Science fiction could be found in the movies as well. I saw Them and War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth and Destination Moon. And Forbidden Planet, which put all of them to shame. Little did I suspect that I was getting my first taste of Shakespeare there in the DeWitt Theater, courtesy of Dr. Morbius and Robby the Robot.
Most of my beloved funny books were science fiction of a sort as well. Superman was from another planet, wasn’t he? He came to Earth in a spaceship, how scientific could you get? The Martian Manhunter came from Mars, Green Lantern was given his ring by a crashed alien, and the Flash and the Atom got their powers in a lab. The comics offered pure space opera as well. There was Space Ranger (my favorite), Adam Strange (everybody else’s favorite), Tommy Tomorrow (nobody’s favorite), and this guy who drove a space cab along the space freeways…There were the Atomic Knights, post-holocaust heroes who patrolled a radioactive wasteland in suits of lead-lined armor, riding giant mutant Dalmations…and on a somewhat more elevated plane, there were the wonderful Classics Illustrated adaptions of War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, which gave me my first introduction to the works of H. G. Wells.
All that was only prelude, though. When I was ten years old, my mother’s childhood friend Lucy Antonsson gave me a book for Christmas. Not a comic book, but a book book, a hardcover of Have Space Suit, Will Travel, by Robert A. Heinlein.
I was a little dubious at first, but I liked Paladin on TV, and the title suggested this might be about some kind of space Paladin, so I took it home and began to read about this kid named Kip, who lived in a small town and never went anywhere, just like me. Some critics have suggested that Citizen of the Galaxy is the best of the Heinlein juveniles. Citizen of the Galaxy is a fine book. So too are Tunnel Through the Sky, Starman Jones, Time for the Stars, and many of the others…but Have Space Suit, Will Travel towers above them all. Kip and PeeWee, Ace and the malt shop, the old used spacesuit (I could smell it), the Mother Thing, the wormfaces, the trek across the moon, the trial in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud with the fate of humanity at stake. “Die trying is the proudest human thing.” What could compare with that?
Nothing.
To a ten-year-old boy in 1958, Have Space Suit, Will Travel was crack with an Ed Emshwiller cover. I had to have more.
There was no way I could afford hardcovers, of course. Have Space Suit, Will Travel had cost $2.95, according to the price inside the dustwrapper…but the paperbacks on the spinner rack in the candy store on Kelly Parkway only went for 35¢, the price of three-and-a-half funny books. If I didn’t buy so many comics and skipped a Milky Way from time to time, I could scrape together the price of one of those. So I saved my dimes and nickels, stopped reading some comics I didn’t like all that much to begin with, played a few less games of Skee-Ball, avoided the Good Humor truck and Mister Softee when they came by, and started buying paperbacks.
Worlds and universes opened wide before me. I bought every Heinlein that I found; his “adult” books like The Man Who Sold the Moon and Revolt in 2100, since the other juveniles were not to be found. RAH was “the dean of science fiction,” it said so right on the back of his books. If he was the dean, he must be the best. He remained my favorite writer for years to come, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel remained my favorite book…until the day when I read The Puppet Masters.
But I tried other authors too, and found that I enjoyed some of them almost as much as RAH. I loved Andrew North, who turned out to be Andre Norton. What’s in a name? Andrew’s Plague Ship and Andre’s Star Guard both thrilled me. A. E. van Vogt’s stuff had tremendous energy, especially Slan, although I never could quite figure out who was doing what to whom, or why. I became enamored of One Against Herculum, by Jerry Sohl, which took me to a world where you registered your crimes with the police before you committed them. Eric Frank Russell rocketed to the top of my list when I chanced upon The Space Willies, the funniest thing I’d ever read.
Though I bought books from Signet, Gold Medal, and all the other publishers, the Ace Doubles were my mainstay. Two “complete novels,” printed back-to-back and upside down, with two covers, all for the price of one. Wilson Tucker, Alan Nourse, John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson (The War of the Wing-Men was so good it threatened the supremacy of Have Space Suit, Will Travel), Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick, Edmond Hamilton, and the magnificent Jack Vance; I met them all in the pages of those stubby paperbacks with the blue-and-red spines. Tommy Tomorrow and Rocky Jones could not compare with this. This was the real stuff, and I drank it straight, with another for a chaser.
(Eventually my reading would lead me to Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien as well, but I’ll save those discoveries for my other commentaries.)
I sampled different kinds of science fiction along with different authors: “aliens among us” stories, “if this goes on” stories, time travel yarns, “sideways in time” alternate histories, post-holocaust tales, utopias and dystopias. Later, as a writer, I would revisit many of these subgenres…but there was one type of science fiction that I loved above all others, both as a reader and later as a writer. I was born and raised in Bayonne and never went anywhere, and my favorite books and stories were those that took me over the hills and far away, to lands undreamed of, where I might walk beneath the light of distant stars.
The six stories I’ve chosen here all belong to that category. I wrote a great deal of science fiction in the ’70s and ’80s, but these stories are among my favorites. They also share a common universe; all six are part of the loose “future history” that formed the backdrop for much of my SF.
(Though not all of it. “Run to Starlight” and “A Peripheral Affair” are part of a different continuity, the two star ring stories are set in yet another, the corpse stories in a third. “Fast-Friend” stands by itself, as do a number of my other stories. I have no intention of trying to cram these orphans into my future history by retroactive backfill either. That’s always a mistake.)
What I thought of as my “main” future history began with “The Hero” and reached its fullest development in my first novel, Dying of the Light. I never had a name for it, at least not one that stuck. In “The Stone City” I coined the word “manrealm” and for a while tried using that as an overall term for the history, analogous to Larry Niven’s “Known Space.” Later, I hit on the “Thousand Worlds,” which had a nicer ring to it, and would have given me plenty of room to add new planets as I needed them…not to mention putting me nine hundred and ninety-two worlds up on John Varley and his “Eight Worlds.” By that time my writing was taking me in other directions, however, so the name became moot.
“A Song for Lya” is the oldest of the six stories in this section. It was written in 1973, during my days in VISTA, when I was living on Margate Terrace in Chicago’s Uptown, sharing a third-floor walk-up with some of my college chess cronies, and working at the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. I was also in the midst of the first serious romance of my life; it was not the first time I had ever been in love, but it was certainly the first time my feelings had been reciprocated. That relationship gave “Lya” its emotional core; without it, I would have been the proverbial blind man describing a sunset. “A Song for Lya” was also my longest story to date, my first novella. When I finished it, I knew that I had finally surpassed “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” written two years earlier. This was the best thing I’d ever done.
Analog had become my major market, so I sent it off to Ben Bova and he bought it straightaway. Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim both selected “Lya” for their competing “Best of the Year” anthologies, and it was nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo. Robert A. Silverberg had a powerful novella entitled “Born with the Dead” out that year as well, and we ended up splitting the honors. Silverberg defeated me for the Nebula, but at the 1975 worldcon in Melbourne, Australia, Ben Bova accepted the Hugo on behalf of “A Song for Lya.” I was in Chicago
, sound asleep. Flying to Australia was way beyond my budget at that point in my life. Besides, Silverberg had already won the Nebula and the Locus Poll, and I was dead certain he was going to make it three-for-three.
It took months for me to get my hands on the actual rocket. Bova passed through Minneapolis on the way home, and handed it off to Gordon R. Dickson, who gave it Joe Haldeman the next time he saw him, who took it to Iowa City for a while and finally delivered it to me at a con in Chicago. The next time Gardner Dozois saw me, he threw me out of the Hugo Losers Club. Robert Silverberg announced his retirement from writing science fiction. I felt guilty about that, since I was a huge fan of the work he was doing at that time…but not so guilty that I contemplated sending him my Hugo, once I’d finally pried the damn thing away from Joe Haldeman.
By the time I wrote “This Tower of Ashes” in 1974, my life had changed markedly from what it had been a year and a half before, when I’d written “Lya.” My alternative service with VISTA had come to an end, and I was directing chess tournaments on the weekends to supplement my writing income. I had started the novel that would become Dying of the Light, but had put it aside; it would be two years before I felt I was ready to return to it. My great love affair had ended badly, when my girlfriend dumped me in favor of one of my best friends. With that wound still raw and bleeding, I promptly fell in love again, this time with a woman with whom I had so much in common that I felt as though I’d known her all my life. Yet that relationship had only begun to bloom when it ended, almost overnight, as she fell head-over-heels for someone else.
“This Tower of Ashes” came out of all that. Ben Bova bought it for Analog, but ended up publishing it in the Analog Annual, an original anthology from Pyramid. The idea of the Annual was to try and reach book readers and get them interested in the magazine. Whether it did or not, I couldn’t say…but I would sooner my story had remained in Analog itself. One lesson I learned early in my career remains as true today as it was then: the best place for a story to get noticed is in the magazines. If anyone ever read “This Tower of Ashes” besides Ben Bova, you couldn’t prove it by me.
“And Seven Times Never Kill Man” was written in 1974 and published in 1975. It got me my second Analog cover for that year (a few months earlier, a gorgeous Jack Gaughan painting had adorned the issue featuring “The Storms of Windhaven,” a collaboration between me and Lisa Tuttle), this one a stunning John Schoenherr that I wish I’d bought. The Steel Angels were created as my answer to Gordy Dickson’s Dorsai, although the term “Steel Angel” came from a song by Kris Kristofferson. Their god, the pale child with a sword, had an older and more dubious pedigree: he was one of the seven dark gods of the mythos I’d designed for Dr. Weird, as glimpsed in “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark.” The title is from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, of course, and got me almost as much praise as the story. Afterward several other writers, all Kipling fans, announced that they were annoyed they hadn’t thought of it first.
“And Seven Times Never Kill Man” was nominated for a Hugo as the Best Novelette of 1974. “The Storms of Windhaven” was also up that year for Best Novella. At “Big Mac,” the 1976 worldcon in Kansas City, the two stories both lost within minutes of each other (the former to Larry Niven, who promptly dropped and broke his Hugo, the latter to Roger Zelazny). The following night, aided and abetted by Gardner Dozois and armed with a jug of cheap white wine left over from someone else’s party, I threw the very first Hugo Losers Party in my room at the Muehlebach Hotel. It was the best party at the convention, and in later years would become a worldcon tradition, although recently some irony-challenged smofs have insisted on renaming it “the Hugo Nominees Party.”
“The Stone City” was first published in New Voices in Science Fiction, a hardcover anthology I edited for Macmillan in 1977, but its roots went all the way to the 1973 worldcon in Toronto. John W. Campbell, Jr., the longtime editor of Analog and Astounding, had died in 1971, and Analog’s publisher, Conde Nast, had established a new award in his honor, for the best new writer to enter the field during the previous two years. The first time the award was given, I was one of the finalists, along with Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, Ruth Berman, and Jerry Pournelle. The Campbell was voted by the fans and would be given out at the Toronto worldcon, with the Hugos. If not quite a Hugo itself, it was the next best thing.
My nomination took me utterly by surprise, but it thrilled and delighted me, even though I knew I had no hope of winning. Nor did I. Pournelle took home that first Campbell Award, although Effinger finished so close in the balloting that Torcon awarded him a plaque for second place, the only time I’ve seen that done. I have no idea where I finished, but for me, at that time, the old cliche was true: it really was an honor just to be nominated.
Afterward, at some of the parties, I told a couple of editors named Dave that there needed to be an anthology devoted to the new award, as there were for the Hugo and the Nebula. I was angling for a sale, of course; in 1973, I was still at the point where every one was precious. I got more than I bargained for; both editors named Dave agreed that a Campbell Awards anthology was a fine idea, but they said I had to put it together. “I’ve never edited an anthology,” I argued. “So this will be your first,” they replied.
It was. It took me a year to sell New Voices (to an editor named Ellen), and a couple more before all my authors delivered their promised stories, which is why the anthology showcasing the 1973 John W. Campbell Award nominees was published in 1977.
One of my writers gave me no trouble whatsoever, though. Since I was one of the finalists, I got to sell a story to myself.
There is a certain freedom that comes from knowing that the editor is not likely to reject your submission, no matter what you do. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of pressure as well. You don’t want the readers thinking you just pulled some sorry old turkey out of the trunk, after all.
“The Stone City” was the story that grew from that freedom and that pressure. Though one of the core stories of my future history, this one is also a bit subversive. I wanted to season it with a little Lovecraft and a pinch of Kafka, and plant the suggestion that, when we go far enough from home, rationality, causality, and the physical laws of the universe itself begin to break down. And yet, of all the stories that I’ve ever written, “The Stone City” is the one that comes closest to capturing the yearnings of that boy stretched out in the summer grass beside the Kill van Kull, staring up at Orion. I don’t know that I ever evoked the vastness of space or that elusive “sense of wonder” any better than I did here.
In 1977 a new science fiction magazine named Cosmos was launched, edited by David G. Hartwell. David asked me for a story, and I was pleased to oblige. If “Bitterblooms” has a certain chill to it, that may be because it was one of the first things I wrote after moving to Dubuque, Iowa, where the winters were even more brutal than those I’d weathered in Chicago. Over the years I have done a number of stories inspired by songs. “Bitterblooms” is one of those as well. (Anyone who can tell me the name of the song that inspired it will win…absolutely nothing.) Hartwell liked the story well enough to feature it on the cover of the fourth issue of Cosmos. Unfortunately the fourth issue of Cosmos also proved to be the last issue of Cosmos. (It wasn’t my fault.) I had headed for Dubuque in the spring of 1976, to take a job teaching journalism at a small Catholic woman’s college. Though my writing was going well, I was still wasn’t earning enough from my fiction to support myself as a full-time writer, and the chess tournaments had all dried up. Also, I had married in 1975, and had a wife to put through college. The position at Clarke College seemed the perfect answer. I would only be teaching two or three hours a day, after all. Four at the most. That would leave me half of every day to write my stories. Wouldn’t it?
Anyone who has ever taught is laughing very loudly right now. The truth is, the demands on a teacher’s time are much greater than they appear. You are only in the classroom a few hours a day, true…but
there are always lessons to be prepared, lectures to be written, papers to read, tests to grade, committees to attend, textbooks to review, students to counsel. As the journalism teacher, I was also expected to serve as faculty advisor to the school newspaper, the Courier, which was great fun but got me in no end of trouble with the nuns, since I refused to be a censor.
I soon found that I had neither the time nor the energy to devote to my fiction while Clarke was in session. If I wanted to get any writing done, I had to take advantage of the long summer vacation, and the shorter breaks at Christmas and Easter.
The Christmas break in the winter of 1978-79 was the most productive period I ever had during my years at Clarke. In a few short weeks, I completed three very different stories. “The Way of Cross and Dragon” was science fiction, “The Ice Dragon” was a fairy tale fantasy, and “Sandkings” married an SF background to a horror plot. All three stories are included in this retrospective. I will discuss “Sandkings” and “The Ice Dragon” when we reach them.
As for “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” it is certainly my most Catholic story. Though I’d been raised Roman Catholic and had attended a Catholic prep school, I’d stopped practicing during my sophomore year at Northwestern. At Clarke, however, surrounded by nuns and Catholic girls, I found myself wondering what the Church might become, out among the stars.
Ben Bova had recently left Analog to become fiction editor for a slick new magazine called Omni, that published science fact as well as science fiction. “The Way of Cross and Dragon” became my first sale to this new market. The story was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, lost the latter to Edward Bryant’s “giAnts,” but won the former as the Best Short Story of 1979…on the same night that “Sandkings” won for Best Novelette, at Noreascon 2 in Boston.