The Synopsis Treasury

by Christopher Sirmons Haviland

  David Hartwell knew my work from earlier projects and surely decided to go to contract with us on No Enemy But Time because he understood that I find my way (or fail to) in the act of writing. Further, he trusted that either I or the two of us together would fashion from the specious generalities and hifalutin horsefeathers of my proposal an engaging narrative. Perhaps we did. (Readying the book for publication required that I visit David in Pleasantville, New York, and go over the manuscript a chapter at a time, laying out and ordering the chapters in a pattern different from my original arrangement.) In 1982, No Enemy But Time appeared on the final Nebula Award ballot against daunting rivals, namely, novels by Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Wolfe. It still astonishes me that No Enemy But Time took the Lucite trophy, and I suspect that the membership of SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America, as we called it back then) rewarded me more for my promise than for my achievement. I did not, however, offer to hand my ill-gotten trophy off to Brian, Isaac, Phil, Bob, or Gene.

  The point of all this? I still don’t know how to write a book proposal. And the clunky proposal that follows, believe it or not, reads better than did the version that I had Howard submit to Timescape. I’ve cleaned it up. I’ve dropped some words—adverbs mostly—and tried to smooth out, as well as tighten, its prose. Even this sanitized version would unquestionably fail to sway an editor who did not already know me, however, and all young writers hoping to crash the publishing big time should probably study just about any other proposal elsewhere in the contents of Chris Haviland’s beneficial, niche-filling compendium.

  —Michael Bishop

  No Enemy But Time

  The book I want to write demands a reconstruction of hominid life in Africa, either at Olduvai in present-day Tanzania or at Koobi Fora on Lake Turkana in present-day Kenya, approximately two million years ago. The protagonist will be a modern man dropped back in time to this period by a combination of his own psychic susceptibility to temporal relocation and a government project’s technological exploitation of this unusual trait.

  The time-travel element will be downplayed, however, in favor of a detailed portrait of a hominid community and the protagonist’s necessary involvement with it. He must become a protohuman to survive; at the same time, in order to live with himself, he must find ways to validate his modern identity even in this arduous and unlikely context. For him, what we ignorantly call prehistory has become vividly, and hazardously, historical.

  The book will deal with nurture and growth among the hominids (members of Homo habilis, whom many paleoanthropologists regard as the first decidedly human species of the three or four East African hominid families); the emergence of language; the division of tasks by sex, and an exception to this rigid female/male dichotomy in the person of a large but barren female whom the protagonist calls “Helen Habiline”; African ecology; and the time traveler’s struggle to discover himself in the distant origins of his own species.

  The only other contemporary novel that deals with this subject matter—or the only one that springs to mind—is William Golding’s The Inheritors, which takes place some 30,000 odd years ago rather than two million. Further, Golding’s most basic concern is not hominids (little was known about these creatures when he was writing his book), but the ascendancy of Cro-Magnon Man over the doomed Neanderthals, whom he treats as incipiently telepathic.

  One of the main assets of No Enemy But Time, as I envision it now, will be that it handles recent paleoanthropological findings within a psychologically realistic narrative. I intend to write both an ethnography of a species that no longer exists (honoring the known facts and extrapolating from them the outline of a workable hominid community) and a character study of the man who almost literally dreams himself among these habilines. And even though No Enemy But Time will be as far from melodrama as I can make it, the dangers posed by the harsh Pliocene ecology of East Africa should ensure that the novel lacks neither suspense nor otherworldly “local color.”

  The Protagonist: At this stage, I plan to make my protagonist either an orphaned American Chicano from southeastern Colorado or the son of a black serviceman and a young Spanish girl disfigured by a spidery birthmark whom the serviceman has met on his tour of duty at Morón Air Force Base near Seville, Spain. I propose either the one or the other because my main character must be small and dark. These physical attributes will facilitate his acceptance into the hominid band of two million years ago and his adjustment to the severe African heat of that period. From whichever background he hails, my protagonist will grow up blessed—or afflicted—with vivid dreams in which the boredom and terror of ancient veldt life rumble through his sleeping mind, giving him a shadowy psychic umbilicus to the past. In fact, these dreams make him susceptible to the efforts of the secret government project to relocate human subjects in time by mechanical means and the subject’s own suggestibility. In addition, my method of bringing about this temporal dislocation will suggest an ambiguity—similar to that used by Philip K. Dick in Ubik and elsewhere, and by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven—that the narrative may profitably exploit. Namely, has the protagonist really gone back in time, or does his total immersion in the past constitute a protracted but vivid fever dream? In either case, the reality of his experiences among the hominids will occupy the heart of the narrative. In either case, he will define himself for the reader, and for himself, by these experiences.

  Tentative Development: These are points that I want to include in my story after the protagonist’s “dropback” to prehistoric Africa:

  1. A struggle for acceptance as a member of one specific band of Homo habilis. Because of his size (even if he is small by present-day standards), his relative lack of body hair, his dress, and his sudden appearance near the habiline camp, the protagonist will have to insinuate himself among these creatures gradually. To them, he is at first a monster of alien incomprehensibility, more terrifying in some ways than the giant hyenas and walrus-tusked elephants. He must prove that he belongs.

  2. Socialization. Once tentatively accepted by the habilines, the time traveler will begin to distinguish them by identifying physical features. He will name these early tool-using creatures. This naming will raise the question of language as it exists among them. They will have a “call system” of some complexity, involving screeches grunts, panting sounds, ululations, and even a few onomatopoeic words. The protagonist will attempt to learn what he can of their system, meanwhile teaching them a few words with which to refer to objects in their immediate environment.

  3. Scavenging, hunting, foraging—all more or less parceled out by sex. These activities will constitute the background for many of the relationships that the protagonist develops with the habilines, especially the adult males in this band of 18 to 25 members. Females, it seems, outnumbered males in these bands, and I must calculate possible ratios among males to females, adults to children, etc.

  4. “Helen Habiline.” A major character will be a large barren female hominid who insists on hunting with the males (or scavenging with them, since that may have been their more common food-accumulating method) rather than staying near camp to grub and forage. Because she has no children, and because her size allows her to enforce her desire in this, the males accept her on their hunting or scavenging forays. A complex relationship will develop between Helen and the protagonist, whose responses to her will vary from tenderness to disgust.

  5. Infant and adult mortality. Death is an inescapable fact among the habilines. They fall to predation, accident, disease, and even intramural scuffling. The protagonist will find that they have a reliable remedy for wounds in the plant today called Olduvai—from which the Olduvai Gorge takes its name—or, in scientific circles, Sanseviera. An incident during a heavy thunderstorm will dramatize a glimmer of religious or mystical feeling among the habilines; this feeling will later be repeated in a different context when the group falls into ritualistic behavior to dispose of the corpse of a fellow. />
  6. Sexual behavior, including pair bonding, the meaning and frequency of genital displays, and the likely nature of sexual receptivity among habiline females (i.e., whether it is tied to a cycle, as among most primates, or exists as a virtually day-to-day condition, as among contemporary human beings). These questions also connect with the enigma of habiline social relationships, including the structure of the family, food-sharing behaviors, and such things as grooming and “kiss feeding.” The protagonist and Helen form a pair, but only over time. I hope to show the poignancy of the relationship, which many readers may initially see as bestial and unnatural. I hope to handle these topics with a degree of delicacy as well as with realism.

  7. Interspecies relationships. Conflicts among other bands of habilines, encounters with representatives of Australopithecus africanus and A. robustus, and even run-ins with baboons or chimpanzees are highly likely occurrences in this narrative. Of course, the protagonist’s anomalous presence in Helen’s band will eventually prove a distinct advantage in these encounters, because of his size and his knowledge—but maybe not always.

  8. One odd side effect of the protagonist’s dislocation in time is that he will stop dreaming prehistoric landscapes, to dream instead about the modern world. Twentieth-century images will skate across these dreams: jukeboxes, automotive grills, comic-book characters, scenes from television programs, and so on. At times, he may find himself living out hallucinatory modern scenarios within the realistic, dream-actualized state of his life among the habilines. These flash-forwards will occur during periods of repose or respite, and they will be brief, like commercial spots projected to him across a thousand millennia. One consequence will be a greater sense of isolation, and a developing sense of irony, as he realizes that he is shepherding Helen and her conspecifics toward the very future—his native “present”—from which he has so often fled in dreams.

  9. Fire as both life-giver and destroyer on the plains around Olduvai. Writes Norman Myers in The Long African Day, “An African fire is a stirring sight … quick enough to clear and cleanse without destroying everything in sight. The animals step lightly through its path.” Although the center of a burning tussock may soar to over 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, Myers points out that the soil does not heat up much a fifth of an inch below the surface of the plain. One climactic scene will involve a fire on the veldt, set by a bolt of lightning. This fire will prompt an important ritual display among the habilines.

  10. The sexual liaison between the protagonist and Helen will prove productive, in spite of her obvious barrenness with her own kind. Her pregnancy will occur because the protagonist, having developed a truly caring relationship with Helen, has taken the time to discover the obstacle to insemination posed by her anatomy—for, in contrast to that of most other habiline females, her body has evolved to accommodate face-to-face coitus. Ultimately, the protagonist will assist at the birth of their child, a birth requiring a dangerous Caesarean section.

  11. The ending will turn on the protagonist’s apparent death in our reality and the escape of his consciousness to the ancient African grasslands where Helen Habiline has delivered their hybrid child. Someone in the here-and-now (I would like to establish the year as the same one in which the novel is actually published) will say that the protagonist has died “alone, with no surviving family.”

  Sources: I have read a number of popular and scientific accounts of the recent discoveries—many quite controversial and open to different readings—allowing us to imagine the development of these hominid species in East Africa. Before beginning to write No Enemy But Time, I hope to query, directly, the paleoanthropologists now involved in the search for our origins: Mary D. Leakey, Richard Leakey, Glynn Isaac, Donald Carl Johanson, Timothy White, Owen Lovejoy, and others. I especially need facts about the paleoecology of Olduvai and Koobi Fora.

  Final Comments: Although I would like enough time to complete my research and to develop this material with proper care, the core of a potentially exciting novel already resides within this prospectus. I believe the material has a potential audience wider than that associated with the typical sf novel, and I intend to handle it with that fact in mind. I submit this outline hoping that it will suggest the market possibilities of such a work and that any ensuing contract will reflect the determination of the publisher to reach that audience. I have given myself to this project as something inherently valuable, not merely as an avenue to another slam-bang sf thriller, and I ask the publisher’s help in doing it right.*

  Not long after No Enemy But Time won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1982, Simon and Schuster terminated the Timescape program that, under David Hartwell’s direction, had published the book. —MB

  First published in Thrust #23, Winter 1985. —MB

  ***

  Joe Haldeman

  Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Joe Haldeman has earned steady awards over his 45-year career: his novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he has won four more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Three times he’s won the Rhysling Award for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His latest novels are a trilogy, Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound, and just out this year is Work Done For Hire. Joe was a combat soldier in Vietnam, which strongly influences some of his work. Ridley Scott has bought the movie rights to The Forever War. When Joe’s not writing or teaching—he’s just retired from M.I.T., where he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints and bicycles and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for 49 years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.

  About half my novels nowadays don’t go through a synopsis presentation, at least not a written one. I have dinner with my editor and pitch the book, and she usually likes the idea and sends my agent a contract. The contract is just for “the next science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman.”

  In fact, I do have a synopsis-style letter to my editor, which she asked for after such a conversation … here it is, written from Norton Island, a small retreat for writers and artists off the coast of Maine.

  —Joe Haldeman

  Funny thing, Susan … out here on the island people ask “What is your novel about?”—and I realize how hard it is to sum it up in a few lines. Because it doesn’t seem all that complex or complicated from my point of view, “inside” it. But it’s hard to explain to other people, especially if they aren’t science fiction readers.

  It goes like this. Old Twentieth is set a couple of hundred years in the future. People’s bodies are self-repairing; they can die of catastrophe, but not of age or disease.

  This world is enamoured of the twentieth century, the last century in which people were born in the sure knowledge that their lives were a rainbow arc of accomplishment—or failure or mere existence—comprising less than a century, from birth to death. They visit the twentieth century in an all-pervasive “time machine,” a virtual-reality environment that is realer than real life, more addictive than television.

  There are two main characters in the book. One is Jacob Brewer, a virtuality engineer who’s in charge of the time machine aboard the starship _Ad Astra, headed on a thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, with a crew of eight hundred.

  The other main character is the time machine. It’s designed to evolve, improving itself as years go by. But it starts to evolve in a strange direction, toward a nonhuman self-awareness.

  The immortals start to die, inexplicably, and they die in the machine. It invites Jacob to come inside and investigate.

  Of course a novel is more than a plot line. Old Twentieth is about the 75-year span that comprises the actual twentieth century, from the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The American Century, yes, but a period that can also be characterized by the waxing and waning of German imperialism and international communism.
That’s a subtext of the novel, never brought up directly.

  Another subtext, which is discussed obliquely, is the nature of self-awareness. We can agree that a rock is not self-aware, and neither is a radio, even though it speaks and can appear to think. Is a computer, like a radio, just a collection of electronic parts that can be made to mimic human behavior in certain ways? How complex and self-directed does that behavior have to be before we have to wonder whether the machine is aware of itself? Or does that question have any actual meaning?

  At an elementary level, that’s the Turing Machine problem: You have two boxes, one with a machine inside it and one with a human, and you communicate with both of them via teletype. If you can’t tell which one is the machine, then you’ve arrived at an interesting watershed of computation.

  It goes further, though. The machine that can pass the Turing criterion is a so-called Type I Artificial Intelligence: it can mimic human self-awareness because its programming and database are so sophisticated and huge that a person can’t tell that it’s not a person. It lies, it makes mistakes; it does all sorts of things that a “machine” doesn’t do. Unless it’s programmed to.