Writing Fiction

Revisiting my first novel

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was re-reading my "chronoplane wars" novels so I could write summaries of them for a team of translators in China. Now I'm on the last of the trilogy, The Empire of Time, which is actually my first published novel. I'd sent it to Del Rey Books circa 1977, they eventually bought it, and then suggested years later that I turn it into a series. So I wrote two prequels, using the skills I'd developed in writing three other novels in the interim.

I'd been working on The Empire of Time, off and on, since the late 1960s. Mostly off. I was also starting a teaching career and going to grad school, so I didn't have much time. Worse yet, I didn't have much discipline. My parents had never started a TV script until they had a solid outline, but I figured I could just wing it.

So I managed to crank out maybe a hundred pages of really crappy SF, with a first-person narrator who was pretending to be a hard-boiled private eye. Then I ran out of steam and let the manuscript molder while I wrote grad-school essays and a master's thesis (The Great War and the Canadian Novel, 1915-1926—a deservedly obscure period in Canadian literature). Then I wrote some radio plays for the CBC, and finally turned my attention back to SF. 

But no sooner had I dug out the old manuscript than I got another idea, which turned into Icequake. That novel took a couple of drafts before it was even presentable, but once it was done I went back to The Empire of Time with some confidence. The result was a novel with every idea for an SF story I'd ever had: time travel, the CIA in the 21st century, telepathy, and social collapse. 

Reading it now, over thirty years after its publication, I can see its problems. It's still too hard-boiled, especially in the opening chapters. The narrative persona sounds like the pompous young jerk I then was. (I'm now a pompous old jerk.) But by the time I got to the conclusion, I'd learned at least as much as my time-traveling hit man Jerry Pierce, and we'd both grown up a lot.

The Empire of Time also a craftsmanlike piece of work. The plot works well; I have no idea why, because the plot was nonexistent in the first draft. The story is full of quirky little details, deadpan jokes that poke fun at the whole hard-boiled style. My chronoplanes are full of deportees who'd rather be back in the slums of the 21st century, and who console themselves by going shopping in malls built south of the North American glaciers. Even then, I guessed correctly that the future would be as banal as the present.

Of course most of my predictions were cockeyed. The US didn't have a depression in the 1980s, and no one discovered the techniques of Trainability that turned a few adolescents into kids who could run a country. Nor did anyone discover other Earths at different points in time. Still, if you treat it as a parallel-world, alternate-history kind of story, it's pretty solid. 

I mention this because I've long thought that your manuscript is trying to teach you what the hell it's trying to say. You need to read and re-read your own work before you can offer it to others, and you are the reader who really needs to understand it. I sure did that with The Empire of Time. Some 35 years after I pecked it out on my old Optima typewriter, I'm glad to see I was a pretty good student of my own stuff.

Researching your novel

I just finished re-reading another of my chronoplane novels, Rogue Emperor, and enjoyed it. I'd forgotten almost all of it, so the characters and their problems were new. I'd even forgotten how Jerry Pierce deals with his climactic struggle in the Roman arena in June, AD 100. 

So that was fun, but it was also fun to see how well the research worked. 

When I first pitched the idea to Del Rey, I thought I knew a lot about ancient Rome. Hey, I'd read Gibbon when I was just out of college. Of course I soon learned how ignorant I was. So I ransacked our local public libraries for books about Rome in general and first-century Rome in particular, and poured what I learned into the story. 

With a rough plot line, I let the research fill in many of the details--from Rome's semi-industrial rural countryside to the mosaics in rich people's dining rooms, to the apartments where my characters lived and what they ate for breakfast (porridge with olives). 

When Jerry Pierce had to find Pliny the Younger, I sent him out into midnight Rome; he ended up in a popina, an all-night wine bar, where--to my considerable surprise--he bumped into a very drunk poet named Juvenal. That led me to more research into Juvenal and his poems, which enlivened his part of the story. Politically, Juvenal was a jerk. But he was a superb guide for Pierce and moved the story right along.

The trick in a research-heavy story is to avoid the Roman vice of overeating and then vomiting it all back up as undigested exposition. Pierce, as a stranger to Rome, has an outsider's point of view: He has to keep thinking about what he's seeing, how to interpret it, and especially how to avoid drawing suspicion on himself as a tall, obviously non-Roman person speaking a rather bookish Latin. So I exploited his outsider's predicament, and also brought in a few locals who could logically explain things to Pierce because they think he's just another barbarian.

This was all done, of course, in the mid-80s; I wrote Rogue Emperor on a British-made PC called an Apricot, but I was years away from doing anything serious on the internet. The web was five or six years away. Research now is far easier thanks to Google, but a surprising number of people still don't go beyond the Google front page and the "I feel lucky" button.

So here's a handout I used to give my students early in the semester. I'd march them into a computer lab and take them through the steps of personalizing Google to make it easier to exploit. They always learned something they hadn't expected.

Download Searching the Web with Google

Dystopian novels for young adults

Years ago, my editor told me that dystopian fiction—novels about horrible societies—didn't sell. That was then and this is now. The New Yorker has just published a very interesting article on the boom in dystopian fiction for young readers. Excerpt:

Collins’s trilogy [The Hunger Game] is only the most visible example of a recent boom in dystopian fiction for young people. Many of these books come in series, spinning out extended narratives in intricately imagined worlds. 

In Scott Westerfeld’s popular “Uglies” series, for example, all sixteen-year-olds undergo surgery to conform to a universal standard of prettiness determined by evolutionary biology; in James Dashner’s “The Maze Runner,” teen-age boys awaken, all memories of their previous lives wiped clean, in a walled compound surrounded by a monster-filled labyrinth. 

The books tend to end in cliff-hangers that provoke their readers to post half-mocking protestations of agony (“SUZANNE, ARE YOU PURPOSELY TOURTURING YOUR FANS!?!?!?”) on Internet discussion boards. 

Publishers have signed up dozens of similar titles in the past year or two, and, as with any thriving genre, themes and motifs get swapped around from other genres and forms. There are, or will soon be, books about teen-agers slotted into governmentally arranged professions and marriages or harvested for spare parts or genetically engineered for particular skills or brainwashed by subliminal messages embedded in music or outfitted with Internet connections in their brains. 

Then, there are the post-apocalyptic scenarios in which humanity is reduced to subsistence farming or neo-feudalism, stuck in villages ruled by religious fanatics or surrounded by toxic wastelands, predatory warlords, or flesh-eating zombie hordes. 

An advantage to having young readers is that most of this stuff is fresh to them. They aren’t going to sniff at a premise repurposed from an old “Twilight Zone” episode or mutter that the villain is an awful lot like the deranged preacher Robert Mitchum plays in “The Night of the Hunter.” To thrill them, a story doesn’t have to be unprecedented. It just has to be harrowing.

That was just as true over half a century ago, when I read John Wyndham's Re-Birth (also known as The Chrysalids), about a post-apocalypse community in Labrador where mutant babies were killed, and any number of similar stories. (As I mention below in my piece about David Stacton, we were seriously freaked out about nuclear war in those days. That's why Ray Bradbury famously said that the SF author's job is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.)

One of my own novels, Brother Jonathan, is just such a dystopian story, but the publishers tried to market it as straight SF, and it got nowhere. Too bad.

But before you drop your current project and start brainstorming about your own dystopias, read as much of these novels as you can find. Then consider that fashions change, and what kids want to read in 2013—probably the very earliest you own dystopia might see print—may be totally different from what they're reading today.

Never follow the current trend. Follow your heart, and if the readers follow too, great. If not, that's the readers' problem.

A consolation of the profession

Some Chinese translators want to publish my SF novels in China, and I sent them my three "Chronoplane Wars" novels. They then asked for short summaries of the novels, and that obliged me to re-read them.

So over the last few days I've read The Fall of the Republic, published in 1987. I doubt that I've read it since then, so I was pleased and relieved to see that it holds up pretty well.

The novel is the first in the series, chronologically, but I wrote a decade before The Empire of Time, which was my first published SF novel. Del Rey brought out TEOT in 1979. Years later, my editor at Del Rey suggested I turn it into a series. So I wrote two prequels. The Fall of the Republic describes the collapse of the US (and the global economy) in the 1990s, and the start of Jerry Pierce's career as a time-traveling hit man for the Agency for Intertemporal Development. Then came Rogue Emperor, in which Jerry deals with the takeover of the Roman Empire by time-traveling Christian fundamentalists in AD 100. The Empire of Time then became the final part of the triptych, when Jerry ends his career.

The series is obviously dated in many ways: the basic document style is the microfiche, which in the 1970s looked like the best way to pack a lot of information into a small space. And of course the economy didn't implode as early as I'd suggested.

So consider a series about a parallel world that discovers still other parallel worlds in the 1990s, and exploits them as effectively as it can.

Going back to an old story can be like attending a high-school reunion and meeting an old sweetheart: Oh lord, what was I thinking? But when I went to my 50th reunion a couple of years ago, I found that a lot of my old girlfriends were still pretty hot. (I doubt that they felt the same about me.)

And The Fall of the Republic actually hangs together pretty well. The plot works. Jerry Pierce is both hard and fragile, as I'd intended him to be. His colleague Eric Wigner is still a charming son of a bitch, and the decrepit USA feels plausible—just 20 years early. 

Some of the social predictions are uncomfortably close. An outfit called the White American Brotherhood tries to take over the US with a cyber-attack on the country's computer network. The CIA is busy with domestic intrigue despite its charter. Something called the Civil Emergency Administration runs the US with little input from the president and Congress. Global warming makes life miserable in New York City. I didn't predict the web, but online communication is the way everything works.

I have no idea how my translators are going to present all this to a Chinese readership. When I taught in Guangzhou in 1983, one of my texts was Hemingway's short story "Soldier's Home," about a World War I vet who comes home too late for the victory parades. I had to take my students through it line by line, explaining everything: "If this is America, why is there a Greek restaurant in his town?" "Our Korea veterans came home and got good jobs and pretty wives; why didn't this soldier, Krebs?"

Well, I expect to swap a lot of explanatory emails with my translators. But I'm happy that the basic story is still good.