They liked it. They hired me. I’ve written the bible that others will refer to for several years’ worth of stories. (But they won’t let me drop antimatter. Or demons. At least I’m rid of “evil unleashed.”)
I submitted a three-issue story too. They’re a bit taken aback. The trouble was, I got inspired and sprinted way ahead of the contract. There came a point at which the only way to make myself stop fiddling with GANTHET’S TALE was to print it out and send it to my agent.
I wrote DC a three-issue story when what they really wanted, it seems, was a little story to go with other stories in one issue.
It’s worse than that. I wanted to make the crazy Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, into an alien, a Guardian’s “cuckoo.” I thought I had permission. Then the guy who had the right to give Guy Gardner away came back from vacation!
As I write (November 1990), there’s still a chance that GANTHET’S TALE will be published. I hope so. There’s a wonderful interstellar fight scene I’d hate to see disappear.
Meanwhile, the stories generated by the GL Bible have been delayed.
There were a lot of givens in the decades-old Green Lantern universe, but a lot of empty spaces, too, in that fifteen billion years. The first intelligent species (I’ve so designated them) evolved on Maltus, eventually settle Oa, presently called themselves Guardians of the universe, and ultimately founded a Green Lantern Corps from more recently evolved species. My task was to fill in the gaps.
• • •
• • •
From THE GREEN LANTERN BIBLE
THE ECOCATASTROPHE ERA
In 9,960,000 AG Maltus was polluted almost to extinction.
It wasn’t any of the trite possibilities: injudicious use of nukes, chemicals, spray cans, oil, DDT, sewage. It was those psi powers…which by 9,960,000 AG had become very powerful.
Maltusians were long on power and short on control. There was a population boom: four billion Maltusians, very long-lived, so that a mere three percent are immature…which is to say, under 1,024 years (that’s 210 Maltusian years) and not expected to act responsibly yet. So species kept disappearing!
A tiger killed someone’s father; all tigers died. Mosquitoes went early. A hummingbird frightened a child; there are no hummingbirds. Lots of people don’t like creepy-crawly things in the house; some overreact. Housekeepers don’t like mold or termites. (I’m using Earthly life as examples. Of course there is no relation to Maltusian species…)
Maltusians developed longevity early. Conscious control of autonomic functions went hand in hand with Guardpower. Every Maltusian developed the Guardpower skill to look within his (her) body for imbalances, invading bacteria, cancers and so forth. Mature Maltusians also learned to cure their own allergies. Immature Maltusians, neurotics and powerful children, wiped out a wide array of plants instead: anything resembling goldenrod, rhododendrons, poison ivy…
Disease bacteria went early…along with some symbiotic gut-bacteria. That caused excitement! For the next eighty years, Maltusians were unable to digest food without exotic techniques. They were at the edge of extinction. Gene engineers were the most admired and least rested beings in the universe. But afterward the lesson was gradually forgotten…
Over a billion years, species are forgotten almost as fast as they disappear. Remember the passenger pigeon? How well? That creature is less than two hundred years extinct!
Major Result #1 was a developing reluctance to have children. Children were dangerous; raising them to adults took thousands of years of intense effort.
Wait a million years; has anyone died? Yes, two, tragically, but four couples have had babies. Well, who are they? They should have been stopped. Males can walk away from the problem—and males took the blame, until social pressure had seriously decreased their urge to mate. They were blamed for that too, of course. The split between the genders came much later, on the colony world Oa, but its seeds are here.
(It’s no less silly the other way. The Koran warns against women as agents of evil. Eve forced the apple on Adam. Women have generally taken the heat for everything. Maybe some of that went on on Maltus, too.)
Men and women are slightly alien to each other; we don’t always communicate well. And we associate anyway…but when the Maltusians’ reproductive urge dropped far enough, there was not enough motivation.
Major Result #2 was an entire science of creation of species. The Psions had their beginning here: they were a local lizard before Maltusian scientists began playing with their genetic makeup.
When the gene altering experiments stopped, the knowledge remained, and travelled with the subsequent refugee colonies.
Major Result #3 derives from swarms of spacecraft leaving Maltus. Many were officially sanctioned terraforming expeditions. Others were flights of refugees.
Throughout the universe in present time, humanoids predominate. Many are descended from Maltusians who were slapped back to savagery by unexpected planetary conditions or failed terraforming, then re-evolved over billions of years of time. (Terraforming refers to techniques for shaping a world into something men/Maltusians can use.) Others used Maltusian gene-altering techniques to fit their descendants for local conditions. Some did that badly.
How do you lose longevity? You stop taking your vitamins; you lose your doctor’s phone number, or your telephone is taken out.
Maltusian refugees generally lost most of their civilization. Of course their lifespans were shortened. Typically, the group would lose its advanced tools to the environment; that would shorten lifespans; survival needs would leave them no leisure time to practice and perfect their psi powers, biorhythm control, breathing, meditation, all of the disciplines that allowed their ancestors to live for up to billions of years; and gradually the disciplines would be forgotten.
Major Result #4 was the Oa expedition.
The group that ultimately chose Oa, and became the Guardians, was financed by a world’s resources. Maltusians wanted to repair a planet: their own. Their best shot at getting data was to finance someone else in some risky terraforming.
The Oa group (and scores of others, many of whom became refugee colonies) may have ruined many half-useful worlds before their techniques turned Oa into a paradise…a paradise that is mostly desert even in present time. (We’re covering 3,200,000 years here. You don’t talk about “generations” when you speak of Oans.) At that point the rest of the Maltusians came too, for a better home, and because Maltus had become drearily barren.
Maltus’s ecology was eventually rebuilt (and that held into historic time). Maltus currently is occupied by a human-seeming species lacking longevity.
The current inhabitants of Maltus derive from a Maltusian colony, established in the “ecocatastrophe” era, that gradually failed. The refugees returned to a ruined and deserted world. So they too found some hard answers.
They reshaped themselves genetically to a ruined Maltus. To protect a fragile ecology they suppressed the Guardpower. (Then and now, their Guardpower is latent but available.) They rejected immortality too.
(If you prefer other answers—such as that a tampered animal species has evolved this far and been left alone to evolve further—then tell Denny O’Neil what you want, quick. Do it before the concrete sets.)
Maltus was chewed up during the “Crisis” (around 1985, and DC-universe wide) and subsequently restored.
OA
“Oa is the central planet of the universe…or at least it’s polite to say so.” Arrogant the Guardians are, and they do make that claim; but no species capable of space travel really thinks the universe has a center.
But Oa must be the center of something. Guardians won’t see themselves as silly!
We’ll put Oa in the core of a big spiral galaxy (our own type, the most common) with a gaudy blazing sky as seen from the planet’s surface, that only becomes more terrific as one moves outward. Artists who want to show Oa may find backgrounds in almost any modern book of astronomical paintings.
The
core of a galaxy is uninhabitable. Lethal radiation bathes the surfaces of all the worlds therein, even those very distant from their suns. Orbits are weird; weather must be entirely crazy; collisions are too frequent. (Yes, twice per billion years is too bloody frequent.) Oa must be kept constantly livable by the Guardpower of its inhabitants.
But they chose to settle Oa. Is that arrogant, or what?
Rotation of Oa is the same as the rotation of Maltus at the time Oa was colonized, five billion years ago. Oa’s spin was altered for the convenience of the colonists. That rotation period is exactly 24 hours.
Why is Oa a barren desert but for the Citadel? Quote a Guardian: “We tried some gardening, but…”
Oa may have been fertile for a time, seeded with Maltusian life after its rotation, temperature, atmosphere, etc. were adjusted. Time passed, worlds evolved; as anticipated so long ago, the Guardians made enemies…and those have made Oa a target. Around Oa life grows gradually more exciting. Excitement is bad for a garden.
The Oan desert sand has absorbed Guardpower, has become a sapient entity. Maybe that entity can be enlisted as a gardener? Maybe Oa can be made fertile that way. It’s a stunt that would not have worked a few billion years ago, and that’s how long it’s been since they last tried it.
Guardians don’t care. They can imagine a garden, make it with their minds, turn it off when they tire of it. But for the Guardian children to come, a garden would be nice.
Why did the females leave Oa? This is a point where my “chronological ordering” breaks down. Bear with me.
The females are said to have deserted Oa 2.5 billion years ago, at 12,500,000,000 AG, and this is a tale only partly told. See GL Issue 200 for what’s known. What follows is Niven.
A pair of Oans, mates, broke the Origin Story barrier.
This is stranger than it sounds.
Male and female Oans show extreme sexual dimorphism. Dumpy rounded males with a low sex urge; tall slender females interested in mating with other humanoids. It’s as if they belonged to different species. They think differently too. The females are attuned to tools, the males to powers of the mind including psi.
Untold story: Thwarcharchura (female) and Whisthend (male) must have been a little weird. They considered each other to be lover, mate, companion, friend, colleague…secretly, of course. (Neither has appeared anywhere, to date.)
They attacked the Origin problem together. They built a time camera, reached the Origin Story and (of course) blew the camera to smithereens. They built another, and went around the Origin Story to watch their world and species evolve—as many males had done before them, and no female ever. It takes male Guardpower to feel out the shape of spacetime.
Another thing about Oan females: they live closer to reality. Whisthend was badly shaken. Animals. We were animals. But Thwarcharchura persuaded him to continue playing with the time machine; Whisthend presently was intrigued.
They watched a crucial time in their species’ past: the taking of Oa. (More than a history lesson. They knew elders who had participated! At least one such participant, Dawlikasstoktok, survives currently.)
They learned that there had been an intelligent species on Oa. Not natives. See descriptions of Oa, above, for reasons why life couldn’t develop. But colonists had set up a localized terraforming project.
These Visitors were aesthetically ugly, psychotic in temperament, short-lived, and generally not admirable. Their claim to the planet was not strong. They attacked the Oan landers on sight.
(Artists: have fun with these.)
The proto-Oan males exterminated them (and their Guardpower told them that there were no more: these Visitors were the last of their race). The first crews in were male only! Females were being protected as child-bearers necessary to a colony and engineers needed to maintain the ships.
It should be pointed out that the men would have been killed if they hadn’t acted.
They sent a message to the women: “Boil us a sea at these coordinates. We need water vapor.” The women used their terraforming equipment. A patch of land reached solar temperatures, with most of the Visitors on it. The men then mopped up.
The women had killed without knowing.
Some of these women survived until, two and a half billion years after the taking of Oa, Thwarcharchura exposed the truth. Their mates had never hinted at this crime.
Note: Genocide is just the kind of crime Green Lanterns and Guardians were formed to prevent.
Ragtokgond’s rage was no transient thing. Her answer was to lead the emigration of the Oan females…who thenceforth called themselves Zamorans.
Guardians tell other species (if they tell them anything) that their mates left them because the males had lost interest in reproduction and physical sciences and every other pastime interesting to Oan females. Zamorans say the same. The home life of Guardians is no alien’s business.
What human male would claim impotence in order to hide his part, or his ancestors’ part, in winning a war? But Guardians do that.
The Zamorans’ subsequent fate is on record. Their reconciliation with the male Oan Guardians is recent, from issue #200. The Guardians (meaning only the survivors of the Crisis) and their mates are currently absent from the universe. It is expected that they are making babies.
• • •
• • •
CRITICISM
On a Thursday afternoon the 1970s I read a well-written, convincing review in an amateur press magazine. It chopped one of my books into hamburger.
The Los Angeles Science Fiction and Fantasy Society meets Thursday nights. That night Joe Haldeman was visiting. After the meeting Joe and I went to Jerry Pournelle’s house to drink and talk shop.
I was still worried. Not angry: worried. It wasn’t my first bad review, but this one sounded too plausible. Maybe I was doing everything wrong. After a few years of writing I was still the new kid on the block, and I knew I had a lot to learn.
So I told my friends of my fears. “Does this guy Richard Lupoff know what he’s talking about? He’s a writer, isn’t he?”
Joe said, “He wrote Sacred Locomotive Flies.”
I laughed and we changed the subject. But I’ll never forget the relief that swept over me.
New writers hear it constantly: Don’t read your own reviews. If you do, don’t take them seriously.
It can’t be done.
Critics are self-designated. Nobody licenses critics—it would violate First Amendment rights—and nobody votes for them. Where do they come from? Where do they get the arrogance?
They come from us.
A novice writer is a critic before he sells his first words. He must judge his own work before he sends it to some stranger who will decide whether other strangers should see it at all. The critic’s arrogance is already there, or else the story never goes out. Every writer is a critic, and every critic has a touch of what it takes to be a writer.
A critic is at his best when analyzing good, imaginative work that is yet a little cryptic, a little murky.
Writers are communicators and translators. Our careers are spent learning how to write more lucidly. This is most difficult with science fiction and fantasy, where the pictures a writer must put in a reader’s mind are of things never yet seen, or of things impossible. The most complex ideas need the simplest prose. Kurt Vonnegut writes almost in baby-talk, and he can talk to anyone.
Any story that needs a critic to explain it, needs rewriting. A lucidly written, easily understood book is likely to escape critical attention.
Can you say “conflict of interest”?
Many critics avoid science fiction and fantasy as demons avoid holy water. And why not? A science fiction work that needs explaining may or may not be trash, but the standard-issue critic is not likely to know the difference, and not likely to be able to explain it either.
Many teachers of science fiction end up letting the students run the classes; many critics end up ignoring science fiction for fear of looking fo
olish. They are right. They have looked foolish:
An author of recognized literary worth tries his hand at SF. He confuses infrared with ultraviolet, or loses all track of basic sociology or economics. Everybody notices except the critics.
A critic praises a brilliant new idea brilliantly handled by an author already honored in literary circles. The core idea turns out to be Heinlein’s “Universe” ship, decades old and universally imitated.
The standard-issue critic stands some chance of understanding and appreciating Caroline Cherryh or Ursula Le Guin, and that can make him cocky. (Always give The Left Hand of Darkness to an English teacher who hates science fiction. It’s good by his standards as well as our own, and short enough that he’ll keep his promise to read it.) But Le Guin and Cherryh tend to step lightly around physical laws while they play with sociological implications.
What chance has the same critic of knowing whether Poul Anderson is any good? Anderson is a poet with a solid grasp of every science a mainstream critic can spell, and many he can’t. The standard-issue critic took English lit because physics was too hard for him!
It’s modern criticism that has ruined modern poetry. Any budding poet will be attracted by the freedom-plus-discipline of science fiction. Kipling saw no reason not to write science fiction and poetry both. Dante Alighieri wrote science fiction in poetry. The Divine Comedy was the first hard science fiction trilogy…but the critic sees only that Poul Anderson and Chip Delany and Roger Zelazny write sci-fi. Their poetry never gains them recognition.
Then again—