“The Crosshatchers” involved a carefully designed alien, the #, an intelligent being of asymmetrical build. The # never evolved vertebrae. There are two joints in the back, which is otherwise as solid as leg bones. Solid bone extends from the skull to the upper joint (below the shoulders). I gave it two right arms and lots of sensitive fingers, and a crossover spinal cord (as with humans), so the left side of the skull needs more brain capacity. There’s one left arm, built for strength. The shoulder muscles would run all the way to the top of the skull on the left, for increased leverage; which only works because of the solid backbone. But that makes the skull even more lopsided.
The first glimpse of the # was to have been a skull picked off a sandy beach: a weathered, lopsided skull with a handle on it: a serviceable club.
The Crosshatcher novella sat unfinished in my filing cabinet for years. Jerry Pournelle and I had only just begun talking collaboration when I pulled the # out to show him. I had realized that I could put an alien-occupied planetary system in the middle of his thousand-year-old human empire.
The # became the Motie Mediator. But the skull-with-handle scene never worked its way into THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE. You may find it, much altered, in a Draco Tavern Story, “Folk Tale.”
The one that hurts is the one I published.
Following “Neutron Star,” Frederik Pohl made a suggestion. I would write stories about the odd pockets of the universe: double stars, red giants, whatever oddities took my notice. These would be paired with paintings of such objects.
The format wasn’t followed exactly, but several stories emerged from that suggestion, including all of the stories in the collection NEUTRON STAR.
A painting of the galaxy as seen from along the axis sparked “The Ethics of Madness.” From the beginning I knew the ending: one spacecraft chasing a second with intent to murder; the leading spacecraft afraid to turn around. From that I let the rest of the story germinate. The theme: in an age when one’s sanity can be controlled by biochemicals, forgetting to take your pills is murder.
The ending I started with was wildly inappropriate to the story as it developed. The theme got lost. I should have dropped the ending I started with; and I have done that on numerous occasions since.
And I did a better job with a recent sequel, “Madness Has its Place.”
A Planetarium Show…well, the term explains itself. As a juvenile I had seen artificial starscapes rolling across a dome at Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles. I had not known that some planetarium shows are fiction, until Rueben Fox asked me to write one.
Now, that was new. Fiction in planetarium shows is almost always science fiction, because the theme is almost always astronomical. Some good stories have become planetarium shows, including The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle and “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov. There were some originals, too, but in the early seventies the routine was to search the literature, find the perfect story, then produce a show.
So Marilyn and I were flown to Salt Lake City. There was a mini-convention of sorts. I made a speech in the planetarium—and found that the little penlight wouldn’t show me my notes. I never speak extemporaneously on purpose; it always happens by accident.
We were shown around the planetarium. The restrictions of a planetarium show were explained to me: You don’t see actors, though the equipment may project still photographs. In terms of dialogue it’s close to being a radio show. Landscapes are possible, but not convincing.
And Hansen Planetarium is in Salt Lake City, the center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Would that be a problem? Was I in danger of offending the planetarium’s audience? No, perish forbid. No restrictions would be placed on my artistic soul.
So I wrote them a script. It came back, and I was told what I’d done wrong in terms of offending an audience. And I tried again…and again…
What was happening was this. Hansen Planetarium was learning what restrictions applied to a Salt Lake City planetarium show, and they were learning this by watching me violate them. This (as I told myself, manfully holding my temper) is no more than what television producers do to scriptwriters, except in one respect. A scriptwriter is paid for every new version of his script. I had been paid nothing.
I presently wrote a letter to Fox explaining that what he was trying to do was impossible. In general, nobody will write a story for a planetarium show except by purest accident. I reasoned that Fox and his colleagues had been doing it right all along: reading the books and magazines, and choosing what they wanted out of the literature!
And the Planetarium presently paid me two hundred dollars. Live and learn…
—Late flash: In September of 1988, Von Del Chamberlain, the present director, phoned from Hansen Planetarium. Don Davis (The Don Davis, who first painted the Ringworld as seen from the surface) had found the last of my scripts. He and Del Chamberlain are planning to make “The Leshy Circuit” into a planetarium show. They’re talking about new technology. They sent me a copy—I didn’t have one—and it reads well.
—Later flash: Nothing has happened since. Don has quit.
Jim Baen was with Ace Books when he realized that Ace holds title to Armageddon: 2419 A.D. Sound familiar? It’s the original Buck Rogers story. Ace holds the right to publish sequels!
So Jim propositioned me and Jerry. For a flat fee, not large, would we work out a format for future Buck Rogers stories? The idea was to rationalize the old assumptions.
It sounded like a challenge. It sounded like fun. It sounded (for that matter) like a project best embarked upon at night while drinking. By now I had taught Jerry to pour brandy in his coffee. Free the imagination and stay alert too! So we read the old story over…
Hmmm.
We would have to give up certain laws of physics.
Then again, Anthony “Buck” Rogers was no scientist. He might well have misinterpreted a lot of what he saw.
A radioactive gas found underground won’t put you out for five hundred years; it’ll give you cancer! There must have been something else in that cave. Advanced Han medical equipment? If Rogers at age ninety went back to explore…
The Han had disintegrator cannon mounted around their cities, firing continuously. That should have robbed the Earth of its atmosphere within a few days! Clearly the air wasn’t actually disappearing…
The planets of the solar system don’t all have breathable atmospheres, do they? Not now they don’t…
A picture emerged.
Jerry was really getting into this. I was fiddling with physical laws and following him around, mostly. There was an empire out there among the stars. They had projects, some running automatically, throughout the solar system. By A.D. 2419 they had terraformed Mars and Venus. Their representatives were gone, except for enclaves in suspended animation on Earth and elsewhere.
The cache in China had been hospital patients.
What ripped that one open, while Rogers had already slept nearly a century, was a piece of a “calved” comet head. The patients boiled out and, using interstellar-level hospital equipment, conquered most of a world already battered back to savagery by the Hamner-Brown comet impact: by Lucifer’s Hammer.
Antigravity was in use for ambulances and stretchers. The disintegrators were surgical tools and such; teleport devices work as disintegrators when the focus is fuzzy. Antigravity plus disintegrators make a dandy airplane, by the way. The air disappears at the nose and reappears in a rocket nozzle aft. We gave rocket belts the same design.
There were things Buck never told Wilma. Good thing, too. Mean broad, Wilma. Buck Rogers has an illegitimate son among the refugee Han.
The enclave under the South Pole isn’t hospital patients. It’s gene-engineered soldiers. And Rogers, fighting the all-new meaner Han, is a bit peculiar himself. The equipment in the cave has followed its programming and rejuvenated him…as a Han soldier.
What went wrong? Well, nothing, really. But Jerry and I were busy, so the stories went to authors picked b
y Jim Baen. The quality was not impressive, the sales were not impressive, and the series was dropped.
It’s a shame that Rogers never got as far as Mars.
I’ve had little involvement with movies and television.
Dorothy Fontana invited me to write a Star Trek animation. I feared (groundlessly) that nobody at Filmation would see their chance to use real aliens rather than actors in rubber suits. So I wrote a story treatment using Outsiders (built like a black cat-o’-nine-tails, using photoelectric metabolism at near absolute zero) and quantum black holes. For Saturday morning TV!
Dorothy advised me that wouldn’t work. My next attempt was too bloody…
Dorothy and I presently spent part of an afternoon at Gene Roddenberry’s place. Gene suggested rewriting “The Soft Weapon” from NEUTRON STAR. That worked, as “The Slaver Weapon,” with Spock playing a Pierson’s puppeteer. I was given permission to leave Kirk out.
My first attempt (quantum black holes) became the basis for “The Borderland of Sol.”
And Paramount sold to Ballantine Books the right to turn my script into a book. Alan Dean Foster did that. So “The Soft Weapon” wound up competing with itself…
I wrote three Land of the Lost episodes with David Gerrold. David was story editor, and all of the ideas were his. It still irritated me when random powers would change my—our—precious prose.
Eventually I quit the Writers Guild rather than participate in a strike. But before that, Jerry Pournelle and I got involved in some projects.
You won’t see them on big or little screens.
We got a certain distance into a PBS project. They wanted near-future predictions. The concept of the cargo sailing ship was coming back into vogue. “Gullwhale Crossing” would have involved a huge cargo-carrying sailing ship, fully automated and computer-driven, easy on the environment and the oil reserves, and dirt cheap. We planned to put some Boy Scouts aboard, then run up a storm…
It vanished. PBS must get more good offers than they can handle. For awhile I hoped “Inconstant Moon” would become a PBS project, but that didn’t happen either.
We weren’t the only writers who got involved with A Watcher in the Woods after it was shown. Many at Disney Studios surely suspected that something had gone wrong. The film opened outside New York. Reviews were nasty…
Our agent Marvin Moss called. Disney Studios was offering a flat fee for a limited task. None of the requirements were onerous.
We drove out to Disney Studios. There, in a small private theater, an officer took us in charge and explained the rules.
We were shown all but the last ten minutes of a movie.
We were invited to guess the ending.
Then we were shown their ending.
Then we were asked to attempt to write a better one.
The first hour and twenty minutes of A Watcher in the Woods wasn’t bad at all. The acting was good; the sense of mystery and doom was powerful; Bette Davis was superb as an elderly lady ridden by old guilt.
I took the story for fantasy. We’d had continual glimpses of something—flashes of blue-white light offstage, a viewpoint that stalked the heroine and behaved like a hyperactive, secretive six-year-old—which I saw as a lightning elemental. Fantasy. Jerry thought he could interpret all of this as science fiction. We weren’t far apart in interpretation: it would be possible to wrap up the plot elements we’d seen and return the lost girl to Earth.
The ending they’d used looked like it had been torn off a cheap Japanese rip-up-Tokyo movie! The lightning elemental became a giant rubber bat who snatched up the heroine and transported her to an angular domain, verrry scientific. This creature who has been behaving like a six-year-old is now given as a trapped alien master scientist…
They’d made a mistake (Ron Miller told us) that seems all too common in Hollywood. They’d bought a book. They’d made a movie, making changes where whim struck them. When it was wrap-up time, their changes had made the original ending impossible. They looked at each other and…
Moviemakers have too little regard for story.
Jerry and I were having fun. We ate lunch at Mon Grenier—our favorite restaurant, open for lunch for less than a year before Andre Lion realized that too few people would pay his prices—while we fine-tuned the elements of the story. Certain elements were so prevalent during the movie that they had to be in the ending: mirrors cracked in a certain pattern, triangles, lightning, demonology. Back we went to Jerry’s house to work out an outline.
We turned it in.
Understand: we had something to lose here, but not very much. We didn’t yet know that Joe Haldeman had also written them an ending, or that Mike Jitlov had done them one for nothing, because their present ending upset him. But we wanted the joy of fixing something broken. We wanted that movie done right.
A few days later we were summoned to conference at Disney. How tactful should we be? There were things that needed saying…
“Obviously we know that something’s wrong with it,” we were told.
Ah, that’s a relief. I said, “The giant rubber bat has got to go.”
After that conference we wrote a second draft. It would have cost a couple of million, done with Jerry’s climax; or half as much, with a minor rewrite. It would have been superb!
They didn’t use our ending. What I’ve heard is that they solarized the giant rubber bat: he’s blazing white now, like a lightning elemental. I haven’t had the courage to see for myself.
We got involved in V, too, but just barely. It was a TV series at that time, and already doomed, probably. We weren’t told that. Jerry and I were invited to the office of a guy who had only just been put in charge of V.
You’ll remember V. That’s aliens who come from interstellar space to steal Earth’s water, cruising right past all the moons of Saturn, where water comes prepackaged and nobody is shooting at them.
The problem with V (as the new producer saw it) was that they never had an alien. They had costumes, they had makeup, they had special effects, but nobody had ever set forth to describe a life form (a remarkable insight, placing him far above average for a producer of a television series).
The studios had already discarded that matter of the water. The question remained: with several worlds under their control, what do the Visitors want from Earth?
I took the position that they are dinosaurs.
Assume an intelligent species of dinosaur. When the Dinosaur Killer asteroid was sighted, some of them escaped. Their descendants don’t remember this. They only know that Earth feels good. The day is the right length, the air smells right, the taste of the water has character.
Picture the episode in which archaeologists find traces of Visitors bones in the Cretaceous clay. What a publicity coup for the Visitors! Now they can claim the Earth not by force of arms but by prior right! They’ll turn it into a major publicity push…
And they will not instantly understand why their human audience is giggling. But dinosaurs are big, stupid creatures with brains the size of walnuts…
And nobody ever called us back.
One night at a party in 1981, Sharman Di Vono asked me if I’d like to do a story for a newspaper comic strip.
Sure!
She and an artist, Ron Harris, were (respectively) writing and drawing a Star Trek strip for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. The Syndicate would own it, but it would appear only in the Houston Chronicle in Texas. Why? Because the Syndicate owns the Houston Chronicle, but the Times was running a Star Wars strip.
Sharman and I wrote twenty weeks of story line.
It involved kzinti and another Federation member species, the Bebebebeque: small, shelled communal creatures about the size and proportions of a fifth of Haig & Haig Pinch. (I had already added kzinti to the Star Trek universe via “The Slaver Weapon.”) The kzinti had discovered a Bebebebeque colony world and enslaved it. The Enterprise was transporting more colonists. We put in another alien, a ferreth, and a corrosive biochemical drug used
in ferreth mating battles: all Sharman’s invention, and a fine, fanciful way to ruin some Enterprise machinery. There were colony life forms: big mean ravagers who ate the colony’s carpet leaf crops, then turned carnivore. Kzinti sportsmen, arriving in spring to hunt the ravagers, saved the colonials from starvation before enslaving them.
Sharman had to translate all this into comic strip format, because I can’t. Ron drew it. We called it “The Wristwatch Plantation.”
Sharman had trouble explaining the peculiarities of the comic strip business, and also making me believe it. For instance, there’s the matter of names. What’s most visible is the slug line, next to the title, and that remains the same forever, for product recognition. At or near the end of the strip is the signature box. Illegible it might be, or nearly so, but it names the people who actually produced the strip. So my name as guest writer went into the signature box but not the slug line.
I didn’t understand that until Sharman explained it to me at a lunch six years later.
We considered turning the story into a novel, or publishing the strip as a book. If Johnny Hart can do it, why not us?—with permission from Paramount, of course, for a piece of the royalties. Anything worth doing is worth selling repeatedly (Niven’s Law). Sharman had the “blessing” of the head of the merchandizing department at Paramount, Hi Foreman, and from a David Seidman at the Times.
But Hi Foreman moved on, positions were reshuffled, and word came from higher up. Blessings withdrawn. No book sale.
Ron Harris quit. Overwork: he had to give up something. He was willing to stay a bit longer if we would stop dawdling and finish the story.
Switching artists in the middle would be bad. We preferred to wrap the strip up fast. Sharman’s final-draft climax was a short cut: Kirk used the (repaired) transporter room to put a ravager aboard the main kzinti warship during a battle with the Enterprise…
And okay, it worked. It didn’t look hurried. Sharman’s a professional, and this isn’t my profession. But the climax I had in mind, back when we planned a more leisurely wrapup, is something I hate to see vanish.