The Book Of Ian Watson, page 16
Supremely alert, the burly man sifted through a thousand voices—confident, petulant, brash, boastful, yearning—before one harsh, regal voice spoke to him; and he froze utterly. Until now, for an hour and more, he had been moving in infinite slow motion. Now he did not move at all. He was a statue.
“I am Tajalam,” said the voice. “My son! My heir Tajasanid!”
But Tajasanid, son of Tajalam, was dead a thousand years since—caught by the wolves, in disguise, on Praesepe Prime itself.
“You seek the key that will unlock the door to Paradise, as I sought it too. Meanwhile, the enemies increase. The assassins bestir themselves. The carrion fowl gather. I know you, my son, and I love you. How to save you from yourself, as I was never saved from myself? Let me tell you, Tajasanid, that the forging of an empire is simply forgery. It is the production of counterfeit—whereas a single man may become true gold himself. Remember our battle-code command for wreaking havoc and laying waste a world: ‘Wilderness is Paradise enough!’ There is no alien paradise planet to inherit, my son, except for the Paradise that you will make for yourself in the wilderness of exile, and simplicity. Howl now, my heir, but heed my words in time. I hope you will learn how wilderness may be truly paradise enough. I learnt it too late—but I shall write it in my blood for you to find. This is my legacy. Farewell—and blessings!”
The visitor tore the seal from his lips, and howled. He hit out at the air, as though he could strike Tajalam himself across the face, but his blows only met air.
Before Istinbat could intervene, the visitor stepped back across the black marble strip of his own accord.
Controlling himself, the visitor said to the guardian, “Didn’t I say that there was only one good reason for this Dome’s existence? Well, didn’t I?”
“What did Tajalam say to you?”
The visitor spat on the floor.
“Barbarian wisdom! Now that the single reason has gone, my friend, and now that the reason for my own life has gone together with it … well, I did promise you your life, and there’s small reason to break my promise now! So be warned, do not remain in this Dome today. This Dome is a trap for fools—for millions of idiots. Here is the temple of folly of all the galaxy. I do not suffer fools gladly, even though I am one myself.”
The visitor strode away towards the mouth of the spiral stairway.
“What do you mean to do?” cried Istinbat, hurrying after him.
“I shall put an end to folly, honourably, as Tajalam put an end to his own folly. Stay out of this Dome!”
“But I guard this Dome.”
“Guard it from the outer doorway, then!”
“What can one man do?” Istinbat laughed. He twitched his taper alight again. “I am a fool too. I thought this was an Event. It is no event at all. Nor are your threats an event. You did not even speak them aloud, so that future visitors can hear and wonder. You only howled like a beast. Your howl whispers round the wall forever, now, until time wears the Dome away.”
Istinbat reached the base of the stairway, where the visitor was necessarily forced to wait for his way to be lit. Istanbat led him quickly along the tunnel.
“I have told you,” the visitor repeated. “You, who wish for an Event. I promise you there will be an Event.”
Ignoring the woman Tasamma, sitting inside the doorway, the visitor retrieved his computer bracelet and strode away, brushing aside a few brown people with flashing teeth who rushed to him from their stalls.
Istinbat watched him go. The visitor did not look back.
Half an hour later, still sitting together in golden silence, Istinbat and Tasamma saw a small hyperboat rise up into the cloudless sky from the desert beyond Wakil City. But it did not shrink to a speck, disappearing into space. Instead, it arced above the city on a tight parabola, curving back down towards them.
“It’s out of control!” cried Tasamma.
Istinbat dragged her down the stone steps into the darkness of the tunnel. They huddled where they fell.
A moment later, came the crash of the explosion: an almighty thunder-shout. The tunnel floor ripped under them. A single brick fell onto Istinbat’s back. Dust choked their lungs.
Coughing, they staggered back up the steps again and out onto the turquoise marble space, where vendors were running and crying out, though all apparently unhurt. The rise of the Dome above them was intact. However, as Istinbat and Tasamma ran together around it, keeping a long way from its base, they saw that the whole western quadrant had been demolished. Pieces of marble had been tossed about the sands by the force of the explosion. The remains of the hyperboat, scattered widely, were recognizable only because they were steel not stone. The Dome was a great yawning cave, now—a broken golden egg.
As Istinbat trotted towards the great hole, a voice assailed his ears, fleetingly.
“I’ll marry Lala whatever …”
And another: “Khalwat dar anjuman …”
And a third: “I, Seloose of Vega, swear …”
He stopped, appalled, bewildered. Tasamma stopped too, cocking her tall thin head.
The voices were all escaping into Suf, flying out of the hatched egg of the Dome as though from a Pandora’s Box, spreading and reproducing themselves throughout the suddenly increased atmospheric volume. The phenomenon was as enigmatic, to Istinbat’s mind, as the Dome itself had been.
Alone, he scrambled over the banks of rubble in the face of a tidal bore of voices, into the mouth of the cave.
He was nearly driven back by the pressure of noise, but then quite suddenly the voices became a trickle, and ceased—the flood had flowed past him.
Istinbat stepped down onto the floor of the Dome, and hurried towards the nearest intact stretch of wall. He crossed the black marble strip, and found only silence there.
Which is why the planet Suf is known as the Whispering World, or the Ghost World, nowadays; and why the brown people with flashing teeth wear plugs of wax in their ears and converse in sign language; and why more tourists pay visits to Suf, to be haunted. Generally the constant haunting is too much for the curious tourists, so that after the first five or six hours they will seek refuge in the inappropriately-named Dome of Whispers, where alone in all that world there is utter silence.
That silence has its guardians, who will not as a rule let visitors so much as whisper anywhere inside their fractured holy place. Though sometimes, for a truly golden consideration, they will allow a person to shout aloud and hear his or her voice vanish utterly without even an echo.
Nowadays there are a hundred guardians. People are eager to escape all the whispers in the world.
METAPHORICAL
The Recession Strikes Back! The jam disappears from one’s bread and butter, soon followed by most of the butter. How long will the bread last …?
Down the Mines
Last week I received a fan letter from George Turner in Australia, about my novel The Gardens of Delight.
A fan letter from George Turner is an unparalleled event, and must be recorded in the annals of the universe, or at least of my own universe.
Now, The Gardens of Delight appeared from Gollancz under the rubric ‘Gollancz Fantasy,’ and George duly noted that “despite the Gollancz pigeonholing it does fulfil the most necessary qualifications of sf, though it stretches them to the limits.” While Brian Stableford, reviewing the same novel in Arena 11, wondered why “the author and/or publisher should have chosen to distinguish it from his earlier novels.” Because, of course, the book does possess a perfectly solid sf rationale.
So why, then, is The Gardens of Delight labelled ‘fantasy’? From the publisher’s angle I would surmise that, having established a fantasy line, it is necessary to bring some books out in it. While I must confess to having been seduced by the prospect of a real live illustrated dust jacket.
When the novel went out to reviewers, however, great and perhaps predictable confusion ensued. The ‘straight’ reviewers, who can count fantasy within their domain, were sorely puzzled.
“In The Gardens of Delight,” wrote one, “Ian Watson has unwisely foresaken SF for FF (fantasy fiction).” A second, seeking a neat antithesis, wrote: “Watson has already written a string of science fiction but this is his / / / strangest and most compelling tale to date.” (The phrase following the slash marks is, sigh, merely lifted verbatim from the jacket blurb.) While The Observer opened with a whole column discussing the nature of fantasy before deciding that, by virtue of being fantasy, the novel under review “transforms itself into something more interesting than ‘ordinary’ SF.”
An interesting case study in confusion, this. And incidentally it resulted in the least favourable bunch of reviews I’ve ever had, for a book which George Turner, doughty critic, says makes him “jump for joy.” But George Turner, of course, knows perfectly well what sf is.
At a time when a fair few writers and critics deplore the existence of the label and the category sf, one might feel inclined to draw the moral from all this that the label and category are no bad thing. This wasn’t a case of an sf book being let loose in the wider world to take its chances, and succeeding or failing, whichever. Rather, it was a case of the mainstream critics desperately trying to understand it by means of a label, and failing utterly—establishing false antitheses, proclaiming it to be worse than sf because it was fantasy, or to be better than sf for the same reason. The ‘outside’ critics actually yearned for the label, and simply couldn’t understand what they were reading when it didn’t fit the label. Particularly, none of them—while making knowing noises about sf—knew enough to say: this is sf.
So should we simply call an sf novel ‘a novel’—or even perhaps ‘a book? The confusion would probably be worse compounded then, since the critics wouldn’t even have the term ‘sf or ‘fantasy’ to react against. Yet again, if The Gardens of Delight had simply been labelled ‘a novel’ I’m fairly sure that the reviews would have read quite differently: “Now we turn to a science fiction offering which has slipped into the pile …” Because the novel has a spaceship and an alien planet in it. So now it could have been mis-reviewed, with all prior prejudices intact. (At this point I fantasize about issuing normative definitions of the universal, multifarious plenty which we know as sf, to all newspapers and weeklies.)
But this is really a rather obvious, first-stage thought about the current anathema regarding the genre label. What I want to write about in this particular column, instead, is what the writer who writes and loves sf ought to do, particularly in a time of economic recession, to pay the bills and maintain him or herself as a writer.
For one immediate hope, or temptation, is to diversify. We are wordsmiths, after all; and words can be written about anything at all.
Surely we can dash off a quick Romance (under a pseudonym, of course). And how about all these horror novels which now seem to share the shelves 50/50 with sf? (Last year it seemed more like 25/75, in favour of sf.) I refer to The Squirming, The Slithering, The Foreboding, The Presage, The Yucking. How about a quick children’s book? And how about TV? Or how about a quick ook, rather than a book? Supposedly publishers are on the lookout for writers with a good track record of published pages, who haven’t made it big, with a view to hyping them into orbit through an artificial book, an ook. How about contributing to other kinds of artificial books, ‘marketing books’ such as Great Interstellar Dreadnoughs of the Sirius Class?
I have the information sheets for one such current project before me, kindly sent by a friend in California who heard that I was broke. It is undoubtedly a nobler venture than Alien Criminals to Beware Of, but it’s still a wholly artificial book. It’s The Dune Encyclopedia, and the idea is to invent fictitious entries on everything mentioned by Frank Herbert in the Dune books, from the Aba Hood through to Zombie-Katrundo, without ever mentioning the name Frank Herbert. Thus the result should seem to be a genuine encyclopedia of facts.
I admit to being tempted, since it would be quite easy to pull down from my shelves books on Islamic theology and Sufism, and write entries for Baraka or Dar al-hikman or Fiqh or Ilm, giving these a cosmic future twist, and so performing a double displacement of the original material which Herbert drew upon.
One deterrent is the fact that his project is a ‘Work for Hire’ which means that you give up your copyright on your own words immediately. But the other deterrent—working against the prospect of $40 per 1000 words payable immediately upon acceptance—is the thought: Why the hell? Why the hell write marginalia to the Dune Quartet instead of writing fiction of one’s own?
Likewise, why the hell propose to write The Yucking or Spock Goes Schizo or A Guide to Extraterrestrial House Plants?
One mistake, if I did this, would be to try to do it fairly well. To take too much time over it. (Perhaps any time taken is too much?) Actually to care for it. To believe in it 100% at least 5% of the time.
And the book would just drown. Vanish.
There are nuggets of gold in the midst of crappy hack projects. Take Laser Books, universally scorned. I read one pretty good Laser Book: Jerry Sohl’s I am Aleppo, and one really stunning one: Ray Nelson’s Blake’s Progress. And what mention is ever made of these? They are tainted.
Even in the Marvel Novel Series—another way of picking up extra cash by novelizing the superheroes—number 7 is pretty good. The cover proclaims: STAN LEE PRESENTS: DOCTOR STRANGE, MASTER OF THE MYSTIC ARTS / / IN A NOVEL BY WILLIAM ROTSLER (much smaller capitals) / / NIGHTMARE. I bought this because I was always intrigued by Doctor Strange, and knew Bill Rotsler’s name, and thought that he would turn in a rather good book; and he did.
And who cares?
Yet as advances sink to historic lows, not always paid in advance, one needs the money.
So, in the past year or so, I’ve been tempted by several bright ideas for diversifying.
The first lightbulb lit up overhead when TV Times announced that they had run out of Roald Dahl stories for the Tales of the Unexpected series, and were offering a prize for a story. Not much. About £200, I recall. But I reckoned I could blitz Anglia TV at the rate of two pretty good 1500-worders (this being the limit) per day. After all, I had watched the series—which I always thought ought to have been renamed Tales of the Expected. So I sent in six specially written rural horror stories with suitable twists in the tail (or perhaps they were unsuitable: too unexpected?) A year later I can say with a fair degree of objectivity that they were all rather good. And I heard of another sf writer who sent in fourteen stories.
As I should have realized in the first place, this was an utter waste of time. What news value was there for TV Times if they handed the cash over to a full-time writer? With no disrespect intended, the winning entry just had to be a first story by a chiropodist’s secretary.
My next foolish project was to try to float an ook, about our feathered friends who fly around my windows, in the great tradition of epics about rabbits, moles, barnyard roosters, cockroaches and earwigs—and get paid to write it. I wrote a bloody good chapter and outline, and these were really well pushed for me at the Frankfurt Book Fair. And nothing happened. (Thank God.)
So then I launched into a brief children’s book. And nothing happened.
By now friends across the globe were working furiously for me, trying to hook projects. Thus in due course I heard that Playboy Paperbacks were really keen to consider The Woman Factory, which has only appeared in French so far (and in Portuguese, I believe, but the publisher has defaulted on the second half of the advance, any complimentary copies, and the copy of the typescript which I loaned him). I hauled out the last surviving blurred xerox of the typescript, and decided with the hindsight of ten years that it could well do with being entirely rewritten. So I typed out the first eighth of the book as it was, as a sample, and outlined the rest and my further plans for it, and airlifted the package to Playboy Paperbacks, who were so keen. Silence. The silence continues, despite enquiries.
I also wrote the story for a proposed film maker, at his request. Gratefully acknowledged, then silence.
Now all this may seem par for the course when one is trying to hack it as a wordsmith. (I suppose I had better except The Woman Factory from that, since I wrote it with full commitment originally. But is the book actually clamouring to be written—rewritten—ten years after)* And no doubt I should have hustled a lot more, in a lot more places. But anyway, after quite a lot of working hours wasted here and there, I decided: sod it all—and went into an sf story blitz. The repressed material erupted like Etna. Fantasy & SF bought, Omni bought … Out of the blue came a phone call from Germany asking for SF stories.
So there’s a moral here, to me at least. It isn’t the moral that one should write the same darned old stuff as ever, stuck in the same faithful genre groove. (Since in fact I feel that my fiction is altering, mutating.) But it is an argument, to me at least, for writing organically, out of oneself, rather than arbitrarily—as a wordsmith of any old thing due to economic pressures. Somehow one survives. Usually. One hopes.
“Depend upon it, Sir,” said the redoubtable Doctor Johnson, who knew all about the effects of poverty on the author, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” I would add that it is important to concentrate on the right things.
In a publishing scene where relatively easy money can be picked up from Dune Encyclopedias and novelizations of Blake’s 7 or whatever, and where an original creative act is much less certainly rewarded, there’s a great temptation to pick up on these peripherals, or to generate others—ooks et al—to survive as an independent writer. Though if someone offered me a UFO film novelization tomorrow, what would I do?
Down in the hot dark mine of the creative process, labours the miner with little job security (since someone might close his mine down or foreclose on the loans to run it). He works a long day, carving out ore or coal or whatever for pay that just ensures the roof over his head and a pint of beer or three; but not always. The ore or coal or whatever is trundled off, and the value and energy are transmuted presently into highly-advertised profitable toys of the moment, from which the miner receives little joy. One day the miner is offered a job in the secondary-products factory. Then all the other miners are offered jobs there too. And lo, the secondary factory proves to be self-sustaining, even without the original ore and coal. The products circulate through an abstract causality loop, and no longer need the raw materials. One day the first miner has saved up enough to return to the true mine. But he has forgotten how to find the veins of ore, and can only dig up fool’s gold and cardboard coal—which still glitter and burn, though.
