The impetus for that effort came from my having learned of the existence of a well-funded writing contest, entries to which were to emphasize “positive visions of the future.” I believed in such visions. That is why Lightpaths is shaped by the tradition of utopian novels, and why the book is itself as close as I’ve yet come to writing a utopia.
That belief too was why, as I was writing the novel and teaching part-time, I was also busily protesting my country’s march to war. Even after half a dozen years of giving much of my free time and energy to peace and social justice work, I very much believed that any internal contradictions in the phrase “truth, justice, and the American way” could still be overcome with relative ease.
There was (as also noted in the 1997 acknowledgments) a more personal impetus for the writing as well: in 1990 my brother, Vincent John “Jay” Hendrix, had been dead for less than two years. An idealist with a beautiful soul, eventually Jay had been twisted by mental disorders to the point that, just short of his twenty-seventh birthday, he froze to death in the Laramie Mountains. Seiji Yamaguchi’s deceased brother in this novel, Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi, owes a lot to whom my brother was and how I tried to make sense of his life and death through the writing of this book.
Others to whom the book owes much for its ideas (if not its characters) include two friends of mine: philosopher D. Bruce Albert, for our discussions of the nature of consciousness, and landscaper Stuart Straw, for his knowledge of horticulture. Both are acknowledged in the 1997 edition, but continue to be worthy of acknowledgment here.
Despite the energy and idealism of both the author and the book, the novel was a long time coming into the world. With the completion of the contest version of the manuscript, I finally had something under my belt that I thought would be worth further effort. There was, however, much work still to be done, and much of the publishing labyrinth still to be navigated. Along the way I picked up an agent, who was fascinated by how “retro” the book felt.
I suppose that retro feel came not only from the book’s idealism and utopian emphasis, but also from what I referred to in the 1997 acknowledgments as the book’s “summing up of my debt to a century of science fiction writers who have shaped my thinking.” In the growth of the conflict between Earth and the orbital habitat, I can now see not-so-dimly the ghost of the conflicts between Earth and colonies which one finds in Clarke’s Earthlight, Nourse’s Raiders from the Rings, Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and many more. The mystical elements in the novel also owe much to Clarke (and through him, to Olaf Stapledon), the ecological elements to Frank Herbert and George R. Stewart, and the lyrical elements to Ray Bradbury. Much of the sheer weirdness of the book is indebted to Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fritz Leiber, particularly to the last for the characterization of Roger Cortland: for the great truth that villains do not generally see themselves as villainous but rather as rational and forward-thinking, even when one of Cortland’s primary motivations is what he calls his “scopogynomachiaphilia” (see also Leiber’s A Spectre Is Haunting Texas and The Big Time in this regard).
Finally, in January of 1996, I met with Ginjer Buchanan at Ace. I gave her the manuscript for Lightpaths and a proposal for my second novel, Standing Wave. Ginjer read the Lightpaths manuscript, and within a few short weeks had cut a contract for a two-book deal with me. I was very pleased.
Now, thirteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after I began work on it, I am pleased all over again to have this novel coming back into the world once more, thanks to The Borgo Press.
Howard V. Hendrix
November 2010
About the Author
Howard V. Hendrix is the author of numerous poems, short stories, and essays, as well as half a dozen novels, several short fiction collections, and nonfiction books. He tries to live quietly with his wife and their animal companions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Lightpaths Page 39