by Joe Haldeman
So there I was, sitting on a blanket on this gorgeous topless beach, not a cloud in the sky or a care in the world, and of course my thoughts turned to terraforming, because deep inside this jet-setting sybarite is an American Puritan workaholic. I took out my Moleskine notebook—that I should even have it on the beach condemns me as hopeless—and decided to make a list of every terraforming theme I could remember, and see whether that would generate an idea for a new one. It worked. The list, which didn’t take a half an hour of Spanish sun, is kind of interesting:
Playing God
The ultimate in pollution
Unwitting horror
Greed
Insane colonialism
Need to abandon Earth
Geometric increase (von Neumann machines)
Earth as a result of terraforming
Accidental terraforming (garbage taking over)
Terraforming as trivial hobby
Aliens xenoforming Earth
Doing Mars, Venus, Luna for mining, etc.
Moon partially terraformed
Earth retroterraformed after disaster
Very slow terraforming
—which led to the story. I wrote down “Maybe nobody has done this one—terraforming on such a slow scale that it looks like planetary evolution. The aliens come back to claim Earth, now that it’s “done,” and their claim is legal; humans are an accidental by-product and are screwing up the process. They have to be educated so they know why they’re being destroyed. “Foreclosure”—people have a thousand years to leave the Earth.
I chose as a viewpoint character my late mother-in-law, a wonderful woman who left a bad marriage and reinvented herself as a hotshot real estate agent.
“Four Short Novels” was another story generated by a Robert Silverberg request. The French publisher Flammarion wanted an anthology of stories that take place a thousand years from 2001, called Destination 3001. Unspecific enough that I could say yes and table it until an idea occurred to me.
This is unusual: I don’t have the faintest idea where the story came from, but I know the exact instant when it occurred to me.
I’m a fairly serious bicyclist, and one chore bicyclists do is “interval training,” which is a fancy way of saying “go up hills.” I was laboring up one beautiful hill here in Gainesville, Florida, trying to keep my cadence up without descending into granny gears, when the structure of the whole story came to me in a hyperoxygenated flash. By the time I finished with the hills, I knew what the first and last sections of it would be, and wrote a paragraph describing them as soon as I got home.
I wasn’t able to write it right away, though, because I was racing a deadline on the novel The Coming. I got that put away and we hopped on a plane to Australia, for the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne. After that convention, we were invited up to Airley Beach, a lovely resort town just off the Great Barrier Reef, which we’d visited back in the eighties with Australian fan and critic Eric Lindsay. Eric had had the good sense to move there, and he invited a small mob of us up to continue the party that had started in Melbourne a week before.
I suppose the old Puritan gland, again awakened by cloudless skies and topless women, drove me once more to my notebook, and I wrote the story in three or four easy mornings. Perhaps I ought to move to a topless beach and start making a living as a short-story writer.
“For White Hill” is probably the most complex story in this book, and is my personal favorite, for various reasons. Greg Benford wrote to five “hard” science-fiction writers—as a short definition, you can say that hard SF uses real science—and asked us to write novellas for an anthology called Far Futures, stories set at least a thousand years from now.
Looking back at the notes for this story, I see that initially I had suggested a much different one, concerning time travel. Here’s a letter to Greg, who is a professional physicist:
Many thanks for yours of 12 July re Lyapunov exponents. etc. I’m late answering because it arrived just after we left for Europe. Sweden and Denmark, loverly.
It’s an interesting constraint. Tell me whether I might get around it in this wise:
Chaos noodges the planets around so that their position is basically unknowable beyond a few million years of launch time. This does play hob with my wanting to have each jump orders of magnitude longer than the previous one. Or does it? After the first couple of jumps—a mere few thousand years into the future—it would be duck soup for them to enclose a snazzy space ship inside the time machine’s radius of influence. Here you go, right off the rack. Our hero takes care of chaos etc. by zooming up orthogonal to the plane of the ecliptic and doing his time travelling way up there, deliberately missing the Earth by tens of A.U.’s. Then he finds Earth and goes back down and lands, to see what the Morlocks are up to.
Furthermore, the protagonist has planned for this ahead of time. He knews he’s on a one-way leap into the unknown, and he’s gambling that technology will save him before chaos destroys him. What a guy!
Possible?
Let’s have a glass of good wine in San Francisco and mumble over these and other things. You have a deadline yet?
That turned out to be the novel I’m writing now, twelve years later: The Accidental Time Machine. I’d forgotten that Greg was in on its inception.
I drifted over into another direction, though. I’d been thinking about writing a novella about the future of art, anyhow, so why not do it for Greg? The structure of it, I stole from the best of sources.
When I was in the middle of the book Forever Peace, I was slowly reading The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by Helen Vendler. I had real issues, as they say, with her approach to the text, but it was a good read and a good way to start writing in the morning: I would copy out a sonnet by hand, and then read her analysis while the tea was brewing, and then turn to my own book with the same pen. (Some of us hard-science guys slightly believe in magic.)
In the course of that exercise, I noticed that some of the sonnets had a compelling narrative thrust; in particular Number 18, possibly the best-known poem in the language: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I decided I would write a novella in fourteen sections, each one based on a line of that poem.
I wanted to make it just possible for a careful reader to figure out the source. Numbering the sections 1 through 14 would make it too easy, so I invented a base-14 number system to be decoded. The title “For White Hill” is another clue; Shakespeare dedicated the 1609 printing of the sonnets to W.H., their “onlie begetter.” Finally, the short last section is a pretty direction evocation of the final line—“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
(There’s also a writing pun in the names of the main characters—Waterman and Montblanc [roughly “white hill”] were the brands of fountain pens used to write the story. I know, that’s beyond the pale.)
For anybody with a morbid interest in the calculations and logic that go into a story like this, I put eight pages of notes at http:home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/forwhitehillnotes.htm. I trust the story can be enjoyed without all that stuff, though.
The plot for “Finding My Shadow” also came from verse, but this time a popular song. Along with a number of other science-fiction writers, I met singer/ songwriter Janis Ian at a World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal—she had been in correspondence with Mike Resnick over one of his stories, and he talked her into coming.
We were all kind of fascinated by her bubbly enthusiasm—I mean, half the people I know are science-fiction writers, so they’re no big deal—and delighted when she subsequently sent a bunch of us a stack of her CDs, with the suggestion (Mike Resnick’s idea) that we write stories based on the lyrics, for a book eventually called Stars. Her “Here in the City” suggested to me a dark vision of urban apocalypse, which I placed below and within my beloved second home, Boston.
“Civil Disobedience” is another urban apocalypse, this time set in the Washington area, where I lived from grade schoo
l through high-school graduation, and later for five years of college. Ernest Lilley was putting together an anthology of future Washington stories and, knowing I’d grown up there, asked me for one. I said sure, and more or less forgot about it. The deadline just came due as I was starting to write these story notes, so I tabled them and wrote it.
I’m not alone in being angry at and scandalized by the current administration, so a story set in Washington had to be political. The immediate impetus of it was the establishment’s blithe dismissal of warnings from mainstream British scientists that catastrophic flooding from global warming could be only a few years away. I suppose they think they will be saved by the Rapture, or their fortunes.
Now we come to two stories that were written to “illustrate” paintings. I was waxing nostalgic for the days when a science-fiction magazine editor would send you a photocopy of a painting that would be on the cover someday, and have you write a story around it. I once won a Hugo for one of those, “Tricentennial,” in the July ’76 Analog. Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, heard my plea, bought a painting he liked, and sent a copy to me. The artist Max Bertolini gave me permission to publish a link to a copy of it: http://home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/FSF_art.jpeg.
It’s a good painting, and suggests any number of stories. Two scientific problems presented themselves immediately: the air has a green cast, and the shadows indicate that there are two suns. So only a certain set of orbits would work, and I had to postulate some aliens who could breathe chlorine, or at least tolerate it in a concentration where it was visible. (A human can’t, nor can any living organism I know of; it was an effective weapon in World War I because it would sink down into trenches and bunkers and poison people in fairly low concentrations.)
So I juryrigged a planet and some aliens who could live there, and who might construct the huge stone artifacts in the cover illustration—for those of you who don’t have a computer at your elbow, it’s two space-suited people looking up at three identical large alien faces carved out of rock, with a tanklike vehicle behind them.
“Memento Mori” was an interesting challenge from Dave Gross, who had just taken over the editorship of the venerable Amazing magazine. Among the new things he wanted to do was a feature called “A Thousand Words,” where an author would be given a picture and asked to write a thousand-word story—not 999 words or 1001, but exactly a thousand. It seemed difficult but not impossible. I do a lot of formal poetry with more or less arbitrary restrictions, and in fact I’d done exactly-100-word stories (called drabbles) twice for a British charity.
Dave sent me four paintings, and I chose the one by David Rankin, who kindly allowed me to post a scanning of it at http://home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/Mmori.jpeg.
“Brochure” and “Heartwired” were both written as short diversions for a series in the science journal Nature. All the editor required was that they be amusing, short, and contain some actual science. The first, “Brochure,” was part of a millennium project. The series was well enough received that they did a repeat.
It’s kind of humbling to have a story in a magazine most of whose contents you have no chance of understanding.
“Out of Phase” is the first science-fiction story I sold, back in 1969, and “Power Complex” was its 1970 sequel. They didn’t appear in earlier collections of my short stories because I intended for them to be the first two chapters of a novel.
I kept them in the back of my mind for a while, but after thirty-some years the back of my mind got pretty far back. I looked at them while putting together the stories for this volume and realized with a shock that I can’t use them for that novel anymore, because their main character is too similar to the Changeling in my 2004 novel Camouflage. I had unconsciously plagiarized myself!
There’s a lesson for beginning writers in the history of “Out of Phase.” It’s the first story I wrote in a fiction-writing course I took, my last semester in college. (I got an A. The other SF story I wrote for the class became an episode in the Twilight Zone series.)
Right after that semester I graduated and was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Like most other draftees who went there, I spent one year in combat and then came back to a month’s leave—so-called “compassionate” leave, which I think means that your family, rather than the army, gets to deal with your problems.
One thing I did that month was type up those two stories and send them out to the science-fiction magazines. I was rejected by both Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but when Frederik Pohl at Galaxy saw “Out of Phase,” he sent me a little note saying that if I could boil the first four pages down to one, he’d look at it again.
In fact, I boiled those pages down to the one word, “Trapped.” I sent it back, and knew from magazines about writing that I should include a cover letter with a bare minimum of information. It went like this: “Dear Mr. Pohl: Here is the story with the changes you requested.”
It turned out, though, that Mr. Pohl had quit as editor of Galaxy, and his last-minute replacement was a man who hadn’t seen a science-fiction magazine in twenty years. He didn’t know Haldeman from Heinlein, so when my story came in with that cover letter, he probably bought it without even reading it.
The lesson to the beginning writer is clear. Just keep track of magazines’ hiring and firing in journals like Locus and Publishers Weekly. When somebody leaves a magazine, shoot his or her successor a story with a cover letter addressed to the recently departed. “Here is the story with the changes you requested” could start you on a career that could result, thirty-five years later, in a confession like this.
I started writing just a little too late to get into Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. “Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip,” written in 1972, was going to be in The Last Dangerous Visions, and make my name a household word. I could have been the Father of Cyberpunk, seven years before William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic.” Or maybe not.
At any rate, the last of the dangerous anthologies never saw print. I lost this story for ages, since it was written before computers made it easy to keep track of things. Then the University of South Florida offered to collect my papers, which sent me rummaging through dusty old boxes.
In one of the boxes I found a carbon—that’s what we used when “Xerox” was the name of a villain in Buck Rogers—of the story, and I still like it, though perhaps it’s more quaint now than dangerous.
Joe Haldeman
Gainesville, Florida, 2005
Copyrights
“Introduction: The Secret to Writing,” copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“A Separate War” appeared in Far Horizons, copyright © 1999 by Joe Haldeman.
“Diminished Chord” appeared in Renaissance Faire, copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“Giza” appeared in the March 2003 Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, copyright © 2003 by Joe Haldeman.
“Foreclosure” appeared in the Oct/Nov 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“Four Short Novels” first appeared in English in the Oct/Nov 2003 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 2003 by Joe Haldeman. It was first published in French as “Quatre courts roman” in Destination 3001, in 2000.
“For White Hill” appeared in Far Futures, copyright © 1995 by Joe Haldeman.
“Finding My Shadow” appeared in Stars, copyright © 2003 by Joe Haldeman.
“Civil Disobedience” appeared in Future Washington, copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“Memento Mori” appeared in Amazing, copyright © 2004 by Joe Haldeman.
“Faces” appeared in the June 2004 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 2004 by Joe Haldeman.
“Heartwired” appeared in the 24 March 2005 issue of Nature, copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“Brochure” ap
peared in the May 2000 issue of Nature, copyright © 2000 by Joe Haldeman.
“Out of Phase” appeared in the September 1969 issue of Galaxy, copyright © 1969 by Joe Haldeman.
“Power Complex” appeared in the September 1972 issue of Galaxy, copyright © 1972 by Joe Haldeman.
“Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip,” copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.
“Notes on the Stories,” copyright © 2005 by Joe Haldeman.