Writing Fiction

Revisiting my first novel

I’m happy to report that Endeavour Press in the UK has published my novel The Empire of Time as an e-book in its Venture Press SF titles. (If you’re not in the US, your local Amazon site should have it.)

The Empire of Time was my first published novel, brought out by Del Rey Books in 1978. It had had a long gestation: I began to think it out in the 1960s, and kept adding ideas as I ran across them or they occurred to me. In the late 1960s I actually started writing, and produced (on a genuine typewriter) about 100 pages of text.

In hindsight, I can see it was a farrago of what I liked to read in those days: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, as well as countless SF stories time-traveling or interstellar secret agents.

Then I paused, without a clue where to go next. I had no one to blame but myself. My father and stepmother were professional TV writers who outlined their scripts before writing them; I’d just started typing while hoping for the best. So the manuscript sat there for several years, while I also learned the craft of teaching and earned a master’s degree.

In the process I learned a lot more about the structure of fiction, and when I returned to the manuscript I understood it better than I had. Then I read a news story about the possibility that the Antarctic ice sheet might collapse—which led to another novel, Icequake, which Endeavour will soon make available again.

While Icequake bounced back from various publishers, I took some lessons from it, returned to The Empire of Time, and finished it. It was still too hard-boiled, but I’d also read early John Le Carré: my secret agent Gerry Pierce was no James Bond. He was a guy with problems and talents who’d been studiously manipulated into becoming a killer.

Gerry’s life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries seemed pretty remote in the 1970s; since then, I’ve thought of him as living in another chronoplane from ours. We failed to discover his timeline’s chronoplanes and mind-control technology; his timeline messed up on computers and settled for microfiches, flickreaders instead of smartphones, and a primitive internet that Gerry Pierce could hack when he needed to.

In the late 1970s everything came together, and The Empire of Time was published not long before Icequake. My timing was lucky—publishers were still grubstaking outliers like me in hopes they might be the next Stephen King or Frank Herbert. They were still willing to bet on a writer whose third or fourth book might gain a big audience eager to read the writer’s backlist.

Writers could also treat each novel as training for the next one: We’d learn from our mistakes, build on our successes, and tackle more ambitious projects with some confidence. And since the market was changing rapidly, we had an incentive to change as well: I moved from time travel to far-future societies, nanotech to young adult tales, and then to fantasy. The Empire of Time, which I’d considered a one-off, turned into a trilogy (the rest will be available soon from Endeavour).

Revisiting The Empire of Time, of course I’m itching to clean up this sentence, improve that conversation, smooth out the clunky exposition. But after all these years it still seems to me to hang together as a story about believable people in a strange but believable world, and everyone in a hell of a believable jam.

Brian Aldiss, 1925-2017

Via The Guardian: Brian Aldiss obituary. It seems impossible that he's gone; he's been a presence in literature, especially SF, for 60 years. Excerpt:

Brian Aldiss, author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, was one of Britain’s most accomplished and versatile writers of science fiction. In a lifelong and prolific career, Aldiss, who has died aged 92, produced more than 40 novels and almost as many short-story collections. 

An ambitious and gifted writer, with a flowing and inventive literary style, he did not confine himself to science fiction. As well as his prodigious output of SF, he wrote several bestselling mainstream novels, poetry, drama, two autobiographies and several film scenarios. He also edited a huge number of anthologies and produced a body of criticism that was remarkable for its energy and clarity.