by Bill Fawcett
A formal invitation that spelled out the ground rules—I thought that sounded good. We were heading into our fifth volume by then and planning to send out a handful of new invitations. We could clarify the whole copyright situation—What copyright situation? my friend the lawyer asked. It was really very simple, I replied: the authors made free use of each other’s characters, settings, etc., but Thieves’ World wasn’t work-for-hire and we’d been copyrighting the stories in their authors’ names.
Most jaw-dropping moments are metaphors; not that one. My friend sat across the table, struck mute and frozen. When he finally did move, it was to toss his pencil at the ceiling. Apparently what I’d so glibly described had more legal implications than could be covered in a one-paragraph addition to the standard short-story contract. He suggested a weekend retreat, possibly two.
As an author, one would like to be remembered for one’s stories; I fear that Bob and I are going to be remembered for a contract: the Thieves’World Master Agreement, the legalese novelette that unleashed the concept of “Shared Worlds” on a unsuspecting and not altogether welcoming industry. In effect, the Master Agreement solved the problem that had earned me a lecture in 1978. We’d turned the world of science fiction into marketable properties and preserved the intellectual property rights of both the creators and the participants.
Suddenly, Hollywood wasn’t the only franchiser in town. Anyone who’d ever built a world could change the proper nouns in the Master Agreement and go into the exploitation business. And a good many did. The Thieves’ World authors were among the first to exploit their worlds.
C. J. Cherryh wrote The Angel with a Sword. There were spaceships and aliens in the backstory, but the novel itself was pre-steampunk set in a city that reminded me of Venice . . . and Sanctuary. I mentioned the similarities to her after reading the proofs. Sure enough, a shared world called Merovingen Nights was in the works. In addition to creating characters, Merovingen’s authors would lay claim to their very own island. Did we want to play? Of course. After five years of editing Thieves’World, Bob and I were more than willing to be the pain in another editor’s neck.
C.J. adopted the Master Agreement lock, stock, and pussycat. Janet Morris knew all about the hassles Bob and I endured and opted for something simpler: Hell. After all, you couldn’t get more public domain than Hell. Her notion was that we’d write stories about the people who wound up there. Because our characters were to be based on real people, there wouldn’t be a copyright problem; and because they were dead, Janet didn’t think there’d be libel problems, either. Did we want to play? Bob said yes; I waffled until she suggested that I write a story about Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov sharing a cold-water flat in the part of Hell that was indistinguishable from Siberia. How could I resist?
David Drake, who’d written for both TW and Heroes in Hell, and Bill Fawcett, came up with The Fleet in an attempt to inject some honest science fiction into what was becoming a fantasy-dominated sub-genre. They took the Master Agreement into intergalactic space where the writers sent their characters into a nasty, desperate war against an implacable enemy. They asked us to play, but by then we were learning how to say No.
Wendy and Richard Pini weren’t part of the Thieves’ World crew, but we’d been friends for years. They had a world, Elfquest, a sui generis tale of wolf-riding elves that Wendy told in a graphic novel format. They had a problem, too: A backstory that spanned ten generations of said elves. Even if she gave up sleeping and eating, Wendy couldn’t draw it all. We gave Richard a copy of the Master Agreement, and the next thing we knew, he’d not only dreamed up The Blood of Ten Chiefs project, he’d convinced us to sign on as coeditors until he got up to speed as a prose, rather than graphic, editor.
There were others. Beth Meacham (who’d really gotten the ball rolling when she told me about Jamie the Red ) shepherded Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s Liavek series into existence. George R.R. Martin questioned me about the Master Agreement when he was putting Wild Cards together. I waited and hoped for a call from Spider Robinson. Even more than the Vulgar Unicorn, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon seemed a natural shared-world setting, but Spider, wise man that he is, proved immune to our infection.
Throughout the eighties, we described Thieves’ World as the “Hill Street Blues of sword-and-sorcery” or “Dungeons and Dragons for authors.” It was the decade of using one brand name to describe another, the era of subrights and exploitation. ACE published their final TW anthology in 1989, after which it was time for the eighties and all they had spawned to fade into history. For better or worse, we’d made our mark: we don’t just write books anymore, we create properties, and if we’re careful, we’re the ones who control and profit from them.
AUTHOR EMERITA
TALKING ABOUT FANGS
M.J. ENGH
The Author Emerita award this year went to M.J. Engh. Mary Jane Engh has written such notable books as Arsian and Wheel of the Winds. She has been publishing science fiction since 1964. While being honored as writer emerita, she plans to continue crafting amazing novels. Here is a short story she wrote in 1995.
I’ll get back to the subject in a minute, but first let’s talk about fangs. You’ve seen these vampire movies? With the vampires dislocating their jaws to show their pointy canines? I think the great American public would like vampires to have fangs like rattlesnakes, except equipped for suction instead of injection. But what humans have to work with are these little dull canine teeth way out toward the sides of our mouths.
Even if they were bigger and sharper they’d be more like railroad spikes than a rattlesnake’s hypodermics. Look at a dog’s canines. They’re for hanging on to a struggling victim and doing as much damage as possible, not sliding in and out and leaving a cute little hole. But people are hung up on the fang idea. It’s the word fang, I think. Sounds all sinister and thrilling.
So you see these movie vampires with their artificially lengthened and sharpened canines, twisting their heads around and trying to make cute little holes in somebody’s neck. It’s not easy; no matter how long and pointy you make them, they’re still in the wrong place for that kind of bite—too far back in the mouth and too far apart.
Okay, we’re supposed to be talking legal business. But imagine if you decided to lean over your desk right now and bite my neck. You can’t drop your lower jaw out of the way like a rattlesnake, and you can’t just go whack with your upper jaw and there’s a hole wherever a tooth hits. No, you’d have to get a piece of me between your uppers and lowers and chew.
And how about these stories where a pair of vampires simultaneously chomp each other’s neck? Picture the contortions required, and ask yourself if it wouldn’t be easier to get at a wrist. The main reason fictional vampires have this throat fetish is the public thinks it’s sexy.
Which is another thing. Something snuffling and masticating and slurping under your chin is not necessarily sexy. And except for mosquitoes, sucking is a separate operation from biting, so the process can get messy. Yes, I did say “something,” not “somebody.” A vampire is not a person, and it’s not male or female. It’s a monster. You can say getting sucked by a vampire is a sensual experience, but so is being swallowed by an anaconda. A vampire is an animated corpse, and what animates it isn’t something you’d invite for dinner. It’s an infection, a parasite, and it’s about as romantic as diarrhea.
Personally, I think this sexy-vampire stuff is a legacy of good old American puritanism. We’ve been so uptight about sex and how ooh yikes physical it is, a couple of generations have grown up convinced that anything physical has got to be, really, deep down, sexy.
Let me tell you, I’m tired of this sinister-but-thrilling bullshit. Getting vampirized isn’t a sinister but thrilling step to immortality. It’s a dreary, yucky death, a lot like AIDS, only faster. And what stands up out of that grave isn’t you. There may be some traces of your personality left—the thing’s using your body, and a lot of personality is physical. But it
doesn’t have your memories. The brain is the first thing to go. After that, the digestive system gets reorganized.
Talking about graves reminds me of another thing. Yes, the will, we’ll get back to that, but first, coffins. Vampires are supposed to sleep in their coffins, or the soil they were buried in, or maybe both, and if they don’t they go all to pieces. Not what you’d call a mobile lifestyle. Think about taking your own bed with you every time you make an overnight trip.
Only it doesn’t work that way. Real vampires are drifters. They can’t afford to stay put. Look at it ecologically. The more they eat, the more competitors they create, not to mention the chances of a vampire scare in the neighborhood. It makes sense just to browse a little and move on. And they don’t need any special box or dirt to get a good day’s sleep.
They’re very physical beings, vampires. They don’t have a religion, no more than a tapeworm does, and they don’t give a damn about yours. So all the crosses and crucifixes and communion wafers in Christendom don’t bother them as much as one good whiff of garlic. Garlic and sunlight are unhealthy for vampires, that much is true. But it’s like wood alcohol and radioactivity are unhealthy for humans. A big enough dose can be fatal, but a little isn’t going to knock you off your chair.
Vampires are like fish; they’re not immortal, they just don’t die until something kills them. You might think modern embalming techniques would be as good as a stake through the heart, but think again. The crap the funeral home puts into you isn’t toxic enough to disinfect against vampirism, and what they take out isn’t all that essential. The ancient Egyptians did it better. The only vampires in ancient Egypt were the poor working stiffs who couldn’t afford to get mummified.
I’ve done a lot of research on this, you see. Figured some of it out on my own, learned some of it from books. Not the bestsellers, you can bet on that! The rest of it you might say I got from the horse’s mouth.
And speaking of animals reminds me of the bat business. That’s one of the silliest pieces in the whole package. You know how big a bat is? About one ounce and five inches, that’s how big. Can you figure any way to condense a human body into that size? We’re not talking fantasy here, we’re talking vampires. Sometimes the stories try to get around that with giant bats. But think about the wingspan on a two-hundred-pound vampire. Or even a hundred pounds; you do tend to lose a lot of weight. Anyway, it’s a lot less conspicuous to buy a ticket and take the plane.
You want to know why I’m telling you all this? Okay, let’s get to it. I’ve already said embalming isn’t good enough. There’s a way, though, and it’s legal, and perfectly sane people do it. Cremation. You burn a body, you kill whatever’s in it. Killed. Dead. Finished. Now you understand why I wanted to make a new will?
Get this: I’m dying. Dying a dreary, yucky death, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it, though the transfusions slow it down. Most of my friends and ex-friends think I’ve got AIDS. That’s what you thought yourself, wasn’t it? My doctor doesn’t know what the hell to make of it. I’m past the stage where garlic could have helped. I’m infected. I’m digesting myself, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Only what I’m turning into won’t be pretty. No, more like a caterpillar one of those parasitic wasps has laid eggs in—something eating me from inside, turning me into it. Using my blood is the least of it. I can feel the brain going. Part of my doctor’s final diagnosis is going to be Alzheimer’s.
That’s why I’m here now, getting the new will finalized, setting up the trusts and all of that, before anybody can say I’m too far gone. Been talking to the family too, letting everybody know what to expect. The good news is, nobody objects to the trust for you. You’re not just my lawyer, you’re an old friend.
The trouble is, nobody in my family has ever been cremated. We’ve got that family plot in Oakdale cemetery, right across the street from here. Look, you can see it from your office window. My mother put a lot of store on all of us being buried close together. Some of the family just think cremation is silly, but for others it’s like sacrilege. I might as well ask for voodoo rites at my funeral.
That’s where you come in. You’ve got to make it very clear to all my loving relatives that unless my corpse is cremated, nobody gets anything. The trusts are dissolved, the legacies annulled, and everything goes to AIDS research. Well, hell, there isn’t any vampire research. That includes the trust for you. Essentially, you don’t get paid if I don’t get burned. You know that carrot and stick approach? That’s the carrot.
It’s not selfishness. I’ll be dead, whatever happens. I’m not trying to save myself from turning into a monster. Well, maybe some of that. It’s not a sweet picture, my dead body creeping around in the dark like an animated vacuum cleaner, looking for veins to suck. But mostly it’s the one favor I can do for the world, and this world needs all the favors it can get.
I hope it hasn’t been a mistake, talking to you like this. If I tried it with any of my family, they’d be sure I’d gone over the edge. But I feel a little better now. I’ve done what I can; from here on it’s in your hands. So don’t take this personally, old friend, just hear it as a statement of fact: if you let them bury me uncremated, you’ll be sorry. That’s the stick.
SCIENCE FICTION IN THE 1990S: WAITING FOR GODOT . . . OR MAYBE NOSFERATU
MIKE RESNICK
The science fiction field seemed to have no boundaries in the 1990s. Six-figure advances no longer made headlines; seven-figure advances were not unheard of; there were even some eight-figure advances, this in a field where more than half the acknowledged classics had been written for two cents a word or less.
There was a time when science fiction movies were solely for the true believers. They were made up of guys in robot suits, scientists’ beautiful daughters who couldn’t get work in “A” movies, and painfully clumsy and obvious special effects. No more. By the end of the decade, more than a dozen of the top twenty all-time box office grossers were science fiction or related films, and mighty few A-list directors and stars didn’t take a shot at one (or more).
There was a time—a lot of people don’t remember it, and the younger ones usually don’t believe it—when Star Trek was a dismal flop, when it hung out near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings for the entire three years of its existence before the network, which had given in to Bjo Trimble’s Save Trek campaign once, elected not to do so again. Move the calendar ahead, and counting animation there were over one hundred science fiction shows on television in the 1990s.
Things looked pretty rosy. The Old Wave/New Wave wars were over, the general public was discovering that we weren’t all just writing that crazy Buck Rogers stuff, there were viable publishers everywhere you looked, and there was a constant influx of new, talented writers.
If you looked closely enough, there were some problems too. At the three-quarter mark of the century, there were something like seventeen New York houses with science fiction lines. We published more books in 1999 than 1975, far more . . . but there were only eight houses with science fiction lines (and in another decade there would be only six—that’s not a lot of editorial taste to spread around). The anthology market was incredibly healthy at the beginning of the decade, less so at the end. The magazines had been selling very well in 1990; by 1999 each had lost more than half its circulation, and a new title, Science Fiction Age, which was actually the bestselling of them all a year or two into its existence, was gone by the end of the decade.
There were a number of truly fine novels in the 1990s, but I don’t believe any had the immediate classic status of predecessors such as The Forever War, Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer, or Ender’s Game. Still, there were some wonderful and popular novels, among them Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar and The Vor Game, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain (an expansion of a now-classic novella), and the truly unique and important trilogy of Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, each of which won a Hugo o
r a Nebula.
Speaking of awards, the decade was dominated by Connie Willis, who won seven Nebulas and Hugos, and by 1999 was the all-time leader in both categories. Others to win three or more Hugos and Nebulas combined during the decade include Lois McMaster Bujold (4), Kim Stanley Robinson (3), Nancy Kress (3), Joe Haldeman (5), and your humble undersigned (4). Major work was also done by Robert J. Sawyer, Michael Swanwick, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Morrow, Allen Steele, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harry Turtledove, Maureen McHugh, William Gibson, Neal Stephen-son, and many others.
Among the editors, Gardner Dozois won nine of the ten Hugos given during the decade (there is no Nebula for editing), and Kristine Kathryn Rusch won the other. Among artists (where there is also no Nebula), Bob Eggleton walked away with five Hugos, while Michael Whelan and Don Maitz won two apiece, and Jim Burns picked up the remaining one.
We also had our share of very talented newcomers break into science fiction during the 1990s, including Kage Baker, Ted Chiang, Tobias S. Buckell, Michael Burstein, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Kay Kenyon, Susan R. Matthews, Laura Resnick, Ellen Klages, Mary Doria Russell, Nicholas A. Di-Chario, Michelle Sagara West, Julie Czerneda, and many more.
We also lost our share of writers: gone were Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Lester del Rey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, James White, Walter M. Miller Jr., Avram Davidson, John Brunner (who became the first writer or fan to die at a Worldcon), Bob Shaw, Judith Merril, Jo Clayton, Frank Belknap Long, Ed Emshwiller, Jack Finney, and more.
A number of our authors appeared regularly on the various bestseller lists: Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Terry Good-kind, Stephen Donaldson, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Sir Terry Pratchett, Kevin J. Anderson (alone and in collaboration with Brian Herbert), Timothy Zahn, David Weber, and more. Dean Koontz, who used to write halves of Ace Doubles for $1,500 a shot, joined Stephen King as the two writers of the fantastic who belong to that tiny community of authors whose manuscripts command eight-figure advances.