Or, "What Possessed You To Write
That?
Warning! Possible Spoilers Ahead!
Sometimes there is more to a story than meets the eye. I
suspect it's true that there is often more to a story than
meets its writer's eye. We do not fully comprehend our own
complexities, but if we are fortunate, those complexities can
still work in our favor.
These short pieces on certain of my stories are my attempts
to show what I had in mind for them. You will be the best
judges of whether I succeeded or not. I realize this may be
akin to the magician revealing his secrets--but then, I'm
probably hiding some of those secrets even from myself.
Featured Stories Mortal
Instruments
Live
Bait
The Hanoi
Tree
String of
Pearls
And more to follow.
"Mortal
Instruments" I began writing with an eye to
publication in the autumn of 1994. Like so many naive souls
before me, I thought I would make a quick and impressive
splash. Well, so did the Titanic.
A year went by with nothing but form rejection letters from
a variety of magazines. Another six months passed, with no
improvement, save a brief letter from Stanley Schmidt, editor
at Analog, regretting that a particular story didn't
quite meet their needs. The astonishing thing is, I didn't
even open that letter. I had grown so accustomed to
thin envelopes and what they carried, I simply filed it away
unopened, another rejection like all the others.
By the summer of 1996, I was discouraged, though still
ramming my head against my chosen brick wall. I doubted myself
intensely. I believed I would never sell. Only the stark dread
of failure, and an almost pathologically stubborn streak in
me, kept me going.
Still, I dwelt on my failure. I wondered what I lacked ...
and I wondered what price I would pay, what sacrifices I would
make, to gain the ability I so fervently craved.
Being an aspiring writer, I wrote that down as a story
idea. Really, half a story idea. Perhaps someday something
else would come along to complete it.
What came along was a newspaper article on cybernetic
vision, using implants to allow people who had become blind to
regain some sight. Practical applications were still a decade
or two down the line, but the processes and the hardware had
been well worked out.
It began falling together. From cybernetic sight, I leaped
to cybernetic hearing. From my own writing frustrations, I
developed the idea of a professional musician balked in his
ambitions by 'deficient' hearing. Much research remained,
primarily in the musical field, but I had my story--my
catharsis.
My confidence did not return as swiftly. I submitted the
story to a smaller SF publication which has since folded. The
editor liked the story, but had no room in her inventory for
it. Emboldened by this promising reply, I sent it off to
Analog. Fortunately, Stan did have room in his
inventory.
How much ordeal and sacrifice would I be willing to endure
for success? Thankfully, I may never know. By asking the
question the right way, I found for myself a much more lenient
answer.
Read "Mortal Instruments"
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"Live
Bait" The question many writers hear, and
dread, most often is "Where do you get your ideas?" A variant
of this is "Where did you get that idea?" The premise
of "Live Bait" is the kind that draws the second question.
Fortunately, I have a ready answer: My editor.
Stanley Schmidt wrote a book entitled Aliens and Alien
Societies a few years ago, as a guide for science fiction
writers wanting to create plausible extraterrestrial
lifeforms, from biology to sociology and most things in
between. There is a section in the chapter "Engineering
Organisms" where he discusses various means of locomotion in
animals(and plants, but that's another speculation). One
paragraph on water mobility mentions jet and rocket
propulsion, used by some octopi and squids. To quote:
However, in those animals it's only practical for
occasional short bursts, and it's a little hard to see how it
could be adapted to routine, continuous, long-term
transportation.
Two pages before that, he also notes that "science
fiction writers take statements like that as challenges."
Well, I certainly did.
My solution came with surprising rapidity: peristalsis. The
same variety of rhythmic muscular contractions that gets your
lunch where it's going could also serve as a continuous
propulsive mechanism. It would take a lot of specialization to
make it work well, but hey, so did flying.
That's where my first idea came from. The second one arose
because I imagined these alien creatures as being of
whale-like size--naturally more interesting in a story than
having them the size of trout. It's only with something that
big that anyone could possibly get the idea of--but I think
I'll just invite you to read the story, if you haven't
already, and find out.
One last thing: if you've looked into my other writings, you may recognize several
names that appear in this story. I wrote this tale during my
time at Grudge Match, and, well, perhaps I got a little
carried away. I promise you, though, there are almost no
inside jokes involving them hidden within this story. Two at
most.
Read "Live Bait"
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"The Hanoi
Tree"
Warning! Definite
Spoilers Ahead!
One of the more unusual facts regarding me as a science
fiction writer is how late I began immersing myself in the
written genre, and how shallow my knowledge of it still is in
many respects. This sometimes puts me at a handicap in my
writing, because I don't know which ideas are fairly fresh,
and which have been mined out. When I decided in mid-1994 to
make a serious run at becoming a writer, I had the advantage
of having recently come across dozens of back issues of
Analog in a friend's attic. I spent a lot of time
reading through them, and through collections of classic
stories I checked out of libraries in two counties. This
self-directed lesson in SF writing helped, but it was by no
means exhaustive.
One of the stories I wrote before I started selling
involved a teenage girl's friendship with a deeply troubled
and introverted classmate. The reason for his psychological
distress, which she discovered bit by bit, was that he was
telepathically sensitive to others' emotions--but
preponderantly their negative ones. It was the first time I
had worked in this area of speculation, and nearly my last.
The story never sold. I submitted it to Analog some
while after making my first sale to Stanley Schmidt. He, of
course, has a deeper knowledge of SF history, so he knew how
Analog(and Astounding, its earlier title) had
focused a great deal on stories about telepathic powers during
the latter years of John Campbell's editorship in the 50s and
60s. Longtime Analog readers had had more than their
fill of such stories, he assured me, and only something that
broke very new ground could break through that resistance.
Okay. I can take a hint. However, I can also feel the
embarrassment of exposed naivete keenly enough to want to
erase it, to do better next time. I wanted to visit the
'psychic powers' area again, but obviously it would have to be
in very different form. Fortunately, science fiction
specializes in different forms.
Remote telepathy is passe? Okay, how about telepathy by
physical contact? You say that's impossible in humans? (As if
ESP and such weren't impossible, or very nearly so.) Then it
won't be in humans. The two juvenile protagonists, and their
difficulties in coming to understand each other, I kept. "The
Hanoi Tree" may be utterly dissimilar to that earlier story,
but two of the underlying ideas in the framework of each story
are very similar indeed.
Three notes before I close. First, the turbulent
relationship between Kevan Marek's parents is fictional, but
the underlying emotions, and Kevan's perspective on them, are
very familiar indeed to me. I won't go into personal details,
but this is a case where lack of fact does not mean lack of
truth. (That is a cliche which I frankly detest when it is
applied to real world events, usually with heavy doses of
cynicism, self-serving, and hypocrisy. Fiction, though, is its
own world with its own rules, which in a sense depends on that
cliche for its power. The trouble, I guess, is keeping the two
separate.)
Second, this story is rather old. I wrote my first draft in
January 1998, and at that time, one of my secondary characters
was named Rachel Lewinski. Now, remember what burst onto
public consciousness in January 1998? ... She became Rachel
Levitski fast.
Third, there are some odd coincidences in the issue of
Analog in which this story appears. First, the story is
set in the Sigma Draconis system, which turns out to be the
setting of another story in that issue: Diane Turnshek's
"Hullabaloo." Part of the reason I set the story in that
system was so I could make a throwaway joke about the colony's
primary computer: Spock's Brain. You may well be familiar with
that infamous Star Trek episode, where Mister Spock has
his brain kidnapped in order to run the life support systems
of an underground colony of women--in the Sigma Draconis
system. Well, someone else was familiar with that episode. In
Kyle Kirkland's science fact article "Brain-Machine
Interfaces" in this same issue, he says his interest in that
area was first piqued by the "Spock's Brain" episode of
Star Trek!
Stan, did you do this deliberately!?
Read "The Hanoi Tree"
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"String of
Pearls"
The action in "String of Pearls" centers around an alien
game of the same name, played with tiles representing language
units laid onto a multicolored board. This is not the most
subtle parallel I've ever written: String of Pearls is
patterned directly after the very human game of Scrabble. And
I, very human as I am, was a tournament Scrabble player for
several years.
I got sucked into the tournament Scrabble scene, fittingly
enough, through a book. Word Freak, by Wall Street
Journal sports writer Stefan Fatsis, follows him as he
explores the world of Scrabble played at its highest level -
by becoming a tournament player and striving to play the game
at its highest level. He gets to know the fascinating and
often eccentric experts at the heart of tournament play,
examines the origins and development of both the game and the
strategic analysis of the game, and lays open his own mounting
obsession with Scrabble as he tries to climb into the ranks of
the elite players. It is a sign of good writing when an author
can transfer his enthusiasms to the reader - and by that
standard, and others, Fatsis wrote a very good book.
So began my own milder (I think) fixation with Scrabble. I
studied structured lists of words, encountering plenty of
words very few people have ever seen, but which are in the
source dictionary for the game and hence acceptable for play.
I got weekly practice at a local Scrabble club in Somerville,
New Jersey (hi there, Scott), getting to meet several
interesting and occasionally eccentric players myself. I began
playing in tournaments: some in New Jersey, when I could find
them, plenty of one-day affairs in Queens and Philadelphia,
and bigger tournaments farther afield. And through it all, I
kept studying, kept producing new lists of words to study,
kept drilling myself on words I had learned but had to
remember perfectly to play at my best.
And as the effort mounted up, as I strained harder and
harder for smaller marginal gains, I came to realize that the
game had become work.
No doubt this happens a lot in such circumstances. It's
difficult to imagine a chess grandmaster having as much fun
with his game as a casual player of whatever skill level,
especially during his many, many hours of study. Baseball
players put a whole lot of practice and physical training into
their profession, and while the games themselves are probably
still fun, the hours of lifting weights and fielding practice
grounders behind each game are far less so. As your skills
rise, the room left for improvement narrows, and the more
sweat you have to pour into gaining that next quantum of
ability. I got a pretty good taste of that.
I also got a taste of something on a more philosophical
level, something Fatsis himself observed in Word Freak.
Like chess, Scrabble at its higher levels becomes solely about
itself. At lower levels, it is a useful tool to train your
mind to think better: in Scrabble's case, it can also be a
method for expanding one's vocabulary. But as one strives for
elite skills, the ancillaries fall away. It becomes an
impediment to learn the definitions of your new Scrabble
words. You are far better off concentrating your finite brain
power on pure memorization of the words themselves, perhaps
also learning their parts of speech so you know when you can
or can't add a strategically vital S or D, a RE- or an -ING.
The words lose meaning as words, and become mere scoring
patterns, as some Scrabble masters freely admit. The game
approaches something like pure mathematics, which is
fascinating in one sense - but in another, costs it quite a
lot.
Marcus Parrish reaches such a realization in "String of
Pearls." He is concentrating so much on the game as a game, he
has begun to forget that it is a means to learn an alien
language, not an end to reverse his own humiliations in
Bunwadde's household. It is only when he sees and rejects this
blind alley that he can start to see their language on its own
terms again, and his insight finally comes.
This wasn't why I ended up quitting tournament Scrabble - I
had other reasons to make the break - but it is something I
learned from the game, something I am liable to remember
longer than many of those weird and wonderful words I
learned.
Thus forewarned … if you have a sudden Scrabble itch to
scratch, and Word Freak isn't enough for you, go take a
gander at the National
Scrabble Association's website. Who knows what might come
of it?
Oh, and just to satisfy the lawyers: Scrabble is a
registered trademark of Hasbro. Not trying to infringe, though
that ought to have been pretty clear.
Read "String of Pearls"
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