And that wasn’t all…
There was, Robert said, an outline for an entire novel that no one knew about, that Heinlein had never gotten around to writing. What it read like, he said, was a classic Heinlein Juvenile, and indeed it had been dreamed up around the time he was writing them, and—
—and from the back of the room, a woman I could not see called, in a loud, clear, melodious voice:
“You should get Spider Robinson to finish that novel.”
And there was applause.
One of the other people on that panel was Eleanor Wood, literary agent for the estate of Robert A. Heinlein—and also, as it happens, for me. Another was Art Dula, trustee for the estate and its half-million dollar Heinlein Prize Trust (See www.heinleinprize.com for details)…and Robert’s literary executor. Glances were exchanged. Immediately after the panel ended, words were exchanged.
I was, please understand, profoundly terrified that this cup might actually come to me. It was quite literally the most difficult and intimidating challenge that could possibly be handed a science fiction writer, a red flag to critics. It was like a musician being asked to write, score, produce, perform, and record an entire album based on a couple of John Lennon demo cassettes. In boxing it’s called leading with your chin. But I was fifty-five years old, just in the mood for the challenge of my life. Most of all, I wanted to read a new Heinlein novel so badly, I didn’t care if I had to finish it myself, didn’t care what kind of grief it cost me to do so.
Once again, a woman I didn’t know had changed my life.
I’m delighted to report that she did not remain anonymous. I sent this Afterword around to some of those mentioned in it for corrections, and one of them was David M. Silver, President of the Heinlein Society (www.heinleinsociety.org), who was also on that panel. He was able to identify my benefactress as a member of his esteemed society. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Kate Gladstone!
Shortly after I returned home from Torcon 3, I received Robert’s outline, and permission to write two sample chapters and a proposal for Art Dula; if he liked them, the gig was mine. Wild with exultation, I fell upon that outline and read it three times with extreme care.
And then I began banging my head on my desk. Gently, at first.
You may recall I stated earlier that Robert’s outline ran at least eight pages. It may have run fifty, for all anybody knows. What we do know is, seven of them survive.
They establish the ficton—Robert’s term for time and place in which a story is set. They create vivid characters and their back stories, especially Joel, Jinny, and her grandfather. They describe the basic antinomy that impels Joel to emigrate, discuss the economics of interstellar colonization, and sketch in some of his early adventures after he leaves.
And then they chop off in midsentence, and midstory.
My God, I said to myself, the first time I finished reading the outline, there’s no furshlugginer ending! It could go anywhere from here…
God, this is great! I said to myself the second time I finished it, I not only get to write a book with Robert, I get to pick the ending.
Dear God, I moaned to myself after the third reading, what the hell am I going to do for an ending?
I holed up in my office for a week, and stared at those seven pages and fourteen quasilegible index cards and asked myself that question until beads of blood began to form on my forehead. Barring another miracle of forensic scholarship, this was going to be the very last Robert Heinlein novel ever. No ending I thought of seemed adequate. Twice a day my wife poked food in with a stick and retired to safety. I played my entire iTunes music library in search of inspiration, staring at its hypnotic visual display on my PowerBook screen, thinking like mad.
And one afternoon, iTunes finished playing the last Ray Charles album on my hard drive, and defaulted to the next artist in alphabetical order.
Robert Anson Heinlein.
Half a dozen short mp3 audio clips, of him being interviewed on radio in his hometown, Butler, Missouri, on its first-ever Robert A. Heinlein Day back in 1987, a year before his death. I’d listened to all those clips often. But the first one in line made me sit bolt upright in my chair now.
There—in my GrandMaster’s Own Voice—was the rest of our novel, and the inspiration for its new title, in a single unscripted sentence. Two clips later, he said it again, in different words. Suddenly I recalled Robert griping to me once in a phone conversation about a story he’d always wanted to tell, that John W. Campbell had argued him out of writing…
You have read both those soundbites. They were the chapter-opening quotes for Chapters 17 and 18.
That quickly, the novel finished itself in my mind. All that remained was the comparatively trivial business of writing those first two sample chapters and a proposal, winning Art’s approval, marketing the novel, selling it to Tor Books—oh, yes, and then typing 115,051 words, configuring them in sentences, arranging those into paragraphs, and separating them into chapters. Every waking moment of two years of my life, tops.
Two Novembers later, the task is completed, to the best of my ability.
And well beyond. Fortunately I had help. Even more so than any of my previous thirty-two books, I could not conceivably have completed this one without the generous and patient assistance of many people far more knowledgeable and intelligent than myself. We have come now, in other words, to the closing credits.
My principal consultants and unindicted co-conspirators were the gentlemen who have assisted me with all of my recent novels, the Vancouver Lunar Circle, particularly engineers Guy Immega and Ray Maxwell, physicist Douglas Beder, and astronomer Jaymie Matthews. Once my colleague and friend Allen M. Steele (www.allensteele.com) and noted rocket scientist Jordin Kare had helped me decide what kind of starship I wanted, Guy, one of my oldest friends, designed the Sheffield with Doug and Ray for me, treating the Ikimono Drive I handed them as a black box. Guy and his daughter Claire created Brasil Novo together in the course of a bedtime story they spent several years telling themselves, calling it “Jungle World,” and latterly Jaymie added a few refinements to help it retain its atmosphere. Jaymie also figured out how to make its star satisfy the odd requirements I needed, and educated me about the destruction of my own star, its precursors and its consequences, as well as consulting on cosmology in general. Doug saved my bacon over and over, not only working and reworking complex relativistic computations in what appeared to be zero time, but continually suggesting ingenious ways to make the answers serve the needs of the story. And each of these Lunarians made invaluable comments on the work of the others.
Allen was also enormously helpful in helping me visualize what interstellar flight would actually be like, over a period of years, having devoted considerable thought to the matter for his own terrific Coyote novels. To help me imagine what a starship’s farm that feeds five hundred might look like, however, I went straight to the man himself: Dr. Raymond M. Wheeler of NASA’s Biological Sciences Office, who’s designing the farm that will feed astronauts on their way to Mars; he gave generously of his time and special knowledge. The goat lore I acquired myself, painfully, a long time ago in Nova Scotia.
One more technical adviser must be thanked who, like Dr. Wheeler, had never previously helped me with a book, yet proved invaluable this time. Everything I know about the sax I learned by either listening to, watching, or questioning my friend Colin MacDonald, a composer, saxophonist, Soto Zen monk, and in his spare time (!) the keeper of my Web site www.spiderrobinson.com.
Nor will I ever forget the love and support of David Crosby, who gave me the chords and melody for “On the Way to the Stars”—not to mention the 1.67 gHz G4 Powerbook on which Variable Star was researched and written. The music I listened to most often while I wrote was that of CPR, the band David and his older son James Raymond formed with Jeff Pevar (www.crosbycpr.com), and also the landmark 2004 Crosby • Nash double-album.
Numerous others also furnished invaluable ideas and ins
ights, including Bob Atkinson, John Barnstead, Bill Patterson, Eleanor Wood, David Gerrold, Jef Raskin, Michael Lennick, James Gifford, Paul Hattori, Yoji Kondo, Herb Varley (who suggested the Mercury be powered by hyperphotonic swans), my editor Pat Lobrutto, and doubtless others I’m blanking on now. I hope they’ll forgive me.
And nobody’s input was more valuable or more profoundly appreciated than that of my beloved wife and partner, Jeanne, who read each day’s copy when she woke up, and left extensive notes on my keyboard for me to find every night when I went to work; no one will ever suspect how many stupid mistakes she caught before anyone else got to see them, or how many neat ideas were really hers.
Once the story was complete, everybody named went over it looking for mistakes, misunderstandings, and problems, and then helped me repair them. So—crucially for my peace of mind—did my friends John Varley and David R. Palmer, both noted Heinlein experts, who went over the manuscript with great care and each made characteristically astute suggestions.
To all these people I give my deepest thanks. As always, any mistakes are my fault.
But it takes more than just technical advice to finish a novel. Especially this one.
First of all, and last of all, I want to say that without Jeanne’s boundless love and rock-solid support, I would never have even dreamed of starting such a nerve-wracking project, and would probably have finished it, if I did, with a massive dependency on Ativan, or worse. She is my invariable star, and our orbit is stable. Equally invaluable were the unquestioning love and sensible advice of our remarkable daughter Terri Luanna, both an advertising exec and a social worker in the toughest town on Terra.
Art Dula took a major weight off my shoulders right from the start, by telling me, “I do not want you to try and do the literary equivalent of a Rich Little impression of Robert Heinlein. I want you to take his outline and write the best damn Spider Robinson novel you’re capable of.” He also gifted me with Robert’s own, many-times-hand-repaired desk dictionary. I had Robert Heinlein’s personal box of words to dip into, any time I ran short of them—and still do. Thank you, Art.
A mainstay of my morale throughout was Robert and Ginny’s granddaughter, Dr. Amy Baxter, M.D., Jeanne and I met her and her husband, Louis Calderon, M.D., at Torcon 3, two nights before I sat on that panel and learned of the existence of an unwritten Heinlein novel, and we hit it off immediately. When she learned I had landed the commission, Amy promptly sent me a pair of her grandfather’s Polynesian cuff links to wear as I typed, and sent Jeanne some of Ginny’s jewelry to wear for me. (I was startled and amused to discover that it was necessary to send one of my shirts out to a tailor and have it retrofitted to accept cuff links—apparently they stopped having them while I wasn’t looking.) By the time I was steaming into the home stretch of Variable Star in summer 2005, I was wearing Robert’s treasured, threadbare favorite gardening shirt as I wrote out in my office, and Jeanne was in the house, in her own office, wearing Ginny’s kimono. Bless you, Amy.
Other moral support and/or morale support (sometimes inadvertent or unsuspected) was provided by Daniel P Gautreau, Alex Morton, Anya Coveney-Hughes, Andrea MacDonald, Greg McKinnon, Bob Atkinson, George R. R. Martin, Parris McBride, Alex Grey, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Lawrence Block, Tom Robbins, Robert Crais, Donald E. Westlake, Amos Garrett, Gregg Carroll, Holger Petersen, Paul Pena, Seth Augustus, Moses Znaimer, Keith Hensen, Paul Krassner, David, Jan and Django Crosby, James Raymond, Graham Nash, Jens Stark, Gabrielle Morrissette, Rob Bailey, Kerry Yackoboski, Damien Broderick, James R. Cunningham, Brad Linaweaver, Robin W. Bailey, Steve and Lynn Fahnestalk, Will Soto, Evita Karlic, the Heinlein Society (www.heinleinsociety.org), Charles, Mary, and Jim Robinson, innumerable kind members of the Usenet group alt.callahans, and whoever I’ve forgotten to mention.
Finally, all the Portuguese names for Brasil Novo and its moons were furnished by my son-in-law, Heron Gonçalves da Silva, of Niteroi, Brazil—a classic young Heinlein Hero if there ever was one, who came to New York a few years ago without a dime, a reference, or a word of English, and is now studying electrical engineering at the same university I got my own degree from. Obrigado, meu genro.
Writing Variable Star has involved more work, more pressure, more fear, and above all, more sheer fun than all my other books put together. I hope it will be given to me to write another thirty-three, but I doubt any of them will come close to this.
Every time I’ve ever sat down to write anything, I’ve had Robert looking over my shoulder, of course, because he is my first template for How This Thing Should Be Done. But this time around, I felt his presence far more powerfully than ever before. In general it had a calming effect.
Only twice did it actually get spooky.
The first time, I frightened my wife badly when she discovered me heading out to my office with the vacuum cleaner. She was vastly relieved to learn I was not going insane, but merely being haunted: in fact, she roared with laughter when I finally admitted that Robert had stubbornly insisted he was not going to work in that goddamn pigsty until I mucked the place out.
The second time, it was me who got the willies. A friend had sent me the URL for a particularly thrilling NASA Quicktime movie: a full 360-degree true-color view of the surface of Mars from Sojourner. (Google it for yourself.) I was mousing my way around in a circle in wild exhilaration, like a drunken dervish, intoxicated by what I was doing, thinking to myself how thrilled Robert would have been to see this. Check it out, Robert! I cried in my mind. A robot on the Red Planet, named after Miss Sojourner Truth! I’m sitting at my desk, using my mouse to pan around Mars, can you believe this?
Just then, I moused past a series of surface irregularities just odd enough to catch my eye: a string of roughly spherical depressions in the coppery sand, separated by intervals of about the same distance. I wondered idly what they were.
At that moment, I heard a voice—an actual, physically audible voice—the well-remembered, unmistakable Missouri voice of Robert Heinlein—say, I swear to you, these two words: “Willis tracks.”
Well, those bumps in the sand did indeed look just like the tracks that might be left by a Martian bouncer such as Willis, the star of Robert’s classic juvenile novel Red Planet, now that I thought about it. But I hadn’t been thinking about it. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I nearly crushed my mouse. If you’ll pardon the expression.
That is my only actual ghost story, I’m happy to say. And I admit I was not cold sober that night. Nonetheless, I report that from start to finish, writing Variable Star has left me feeling Robert’s presence and spirit far more strongly than I had since he caught a starship for parts unknown back in 1988.
I sincerely hope it has done the same for you.
—Bowen Island, B.C.
24 November 2005
Robert A. Heinlein, Variable Star
(Series: # )
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