Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 2 - Serpent Mage
Page 42
I worked on my novel in a kind of heat. I had to see how it all turned out. The protagonist wandered through the last chapters, bereaved, experiencing more and more revelations, until at the end, he was restored to a more solid world, and regained Kristine.
With such wish-fulfillments, I began to purge myself. I finished the novel, took out a student loan for one hundred and twenty-five dollars to have it retyped, submitted it once - receiving a kind rejection slip from Betty Ballan-tine - and shelved it.
The work was neither complete nor mature. Its core was true, but its form was awkward; the emotions and ideas were fine, perhaps more intense than anything I would write later, but it was not publishable.
Too amorphous, too tied in with half-understood emotions, the book languished for years. Occasionally I would give thought to revising it, but I was working on other books and stories that would eventually sell and be published.
Then, in 1979, the book reshaped itself in one evening of inspiration. In a heat, I wrote the details down in a small blue notebook. The plot was completely different, but much of the core remained. Arno Waltiri, Opus 45, Kristine, the quotation from a nonexistent book by Charles Fort, and the ensorceled Chinese were still there. My early protagonist - originally the son of Arno Waltiri - had evolved into Michael Perrin. Intricate plot and carefully worked out fantasy elements replaced much of the amorphous surrealism.
Here at last was a book that could be written and sold. Still, I waited a few years before I broached the idea to Terri Windling over lunch in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. She asked to see the proposal.
Eventually, The Infinity Concerto became part of a package contract with a very different novel called Blood Music. (They are still joint-accounted in the United States; Blood Music has sold much better. Yet a third proposed novel, Eon, was rejected by the publishers because they did not want to risk a three-book contract with a fledgling writer.)
I knew that The Infinity Concerto was really only the first half of a longer novel, but the second half would have to wait, to be written separately and published as a second book. In due time, the second half was proposed and written and published.
I dedicated the first part to a beloved teacher, Elizabeth Chater, who had read the first version in 1971 and given me much needed praise and support. The second part, the part with Kristine, I dedicated to her. It was my way of sending her a copy.
Adolescence is far behind me now. I'm a full-time writer. I do very little artwork. I've been married twice, and now I'm a father of two; I've been through a few traumatic times, and many more joyous ones. Yet in that winter and spring, life laid down the brick on which I now stand. I gathered themes I'm still working with.
As for the obvious mystical elements of those months. I've had weaker but similar instances of what might be called clairvoyance or second sight. They have not come so frequently as to convince me that they are irrefutable evidence for psychic phenomena; but I cannot deny the multiple documentation of painting, manuscript and poem, of my strange foreknowledge of Kristine's death. I remain, oddly enough, a skeptic in psychic matters, perhaps because I wish to believe so strongly. I resist easy and comforting answers.
How does this final work compare with the first version? I suspect the first version was better in some respects, more true and immediate. But the ideas and emotions are better worked out in the final product. I think the balance favors the newer version; I did not so much distill and reshape the ideas as guide them with a steadier hand.
Since those years, I have gained a reputation as a writer of science fiction. It may surprise some that my first novel was fantasy, and that it was grounded in such experiences. Almost needless to say, I am very fond of this book, and pleased to see it bound in one volume for the first time, revised and polished a little more: one novel in two parts, as originally intended.
The End