by Dan Simmons
It bore a mundane title, but the opening sentences were strong and written well. Thank goodness, I remember thinking. At least we won’t have another bloodbath.
And I read on.
It occurred to me, somewhere along about the middle of the story, that I was crying. And when I finished the story, I had been touched, had been manipulated as all excellent writing turns and bends us, had truly experienced that frisson we seek in everything we read.
I found my way into the corridor, needing air. The story had really gotten to me. And all down the hall, I saw others from the section, sitting on the floor, crying; holding onto the wall for support, crying; standing in small groups outside, many of them crying. Clearly, this was more than merely competent work. We had been reached by a real writer; a writer with a helluva gift.
When the section reassembled, I called out the title of the story, and said we would now open for discussion.
Very few hands were raised to offer comments. But the few who did speak, all praised the story. Then, as if the floodgates had been opened, others began speaking without taking turns, just tumbling over each other to say how deeply they had been affected by this wonderful, wonderful story.
Then it came my turn to offer a critique. And they looked up at me with some uneasiness. Would this awful man savage even this exemplary piece of work, was he merely acid-tongued and snide, did he enjoy hurting these delicate souls?
I said, “Who among you is Dan Simmons?”
A quiet man whom I hadn’t even noticed, in the third or fourth row, raised his hand. He seemed to be in his early thirties, physically average, a plain man with nothing bizarre or even out of the ordinary about him. He looked at me squarely.
I only remember, in specific, some of the things I said to him. Dan remembers most of it accurately. But the essence of what I said was this:
“This is not just a good story, or a competent story, or an original story. It is a magnificent story. What you have created here is a wonder. It is what writers mean when they say ‘this is what good writing is all about.’
“The writing is extraordinarily adept, a level of craft that comes to writers only after years of trial and error. The story is original, and it is filled with humanity. What you have created here is something that never existed in the world before you dreamed the dream.”
The section was stunned. Fifteen minutes earlier they had seen a poor guy eviscerated, and now they were seeing some other guy raised as a symbol of everything they hungered to possess. (Had I planned the encounter as a demonstration of the two edges of a sword, I could not have put it together more perfectly. In real life, one does not encounter these neat, symbolic scenes of contrast. In real life it’s messy, and rarely plotted for the epiphany. But here I had stumbled into just such a set-piece.)
Then I said, “Now, having said that to you, I will change your life forever.
“Mr. Simmons, you are a writer.
“You will always be a writer, even if you never set down another word. There may be another writer among this crowd, but I think it unlikely that anyone else here is as totally and correctly and impressively a writer as are you. But now that I’ve told you that, I must tell you this: you will never, not ever be allowed to turn away from that. Now that you have the knowledge, you are doomed to spend the rest of your life working at this lonely and holy profession. Your relationships will suffer; your wife and family—if you have them—will inevitably hate you; any woman you come to love will despise that part of you for whom the writing is irreconcilable mistress; movies you will miss because you have a deadline; nights you will go without peace or sleep because the story doesn’t work; financial woes forever, because writers don’t usually make enough to pay the rent, allow the spouse to quit a second job, buy a kid a toy.
“And the most awful part about this, is that most of you think I dumped on that man …” and I pointed to the kindly old gentleman I’d savaged, “… but I’ve crowned with laurels this man. But the truth of it, is that I was trying to save his life, and I’ve just sentenced Simmons to a life of unending labor, probably very little recognition, and a curse that will not be lifted, even after death!
“You are a writer, Mr. Simmons. And you know how you can make book on that? You know you’re a writer, when a writer says you’re a writer.
“May I enter your story in the Twilight Zone magazine short story competition?” And everyone in the room fainted.
Dan can tell of all this better than I. His memory of that morning in the Rockies is near letter-perfect. But what he cannot tell you, is the look on his face as I spoke. It was amazement, and pleasure, and stunned silence, and fear. It was the moment in which the poor dirty stablehand learns he is the Lost Prince of Dimension Exotica.
He won the contest, of course. (On a technicality it was actually a tie with another yarn for first place, but each of the judges—including Peter Straub, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson—went nuts for the piece.) Out of thousands of submissions, Dan Simmons took first place. The story was “The River Styx Runs Upstream” and it was only the first of many works that were to follow along the trail of awards.
Dan told me that he had been trying to sell fiction for three years, with very little success. He had sold a story to Galaxy, and the magazine had folded before it could see print. He sold a story to Galileo, and the magazine folded before it could see print. He had been batting his head against the market for three years, while he earned a living as an elementary school teacher, a specialist in gifted and talented education.
He told me that he had come to this workshop as a last chance. It was clear to Dan, and to Karen, that with a child on the way, he had to make a commitment that could insure their security. Karen’s faith in Dan’s talent never wavered, but she could see he was torn, and tormented. So she urged him to go to the workshop. And Dan said to her, “If I don’t get some small reinforcement that I have talent, I’ll pack it in. This will be the watershed for me.”
And he won the contest. And he sold a novella to Omni. And he got an agent, and the agent sold SONG OF KALI, and SONG OF KALI became the first first-novel ever to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel. And HYPERION came out, and HYPERION won the Hugo. And I spoke to Dan one night late, he in Longmont, me in L.A., and I said to him, “I once told you a true thing that I said would change your life completely and forever. Did you believe me, then?”
“Yes.”
“Will you believe me now, when I tell you another true thing that will alter your life again?”
“Yes.”
Across the night that separated us I said as quietly as I could, “Dan, you are going to become famous. Not just wealthy; that’s the easy part. You will become one of the most important writers of our time. Strangers will know your name, and recognize you on the street. People will seek your advice, and businessmen will try to attach themselves to you. What I’m telling you is not just that you will be a great writer, but more: you will become a famous writer. You’d better know it now, because it’ll all be coming faster than you can take note of it. And you’d damned well better start arming yourself now, because they’ll be on you in a trice, kiddo, and you won’t have time then to figure out where survival lies.”
I have been where Dan Simmons is now, and I have been where he will be soon enough. I may be there now, and I may be there again. But this I know: if I stand a chance of being remembered, it may well be that it will come to me because I “discovered” Dan Simmons. Now ain’t that a pisser!
Introduction to
“The River Styx Runs Upstream”
It’s a cliché that writing fiction is a bit like having children. As with most clichés, there’s a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novel—that moment of pure inspiration and conception—is as close to ecstasy as writing offers. The actual writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of difficu
lt labor before the thing is born. Finally, the stories or books take on a definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer’s control completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to express themselves fluently in languages the author will never begin to master, gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and education far beyond those of their progenitor, and—perhaps the most galling of all—living on long after the author is dust and a forgotten footnote.
And the ungrateful whelps don’t even write home.
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” was conceived on a beautiful August morning in 1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife’s parents’ home in Kenmore, New York. I remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinking—This will be my first story to be published.
It was, but not before two and a half years and a myriad of misadventures had passed.
A week after I’d finished writing the first draft of “The River Styx …” I drove from western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New Hampshire, meeting and talking to a respected writer whom I’d previously only corresponded with. His advice: submit to the “little magazines,” spend years—perhaps decades—building a reputation in these limited-circulation, contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel, and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known publishers, reaching only a thousand or so readers but trying to acquire some critical underpinning.
I picked up Karen in Rockport and we began the long drive back to our home in Colorado. I was silent much of the time, pondering the writer’s advice. It was sage advice—only one would-be writer in hundreds, perhaps thousands, achieves publication. Of those who publish, a scant few manage to make a living at it … even a “living” below the poverty line. The statistical chances of becoming a “bestselling author” are approximately the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being attacked by a great white shark.
So between Rockport, Maine, and the front range of Colorado, I pondered, decided that the advice was undoubtedly sound, realized that the “little magazine route” was almost certainly the wise way to go, and began to understand that it was a sign of maturity to realize that the quest for being a widely read author, a “mass market” writer of quality tales, was a chimera … something to be given up.
And then, about the time I saw the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains ahead of us, I said, “Nahhh.” Perversely, I decided to go for the widest audience possible.
Cut to the summer of 1981, two years later. Dispirited, discouraged, all but broken on the wheel of rejections, chastened by reality, I “gave up” writing for publication and did something I’d sworn I would never do: I went off to a writers’ conference. Paid to go to a writers’ conference. A “how-to”, “this is the way to prepare your manuscript”, “sit-in-the-circle and we’ll critique it” kind of writers’ conference. It was my swan song. I went to hear and see the writers present and to begin to view writing as a hobby rather than obsession.
Then I met Harlan Ellison.
I won’t bore you with the details of that meeting. I won’t describe the carnage that acted as prelude as the legendary enfant terrible beheaded, disemboweled, and generally dismembered the unfortunate would-be writers who had submitted stories for his critical approval.
Between story critiques, while Harlan Ellison rested and sipped Perrier, officials of the workshop rushed into the seminar room, carried out the scattered body parts, hosed down the walls, spread sawdust on the carpet, and generally made ready for the next sacrifice.
As it turned out, I was the next sacrifice.
“Who is this Simmons?” bellowed Ellison. “Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddammit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmitigated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!”
In one of the braver (read ‘insane’) moments of my life, I waggled my fingers. Stood.
Ellison stared at me over the top of his glasses. “At this length, it had better be good, Simmons … no, it had better be fucking brilliant, or you will not leave this room alive. Comprende? Capish?”
I left the room alive. In fact, I left it more alive than I had been in some years. It was not merely that Ellison had liked it. He … he and Ed Bryant and several of the other writers there … had found every flaw in the story, had revealed every false note and fake wall, had honed in on the places where I’d tapdanced fast rather than do the necessary work, had pulled the curtain off every crippled sentence and humbug phrase. But they had taken the story seriously.
Harlan Ellison did more than that. He told me what I had known for years but had lost the nerve to believe—he told me that I had no choice but to continue writing, whether anything was ever published or not. He told me that few heard the music but those who did had no choice but to follow the piper. He told me that if I didn’t get back to the typewriter and keep working that he would fly to Colorado and rip my fucking nose off.
I went back to the typewriter. Ed Bryant was generous enough to allow me to become the first unpublished writer to attend the Milford Writers’ Conference … where I learned to play pool with the big boys.
That autumn, I submitted the revised “The River Styx Runs Upstream” to Twilight Zone Magazine for their first annual contest for unpublished writers. According to the folks at TZ, more than nine thousand stories came in over the transom and had to be read and judged. “The River Styx …” tied for first place with a story by W.G. Norris.
Thus, my first published story reached the stands on February 15, 1982. It happened to be the same day that our daughter, Jane, was born.
It was some time before anyone, even I, really noticed that I’d been published. Analogies are fine and the similarities between being published and pregnancy are clever enough, but when it comes to being born—babies are the real thing.
And so, submitted for your approval (as a certain gentleman once said)—a story about love, and loss, and about the sad necessity sometimes to surrender what thou lov’st well …
The River Styx
Runs Upstream
What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft
from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy
true heritage …
—Ezra Pound
Canto LXXXI
I loved my mother very much. After her funeral, after the coffin was lowered, the family went home and waited for her return.
I was only eight at the time. Of the required ceremony I remember little. I recall that the collar of the previous year’s shirt was far too tight and that the unaccustomed tie was like a noose around my neck. I remember that the June day was too beautiful for such a solemn gathering. I remember Uncle Will’s heavy drinking that morning and the bottle of Jack Daniels he pulled out as we drove home from the funeral. I remember my father’s face.
The afternoon was too long. I had no role to play in the family’s gathering that day, and the adults ignored me. I found myself wandering from room to room with a warm glass of Kool-Aid, until finally I escaped to the backyard. Even that familiar landscape of play and seclusion was ruined by the glimpse of pale, fat faces staring out from the neighbor’s windows. They were waiting. Hoping for a glimpse. I felt like shouting, throwing rocks at them. Instead I sat down on the old tractor tire we used as a sandbox. Very deliberately I poured the red Kool-Aid into the sand and watched the spreading stain digging a small pit.
They’re digging her up now.
I ran to the swing set and angrily began to pump my legs against the bare soil. The swing creaked with rust, and one leg of the frame rose out of the ground.
No, they’ve already done that, stupid. Now they’re hooking her up to big machines. Wi
ll they pump the blood back into her?
I thought of bottles hanging. I remembered the fat, red ticks that clung to our dog in the summer. Angry, I swung high, kicking up hard even when there was no more height to be gained.
Do her fingers twitch first? Or do her eyes just slide open like an owl waking up?
I reached the high point of my arc and jumped. For a second I was weightless and I hung above the earth like Superman, like a spirit flying from its body. Then gravity claimed me and I fell heavily on my hands and knees. I had scraped my palms and put grass stain on my right knee. Mother would be angry.
She’s being walked around now. Maybe they’re dressing her like one of the mannikins in Mr. Feldman’s store window.
My brother Simon came out to the backyard. Although he was only two years older, Simon looked like an adult to me that afternoon. An old adult. His blond hair, as recently cut as mine, hung down in limp bangs across a pale forehead. His eyes looked tired. Simon almost never yelled at me. But he did that day.
“Get in here. It’s almost time.”
I followed him through the back porch. Most of the relatives had left, but from the living room we could hear Uncle Will. He was shouting. We paused in the hallway to listen.
“For Chrissakes, Les, there’s still time. You just can’t do this.”
“It’s already done.”
“Think of the … Jesus Christ … think of the kids.”
We could hear the slur of the voices and knew that Uncle Will had been drinking more. Simon put his finger to his lips. There was a silence.
“Les, think about just the money side of it. What’s … how much … it’s twenty-five percent of everything you have. For how many years, Les? Think of the kids. What’ll that do to—”