Putting It Together; Turning Sow's Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories Part 18

Answer: Carol and I went to Egypt with my agent, my father, and some friends back in 1989. Our guide in Cairo was a fellow named Iman, a very mild-mannered but highly intelligent man. I got to speaking with him, and learned that he had a Ph.D. in Egyptian history, but that he made more money from tourists' tips than he made teaching at the University.

He explained what was involved in becoming a tour guide: a minimum of four years advanced study of Egyptian history, and the ability to speak four languages fluently, of which at least one must be English or French.

He seemed especially happy to be guiding us, and confessed that his last group was more interested in discussing the relative merits of the Raiders and the Steelers. They actually got mad at him when he interrupted them to point out the various sights he was being paid to show them.

I got to thinking about this exceptionally intelligent man, a member of a race that had once ruled the known world, that had built the pyramids when most of our ancestors were living in mud huts, and was now forced to work for tips from this era's uncultured conquerors ... and after it festered in my mind for eight years (not everything comes quickly or easily), I sat down and wrote it in one sitting.

Question: Did you stop what you were doing immediately and write it, or was it a longer, percolating process? If the latter, how long? Describe the process. What else were you working on at the time?

Answer: Like I say, it gestated for eight years. I was writing the second Widowmaker novel,The Widowmaker Reborn , when everything fell into place and I took a couple of nights off to write the story. Well, one night to write it, one night to polish it.

Question: Did you write it fairly much in its final form or did you have to make some major changes? If significant changes were made, what inspired them and why?

Answer: No, this was pretty much the way I wrote it. After your subconscious has worked on something for that long and tells you it's time for it to be born, your first draft is usually close to the final form.

Question: Did Carol contribute any major ideas to the work after you'd written the first draft?

Answer: Yes. She suggested the sightless alien child. And she made a number of improvements in the language. None of them would seem major if I named them, but as a whole they added levels and tiers of resonance and emotion to the story.From: Robyn M. Herrington Question: Did you consider it a difficult or easy story to write, and why? Give examples of stories that gave problems, and be specific about the problems and how you overcame them.

Answer: It was exceptionally easy after eight years of thinking about it.

Difficult stories? "Mwalimu in the Squared Circle" was difficult to come up with. The first time through I made it a comedy, and then I realized that I could say something important with it, that Amin's challenge was farcical in itself, but there was nothing farcical about a man dying in the ring for his country and his beliefs.

"The Land of Nod" was difficult too. I knew the effect I wanted, but until I combined the rather mediocre first and second drafts, I wasn't able to come up with enough complexity or resonances.

My most famous story is probably "Kirinyaga". I knew I wanted the plot to turn on the strangling of a baby, but the first time I wrote it I did so in the first person of the baby's father-but he was just another member of the society, and not a very interesting one. It was Carol who discovered Koriba, the witch doctor (who appeared on just one page and didn't even have a name) and suggested that he was the only truly interesting member of the society-or at least the only interesting one who had a reason to be involved in this particular set of events. And of course, Koriba turned out to be the most famous character "I" ever invented.

The man shrugs. "Whatever." He looks at his timepiece. "Well, let's get started."

Question: Why did you choose 'timepiece' instead of something like 'watch'? After all, the woman is using something as mundane as a camera and bringing it up to her eye, no less.

Answer: I used it to imply that by that point in the far future, people will not have simple wrist.w.a.tches any more. The other possible word was "chronometer", but that struck me as clumsy, more like something out of a 1930s pulp magazine.

It's true, the woman has a camera-but it's not a mundane camera. It takes holographs. And to be honest, if I had known a good future equivalent of "camera", I'd have used it.

"Thank you," says the woman, deactivating the recorder after I finish. She pauses. "Can I buy a book with some more of your quaint folk legends?"

Question: Why "quaint", rather than something else? What does the word "quaint" imply to you, here?

Answer: I think "quaint" serves a double purpose here: it is incredibly condescending from the narrator's point of view, but I don't believe the woman, given her innate insensitivity, would agree with that, and would probably be both surprised and offended if you suggested it to her.

I have no answer forrapus whose only ambition is to be warm and dry and well-fed, but merely shrug.

They run off, laughing and singing, as if they are human children off to play some game.

"d.a.m.ned aliens!" mutters the man.

"That is incorrect," I say.

"Oh?"

"A matter of semantics," I point out gently."Theyare indigenous. Youare the aliens."

Question: You've mentioned this same sentiment in a few of your stories-most recently, I read it inA Hunger in the Soul . Why do you keep bringing it up?

Answer: I think it's very important to an understanding of the resentment felt by a colonized people. It is one thing to be militarily conquered; sooner or later that happens to just about every country. It's quite another to be colonized, and to be treated like second-cla.s.s citizens-or intelligent apes-in your own homeland, by people who have no business being there.

The att.i.tude doesn't die easy. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have all been independent black-ruled countries for more than a third of a century, and yet we have met white ex-pats in all three nations who still don't seem to understand who's running things.

"38 meters," I say. "The Tomb itself is 203 meters long and 67 meters wide.

Question: Why metric measurements?

Answer: I think it's the height of conceit and arrogance to a.s.sume that, in the far future, the 150+ nations that use the metric system will all have converted to yards/feet/inches just because America uses them ...

and since they will be using the metric system, those are the terms Hermes will use to be understood. (It's doubtful that he would know what a foot or an inchis .) When the Antareans learned that Man's Republic wished to annex their world, they gathered their army in Zanthu and then marched out onto the battlefield, 300,000 strong. They were the cream of the planet's young warriors, gold of eye, the reticulated plates of their skin glistening in the morning sun, prepared to defend their homeworld.

Question: Why did you wait until the arrival of therapu to indicate what the Antareans look like?

Answer: I wanted them to representall colonized and dispossessed people, and I felt that an early and thoroughgoing description of them could dilute that effect. If my description made them physically repulsive in some readers' eyes, there was a possibility that this would detract from the emotional bond I was trying to create between the reader and the Antareans.

Question: Then, as with here, you talk of reticulated plates and the eyes-why not their other physical features?

Answer: Same as above. It's a science fiction story, so at that point I had to describe a few alien features ... but the more I generalized bynot describing them in details, the more they representevery colonized/dispossessed/Third World race, rather than just Antareans.

The truth is that our gene pool was considerably more aggressive before a seemingly endless series of alien conquests decimated it. But I know that this answer would make them uncomfortable, and could affect the size of my tip, so I lie to them instead. (I am ashamed to admit that lying to aliens becomes easier with each pa.s.sing day. Indeed, I am sometimes amazed at the facility with which I can create falsehoods.) Question: Why did you put the last sentence in (parentheses), rather than leaving it as just part of the text?

Answer: It is an aside, spoken directly to the reader. Hermes is breaking the flow of the story to comment on his ability to lie, and as such I felt it needed to be separated from the body of the paragraph.

A dash wouldn't work, because that would make it part of the same sentence thatwas directly relating the story, so I chose parentheses. If I hadn't made so much other use of italics, that would have been the perfect solution-but since I was using italics to show prior eras and epochs, I thought it would be confusing if I used them here as well.From: Issica Baron We walk another 400 kilometers and come to the immense Palace of the Kings.

Question: This is just the first thing that jumped out at me. Are you saying that they walked very far to the next place, or that humans have at the time in the story evolved enough that this kind of walking distance is realistic?

Answer: This is just the kind of thing for which you need copy editors. Of course I meant 400meters . I missed it. Carol missed it. Gardner Dozois, my editor, missed it. Sheila Williams, Managing Editor of Asimov's , caught it two days before the magazine went to press and changed it. I decided to leave it in the story here, just so I could point out the value of good copy editors.

Question: Despite the whole them/us idea that is brought forth in the story, the narrator here says "we", which suggests to me that he must identify with the tourists at least a little bit. Wouldn't "the tourists and I"

have showed a greater distinction between the two species? Was this done intentionally?

Answer: d.a.m.n! You're right-but not for the reason given. "We" doesn't imply any more familiarity than "the tourists and I", but the latter is more formal, more in keeping with someone for whom Terran (which is what he's speaking, though it reads exactly like late 20th Century English) is not a first language.

I might add that a couple of critics praised Mr. Ahasuerus, my blue-skinned being who appeared in Sideshow and its three sequels, for sounding so alien. The answer was simple: he went four books without ever once uttering a contraction. And that was theonly difference between him and the other characters. Sometimes a tiny difference is enough.From: Steven Gurr Question: Why did you choose to write the story in the present tense? Or rather, I suppose, why did you choose to write the majority of the story in the present tense?

Answer: Usually present tense implies a certain sense of urgency, but in this story it was done to juxtapose the present with the past. In some stories where I put past and present side by side, such as "Mwalimu in the Squared Circle", it was possible to retain the present tense in both cases, but here, when we're dealing with events that happened while Man was still living in caves, present tense would have been totally out of place.

Question: Why did you choose to intersperse selections of Antarean history as separate sections of the story rather than as part of the narrator's main story? Did you hit upon this structure early in the writing process, or was it added during later drafts?

Answer: I knew from the start that by juxtaposing the former glories with the present inglorious state of affairs, I was not going to have a straight-line narrative. To include the past sections as part of the present story would have confused the reader, whereas the breaks and the italics have allowed him to differentiate past from present.

Another consideration is that unlike Julius Nyerere, who was involved in all of "Mwalimu's" flashbacks, Hermes wasn't alive during the previous dynasties. He's narratingthis story in the first person, but he couldn't possibly narrate what happened 10,000 years ago in the first person. Changing from first to third person without showing the break in the story where this occurs would have been too confusing for the reader.

The structure was there from the beginning. To simply describe a tour and some insensitive tourists wouldn't have allowed the resonances the story needs, the juxtapositions of a race that had limitless possibilities and an optimistic future to a race that has spent the past few millennia being conquered and occupied by one power after another.

Question: When you were writing this story, did you start with the story of the tour of the temple and allow the sections of Antarean history to evolve out of the events in that story, or did you start with the little Antarean histories and bend the main story to fit them?

Answer: I scribbled down about 30 juxtapositions of ancient and current events, events that played off one another, and then chose the ones that seemed most powerful to me.

Question: And finally, a ma.n.u.script question: I noticed that you inserted a "#" character between sections of the story where in the final, published version a blank line would go; is this standard practice for ma.n.u.scripts you are going to submit to a publisher? What is the correct format to use when preparing a ma.n.u.script for submission.

Answer: The # character tells the printer that you want a s.p.a.ce and no symbols. If you want to show the reader a symbol in that s.p.a.ce, then type * * * and that's what you'll get.

Never add italics. Typesetters and printers look for underlines, and if they don't find them, you don't get italics in the printed version, even if they're in the ma.n.u.script.

Don't justify the right-hand margin. It screams "bush league" at the editor.

Give yourself an inch to an inch-and-a-half margin all the way around the page. Number every page. Put your name/slash/t.i.tle on each page.From: D. Rutsala Question: This story, like many of your others, deals with the subject of colonialism and post-colonialism. What is it about this subject which fascinates you so much?

Answer: I think everyone who reads science fiction or thinks seriously about the far future will agree to two things: first, if we can reach the stars we're going to colonize them; and second, if we colonize enough of them, we're eventually going to come into contact with a sentient race.

Africa offers 51 separate and distinct examples of the deleterious effects of colonization on the colonizers as well as the colonized, and I've used Africa (or, more often, a.n.a.logs of Africa) in many of my stories, because I've yet to find anyone who thinks wewon't be colonizing those worlds that can support us. I think it's been shown to be a harmful and foolish policy, and I also think that men are not very adept at learning from their prior mistakes.

When even a revered figure like Sir Winston Churchill can state that he has "no intention of presiding over the dissolution of His Majesty's Empire", as if England had every right to rule half a hundred other countries, I think there should bemore stories about colonialism, not less.From: Matt Edwards Question: You've mentioned in various articles how you've taken facets of different cultures and reworked them into your tales, I wondered if there was any culture/society that was the direct inspiration for the "Antarean Dynasties" or whether it was a combination of many?

Answer: Egypt. The pyramids, which are four thousand years old, dwarf every structure I've seen in America, England, France, and the rest of the so-called civilized world. I've been to Notre Dame in Paris, and believe me, you could fit 20 Notre Dames into the Temple at Karnak. And so forth. This was a society that expressed everything in huge terms-their history, their statues, their G.o.ds, their buildings-and today the average Egyptian earns about $300 a year, the Nile River is undrinkable, and the prime source of hard currency is tourism by this generation's world powers.

Sound a little like Antares?From: Issica Baron When struck, each column would sound a musical note that could be heard for kilometers, calling the faithful to prayer.

Question: This is completely out of the blue, but do you mean when the Temple is struck somewhere or one column is struck they'd all sound, or that each would sound on its own if stuck?

Answer: I just looked it again, and it seems clear to me: as each column is struck, it sounds a musical note.Each , notthey orall . (Nonsequitur: I really like that image. It strikes me as exotic and totally alien.) Maloth further decreed that no aliens or non-believers would ever be allowed to enter it and desecrate its sacred corridors with their presence...

Question: How did you decide what to focus on in this story? Why did you focus on those things and not, for example, the religion and the event of the aliens' first sacrilege of the Temple?

Answer: I tried to choose those events, however great or small, that would allow Hermes to see parallels in the behavior of the human family. He has no knowledge of their religion, and we have no reason to a.s.sume he knows anything aboutany human religion, so he can't juxtapose it to the Antarean religion. For the story to work, the author had to find/create events that would have a contrary modern application and resonance.

I am invisible. You cannot see me. You will pa.s.s me by.

Question: Why did you decide to use this kind of format for thoughts, as opposed to "and I thought, 'yadda yadda'"? Is it permanent part of your own 'style' of writing, or does it suit some literary purpose (sorry if this is a dumb question, I haven't got a chance to study English yet) beyond creating a closer connection with the inner dialogue of the narrator?

Answer: It has become a permanent part of my own style. I probably used it more inA Miracle of Rare Design than anywhere else ... but over the years I've found that the readers have no problems accepting it, and I hate sticking "I thought" or "he considered" on every unspoken thought.

I'll tell you something, though: If I could expunge one single sentence from the story, it would be the one you just quoted. Why? Because it appears in a science fiction magazine, less than 400 words into the story-and when Hermes says "I am invisible" in ascience fictional context , the reader has every reason to take his word for it, rather than to realize that this is merely wishful thinking.

That's something a science fiction writer always has to be aware of. When you say "He turned into a room" in any other story, there's no question what it means-he turned out of a corridor and entered a room. But when you say it in science fiction-well, have you ever seen a quirky, delightful British movie calledThe Bed-Sitting Room , in which Sir Ralph Richardson quite literally turns into a room?

He went on to rule for 29 years and was never known to bow again.

Question: Was it apparent to you at the time you began writing the story that the histories would take the form of allegories?

Answer: Yes. I write a lot of allegories. More to the point, I did not know-and still don't know-any other way to make the story workexcept through allegory.

"Yeah," chimes in the child. "They're piping in the game from Roosevelt III this afternoon. I've got to get back for it."...

"I should be so lucky," he mutters, returning his attention to his computer.

Question: How long ago did you write this piece? If you had known (did know) about wireless Internet connections, why doesn't the boy have stg. like that (or an 'ansible' connection) that would let him see the game wherever he was?

Answer: I wrote it in mid-1997. The reason the boy can't watch the game during the tour is that if he could, he'd serve no purpose in the story at all. This way he's discontented for a different reason than his father, and he has his own priorities: he wants to leave in time to see the game. Always remember: the characters are there to serve the purposes of the story, not the other way around.

Whatever the h.e.l.l "It's just a G.o.dd.a.m.ned water bubbler, Ma," he says.

...and we had not yet suffered enough to bring forth His tears of compa.s.sion "Our females were not allowed the privilege of literacy until Bedorian's reign."

Question: How do you decide how different things will be, and what will remain similar enough for readers to relate to directly (e.g. the above quotes)?

Answer: I made the humans as close to 20th Century humans as I could; after all, I'm writing about a 20th Century problem for a 20th Century audience-and as the late James Blish once pointed out, the future equivalent of "d.a.m.n!", written for a contemporary audience, is "d.a.m.n!"

As for the last two quotes, they're more exotic than alien. (I created a true alien race once. We all do-once. There just isn't a d.a.m.ned thing you can do with them. Mine was inBirthright: The Book of Man , and having proven I could do it, I've never felt a need to do it again.) Anyway, there are still societies, today, here, on Earth, where women are second-cla.s.s citizens, some where they are not allowed to read, some where wives are still bought and sold like chattel. As for the line about G.o.d's tears of compa.s.sion, I invented it for a Kirinyaga story that concerned a drought, and I liked it so much I used it here as well. So ... exotic, yes; alien, no. But if theyimply a certain alienness without (pardon the expression) alienating the reader, then they've done what they were supposed to do.

"There was a time when there were a million," I explain. "Today only 16,304 remain. Each is made of quartz or crystal. In late afternoon, when the sun sinks low in the sky, they act as a prism for its rays, creating a flood of exotic colors that stretches across the thoroughfares of the city.

Question: Where/when did you come up with the idea of a city full of spires?

Answer: I wish I could take credit for this one, but Cairo is known as the "city of 10,000 minarets". I just made it bigger.

During the Second Invasion, it took the Canphorite armada less than two weeks to destroy all but 16,304 of them...

Question: Why don't we get to know why the 16,304 were allowed to remain standing?

Answer: Something is always left standing, even after the most brutal bombing. I think wiping out 983,696 spires is pretty devastating.

I look at therapu and think sadly: Timing is everything. Once, long ago, we strode across our world like G.o.ds. You would not have gone hungry in any of the 43 Dynasties.

Question: Did you intend this story to be some sort of warning to people today? To cherish what we have while we still have it because it might be gone tomorrow? Or perhaps 'don't destroy and conquer'?

Was there some current event that provoked you into weaving this theme into the story?

Answer: It absolutely is a warning. It's the same warning my Egyptian guide might have given to his clients. In vulgar terms, it's "What goes around, comes around." In religious terms, "Obey the golden rule." In realistic terms, "Primacy is fleeting. Be careful how you treat those you have conquered, for someday they-or someone very like them-will conqueryou ."

For what it's worth, you quoted Carol's favorite line/concept-that in historical terms "timing is everything".

I have no answer forrapuswhose only ambition is to be warm and dry and well-fed, but merely shrug. They run off, laughing and singing, as if they are human children off to play some game.

Question: Why did you decide to make this a.n.a.logy? Why are theserapus so happy despite their predicament? Is it an attempt to draw one's thought to the fact that they might be very similar to the tourists, who treat eons of history as nothing more than an afternoon outing?

Answer: I've never seen a Third World country (and I've been to a lot of them in Africa and the Caribbean) where there weren't street urchins everywhere you looked when you were in the cities.

Because they are children, and have never known full bellies and warm clothes and uncrowded beds, they have no concept of what they are missing, and because children of any race or species are so resilient, they manage to enjoy themselves in circ.u.mstances that any reasonable Westernized adult would find appalling.