If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?
I would cut all the vaguely ESP stuff. In Ammonite I turned it into a biological process, a side effect of the Jeep virus. Here, in what turned out to be the prequel story, it’s utterly unthoughtout, and new-agey clichéd. I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps I’d just finished reading something by Marion Zimmer Bradley...
What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?
It grew from a dream: fireball; slight, skinny thing rescuing a person in armor; running across an overcast plain. When I woke up I wanted to know who or what the skinny thing was, and what happened next.
At this point—1986—I’d been an unconscious writer, scribbling away with a fountain pen on lined paper. “Mirrors and Burnstone” was different. I approached it carefully, consciously (though still by hand). When I finished and read it over, I thought, Oh, this is a real story; I want to send it out for publication; I’ll have to learn to type. So for my birthday I begged my parents for, and got, the money for a used typewriter. After much deliberation I chose an IBM Selectric. I set out to teach myself to type. I borrowed a book—and two days later found myself becoming annoyed when I couldn’t touch-type flawlessly. “Mirrors” is seven thousand words long; no matter how many hours I banged at those keys, I couldn’t produce a decent-looking typescript. Finally a friend of mine couldn’t stand it anymore and offered to type it for me. She did such a fine job (thanks, Maggie, wherever you are) that when I sold the story a few months later to Interzone (the contract is dated October 1987; I made £238) the typesetter sent me a letter telling me it was the cleanest piece of fiction he had ever seen. My first sale; my first fan letter. I grinned a lot.
Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?
I was 25 or 26 when I wrote it in 1986. I was 28 when it was published, in Interzone 25, in autumn 1988. My very first professional publication. It attracted a little attention: a piece about it appeared in the Hull Daily Mail. (I don’t remember how or why, exactly—but I suspect I sent out a press release; I had spent years as a community organizer, self-defense teacher, and lead singer in a band; I understood the value of publicity.) Some local fans contacted me to say Hi, and welcome to the fold. I thought it was a little weird but I said Hi back. Then I learnt there was a group of SF fans in Leeds. They wanted to make friends, too. Making friends involved, in Hull, the ritual viewing of taped Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (which I’d never seen), and, in Leeds, the consumption of lots of beer and discussion of literary SF. A whole new world.
David Pringle, the editor of IZ, asked me to write some fiction for the Warhammer fiction anthologies he was putting together. I leapt at the chance. I wrote two novellas and a short story, and learned even more about writing consciously and professionally to deadline—instead of looking pale and art is -tic while waiting for inspiration to strike.
As a result of meeting people and writing the Warhammer stuff I was invited to my first convention, Mexicon (II, I think, though it could have been III) and sat on my first panel, something to do with the portrayal of women in science fiction as Other, interchangeable with aliens. (This is now a rather hoary subject, but at the time it was all new to me. I was thrilled; I resolved to take my task seriously.) So there I was, on stage, everything proceeding smoothly until the moderator, Sherry Coldsmith, asked me to tell the audience a little about the aliens in “Mirrors and Burnstone.” I opened my mouth—I was prepared, totally prepared, with snippets of theory, quotes from critics; oh, I was going to stun them with my erudition—but before I could say one word I was stuck dumb by the realization that the aliens—Jink and Oryest and T‘orre Na—were women. At that realization, the whole plot of a novel dropped like a screen menu into my head and started scrolling. I thought my eyes would burst and my teeth fly out. I sat mute. A year later, when I had moved to the US, I started writing that novel, and it turned into Ammonite.
How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?
I’m much, much better at it. I spend much more time on it (writing is my only source of income). Yet my major concerns are the same: landscape and how it reflects the characters moving through it, and the human paradox of difference and sameness. I’m still utterly besotted with world-building, though now it’s exotic and/or historical rather than futuristic. I write novels—I honestly think I’m better at long form fiction than short; it’s just the way my mind works.
What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Do the work. There are no shortcuts, no funny handshakes, magic bullets, or secret decoder rings. It’s not about who you know (or even who knows you). It’s about the work. Do the work, don’t skip any of the steps. Patience is your friend. So is faith: at some point in every project, you look about you and you’re surrounded by dust; behind you nothing but dust, ahead of you nothing but dust. You have to believe that if you just keep going, that dust will turn into story. It always does. Also, treat everyone around you like a real human being. You never know when that weird creepy fan you just told to fuck off will become the most powerful editor in science fiction.
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~ * ~
Just a Hint
by David Brin
I
t was exactly seven A.M. when Federman finished typing the last data entry. The small console flashed a confirmation and, several miles away, the central processor began correlating the results of the previous evening's observation run.
Federman winced as he stretched in the swivel chair, his spine cracking. Age seemed to make every strain and pop a cruel reminder, as if decay were audibly calling out its territoriality.
The classical music station playing on his desktop radio began an update of the morning's headlines.
The weather would be beautiful over most of the country. The chance of rain in the nearby area was less than twenty percent. The current probability estimate for the likelihood of nuclear war this year still hovered around twenty percent, also.
Liz Browning backed in, pushing the door open with one foot as she balanced a cardboard tray with coffee, doughnuts, and the morning newspaper.
"Good," she said, laying her load down on his desk. "I knew you could finish without me. I don't know how you stay up all night reducing data without getting hungry. I just had to get some food!"
As a matter of fact, Federman had started noticing a growling emptiness in his stomach almost the moment the last figure had been typed. If his graduate student had been glad to let him finish alone, he was just as happy she had brought back the goodies.
"It's love, Liz. Anyone who stays up all night has to be in love… in this case with astronomy. Either that or he's crazy or in the army."
Elizabeth Browning grinned ironically, leaving crinkled smile lines around her eyes. Her straight brown hair was braided behind her back.
"Or it means he wants to beat Tidbinbilla into print with that new pulsar analysis. Come on, Sam. Outside it's already a beautiful day. Let's let some light in here." She went to the window and pulled the heavy drapes aside. A bolt of brilliant sunshine came crackling in. She didn't even wince as she leaned forward to open the window, but Federman covered his eyes.
"Cruel youth," he moaned. "To bring these spotted hands and time-wracked limbs before the searching gaze of day."
"Aw, come on, Sam. You and I both know there's no such quotation. Why do you keep making up fake Shakespeare?"
"Perhaps I'm a poet at heart?"
"You're a scoundrel and a rogue at heart. That's why I'm so incredibly pleased with myself for latching onto you as a research advisor. Everybody else may be losing their grants as the military budget increases, but you know how to finagle enough funding to keep the radio astronomy program here going. My biggest hope is that I can learn your techniques."
"You'll never learn them as long as you fail to understand why I make up Bard-isms." Federman smiled.
Liz pointed a finger at him, then thought better of it.
"Touché," she said. "I'll enroll in Lit. 106 next term. Okay? That is, if there's still a world then."
"Are we in a pessimistic mood today?"
Liz shrugged. "I shouldn't be, I suppose. Every spring is seems there's less smog and other pollution. Remember that eyesore wrecking yard on Highway Eight? Well, it's gone now. They've put in a park."
"So nu? Then what's wrong?"
She threw the morning paper over to his side of the desk. "That's what's wrong! Just when we seem about to make peace with nature, they're stepping along the edge of war! There were demonstrations on campus yesterday… neither side listening to the other, and neither side willing to concede a single point. I tell you, Sam, it's all I can do to keep from hiding in my work and letting the world just go to hell on its own!"
Federman glanced at the paper, then looked up at his assistant. His expression was ironic.
"Liz, you know my feelings about this. Radio astronomy is not disconnected from the problems of war and peace on Earth. It may, indeed, be intimately involved in the solution."
~ * ~
The sophont had no nose, but he did have a name. If one started there and kept listing his attributes one would find him quite a bit more human than not. The things his species had in common with the dominant race of Earth would have surprised them both almost as much as the differences, but the most important of each has already been mentioned.
He had no nose. His name was Fetham.
"No!" he cried out in the language of confrontation. He pounded a four-fingered fist on his desktop. "Are you mad? Mad! What do you mean, the funds are needed elsewhere? The legislature agreed by almost unanimous vote. Full, permanent, emergency funding!"
The smaller being with no nose was named Gathu. He held up his hand in a newly discovered version of the Gesture of Placation directed at the Optic Nerve.
"Please, Academician! Please remember that those votes were taken years ago. There is a new Assembly now. And since the public health situation has deteriorated…"
"The problem I am trying to solve!"
"… it has fallen on the leadership to seek out new sources of finance for medical research. Surely you know that we applaud your efforts. But it seemed more and more a shot in the dark."
Fetham's prehensile ears waved in agitation.
"Of course it's a shot in the dark! But isn't it worth it? There may be a race out there that has been through what we now face. With the entire world threatened, our very survival in question, shouldn't we make an effort to contact them?"
The government representative nodded. "But you have another two years in your appropriation, have you not? And by husbanding your funds you might make them last longer."
"Idiots!" Fetham hissed. "Why, the first beamed message will reach my first target star only this year! It will take more years for their reply to reach us, barring any delay in interpreting the message!"
"Are all governments as stupid as ours?"
Gathu stiffened. His ridge crest waved in suppressed irritation.
"You may, of course, emigrate to any other nation you wish, Academician. The international Concords give you the right to establish yourself as a citizen of any system of government found under our sun."
"Shall I arrange to have the papers sent over? Perhaps you'll have better luck…"
Gathu's voice trailed off, for Fetham had raised his hands in the Gesture of Supreme Disgust and fled the room.
~ * ~
Federman stared at the ceiling while he tilted back in his swivel chair. "You know, someone once told me that the true definition of genius was the ability to suddenly see the obvious."
Liz Browning stopped pacing long enough to pick up her coffee cup. The stained newspaper was open to a page of boldface headlines and photos of armed men.
"Do you mean that the answer may just be staring us in the face? Are you saying we're stupid?"
"Not stupid. Obstinate, perhaps. We hold on to our basic assumptions tenaciously, even when they are about to kill us. It's the way human beings work.
"For instance, did you know that for years Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous? No one bothered to test the assumption.
"Even the most daring and open of us can't question an assumption until he becomes aware of it! When everyone accepts a paradigm it never becomes a topic of conversation. There must be thousands, millions, of things like that which men and women never even notice because they don't stand out from the background."
Liz shook her head.
"You don't have to belabor the point. Every sophomore has thought about that at one time or another. And it's certainly happened that some genius has leapt out of the bathtub, screaming 'Eureka!' and gone on to tell everybody of the new way to do things."
She tapped the newspaper.
"But this isn't as easy as that. Our problem of world survival is made up of several hundred million tiny problems, each with all the complexity of a living person. There's no underlying simplicity to war and politics, much as Marxists and others dream of finding one. They only make matters worse with simplistic claims and pseudologic."
Federman sat up straight and rested both palms on the desk. He looked at Liz seriously.
"The idea is that we may have missed something basic."
He stood up quickly, and instantly regretted it as his heart pounded to make up for the shift in blood pressure. For a moment, the room lost its focus.
Deliberately, to keep Liz from becoming concerned, he picked his way around the clutter of books and charts on the floor and rested his shoulder against the window frame.
Brisk, cool spring morning air flooded in, carrying away the stale odors of the night. There was the sweet, heavy smell of new-mown grass.
On its way to him the breeze toyed with the branches of aspen and oak trees and the waving wheatfields in the valley several miles away. A low pride of cumulus clouds drifted overhead, cleanly white.
In the distance he could see a gleaming Rapitrans pull into the station at the local industrial park. Tiny specks that were commuters wandered away from the train and slowly dispersed into the decorously concealed factories that blended into the hills and greenery.
It was, indeed, a beautiful day.
Birds were singing. A pair flew right past his window. He followed them with his eyes until he saw that they were building a nest in the skeleton of what was to have been the new hundred-meter radio telescope.
There was a rumbling in the sky. Above the high bank of clouds a formation of military transports made a brief glint of martial migration. The faint growling of their passage had become an almost daily occurrence.
Federman turned away from the window. Inside, except where the brilliant shaft of light fell, there appeared to be only dimness. He spoke in the general direction of his friend and student.
"I was only thinking that maybe we've been missing the forest for the trees. It might be something so simple… something another culture with a different perspective might…"
"Might what, Sam?" Liz's voice had an edge to it. "If there ever were peaceful cultures on Earth, they didn't have the other half of the solution—a way to keep from getting clobbered by the other guy who isn't peaceful! If they did have that answer too, where are they now?"
"Look at the world! Western, Asian, African, it makes no difference which culture you look at. They're all arming as fast as they can. Brushfire wars break out everywhere, and every month the Big Blow doesn't happen makes worse the day when it does!"
Federman shrugged and turned to look out the window again.
"Maybe you're right. I suppose I'm just wishing for a deus ex machine." His eyes lovingly coveted the abandoned, unfinished dish outside.
"Still, we've done so well otherwise," he went on. "The simple problems with obvious answers are all
being solved. Look at how well we've managed to clean up the environment, since people found out about the cancer-causing effects of pollution in the seventies and eighties. Sure, there was inertia. But once the solution became obvious we went ahead and did the logical thing to save our lives."
"I can't escape the feeling, though, that there's a similar breakthrough to be made in the field of human conflict… that there's some obvious way to assure freedom and dignity and diversity of viewpoint without going to war. Sometimes I think it's just sitting there, waiting to be discovered, if only we had just a hint."
Before They Were Giants Page 21