The castle itself is still there. I saw it a few years ago, when I stopped for a day en route to a story on New Refuge. It’s already crumbling, though. Too expensive to maintain. In a few years, you won’t be able to tell it from those other, older ruins.
Otherwise the planet hasn’t changed much. The mists still rise at sunset, and fall at dawn. The Red Ghost is still stark and beautiful in the early morning light. The forests are still there, and the rockcats still prowl.
Only the wraiths are missing.
Only the wraiths.
THREE
THE LIGHT OF DISTANT STARS
Here’s the thing of it. I was born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, and never went anywhere … not till college, at any rate.
Bayonne is a peninsula, part of New York City’s metropolitan area, but when I was growing up it was a world unto itself. An industrial city dominated by its oil refineries and its navy base, it was small, three miles long and only one mile wide. Bayonne adjoins Jersey City on the north; elsewise it is entirely surrounded by water, with Newark Bay to the west, New York Bay to the east, and the narrow deepwater channel that connects them, the Kill van Kull, to the south. Big oceangoing freighters travel along the Kill by night and day, on their way to and from Elizabeth and Port Newark.
When I was four years old, my family moved into the new projects on First Street, facing the dark, polluted waters of the Kill. Across the channel the lights of Staten Island glimmered by night, far off and magical. Aside from a trip to the Staten Island Zoo every three or four years, we never crossed the Kill.
You could get to Staten Island easily enough by driving across the Bayonne Bridge, but my family did not own a car, and neither of my parents drove. You could cross by ferry too. The terminal was only a few blocks from the projects, next to Uncle Milty’s amusement park. There was a secret “cove” a kid could get to by walking along the oil-slick rocks during low tide and slipping around the fence, a grassy little ledge hidden from both the ferry and the street. I liked to go there sometimes, to sit on the grass above the water with a candy bar and some funny books, reading and watching the ferries go back and forth between Bayonne and Staten Island.
The boats made frequent crossings. Often one would be coming as the other one was going, and they would pass each other in the middle of the channel. The ferry line operated three boats, named the Deneb, the Altair, and the Vega. For me, no tramp steamer or clipper ship could have been any more romantic than those little ferries. The fact that they were all named after stars was part of their magic, I think. Although the three boats were identical, so far as I could tell, the Altair was always my favorite. Maybe that had something to do with Forbidden Planet.
Sometimes, after supper, our apartment could seem crowded and noisy, even if it was just me and my parents and my two sisters. If my parents had friends over, the kitchen would grow hazy with cigarette smoke and loud with voices. Sometimes I would retreat to my own room and close the door. Sometimes I’d stay in the living room, watching TV with my sisters. And sometimes I’d go outside.
Just across the street was Brady’s Dock and a long, narrow park that ran beside the Kill van Kull. I would sit on a bench there and watch the big ships go by, or I’d stretch out in the grass and look up at the stars, whose lights were even farther off than those of Staten Island. Even on the hottest, muggiest summer nights, the stars always gave me a thrill. Orion was the first constellation that I learned to recognize. I would gaze up at its two bright stars, blue Rigel and red Betelgeuse, and wonder if there was anyone up there looking back down at me.
Fans write of a “sense of wonder,” and argue over how to define it. To me, a sense of wonder is the feeling I got while lying in the grass beside the Kill van Kull, pondering the light of distant stars. They always made me feel very large and very small. It was a sad feeling, but strange and sweet as well.
Science fiction can give me that same feeling.
My earliest exposure to SF came from television. Mine was the first generation weaned on the tube. We might not have had Sesame Street, but we had Ding Dong School during the week, Howdy Doody on Saturday mornings, and cartoons every day of the week. On Andy’s Gang Froggy the Gremlin plunked his magic twanger. Though I watched Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy, cowboys were more my father’s passion than my own. I preferred knights: Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and Sir Lancelot. But nothing could match the space shows.
I must have seen Captain Video on the Dumont network, since I have a vague memory of his nemesis, Tobor (“Robot” spelled backward, of course). I don’t recall Space Cadet, though; my memories of Tom Corbett derive from the books by Carey Rockwell that I read later. I did catch Flash Gordon, for certain … the TV show, not the movie serial. In one episode Flash visits a planet whose people are good by day and bad by night, a concept that I thought was so cool that I used it in some of my own earliest attempts at stories.
All of these paled, however, before Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, the crème de la crème of the SF shows of the early ’50s. Rocky had the best-looking spaceship on the tube, the sleek, silvery Orbit Jet. I was devastated when the Orbit Jet got destroyed one episode, but fortunately it was soon replaced by the Silver Moon, which looked exactly the same. His crew included the usual comic co-pilot, simpering girlfriend, pompous professor, and annoying little kid, but he also had Pinto Vortando. (Anyone who thinks Gene Roddenberry brought anything fresh to television should take a look at Rocky Jones. It’s all there, but for Spock, who owes more to D. C. Fontana than to Roddenberry. Harry Mudd is just Pinto Vortando with the accent toned down.)
When I wasn’t watching spacemen and aliens on television, I was playing with them at home. Along with the usual cowboys, knights, and green army men, I had all the space toys, the ray guns and rocket ships and hard plastic spacemen with the removable clear plastic helmets that were always getting lost. Best of all were the colored plastic aliens I bought for a nickel apiece from bins in Woolworth’s and Kresge’s. Some had big swollen brains and some had four arms, and some were spiders with faces or snakes with arms and heads. My favorite guy had a tiny little head and chest on top of a gigantic, hairy lower body. I gave them all names, and decided they were a gang of space pirates, led by the malignant big-brained Martian I called Jarn, who was not nearly as nice as Pinto Vortando. And of course I dreamed up endless stories of their adventures, and even made some halting attempts at writing one or two of them down.
Science fiction could be found in the movies as well. I saw Them and War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth and Destination Moon. And Forbidden Planet, which put all of them to shame. Little did I suspect that I was getting my first taste of Shakespeare there in the DeWitt Theater, courtesy of Dr. Morbius and Robby the Robot.
Most of my beloved funny books were science fiction of a sort as well. Superman was from another planet, wasn’t he? He came to Earth in a spaceship, how scientific could you get? The Martian Manhunter came from Mars, Green Lantern was given his ring by a crashed alien, and the Flash and the Atom got their powers in a lab. The comics offered pure space opera as well. There was Space Ranger (my favorite), Adam Strange (everybody else’s favorite), Tommy Tomorrow (nobody’s favorite), and this guy who drove a space cab along the space freeways … There were the Atomic Knights, post-holocaust heroes who patrolled a radioactive wasteland in suits of lead-lined armor, riding giant mutant Dalmations … and on a somewhat more elevated plane, there were the wonderful Classics Illustrated adaptions of War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, which gave me my first introduction to the works of H. G. Wells.
All that was only prelude, though. When I was ten years old, my mother’s childhood friend Lucy Antonsson gave me a book for Christmas. Not a comic book, but a book book, a hardcover of Have Space Suit, Will Travel, by Robert A. Heinlein.
I was a little dubious at first, but I liked Paladin on TV, and the title suggested this might be about some kind of space Paladin, so I took it
home and began to read about this kid named Kip, who lived in a small town and never went anywhere, just like me. Some critics have suggested that Citizen of the Galaxy is the best of the Heinlein juveniles. Citizen of the Galaxy is a fine book. So too are Tunnel Through the Sky, Starman Jones, Time for the Stars, and many of the others … but Have Space Suit, Will Travel towers above them all. Kip and PeeWee, Ace and the malt shop, the old used spacesuit (I could smell it), the Mother Thing, the wormfaces, the trek across the moon, the trial in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud with the fate of humanity at stake. “Die trying is the proudest human thing.” What could compare with that?
Nothing.
To a ten-year-old boy in 1958, Have Space Suit, Will Travel was crack with an Ed Emshwiller cover. I had to have more.
There was no way I could afford hardcovers, of course. Have Space Suit, Will Travel had cost $2.95, according to the price inside the dustwrapper … but the paperbacks on the spinner rack in the candy store on Kelly Parkway only went for 35¢, the price of three-and-a-half funny books. If I didn’t buy so many comics and skipped a Milky Way from time to time, I could scrape together the price of one of those. So I saved my dimes and nickels, stopped reading some comics I didn’t like all that much to begin with, played a few less games of Skee-Ball, avoided the Good Humor truck and Mister Softee when they came by, and started buying paperbacks.
Worlds and universes opened wide before me. I bought every Heinlein that I found; his “adult” books like The Man Who Sold the Moon and Revolt in 2100, since the other juveniles were not to be found. RAH was “the dean of science fiction,” it said so right on the back of his books. If he was the dean, he must be the best. He remained my favorite writer for years to come, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel remained my favorite book … until the day when I read The Puppet Masters.
But I tried other authors too, and found that I enjoyed some of them almost as much as RAH. I loved Andrew North, who turned out to be Andre Norton. What’s in a name? Andrew’s Plague Ship and Andre’s Star Guard both thrilled me. A. E. van Vogt’s stuff had tremendous energy, especially Slan, although I never could quite figure out who was doing what to whom, or why. I became enamored of One Against Herculum, by Jerry Sohl, which took me to a world where you registered your crimes with the police before you committed them. Eric Frank Russell rocketed to the top of my list when I chanced upon The Space Willies, the funniest thing I’d ever read.
Though I bought books from Signet, Gold Medal, and all the other publishers, the Ace Doubles were my mainstay. Two “complete novels,” printed back-to-back and upside down, with two covers, all for the price of one. Wilson Tucker, Alan Nourse, John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson (The War of the Wing-Men was so good it threatened the supremacy of Have Space Suit, Will Travel), Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick, Edmond Hamilton, and the magnificent Jack Vance; I met them all in the pages of those stubby paperbacks with the blue-and-red spines. Tommy Tomorrow and Rocky Jones could not compare with this. This was the real stuff, and I drank it straight, with another for a chaser.
(Eventually my reading would lead me to Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien as well, but I’ll save those discoveries for my other commentaries.)
I sampled different kinds of science fiction along with different authors: “aliens among us” stories, “if this goes on” stories, time travel yarns, “sideways in time” alternate histories, post-holocaust tales, utopias and dystopias. Later, as a writer, I would revisit many of these subgenres … but there was one type of science fiction that I loved above all others, both as a reader and later as a writer. I was born and raised in Bayonne and never went anywhere, and my favorite books and stories were those that took me over the hills and far away, to lands undreamed of, where I might walk beneath the light of distant stars.
The six stories I’ve chosen here all belong to that category. I wrote a great deal of science fiction in the ’70s and ’80s, but these stories are among my favorites. They also share a common universe; all six are part of the loose “future history” that formed the backdrop for much of my SF.
(Though not all of it. “Run to Starlight” and “A Peripheral Affair” are part of a different continuity, the two star ring stories are set in yet another, the corpse stories in a third. “Fast-Friend” stands by itself, as do a number of my other stories. I have no intention of trying to cram these orphans into my future history by retroactive backfill either. That’s always a mistake.)
What I thought of as my “main” future history began with “The Hero” and reached its fullest development in my first novel, Dying of the Light. I never had a name for it, at least not one that stuck. In “The Stone City” I coined the word “manrealm” and for a while tried using that as an overall term for the history, analogous to Larry Niven’s “Known Space.” Later, I hit on the “Thousand Worlds,” which had a nicer ring to it, and would have given me plenty of room to add new planets as I needed them … not to mention putting me nine hundred and ninety-two worlds up on John Varley and his “Eight Worlds.” By that time my writing was taking me in other directions, however, so the name became moot.
“A Song for Lya” is the oldest of the six stories in this section. It was written in 1973, during my days in VISTA, when I was living on Margate Terrace in Chicago’s Uptown, sharing a third-floor walk-up with some of my college chess cronies, and working at the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. I was also in the midst of the first serious romance of my life; it was not the first time I had ever been in love, but it was certainly the first time my feelings had been reciprocated. That relationship gave “Lya” its emotional core; without it, I would have been the proverbial blind man describing a sunset. “A Song for Lya” was also my longest story to date, my first novella. When I finished it, I knew that I had finally surpassed “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” written two years earlier. This was the best thing I’d ever done.
Analog had become my major market, so I sent it off to Ben Bova and he bought it straightaway. Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim both selected “Lya” for their competing “Best of the Year” anthologies, and it was nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo. Robert A. Silverberg had a powerful novella entitled “Born with the Dead” out that year as well, and we ended up splitting the honors. Silverberg defeated me for the Nebula, but at the 1975 worldcon in Melbourne, Australia, Ben Bova accepted the Hugo on behalf of “A Song for Lya.” I was in Chicago, sound asleep. Flying to Australia was way beyond my budget at that point in my life. Besides, Silverberg had already won the Nebula and the Locus Poll, and I was dead certain he was going to make it three-for-three.
It took months for me to get my hands on the actual rocket. Bova passed through Minneapolis on the way home, and handed it off to Gordon R. Dickson, who gave it Joe Haldeman the next time he saw him, who took it to Iowa City for a while and finally delivered it to me at a con in Chicago. The next time Gardner Dozois saw me, he threw me out of the Hugo Losers Club. Robert Silverberg announced his retirement from writing science fiction. I felt guilty about that, since I was a huge fan of the work he was doing at that time … but not so guilty that I contemplated sending him my Hugo, once I’d finally pried the damn thing away from Joe Haldeman.
By the time I wrote “This Tower of Ashes” in 1974, my life had changed markedly from what it had been a year and a half before, when I’d written “Lya.” My alternative service with VISTA had come to an end, and I was directing chess tournaments on the weekends to supplement my writing income. I had started the novel that would become Dying of the Light, but had put it aside; it would be two years before I felt I was ready to return to it. My great love affair had ended badly, when my girlfriend dumped me in favor of one of my best friends. With that wound still raw and bleeding, I promptly fell in love again, this time with a woman with whom I had so much in common that I felt as though I’d known her all my life. Yet that relationship had only begun to bloom when it ended, almost overnight, a
s she fell head-over-heels for someone else.
“This Tower of Ashes” came out of all that. Ben Bova bought it for Analog, but ended up publishing it in the Analog Annual, an original anthology from Pyramid. The idea of the Annual was to try and reach book readers and get them interested in the magazine. Whether it did or not, I couldn’t say … but I would sooner my story had remained in Analog itself. One lesson I learned early in my career remains as true today as it was then: the best place for a story to get noticed is in the magazines. If anyone ever read “This Tower of Ashes” besides Ben Bova, you couldn’t prove it by me.
“And Seven Times Never Kill Man” was written in 1974 and published in 1975. It got me my second Analog cover for that year (a few months earlier, a gorgeous Jack Gaughan painting had adorned the issue featuring “The Storms of Windhaven,” a collaboration between me and Lisa Tuttle), this one a stunning John Schoenherr that I wish I’d bought. The Steel Angels were created as my answer to Gordy Dickson’s Dorsai, although the term “Steel Angel” came from a song by Kris Kristofferson. Their god, the pale child with a sword, had an older and more dubious pedigree: he was one of the seven dark gods of the mythos I’d designed for Dr. Weird, as glimpsed in “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark.” The title is from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, of course, and got me almost as much praise as the story. Afterward several other writers, all Kipling fans, announced that they were annoyed they hadn’t thought of it first.
“And Seven Times Never Kill Man” was nominated for a Hugo as the Best Novelette of 1974. “The Storms of Windhaven” was also up that year for Best Novella. At “Big Mac,” the 1976 worldcon in Kansas City, the two stories both lost within minutes of each other (the former to Larry Niven, who promptly dropped and broke his Hugo, the latter to Roger Zelazny). The following night, aided and abetted by Gardner Dozois and armed with a jug of cheap white wine left over from someone else’s party, I threw the very first Hugo Losers Party in my room at the Muehlebach Hotel. It was the best party at the convention, and in later years would become a worldcon tradition, although recently some irony-challenged smofs have insisted on renaming it “the Hugo Nominees Party.”
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