Tag Archives: literature

155. Three Hostages and Island of Sheep

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John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps (presented Monday), and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. The last two of those sequels are presented here

The Three Hostages

Now the war is over and Hannay and Mary have settled in to a life of peace with their son Peter John. It is not to last. Three hostages have been taken from three of England’s leaders, and the ransom is their support of a program destructive to England. Hannay, against his inclinations, enters the search for the hostages. Much of the story is a series of chases, following various clues, during which Hannay is once again forced to work against the ordinary police to maintain his secrecy. Even when he finds some of the hostages, they cannot be rescued immediately. Unless all three can be retrieved at once, those missed will perish.

Much of the book is a satisfying look at Hannay at work, but there are also long, dull, dreary passages. Hannay first falls under the spell of the mystic hypnotist who is behind the kidnappings, then breaks the spell through deep personal stubbornness. His enemy is not aware that Hannay has recovered, so Hannay plays the role of sycophant, waiting for the chance to rescue the victims. It is a time of misery for Hannay; unfortunately, it is also a time of misery for the reader.

The story largely redeems itself in the last two chapters, which form a kind of long epilog during which Hannay and his nemesis come physically to grips in a Highland deer park.

The Three Hostages is the weakest of the Hannay stories, but still worth reading. Just don’t start with it.

The Island of Sheep

Twelve years after The Three Hostages we once again meet Hannay and his now-teenage son Peter John. Hannay is in a middle-age slump, no longer feeling that he is doing his part to pay rent on his piece of the planet. In that mood, he falls into company with Lombard, a man he recognizes as a old friend from his youth. He remembers an adventure they shared in South Africa, and the vow that came out of it.

Shortly thereafter, he and his son fall in briefly with a Norlander (Norlands is Buchan’s name for the Faroe Islands) who is on the run from some unknown terror. Then Sandy Arbutnot arrives with tablet of jade and a complicated story about the end of an old adventurer known to them both.

All these things come together as if ordained by fate. There is a lot of fate in this book, but don’t worry; fate gets our heroes into trouble, but they have to get out of trouble on their own. It turns out that Haraldsen, the old adventurer who scratched his last testament on the back of the jade tablet, is the same man whom Hannay and Lombard defended against an enemy during their youth, and is also the father of the frightened Norlander. The vow which Haraldsen (senior) extracted from Hannay and Lombard requires them to come to the aid of his son.

The son of the old enemy of Haraldsen (senior) has sworn vengeance on his son, the Norlander, and has claimed the tablet which he thinks is the key to the treasure the old man searched for all his life.

Hannay and Lombard, each for his own reasons, decide to help the son. The bulk of the book sees that carried out through many adventures.

More than any book in the series, this is less about happenings than about the motivations and emotions behind the action. Haraldsen (the younger) is vastly and vacillatingly emotional, shifting from despair, to resignation, to berserk rage. This is his national character. Of course, the Nazis have since made national character a questionable concept, but this was published in 1936. The modern reader can just think of these characteristics as Haraldsen’s personality, and read on without guilt.

The Island of Sheep is not the best of the series, nevertheless, it is one of my favorites. It has that “northern thing” that drove Tolkien’s work. Fate stirs the pot in the beginning and personalities carry the rest of the story relentlessly on.

*****

This is the last Hannay novel, although he also appears as a minor character in The Courts of Morning. Tomorrow, A Prince of the Captivity, which “reads like an apotheosis of the Hannay books . . .”

154. Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast

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John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps (presented yesterday), and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. The first two sequels are presented here

Greenmantle

Despite Hannay’s efforts, WW I has begun. Now a Major in the British army, he is convalescing after the battle of Loos at the outset of the story.

Buchan spent the war in London, working in intelligence and writing propaganda. His school friends were in the front of battle, and he lost many of them. Late in his career he wrote These for Remembrance as a tribute to those friends lost. It doesn’t take much imagination to see Buchan sending Hannay out to do what he was not allowed to do.

Hannay is called back from his soldier’s life and sent into Germany as a spy, seeking out a prophet of Islam who is believed to be about to raise an army in Turkey which will work against the British. His only clues are three words: Kasredin, cancer and v. I. He recruits Sandy Arbuthnot and John Blenkiron to join him. On his way into Europe he encounters an old friend from South Africa, Peter Pienaar, and adds him to his cadre. All three will figure in future novels as well, particularly Pienaar who is the title character of the second sequel.

The Thirty-nine Steps was a bit of a lark. There is no such lightness in Greenmantle. It is powerful, at times verging on grim, and therefore much deeper and more satisfying. It is probably the most unified of the five novels. The protagonists separate and come together, each playing his own part, but the novel never loses its overall focus. The four Brits enter Germany, then make their way down the Danube to Turkey, seeking out clues to their nemesis and finally ending their quest in climactic battle.

These stories are best read in order, but if you only read one of them, let it be Greenmantle.

Mr. Standfast

Mr. Standfast was originally a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book I had studiously avoided until I read this Buchan novel. Peter Pienaar, Hannay’s South African ally, uses Pilgrim’s Progress as the touchstone of his life. One suspects the same might have been true of Buchan. Certainly, self-sacrifice for the cause is a strong theme in most of Buchan’s work.

Once again, Hannay is called back from battle to take on a job of spying. This time he is sent into the heart of . . . England? Among the half baked and disaffected who question Britain’s war effort, Hannay’s old enemy Graf von Schwabing is hiding. He was a spy against Britain during The Thirty-nine Steps, and is a man of almost infinite ability with disguises. Hannay is sent to search him out and discover what new deviltries he is planning.

The first half of the book is more light-hearted than Greenmantle, including a chase across Scotland that is a bit of a reprise of the first novel. Hannay even falls in love with his co-worker Mary Lamington, whom he marries after the end of the novel. Hannay untangles Ivery’s (as von Schwabing is now known) plans, turns a pacifist into a patriot, and sees the man behind the disguises. Nevertheless, Ivery escapes.

His job half done, Hannay returns to the front where he once again encounters Ivery, nearly loses Mary to him, and returns Ivery to England. I’ll leave Ivery’s rather odd fate untold.

In the end, Peter Pienaar, who has been a character in the wings throughout the novel, emerges to fight again at the climax, and justifies use of his namesake as the books title.

Mr. Standfast is a good read, if not quite up to the standards of Greenmantle, but it has its oddities. Ivery’s fate comes in a manner Hannay sees as fitting, even though the logical thing would have been to shoot him and kick his body into a road ditch in France. There is nothing unusual in that, but it is hard not to shake your head in perplexity at Hannay’s choice. Then there is Mary, the woman Hannay will marry and who will give him a son. Hannay falls in love with her – a reasonable start – but he never seems to fall in lust with her. One has to wonder how that son was ever conceived.

A critic of Buchan once said that he wished his characters would stop all those thirty mile walks across the moors and just jump in bed with some woman. That isn’t likely to happen in a book published in 1919.   tomorrow, The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep

153. The 39 Steps

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Shakespeare would not be the world’s greatest playwright if fate had treated him differently. The Bard was born around 1564. If he had been born five hundred years earlier, we would never have heard of him. If he had been born in 1564, but in central Asia or in a Mandan village on the plains of the Americas, we would never have heard of him.

Shakespeare is famous because he was great and because he was born in the right time and place, in a culture that was rising, and which would dominate the globe for the next 400 years.

For roughly a century, counting backward from World War I, there was an efflorescence of English literature celebrating the culture that came from that domination. Much of it is about rich, silly people worrying about their insignificant lives, without knowing or caring about the Caribbean slaves or Indian peasants who were paying the bill. There are masterpieces here, but I find them largely unreadable. I can’t look at Elizabeth Bennet’s little problems without also seeing the colonial system that underpins her world.

There is another literature of that period that understands what it takes to maintain the life of the home country. Kipling, with all his jingoism, comes immediately to mind, as do Stevenson and Scott. The protagonists of this literature know how to get their hands dirty, and are actively creating a nation. Looking backward, we see their failings, but at least they are working to build the world that Darcy and Bennet will unthinkingly inhabit.

I realize that it is illogical to dislike those who reap the rewards of colonialism, yet appreciate those who created the system. Sorry, I can’t help it; I have a prejudice for workers over whiners.

John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott, with the addition of an elegiac tone as his world crumbled beneath his feet. He wrote 100 books, but is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps, and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay.

The Thirty-nine Steps
(Sometimes given as The 39 Steps,
just to confuse alphabetized book lists.)

Richard Hannay is just back from South Africa, having “made his bundle” and ready to  reconnect with his native country. Instead, he finds London dreary and dull compared to colonial life. He is about to give up and return to exile, when he becomes entangled in the affairs of Scudder, a sort of free lance spy who has discovered a massive threat to England. Scudder is killed, Hannay is blamed, and he sets off across Scotland and England, dodging the police while trying to keep Scudder’s discovery out of enemy hands.

Buchan wrote this as a light romp while he was recovering from an illness, and it can be read that way. Hannay is a very human superman. He has great endurance and hunter’s skills learned in South Africa, but he also has moods. He talks himself out of worrying about his fate, then falls into a funk, then rises again to a mood of certainty. It is very British – can you imagine a hard boiled American PI with moods – and very charming. More than anything else in the whole series, moods humanize Hannay and make us care about him, as well as about his mission.

The Thirty-nine Steps was written during WW I, but takes place just before hostilities broke out. It joins Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands as a call for England to wake up to the coming danger, although Childer’s book was true prophesy and Buchan’s only pretended to be. The second two novels in the series take place during the war (tomorrow’s post) and the last two take place after the war has ended (Wednesday’s post).

147. Novella 2, Hunter, Come Home

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I was in high school when I read Hunter, Come Home for the first time and found it deeply moving. Richard McKenna was a force in the science fiction world, but only for a sadly short time. I had to search the internet and my local interlibrary loan to find a copy to re-read. I found it in Casey Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories by Richard McKenna, Harper & Row, 1973.

McKenna is famous outside the science fiction community for his one best seller The Sand Pebbles. He was born in Montana in 1913, joined the Navy in 1931 at the height of the depression and served in WWII and Korea. After retirement, he used the GI Bill to finished the education that had been cut short decades before. He became a writer, but of only a few stories and one novel. He had only six years between his first publication and his death.

If you get the book, you will certainly read the other stories and be glad you did, but my focus is Hunter, Come Home.

Here is a brief, spoiler-free summary. Mordinmen were descendants of a lost Earth colony which had fought a generations long war against the dinosaur like creatures which inhabited their planet. Manhood had become symbolized by the killing of a dino, but now the dinos were scarce and poor families, like Roy Craig’s, could no longer afford a hunt.

Mordinmen had now claimed another planet and were setting about to destroy its native ecosystem, in order to rebuild it in the image of their home planet. Red dots (successful hunters) were running the show, assisted by blankies like Roy who was working toward the time he could make his kill on the new planet. Hired as specialists, the Belconti biologists were providing the virus-like Thanasis used to destroy the native life.

When the story begins, the fight to transform this new planet has been going on for decades, and it is failing. Now the Mordinmen, against warnings by the Belacaonti, are about to unleash newer, harsher, more dangerous plague on the planet.

That’s about as far as I can summarize without a spoiler alert. Roy Craig wants more than anything to be a full fledged member of his machismo society, but his blanky status leaves him marginalized and frustrated. At the same time, he is drawn to the relatively gentle society of the Belaconti with whom is is working, symbolized for him by the woman Midori Blake.

The native life of the planet is totally interconnected, essentially a one-world-tree (shades of Gaia). It does not so much fight back against the invaders as simply refuse to die

There is a three way contrast in Hunter, Come Home. The Mordinmen, from a macho society built on killing are placed in contrast to the Belaconti, scientists who understand and treasure the ecosystem they are trying to destroy, and they in turn are contrasted to the interlocked, almost self-aware native life of the planet. Roy and Midori are each caught in conflicting loyalties as the planned apocalypse moves forward.

Hunter, Come Home is beautifully written, full of human passions, and insights into cultures in conflict. On publication, it was far ahead of its time in its appreciation of the importance of ecology.

146. Novella 1

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I have concluded that every piece of writing has its natural length. Take Flowers for Algernon, surely one of the great pieces of science fiction, or any other kind of fiction. When it was published as a short story, it was superb. When it was expanded to novel length, it was still a fine work, but it lost some of its impact. Charly, the Academy Award winning movie made from it, was clearly excellent, but not up the the quality of the short story.

That is, in my opinion – but what else matters in choosing the best of the best.

As a youth, I started off devouring short stories like candy. Over the years, my taste moved to novels, but throughout my life I have had a weakness for the novella length. It seems to bring out the best in writers.

Take Hemingway, for example. I love reading his work but I have never been convinced of his mastery. He seems more like the greatest writer of novels in which a man fights a war, makes love to a woman, lands a fish, and dies on the final page. Nevetheless, I don’t argue with his Nobel prize, because he won it for his one true masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea. A novella, you will note, even though it is sold as a novel.

Even people who don’t read Dickens love A Christmas Carol, which is a novella. Conan Doyle’s four long Sherlock Holmes stories, including Hound of the Baskervilles, are novellas.

Even two of the stories I hate most in science fiction are novellas: The Persistence of Vision (it won a Hugo and a Nebula) and A Boy and His Dog (it won a Nebula and was nominated for a Hugo) There is no accounting for taste.

I wanted to write appreciations of two of my favorite novellas (tomorrow and Thursday), so I decided to do a little background research. What a morass! No one agrees on anything, except that novellas are a hard length to sell.

In the science fiction world, the word of the SFWA is final for nebula award nominees. They set these lengths:

short story    under 7,500 words
novelette       7,500 -17,500 words
novella         17,500-40,000 words
novel            40,000 words and up

Anything outside of science fiction doesn’t have to follow these rules, and very few outside the field have ever heard of a novelette.

Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest says, “Novellas generally run 20,000 to 50,000 words. About 30,000 words is average.” That may be true in 2016, but when I started writing in the 1970’s the typical paperback mystery, western, or science fiction novel came in at about 50,000 words.

A good cynic’s rule would be, “It’s hard to sell a novella, so stretch your story into a novel. If it won’t stretch, pretend it’s a novel anyway.”

Next, I went to Goodreads. I only recently got high-speed internet because I live in a dead zone in the Sierra foothills, so I am just now learning to use what is clearly a fine resource. I find their reviews surprisingly sensible, so I went to Listopia: World’s Greatest Novellas. It’s a nice list, well introduced, but if you want entertainment, slide down to the comments. I give these people credit for trying to make sensible choices in an under-defined situation, but it also looks like seven blind Hindus describing an elephant. Not that I could do any better.

Let me add one more bit. Here are some of the stories that, according to Wikipedia, are traditionally presented as novels, but still short enough to fall into the novella category — The Call of the Wild, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Heart of Darkness, The Stepford Wives, A River Runs Through It, Billy Budd, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

There are a lot of familiar faces here. One would almost think that our teachers and professors picked out books for their curricula because they were short; but that can’t be, can it?.
tomorrow, Hunter, Come Home

136. A Groaning in the Earth

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There is a groaning in the Earth. In every corner of the globe, we hear the daily rumble of seven billion footsteps, raising dust in the desert, and pounding the concrete of city streets back into the rubble from which they came.

Earth Day is Saturday. It’s a beautiful idea, and ecological consciousness is long overdue, but all our good deeds matter little in the face of seven billion hungry souls. The band plays, but the Titanic still sinks.

Still, it is not in our nature to lose hope. We do what we can here at home, and dream of new frontiers. Like Cyan, where a minor character is about to bring a small dream to fulfillment.

***

As he walked down toward the fence that kept predators out of the settlement, Mitchell was torn between feeling excited and feeling foolish. He had been raised in a midwestern town on the Kansas-Nebraska border. It should have been an outdoor life, but every field was owned, and every farmer was ready to shoot on sight anyone entering his land. The crops of wheat that grew around the little town gave broad vistas, but there was nowhere to walk.

The town had been Mitchell’s prison and the wheat fields his prison walls.  Within the town were only a few tired locust trees, and across one corner an ancient creek bed cut a path. It had never held much water, and now it had only a sluggish flow of muddy outwash from field irrigation. When he was very young, Mitchell had tried to fish there, but the water was empty.

Mitchell’s body had lived in the town, but his imagination lived in the fishing books he checked out from the local library. Funds were low, so there were few modern books, but that suited Mitchell. His interest was in books from the last century; books about fishing in clear mountain streams for trout, grayling, or small mouth bass. 

Eventually, Mitchell grew up, moved away, went to college, got a job, and had as good a life as anyone could hope to find on overcrowded Earth. When Cyan opened up for colonization, his childhood dreams led him to apply. Now he worked as a chemist, stared through the fence that protected this new town from the wilderness beyond, and still dreamed. Until today.

Mitchell passed through the fence and closed the gate behind him. He walked down to the bridge over the Crowley and paused to admire the glint of globewombs far overhead. Then he crossed over and moved downstream. He had picked his place already, a sand bar just within sight of the bridge. Delacroix had told him that the pharagals could leap upward and shoreward, but that if he stayed at least three meters back from the water, he should be safe. But no guarantees; about Cyan, Delacroix never gave guarantees.

Now Mitchell opened a plastic jar and took out a fly. The hook had come from Earth as part of the precious ten kilograms of personal equipment each colonist had been allotted. He had tied it using cloth frayed from his jeans. He attached it to a Cyan-spun kevlar leader and tied that to his precious only fly line, just removed from its original package last night. The reel was also from Earth. It was an antique he had bought before he ever heard of Cyan because it was from a twentieth century company called Mitchell. Like him.

Carefully but unskillfully, he began to cast. He had never used a fly rod before, but he had read and re-read every book on technique. Eventually, he was able to get the fly out over the water and let it drop. It floated in the sluggish current, a wad of cloth trailing a snarl of frayed cloth legs. Probably no more pitiful excuse for a fly had been tied in a hundred years.

But on Cyan, no fly had ever been used. A dimple appeared in the water and the fly was gone. Mitchell pulled back on the rod, and something exploded into motion.

Five minutes later, Mitchell dragged his catch across the sand bar to a point where he could safely examine it. It was slim and bright blue, with a blunt head and twin tails that reminded him of pictures he had seen of seals. Down each side of the Pseudopisces was a row of interlocking cream and maroon triangles. It was gaudy and ungainly, but to Mitchell, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He unhooked the fly and put it away carefully, reverently rewound the line onto his reel, and picked up the . . .

Trout! The Cyanian blue trout. It didn’t matter what this species had been called by the scientists. To Mitchell it was a trout, and to the tens of thousands who would read his fishing books over the next four generations, a trout it would remain.

134. The Long Road to Cyan (2)

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This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. The writing of Cyan began about the time Jandrax was published. Why it took so long is a tale for another time, or maybe never, but the mechanics of bringing it into the twenty-first century will be of interest.

I followed the rise of OCR (optical character recognition) technology as it became available, but didn’t have a functioning system until about 2008. By that time I had two novels in published form, a novella in Galaxy, and five novels in typescript. I also had two other novels which were born on the computer. About half of Cyan was still in typescript and half was digital.

OCR is wonderful. It scans in text, flyspecks, pencil corrections, stray pencil marks,  coffee stains, the shadows from clumps of white-out, the shadows of paper creases, and an assortment of self-generated fantasy marks. Afterward, you have to read the result side by side with the original and make lots of changes.

Actually, scanning dismembered paperback books and magazines is relatively accurate. When I scanned To Go Not Gently before including it in Serial, OCR only made about a dozen mistakes per page. But when it scanned old typescripts . . . well, it took months to undo the curse of the typewriter. Then I was ready for final correction and polishing before Cyan could go out into the world.

Publication in the age of Cyan (2016)

Writer’s Digest and all its daughter publications used to be the bible for authors. Now they are only a place to begin generating lists. You have to go to the publishers’ and agents’ websites for details, or you’ll be lost from the outset.

The digital age has empowered publishers and agents – to be picky. They used to be happy if you typed double-space in pica instead of elite. Now they specify, and nobody specifies the same thing. Some want Times, some want Verdana, some want Courier – or was that Courier New. Some want .rtf, some want .doc, and some want .pdf.  Some still want paper, believe it or not. If they want paper, they don’t want return postage. It’s cheaper to shred at their end and print fresh at yours.

So, let’s say magic happens. Your novel is accepted. Now things really become different from the old ways.

Early in your search for an agent or publisher you were not allowed to send attachments to your emails. That will probably change now, and you will send your ms. formatted in the manner they prefer, as an email attachment. Just like the bad old days, you can pretty much count on months of no contact. Email makes it easier for them to contact you, if they need to, but it also makes it easier for everyone else to contact them. For agents and publishers, being too busy never seems to go away.

In the old days, you would spend this time writing your next novel. That is still true, but it is also the time in which you start preparing to promote your novel when it comes out. Once upon a time you didn’t promote your own novel because you couldn’t. Now you can, so you have to.

How? I can’t fully tell you because I’m still learning, but you can find a thousand people on the internet who think they know. Be careful; some of them charge money. For me, the main thing was to start this website. It has been going for eight months now. You are reading post 134 on this blog, with even more on the sister blog Serial. That’s a day job in itself.

You can get a business page for your Facebook account. I did, but it didn’t work for me. I was already saying everything I needed to say here, so Facebook was redundant. I am getting ready to tweak my author pages on Goodreads and Amazon. I may even try Twitter, but I’m not sure. I don’t think I could clear my throat in 140 characters.

Cyan is coming out from EDGE, a Canadian publisher specializing in science fiction and fantasy, as an e-book. It has been sixteen months since it was accepted, which I understand is not a particularly long wait. Since I’m writing at the end of March, I will probably know the release date by the time this goes online.

In mid-March I got the proofread manuscript back from EDGE and had to learn a whole new set of skills. Change tracking is a function shared by Pages (the word processor I use on my Mac) and Microsoft Word (used by the business world, including publishers) which allows an editor to make changes which are tracked and identified as hers in a sidebar, and allows her to make boxed entries in which she can ask questions, make suggestions, and share concerns. As author, I can then either accept or reject her changes. I can also recognize good criticism, but rewrite a segment in my style instead of accepting her changes. I can make notes in the sidebar for her attention, especially since format changes are better made by her than me. I can even explain the reasoning behind some decisions that might seem arbitrary.

Change tracking is one more reason why these are the good old days. Thanks, Michelle at EDGE, for a great job of proofreading.

About the first of March, I received a questionnaire for the publicity department which asked for such things as an imaginary interview with me, and imaginary interview with one of the characters in the book, three blog-entry style pieces, and the story behind Cyan. They also asked for a one paragraph, a two paragraph, and a four paragraph excerpt from the book, and for a 10 word, a 25 word, and a 75 word statement that might be used for cover blurb. I also received a questionnaire on cover design which asked for a physical description of the main characters, and gave me a chance to suggest a scene for the front cover.

They are still free to make any decisions they choose, but I am hopeful. EDGE seems to want to do things right.

133. The Long Road to Cyan (1)

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Keir and his friends travelled eleven light years to get to Cyan. I sometimes feel as if my journey has been longer. I first wrote down the names of the ten explorers, carefully chosen to represent ten different countries, in 1978. That was about the time my first novel, Jandrax, was accepted by Del Rey.

Cyan will be released in e-book form from Edge, probably in the next month or two. As of today (Mar 30) I don’t know the exact date.

A lot has changed between the two releases. Since many of you are here primarily to find out how to get your own novels published, I’ll give you a rundown on the old and the new of it.

Publication in the age of Jandrax (1979)
(You can skip this until part 2, tomorrow,
or you can stick around and laugh at the bad old days.)

When I sent Jandrax around, most publishers accepted queries, then often asked for samples or full novels. You never sent the original. Once a typed and corrected manuscript was complete, it was precious. A coffee spill could destroy weeks of work and you couldn’t just push print to get another one. You sent a photocopy, and you included postage for its return. After a few publishers had seen your novel, the ms. copy started looking pretty ratty.

All this was expensive for a would-be writer, since photocopying cost a dime per page, coin fed, one page at a time, at the local library. There were hard learned tricks to this process, as well. Without computers, there was no headers function. Typing your name, address, phone number,  book title, page count, and page number on each page was out of the question. I typed all this once (with the word page, but no number), trimmed the copy close, and taped it face down on the platen of the xerox machine when no one was looking. After copying all the pages, I filled in each page number by hand.

I’m sure Heinlein had people for this.

In August of 1978, Del Rey bought Jandrax. It was published in April of 1979, which is a pretty quick turnaround. I didn’t have much to do with the process, and certainly had no say in decisions made. I didn’t see the cover until I got my 20 free copies in the mail. It’s a great cover, even though the “reviewer” at Locus mocked it instead of reading the book.  The back blurb was another story:

JAN ANDRAX
As a scout he’d tamed
four planets — and more women than
most men ever see . . .

Well, not really. I wasn’t too embarrassed though, because every reader knows that back blurbs are made up by sex crazed maniacs who haven’t read the book.

My only input between purchase and publication was to review the galley proofs. Galleys don’t exist anymore, but before computers, the typeset version of the book was run off in long sheets, about four inches wide and eighteen inches long, and sent back to the author for approval.

From the obsolete word file — stet. Not stat, that’s doctor talk for right away. Stet means “No, no, no. Put back that sentence you red-lined out. That was exactly what I meant to say, and I don’t want it changed!”

Truthfully, despite horror stories you might have heard, all the proofreaders I’ve encountered have been good at their job.

Jandrax came out and sold some copies, but never paid back its modest advance. That was normal for a first novel, back when first novels got any advance at all. There was an article in the local newspaper, I had a book signing at a local bookstore, and my wife bought me a T-shirt with Jandrax printed on it. That was the publicity campaign.

Things are different today, as I will explain tomorrow.

Voices in the Walls 34

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6 of 6 of an outline of the remainder of Voices in the Walls.

One of the slaves is young, powerful, and pushy. He has always resented the whites above him; he is happy now to treat Matt as an underling. Matt is not about to buy that, and there is a lot of testosterone fueled head butting, complicated by black-white tensions.

Of course, this brings an image to mind – a white guy handcuffed to a black guy, running through the swamps ahead of the law. We’ve seen this show before, in any number of B movies. It will take careful writing to acknowledge that these emotions have to play out, without having the incidents take over the novel.

Eventually, Matt will have a climatic scene where he has to choose between the life of a white man and the freedom of a black man. The whole book points to this moment. It can’t come too soon, nor be delayed too long, but he finally has to take that pistol, given to him to protect his sister, and use it to protect one of the escaping blacks. Which white he shoots has to be carefully chosen. Not Meeker, that would be too pat. Not someone who is a complete innocent, nor a complete villain. The black he rescues is equally important. Probably not Alice – too easy and pat again, as well as being a sexual instead of a racial act. Not his black adversary among the runaways, that would be unbelievable. Probably Ben Sayre. Possibly one of the lesser characters among the runaways.

(Need I point out that this scene will be an obvious metaphor for the entire coming Civil War?)

This climax needs to come shortly before they all reach the Waterside area. There Matt will meet up with the old slave who taught him how to swing and axe and adz at his father’s shipyard. He has to experience again the servility that the old man offers him, and reject it.

Matt and his group steal a bugeye, an inshore vessel which Matt understands well. They work their way down to the Atlantic at night and out into a storm, then turn north and sail to freedom.

I’ve wanted to write this scene since I saw reference to an actual event years ago, long before I got the idea of Voices. A vessel designed for other purposes is exposed to a storm, and weathers it, to the surprise of those who thought they knew its capabilities. Like Matt. The storm is a massive threat from the outside, overshadowing white-black differences, and forcing them to work together or perish. And finally, the land is ripped apart by men in warlike contention, while the sea (aka nature) offers challenges men can overcome if they work together.

Yes, critics, writers are aware of the symbolism in their books. Readers, too. They don’t need you to point them out.

This also prefigures what Matt will do in the years to come. We find in the epilog, as he and Rachel and Sarah listen to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that he will spend the war in the Northern navy and will be in command of a river steamer with a black crew which is lost at the siege of Vicksburg.

In the final scene Alice comes by with her child at her side and is embraced by Rachel. She and Matt face each other; he nods, she smiles, but they do not – cannot – embrace. Matt realizes, sadly and with feelings of personal inadequacy, that he still can’t treat Alice as he would a white woman, and he predicts in his thoughts – as Lincoln’s words echo in the background – that although the slaves are freed, it may take a hundred years before his kind can bring themselves to treat them as equals.

Voices in the Walls 33

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5 of 6 of an outline of the remainder of Voices in the Walls.

I’ve even considered dumping the Alice altogether and having Saul be the one captured, but I can’t believe the story told that way. Maybe if Saul were five years old, but adult-saves-child is too easy a moral path for Matt.

I want Matt to change his feelings for a race, not an individual. Matt is young, good looking, and with a full complement of hormones. That means horny; it isn’t emphasized, but the reader knows. The girl is young, good looking, and forbidden fruit for two reasons. Young men of that era were supposed to save it for marriage, however often they didn’t. And slave owners – even ones like Matt and his father who strive for the moral high ground – would have been pulled two ways. Their “racial superiority” would tend to make them keep their distance, while knowledge that they could do as they pleased would tempt them to take those women who were unable to resist.

You could write a thousand stories out of that swamp of emotions: comedies, tragedies, or stories of moral affirmation and moral downfall. But those aren’t the story I’m trying to tell.

Matt is going to go into this rescue with massively mixed feelings. I want those feelings to be slave-owner vs. friend of a good, old black man. I’m afraid his inevitable sexual attraction to Alice will skew everything.

Nevertheless, logic notwithstanding, my gut tells me Alice needs to be in the story. The only way out of my conundrum may be to buckle my seat belt and write my way through the dilemma. If it fails, it won’t be the first couple of hundred pages I’ve thrown away.

So, let’s move on with the story. Alice gets rescued, and complications ensue.

For reasons I have yet to plot out, when Matt and Ben spirit Alice away, they are joined by a small group of other slaves who either have been planning an escape, or just take advantage of the situation. It may be that Alice invites them along, risking her life and freedom for strangers she had just come to know. That would be just like her.

Matt, Ben, Alice, and the others find themselves on the run. Matt has been found out. He can no longer pass as a southern gentleman. He has become a slave-stealer and his hosts know it. A hue and cry is raised. The road north is blocked.

They must now turn east and south, following a path that will eventually lead them to the tidewater region.

Here is a sidenote, concerning research: The journey from Gettysburg to the plantation where Alice is rescued has to take long enough for all the planned moral and personal dilemmas to play out. The distance from that plantation to the coast has to be be long enough for the remaining plot events to occur, but not be so far that the journey seems impossible for escaping slaves to accomplish. Beyond the linear distance, there is also the issue of time. Matt’s story begins with Lincoln’s election, and the number of weeks in Gettysburg, plus the trip south, plus the escape to the coast will probably push the end of the escape beyond the opening battles of the Civil War. All this has to be worked out in detail.

Accurate historical fiction is a lot harder than science fiction and fantasy.

From the beginning, I have planned for Matt to return to his own home, Waterside, passing through as a fugitive in the night. I want him to be fully committed to his new people by the time he gets there, and to fully realize what his change of heart has cost him; and to accept the change and the cost.

But before he gets there, he and his new people have to undergo a great deal of hiding, running, sneaking, a batch of close calls, a lot of fear, and a lot of interactions within the group, most of them harsh. Matt is no longer the man looking down from above. The slaves don’t know him and don’t trust him, and he is out of his element. He is not a city boy, but he isn’t Davy Crockett either. The knowledge the slaves bring with them is at least as useful as anything he knows.