Erickson’s primary influences on his writing as growing up in the constantly changing and disjunctive city of Los Angeles, and “equally significant was the impact on his sensibility of the wider cultural, political, and social upheavals that occurred.†They appreciate the degree to which Erickson uses his own “psyche, a region of blasted hopes, confusion, idealism, self-lacerating guilt, and perpetual isolation.†This way, Erickson’s works are not entirely comprised of fictional elements and are, as a result, more relatable. The interview then goes on to discuss the influences that led Erickson to become a writer at UCLA and beyond, and his political ideals. These thoughts on government would ultimately serve as one of the primary inspirations to use both Jefferson and Hemings in Arc d’X.
- Steve Erickson
- http://www.steveerickson.org
- Erickson’s own web site with a biography, bibliography, copies of articles, and so forth.
