Before They Were Giants

by James L. Sutter

  Yet for all its significance, the Callahan’s series represents only one facet of Spider Robinson’s writing. For the last three decades, Spider has produced at least one book a year, along the way garnering three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and several others, including the Robert A. Heinlein Medal for Lifetime Excellence—unsurprising, considering he’s also the only writer to ever collaborate with Heinlein himself, posthumously completing the novel Variable Star from a 1955 outline. He’s written the award-winning Stardance trilogy with his wife, been a guest at the White House, and written songs with musicians like David Crosby, Amos Garrett, and Todd Butler (the lyrics to which sometimes appear in the Callahan stories themselves).

  Life, as Spider says, does not entirely suck—largely due to the preceding story.

  Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

  My name, right up front under the title. It helped ensure its correct spelling on the check.

  If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?

  It’s like asking what was ugly about my firstborn. At this remove, I can’t think of a thing. Look how well she turned out...

  What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

  I had just flung a paperback across the room, snarling for the thousandth time in my life, “Hell, I could write better than that idiot!” I was sitting beside a sewer, protecting it from theft—I was night watchman over its construction site, in Babylon, New York—and I resumed thinking, as always when I’d run out of fiction, about where I’d rather be. The night before I had seen a Charles Boyer-Claudette Colbert film in which they were exiled Russian nobility, reduced to working as butler and maid for a family of pompous Brits ... but late at night, when the master and mistress were abed, they would put on their ragged finery, drink champagne, and smash their glasses in the fireplace just like the Good Old Days.

  Gee, I thought, it would be just great if there were a bar where they let you do that. That’s where I’d rather be than here.

  Of course... it would have to be a special sort of bar. With a special kind of customers, who could be trusted to hurl glassware around while loaded. And a very forgiving bartender. But boy, some interesting stories would probably get told there...

  Before me was a typewriter... and paper I didn’t have to pay for, that only said “J. D. Posillico Construction Co.” on one side ... and hours of boredom before the end of my shift. The rest, as they say, is social studies.

  When I was done, the resulting heap of stained paper looked, to me at least, just like a story manuscript, such as I imagined writers produced. I didn’t expect that to fool an editor . . . but I did suddenly realize that if I sent it to one, he would have to send me a real rejection slip. With that, I could easily get laid. Tragic Figger of a Man, failed artist, genius undiscovered, etc. So the next day I went to the library, found Writer’s Market, sussed out who paid the most for SF —Analog magazine—and decided it would have the most impressive rejection slips.

  Editor Ben Bova screwed the whole thing up: instead of a rejection slip, he sent $400 and an invitation to lunch in the city. His first words to me were, “Does that bar of yours really exist? Because I’d sure like to go there.” He printed “The Guy with the Eyes” in February 1973. In 2008, Ben and I shared the Robert A. Heinlein Medal for Lifetime Excellence.

  Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

  I was just then out of college with a BA in English (after only 7 years), and having belatedly realized I didn’t want to drive a cab, I was trying to figure out what I might do for a living when I grew up. The story’s publication ensured that day would never arrive. Thank God: all I had come up with was journalism, which I discovered I hated, and folk music, which I loved but which ceased to exist as an occupation at just that moment in history. And guarding a sewer.

  How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?

  The only stylistic change I’ve ever noticed myself came with the introduction of the word processor. Before then, I’d written everything longhand. Then during the brutal donkey labor of the typing process, I’d been motivated to cut like mad, losing words, sentences, even whole paragraphs or entire subplots. Then Jef Raskin created the personal computer. Nowadays, I just scroll my golden words past, and can’t think of a reason in the world to cut any of them. Fortunately, if my readers noticed, they’ve apparently decided to keep their mouths shut and go along with the gag. Perhaps I ramble well. (P. G. Wodehouse has always been one of my favorite writers.)

  Other than that, my style changes on a daily basis, depending on who I’ve been reading.

  What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

  Go back; it’s a trap. After 35 straight years of sustained good luck and unbroken success, I’m as broke as when I started, paying off a mortgage, no savings, living from book to book, in a clearly dying industry. I’m 60 years old and I’ve bought one new car in my life. My TV has a cathode ray tube. Imagine how the less fortunate are doing. And from here on, things will be getting much, much worse: today’s “audience” honestly believes anyone at all can write interestingly, and doesn’t see why it should have to pay anyone to do so. They’ll find out. . . but not necessarily before a generation of writers starves to death, like jazz musicians and stage actors.

  On the other hand, I sleep when I’m tired, don’t get up until I’m done, wear whatever I like, work when I feel the impulse, and get to spend as many of my waking hours as I want with my best friend, my wife. I have one important deadline a year. There are urgent professional reasons why I need to read lots of great books and listen to lots of superb music and watch lots of great movies and smoke BC boo. I’ve become friends with people like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Jef Raskin, Tom Robbins, John Varley, Paul Krassner, Stephen Gaskin, Cory Doctorow, and Amos Garrett. A few years ago, Laura Bush invited me and Jeanne to dinner with her and the old man, and brunch in the West Wing the next day. The other guests included Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Bob Woodward. I’m allowed backstage at both Janis Ian and Crosby, Stills & Nash concerts; David and I collaborated on a song for Robert Heinlein. And I have managed to stay interesting to the most beautiful woman I ever saw for over thirty-five years; our first grandchild is due in five months. Life so far has not entirely sucked.

  In return for all this, all I’ve had to do is stare at a blank monitor until beads of blood form on my forehead. And be willing to live on Scraped Icebox and Dishrag Soup sprinkled with fear.

  It’s going to get a lot harder from here on, though. Colleagues I consider my peers are going under. The traditional escape hatch for the failed fiction writer—journalism—is scrambling for survival itself. And the economy has no jobs for unskilled labor.

  We need someone to reinvent the publishing industry for the Internet, we need a visionary to bring us the fabled New Business Model—that is, we need some rapacious fat bastard in a suit to figure out some bulletproof way to exploit us. My sincere advice to would-be writers today is exactly the advice I ignored myself 35 years ago: keep your day job. It took America nearly a decade to notice how incredibly boring reality TV was—and it still hasn’t noticed how astonishingly boring talent-contest TV is—so it’s going to take it a long time to notice how unbelievably boring all those blogs and twitters and amateur YouTubers are, and turn to professional storytellers again. When they do they’ll probably want graphic novels.

  For now, try something with more career potential. Like folk music, or modern dance, or experimental theater. It’s no accident that my home has always been known as Tottering-on-the-Brink.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Fragments of a Hologram Rose

  by William Gibson

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  hat summer Parker had trouble sleeping.

  There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to consciousness.

  To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP-deck. Power loss in the inducer would trigger the deck’s playback circuit.

  He brought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning’s exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette’s transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible.

  He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by now he knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most interesting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift glance down the white beach that picked out the figure of a guard patrolling a chain-link fence, a black machine pistol slung over his arm.

  While Parker slept, power drained from the city’s grids.

  The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra-something; with other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP deck.

  Three in the morning.

  Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.

  Morning’s recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter—fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind’s gray screen.

  Three in the morning.

  Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said—what she said—watching her pack—dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component: you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.

  The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He pedaled away in the rain. She didn’t look back.

  The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.

  ~ * ~

  Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy’s Jungle. It was a massive console in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model—heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.

  He was in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading firms had the first portable decks in major department stores in time for Christmas. The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in California never recovered.

  Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the holo temples of Parker’s childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette smoke.

  Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the industry’s human cameras.

  ~ * ~

  The brown-out continues.

  In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet he emptied the day before. The flashlight’s beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is a white light reflection hologram of a rose.

  At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.

  Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cassette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women’s tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.

  Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience.

  But Angela’s own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that can’t be it—it’s simply that the cassette is an entirely unknown quantity.

  ~ * ~

  When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at least once a month for girls or the holodrome.

  The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different “provisional” city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level.

  Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned-out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said. Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.

  ~ * ~

  The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound—the no-sound of the first dark sea . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

  ~ * ~

  Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lighting that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.

  Many of the refugees were armed.

  Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintained in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession.

  The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and territories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.

  Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent to find.

  After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of
greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a length of brushwood.