A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
Page 27
Well, so what? It was a reprint, wasn’t it?
No. No, it wasn’t. It was a top-to-bottom revision of a paperback space opera that had sold, like, seventy-four copies on its initial go-round. Besides, we had dropped that upsetting word funeral from the title, amputating it to the brief—albeit, to my mind, derivative and undistinguished—Eyes of Fire.
Why had we done that?
It would have been foolish to release the novel under its first title, David Hartwell had said, because a few potential purchasers—eight, I thought—would mistakenly assume they had already read our new version. Contrariwise, it would have been unfair to release our novel under a totally fresh title—my choice had been The Isohet—because a few who put out cash for the Pocket Books version would think they’d paid for an alternate-universe text of the old Ballantine edition. In the first case, David said with off-putting logic, we’d cheat ourselves; in the second, our readers. Eyes of Fire as a title, then, was our middle course between the self-destructive white lie of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire and the wrath-provoking deceit of The Isohet.
Arrrggggh, thought I.
In 1981, Pocket Books reprinted Eyes of Fire, the Authorized Version. This time the novel had a bright blue jacket, and the Szafran cover painting had shrunk to a detail of the alien’s face the size of an extra-large postage stamp. (Maybe, by downplaying the creature’s nudity, Pocket hoped to attract demographic groups in addition to randy teens with flashlights.) Still, it would be a lie, and more than a white one, to hint that my novel ever threatened to become a best seller. It didn’t, and it remained out of print for a good while until a new edition appeared in England in 1989. (I wrote the first version of this afterword in June 1988.) And when Jim Goddard of Kerosina approached me about doing a limited-edition hardcover, we briefly considered calling it The Isohet. But I still liked A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, and when, in a letter to Ian Watson, I alluded to our drift toward The Isohet, he replied frankly, zapping that title’s “unapproachability” and raising another troubling question:
“I, um, don’t care for it much, if you don’t mind my saying. Also, I think it’s a bit unfair on one’s fans & buyers to possibly confuse them thus. Okay, well, many people will buy it as a first world hardcover, a collector’s item, so they won’t worry, but suppose I was an innocent Bishop-fan who heard of a new title and I laid out the bread on getting it from a foreign land to find that I had already read it, I’d be peeved. Don’t feel so cold shouldery about . . . FUNERAL FOR THE EYES OF FIRE. It was pretty good.” He ended self-effacingly, “However, however, not my business; shut up, Watson.”
But it was his business, for he and I are comrades, even if an intervening ocean has kept us from meeting face to face. Also, Ian’s candor made me realize that the only suitable title for a new edition of my first novel—or, rather, of this re-revised version of the first one, which became the seventh—is, well, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire. After all, from my youthful love of Bradbury to my mature appreciation of Ballard, bravura titles and bardic language played a big role in hooking me into SF writing, and it would have been a sad self-deceit to rebaptize the novel that solidified my early commitment to sf with a title as cold and lacking in referents as The Isohet.
So I didn’t.
As for the heart of this novel, the meaning of the story that grew grudgingly from a single haunting visual image, I have nothing else to say. The novel—in what I now consider its most likely final text—requires each reader to reach a private accommodation with its characters, events, and meanings. May your journey to that end prove gratifying.
— Revised December 2014
Pine Mountain, Georgia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel Unicorn Mountain, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective, edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies Light Years and Dark, three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ, and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human. Soon to appear is his novel for young persons, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, dedicated to the Bishops’ exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, a retired elementary school counselor who is now an avid gardener and yoga practitioner. They share their house, Bluestone Homestead, with far too many books.