by Mendy Sobol
You began writing Virtual Fire in 1995. Why did it take so long to finish it?
Believe me, that wasn’t my original plan. I completed a first draft in 1999, and after several revisions, copyrighted it in 2003. I always loved the characters and story, but it was a first novel. As in many first novels, I was telling a story I had to tell, as opposed to telling a story I wanted to tell, and I was eager to move on. In 2015, I published The Speed of Darkness, finished writing a volume of speculative short stories, and began work on my next novel, The Eternal Blue Sky. During those years, I often set VF aside, but just as often reopened the file and wrote a new passage or rewrote an old one. I’d learned a lot about writing during those twenty years, and each time I returned to VF, I saw new problems and new ways to fix them. The United States’ continuous involvement in foreign wars and the legacy of the Vietnam War also motivated me to keep working on it until it was ready for publication.
Is Paul Simmons’s narration early in the novel autobiographical?
Anyone who knew me in college would laugh at that idea!
In VF I drew on my experiences and those of my friends more than I’ve done in later works. Like Paul, Toby, and Meg, I was a college student in 1970, and like them I spent many afternoons at the racetrack. Like Toby, I graduated from a military high school. Like Melora, I love the ocean. Unlike Paul and Toby, I was a Creative Writing major and never used a computer until 1995. The first draft of VF was handwritten and later rewritten on my first desktop computer. Each of the VF narrators includes bits of me and other people I’ve known, but VF is not autobiographical.
What motivated you to write Virtual Fire?
In the early 1990s, I was coaching a college ice hockey team. Two of my players, Darin and Damian (still close friends), asked me what it was like going to college “in the ‘60s.” Some of their teammates saw it as a magical time of peace, love, and solidarity, while others pictured a bunch of drug-crazed hippies burning down buildings.
I wrote them a short story set in 1969, entitled Dreams. It was about two friends, Paul and Toby, training as antiwar parade marshals in the middle of a city street in the middle of the night. In 1990 that would be weird, but in 1969 it seemed normal.
One day over lunch, I read Dreams to Darin and Damian. As the story expanded, my parents and their friends read it. As it grew into what became Virtual Fire, my kids and their friends read it. I’ve always hoped that regardless of generational differences or views concerning the Vietnam War, VF will increase understanding of divisions that affect us to this day. I believe the power of friendship and the power of dreams can overcome those divisions and bring us together in pursuit of a more peaceful future.
You said you had little experience with computers when you began writing Virtual Fire, yet computers play a big role in the story. How did that come about?
By the 1990s, computers had become part of the culture for college students, so it made sense that fictional computer wizards from the past would be more interesting and relatable. As I learned about computers, computers became more interesting to me, and their role in the story grew. That worked out well from a speculative fiction / science fiction and character development perspective. Leaving messages on an IBM 650 is complicated, so I took some literary license with that.
You’ve written about coincidences affecting your writing. Did any coincidences play a role in Virtual Fire?
In VF’s first draft, I wrote that Toby died three days before his
May 9 birthday. For Paul’s birthday, I chose August 14, the date World War II ended. In a draft written two decades later, I added a chapter about the 1969 draft lottery. That’s when I discovered the randomly drawn draft numbers for Toby’s and Paul’s birthdays were 197 and 198.
We picture writers slaving away in isolation. Is that what the experience of writing Virtual Fire was like for you?
Not at all. I love writing. For me, writing fiction is like going on the coolest vacation ever and meeting fascinating creatures—human or otherwise—who surprise and inspire me.
Dozens (and with VF, hundreds) of people have generously read my work and offered ideas that made it better. I wish I’d kept a list of the friends, family members, editors, and strangers who contributed to VF, but because I didn’t, let me say right here that I love and appreciate all of you!
What are you working on now?
Two new novels. The Eternal Blue Sky is a BIG space opera about genetic engineering, intergalactic warfare, space-faring hippies, and the descendants of Genghis Khan. The other novel will—hopefully—amuse more F. Scott Fitzgerald fans than it enrages!
Introducing
If you enjoyed
VIRTUAL FIRE
look out for
THE ETERNAL BLUE SKY
by Mendy Sobol
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. — Saul Bellow
Eric Stratton sat alone on the porch at the top of his stairs, an old man warming his wrinkled face in the waning sunlight of the last mild day of Indian summer, anticipating the daily visit of Regan Hollady, his only remaining friend from the Naval Academy and the many campaigns of the Dream Wars.
She was late.
Eric waited, something he was not good at. Soon enough, a solitary figure appeared, walking along the path that led to Noahstown and formed a border between the Gobi Plain and the Great Magnolian Forest. Eric raised one hand, shielding his eyes from the sun, and squinted.
It wasn’t Regan.
Without looking away, he reached into the worn leather holster that lay across his lap and withdrew an antique but fully functioning, perfectly maintained sweep laser, leveling it at the approaching figure. The young woman hesitated.
“I’m here to see Captain Stratton,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because he knew my great-grandfather.”
She started walking toward him again. As she reached the steps he could see, even through the pale luminescence of his cataracts, that she was very young, just past her teens, and very beautiful. Her face was pie-plate round, her skin without blemish. She was tall, well over six feet, and her dark hair, unevenly cropped above her ears, curled upward revealing twin galaxies of colorful piercings. Her lips were thin, his favored type for kissing, and her eyes translucent green with flecks of gold. Her loose overalls hid the precise features of her body, but Eric only had two skills, and one of those relied on the ability to discern an attractive figure regardless of apparel. Her figure, he could easily see, was uncommonly attractive. Her perfection, because it was perfection, was simultaneously disarming and unnerving.
Eric gestured toward the folding chair next to his, the one he’d set out for Regan.
“Take a load off,” he said.
The girl took one step toward the chair and stopped.
“Are you going to put away the piece?”
Eric lowered the sweep laser to his lap but didn’t return it to its holster.
The girl dropped into the chair. She’d been walking a long time.
“What’s your name?” Eric asked.
“Jenny,” she said. “Jenny Harvard.”
A heartbeat after she finished speaking, Eric raised the laser, pointing it directly between the girl’s lovely green eyes.
Jenny looked away from the laser’s barrel. The corners of her pink lips turned upward in a smile, revealing perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. For a moment Eric thought she might laugh, but he also thought there was a deep sadness in her impossibly pretty, unsmiling eyes.
“You can put the laser away,” she said, “I won’t bite.”
Eric leaned toward her, nostrils flared, loudly sniffing once, then again, more in the manner of a canine than a retired warrior. He leaned closer, sniffed a third time. Not even a hint
of spoiled milk or cloying perfume, just the intoxicating smell of a beautiful young woman on a warm fall afternoon.
“I said I won’t bite, but you look like you might.”
“How?” Eric asked.
“How what?”
“How did they fix you?”
“Gene resequencing.”
“Prove it.”
Jenny hesitated, but only for a moment. With her eyes still looking off toward the forest’s dark evergreen canopy, she reached behind her, untying the straps on her overall bib and lowering it to her navel, revealing firm upright breasts, smooth light-brown aureoles, and nipples pointing skyward toward some distant star.
“I appreciate the offer,” Eric said, “but at my age it might be dangerous.”
Jenny’s smile grew wider, and for a moment her eyes brightened, too.
“Given your reputation, Captain Stratton, I might be tempted. Unfortunately, that’s not the point of this peep show.”
Eric smiled, but his index finger remained on the sweep laser’s well-worn trigger.
“Look closer, Captain. Please.”
Eric did as she asked. Even if the girl was trying to distract him, he was confident he could pull the trigger before she attempted anything, and even if he couldn’t—well hell—it still might be worth it.
Then he saw it. A comet-tail spray of acne beginning at a point in the middle of her right breast, disappearing into the shadow between her breasts, and reemerging up the side of her left breast in a two-inch band of gravelly pimples.
For the first time since the girl appeared at the end of his driveway, Eric relaxed, breathing more deeply now that he no longer needed to keep his breath under control. His smile grew warmer as he raised the sweep laser upward and to his right before taking his finger off the trigger and returning it to his lap. He was a little disappointed, though not surprised, when Jenny raised the overall bib, covering her chest and tying the denim straps behind her long, lovely neck.
“What kind of resequencing?” he said.
“Viral.”
“Rough treatment. Why not biochemical or nano-mechanical?”
“Rough on my mother,” Jenny said. “She let the doctors infect her when she realized she was pregnant. Bio or nano would have been easier. Safer too. But viral offered the best chance for success.”
“Looks like it was worth it.”
“For me, yeah. Not for my mom.”
“What happened to her?”
“She nearly lost me from the infection, almost died herself. But when the treatment was complete, she still had the craving. They’d corrected the nature, but couldn’t fix the nurture.”
“Where is she now?”
“She waited until I was born, waited, my foster mother told me, until my scalp broke out with cradle’s cap. Then she ate a bottle of sleeping pills.”
“Huh,” Eric said, “a Beaut with integrity. That’s rare.”
“Thank you for your sympathy, Captain Stratton.”
Eric reached over, roughly grabbing Jenny’s hand.
“You listen to me, Jenny Harvard, I don’t have any sympathy for Beauts. If you knew how people suffered, how many of my friends had to die! All I can say is I wish every one of those Beaut bastards had your mother’s guts.”
Jenny placed her hand gently over Eric’s. Her skin was soft and cool, and ever so slowly Eric loosened his grip and looked away.
“I apologize, Ms. Harvard. To me, your family name is the most profane word you can imagine. Worse than that, it is blasphemous. But you weren’t around for any of the history, and none of it’s your fault. Your name is a curse, and bless your mother for trying to lift the curse from you. You can’t possibly understand how great a blessing that is.”
Eric started to pull his hand away, but Jenny gripped it more firmly. Reaching across with her other hand, she touched his cheek, turning his face gently toward her.
“I want to understand,” she said, “that’s why I found you. History is one lie on top of another, but I believe you’ll tell me the truth.”
Jenny and Eric sat for a while, warmed by the light of the golden sun as it journeyed ever lower across the eternal blue sky. Every so often Eric looked away from the horizon, beholding instead the youth, beauty, and as he now knew, near perfection that was Jenny. Yet beneath that, Eric sensed something unseen, and it was that something, more than her youth or beauty or near perfection, that stirred an almost forgotten yearning to again be young, invincible, and looking forward to the limitless future.
They made small talk—how long had Eric lived on Magnolia, was it always this hot here, how long had it taken Jenny to find him, had she come all this way alone—until Eric said, “Look Jenny, you’ve traveled a long way and put up with God knows what to find me. But the Dream Wars, the Taran Holocaust, they’re no short story. They’re more like Gone with the Wind, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Naked and the Dead, rolled into one. I could think of worse things to do than holing up in my house all winter talking to you, but at your age you should have better things to do than sitting around listening to an old soldier telling lies. And that’s another thing—you came here looking for truth. What the hell do I know about truth? I spent most of my life chasing women and killing your ancestors. Is that the kind of truth you’re looking for?”
Jenny laughed, a lovely laugh, deep and throaty, the opposite of her clear, no-nonsense speaking voice. “Why thank you, Captain Stratton. I believe I will accept your invitation!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your invitation for me to spend the winter on sunny Magnolia listening to your, uh, war stories.”
“Jenny, do you know anyone on this planet? Do you even have a place to stay tonight?”
“I was hoping you might hook me up.”
“Okay, tonight you can stay here, floor or couch, your choice. It’s too late to find you a room in Noahstown, anyway. But tomorrow you’re outta here, understand?”
“Perfectly, Captain. But tonight, should I be worried? I mean, your reputation….” Jenny, looking scandalized, brought her fingertips demurely to her lips.
“Ms. Jenny Harvard, if I believe in anything, I believe in sex—that it is good, and decent, and the one true gift whatever gods may be have granted to relieve the suffering of humankind. But I also believe in sin, and perhaps the worst sin of all comes from blaspheming the sacredness of sex. No one should be held accountable for their thoughts—it’s only actions that have consequences—and if an old man like me were to act on his thoughts and take advantage of a young girl like you, that would truly be sinful.”
“It’s settled, Captain Stratton. I accept your invitation to stay the night, but on one condition: you will begin the story of the Dream Wars as soon as we finish eating the dinner I hope you’ll let me prepare for us.”
Eric grunted, “Fair enough. But don’t get too comfortable. Tomorrow we find you a boarding house.”
Eric looked down his driveway, squinting against the now-setting sun. “Hmff, guess she’s not coming today after all.”
“You were expecting someone?”
“An old friend. She stops by most days. Maybe you scared her off.”
“I told you I wouldn’t bite, but I never said I wasn’t scary.”
Something about Jenny did scare Eric. Not like her infamous great-grandfather, or the other Beaut monsters of the Eight Families, but something deeper, more profound. He wanted to ask her right up front, because that was his way, but he was afraid she’d be offended, afraid she might leave. This feeling was something new for him, and he admitted to himself how much he wanted her to stay, especially now that Regan wasn’t coming.
“C’mon,” he said, “it’s getting dark. Let’s go inside and I’ll show you the galley.”
Eric holstered the sweep laser, almost forgotten on his lap, and genteelly extended his arm to Jenny. Jenny slipped her arm in his, and together they stood and turned toward the house, leaving the first chill of evening
behind.
Eric’s home was small, tidy, and functional, well suited to a retired Marine and confirmed bachelor. The front door opened into a living / dining room, with a kitchenette on the right and a magnoliawood table and four chairs on the left. A hallway led to three rooms at the back of the house, an office and a bedroom joined by a full bath with tub and shower. The entire space comprised no more than six-hundred square feet, but white magnoliawood walls, large windows facing barren fields at the back and sides and lush forestland at the front, a wraparound porch, and an arched ceiling capped by a widow’s walk, gave the house an open, spacious feel. Glossy, high-resolution photos of nebulae and auroras dotted the walls, interspersed with pictures of places Eric had visited and friends he had known. Visitors asked why he didn’t display his many commendations, and Eric would respond by saying he’d run out of money framing his more numerous reprimands. If his guests looked more closely, they would have realized that other than its tidiness, nothing about Eric’s home gave away his military background.
Eric pushed back from the table, working a toothpick between two of his molars. The girl was a terrible cook—burned toast with canned tuna smothered under heated mushroom soup—but at least it was a hot meal, more than he’d have bothered with.
“Where do you want me to begin?” he said.
Jenny turned from the little sink where she stood washing the last of their dishes. “Growing up in the displaced persons camp on Maracca, the whole subject of the Dream Wars was taboo. The missionaries who taught history classes in the refugee school called it ‘a difficult, war-torn period that ended in the destruction of Tara and the ascendancy of Serene Khatun and the Magnolian Empire.’ But that didn’t explain why the camp guards would spit at us and mumble about ‘the fucking Beauts’. And whenever we asked the adults questions about why we were there, they’d say, ‘some things are better left alone.’ Most of them were so spaced on suppressor drugs, it was a miracle they could talk at all. Later, when Serene Khatun dissolved the camps, I got off Maracca on the first shuttle that would take me. But wherever I went it was the same story—no one wants to talk about the wars, and the history vids are a joke.”