As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

  What happened was this:

  In 1949, when I was working on a Smith-Corona portable atop an orange crate (literally!) in the cellar of my parents’ home in South Philadelphia, I decided to write a science fiction novel about—what else?—the first journey to the Moon. The hero of this novel was an American astronaut named Chester A. Kinsman. The basic plot of the story was that the Russians started a space program before the Americans did, and were well on their way to establishing a manned space station in orbit around the Earth as a steppingstone on their way to the Moon. In 1949 every science fiction enthusiast knew that “whichever nation controls the Moon controls the Earth.” So the United States mounted a crash program to get Americans on the Moon before the Russians could get there.

  It all sounds rather quaint now. But by the time I finished the novel, in the early 1950s, the basic idea apparently startled the editors to whom I hopefully sent the manuscript. It was rejected, time and again, a process that literally took years because each publishing house held onto the manuscript for many months before sending it back to me.

  You can imagine how dog-eared it became. I seem to recall that a few editors were kind enough to enclose short personal notes of the “try again” variety, although most times the battered box of pages came back with nothing more than a printed rejection form.

  In truth, it was a poorly written novel, as most first novels are. Its main usefulness turned out to be that in the writing of it, I learned a good deal about how to write fiction. Nothing teaches like doing.

  When I had finally exhausted all the New York publishing houses I could think of, I sent the manuscript to a local Philadelphia publisher, the Winston Company, which in those days was putting out a line of science fiction novels for teenagers. Lester Del Rey, one of my idols, was among the contributors to this line. In those days of the 1950s, “juvenile” novels were a very important part of the hardcover book market for science fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein was writing juveniles for Scribner’s; Isaac Asimov was doing the same under his Paul French nom de plume for Doubleday.

  I was fortunate enough to hit an editor who cared enough about his work to send me an encouraging letter. Donald E. Cooke even invited me to his office in midtown Philadelphia for a face-to-face discussion of my novel. Brimming with wonder and with hope, I rode the trolley car up to the building where the Winston Co. was headquartered. Cooke was very gracious. He said, essentially, that even though he was not going to buy my novel, he wanted me to write something else for him.

  He explained that my writing was not as bad as some work he had seen in print. But the plot for my novel, the idea that the Russians would get into space ahead of the United States, stirred some misgivings. There was a Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., Wisc.) raging through the land in those days of the 1950s, finding Communist subversion wherever he looked. Cooke told me that if Winston published a novel hinting that the Soviets were smarter than we were, even in something as arcane as space exploration, McCarthy would make his life and mine unbearable.

  He advised me to go home and try writing something else, something that had no connection whatever with current or near-future politics.

  I was both elated and crushed. On the one hand, my novel had been rejected again. (Its weary pages were looking gray and ratty by now.) On the other hand, Cooke had actually said that its quality was not as bad as novels that had been published. But what really stunned me was the form of censorship that allowed the fear of political pressure to keep a book from being printed. I was naive enough to be shocked. Only later did I realize that such “prior restraint” is a major factor in publishing, and that it is the fears and prejudices of editors which determine what we will read, no matter what the Constitution guarantees about freedom of the press.

  But Cooke had offered that glimmer of hope! Try writing something else; he promised he would give my next submittal his closest attention.

  At that time, I wrote fiction slowly. I was working as a reporter on a suburban weekly newspaper, newly married, and still thumping out my prose on that battered old Smith-Corona portable. It was a durable machine, but not a kind one. It spelled poorly. It required a heavy hand to make keys strike the paper and leave a legible imprint. Not for many years would I graduate to an electric typewriter, and then an IBM Selectric, and finally to the Displaywriter word processor which I am using to write this essay.

  When you work all day at reporting and writing, sometimes much longer than an eight-hour shift, among the last things you feel like doing once you get home is sitting at another typewriter and trying to coax fresh words out of your tired brain. I vowed to write a novel for Don Cooke that he could publish. But it was going very slowly.

  I changed jobs and moved away from Philadelphia. The United States, as part of its participation in the scientific researches to be undertaken during the International Geophysical Year, announced that it would launch a series of artificial satellites. Science fiction was starting to come true. I talked myself into a job with the Martin Co. (later to become Martin Marietta), which was building the satellite launching rocket at its plant in Middle River, Maryland, a few miles outside Baltimore. My wife and I took up residence a five-minute drive from the Martin plant and I became a Junior Technical Editor on Project Vanguard.

  I watched my first novel turn into history. The Russians launched Sputnik and Americans launched one of their periodic episodes of breast-beating.

  The first attempt to orbit a Vanguard satellite exploded four feet above the launching stand. Wernher von Braun and his team put up the first American satellite three months after Sputnik, and two months later we got a Vanguard satellite into orbit—with a St. Christopher’s medal welded to the rocket’s guidance system by the Jewish engineer who headed up the project’s electronics group.

  But before all that happened, two events of major significance to me personally took place. During the summer of 1956, while I sweated away at my desk on the Vanguard project (because our desks were jammed into a loft in a Martin manufacturing building, over machinery that used molten aluminum and beneath rafters that housed dive-bombing pigeons) I received a telephone call from David Kyle. He introduced himself as the chairman of the World Science Fiction Convention, which was to be held that Labor Day weekend in New York City. Could I get a couple of Vanguard engineers to come to the convention and give a presentation to the eagerly-anticipating science fiction fans?

  I had never heard of science fiction fandom; this was my first inkling that people who enjoyed science fiction held conventions every year. Up until then, I had merely read science fiction and attempted to write it. I happily corralled the two top engineers on Vanguard and, with a little persuasion by Martin’s public relations officers, got them to agree to go to New York with me. They were very nervous about the whole thing, but I assured them that they would find an audience that was seriously interested in what we were doing. When we got to the Biltmore Hotel, the first thing we saw a giant movie poster advertising some monster flick. The engineers turned to run. It took a mighty effort on my part to keep them at the convention long enough to make their presentation—which turned out to be rather boring.

  Thanks to David Kyle’s invitation, though, I met Arthur C. Clarke, Willy Ley, and Isaac Asimov: three first-magnitude stars in my private constellation. Clarke was at that time engaged in writing a book on the Vanguard project, which we all believed, naively, would be “man’s first step into space.” He was planning to visit the Martin factory soon, and was glad of the opportunity to meet a “friendly native guide.”

  Clarke came to Middle River and I escorted him through the project for two glorious days. The first evening, when I had to drive him to his hotel in downtown Baltimore, a hideously thick fog blew in from Chesapeake Bay and blanketed Route 40. As I inched my trusty Chevrolet along the highway, barely able to make out the hood ornament, Arthur chattered happily about some of the real fogs he had experienced in London.

  Of course, I did what every would
-be writer does. I gathered up the tattered old manuscript of my original novel, handed the shoebox of it to Arthur as he was leaving Baltimore, and implored him to read it and tell me what was wrong with it. That dear man not only took the manuscript all the way back to Ceylon with him, but he read it and sent me a letter carefully pointing out all the things that were wrong with it—but with enough encouragement thrown in, here and there, to renew my determination to write a new novel and sell it to Don Cooke.

  So I sat down and started writing a novel that was set so far in the future that neither Joe McCarthy nor anyone in the next three centuries could object to it. I structured the novel shamelessly on Charles Lamb’s biography of Alexander the Great, turning ancient Greek history into a super-epic of interstellar war and empire.

  And, without quite realizing it, starting the saga of The Others.

  That novel was titled The Star Conquerors. Cooke published it, all right, and it has been translated into many foreign languages. It is as out-and-out a blood-and-thunder adventure as you can imagine, so much so that I have evolved a running joke about it. Whenever a science fiction fan asks me about The Star Conquerors, or tells me that it was the first science fiction novel he or she ever read, I ask if I can buy back their copy of the book. It is such a “thud-and-blunder” novel, I claim, that I am trying to recall all the copies and get rid of them.

  In truth, The Star Conquerors is far from my best work. There are passages in it that I would dearly like to forget about—or at least rewrite. But it holds within its pages this basic idea about The Others, the idea that there was an earlier human civilization, eons ago, which reached out toward the stars, only to be smashed almost to extinction by a superior alien race, The Others. The implacable enemy of humankind. The race that caused the Ice Age, a million years ago, with the intent of making even our homeworld of Earth unlivably hostile to us.

  In The Star Conquerors, the saga of The Others is taken up in mid-stream (sort of the way George Lucas, many years later, started the “Star Wars” series in the middle). The people of Earth have reached the stage of interstellar colonization once again. They have established a Terran Confederation (corny, I know) among the nearer stars, rather as the city-states of ancient Greece had established colonies through the Aegean world. The Terrans know that The Others are out there, somewhere among the stars, waiting to smash us back into nothingness once again. When they encounter and are attacked by a huge alien interstellar empire, they assume it is The Others and prepare for a death struggle. If you see parallels between ancient Greece and the Persian Empire, so be it.

  In The Star Conquerors the good guys win their war, naturally. But they learn that the aliens they fought against are not The Others—they were merely tools used by The Others. The real enemy is still out there somewhere, unseen but very much feared. The next step in the saga was Star Watchman, which shows how the “victorious” Terrans deal with the problems of running an interstellar empire. Then came The Dueling Machine, in which the problem of The Others was subordinated to a plot dealing with the internal social stresses that forced the Empire to reconstitute itself into a more democratic, less tightly-controlled Commonwealth. I was also writing nonfiction along the way, including my first astronomy book, The Milky Way Galaxy, which started as the background research for the novels.

  But that old first novel of mine would not leave my mind. Even though the first flight to the Moon soon enough became history instead of science fiction, the character of Chet Kinsman and what he stood for refused to lie still. Eventually I wrote Millennium, and was pleased to give the first copy of the novel off the press to Arthur Clarke—who professed not to remember reading that awful early manuscript. “Read your manuscript!” he snorted. “I never read other people’s manuscripts!” He even gave me a copy of his form letter which clearly states that he never reads other people’s manuscripts. Later, I gathered together some of the short stories I had written about Kinsman and used them as the backbone for a novel about his early life, titled Kinsman. Sometime soon I will combine those two books, Kinsman and Millennium, rewriting them from start to finish into the definitive “biography” of the man who has inhabited my mind since 1949.

  But this is supposed to be about As On a Darkling Plain, isn’t it?

  By the mid-Sixties I had written three novels and a few short stories dealing with The Others. As I said earlier, I followed no rigid plan, no preset outline. Rather, I used the basic idea of The Others and their destruction of the earlier human interstellar empire (and creation of the Ice Age) as a loose sort of environment in which to place stories. I never tried to connect one tale closely with any other; that would have been too confining.

  But the saga had no beginning, as yet. What about a novel that deals with the stunning moment when the human race finds, not only that we are not alone in the universe, but that there is a superior alien intelligence that is implacably hostile to us?

  I was mulling these thoughts when, at a science fiction convention, Frederik Pohl showed me a cover sketch for a future issue of Galaxy magazine and asked me if I would like to write a story around it. I was highly flattered. Fred was winning Hugo awards with great regularity for Galaxy and its companion magazine, If, in those years. Judy-Lynn Benjamin was his associate editor, and Lester Del Rey the managing editor. Those two would eventually marry and found Del Rey books, one of the most successful publishers of science fiction in the history of the business.

  I wrote the novelet for Fred, based in part on the cover sketch, but more heavily on the ideas I had been kicking around about The Others. Sidney Lee, a minor character in The Star Conquerors, became the central figure now. The story was published in the January 1969 issue of Galaxy under the title, “Foeman, Where Do You Flee?” It was Fred’s title, not mine; I still dislike it, but apparently I thought so little of my original title that it no longer comes to mind.

  That novelet became the kernel from which As On a Darkling Plain grew. I added to the novel another ingredient, the idea of a lovers’ triangle based on the time dilation effect of star travel, in which one member of the triangle stays on Earth and ages normally while the other two fly to Sirius at relativistic speed, and return to Earth decades younger than the stay-at-home.

  One other ingredient went into Darkling Plain: the question that is expressed by the juxtaposition of the Haldane and Clarke quotes at the beginning of the novel. Are there limits to our ability to understand the universe? Is it “queerer than we can imagine?” Or can our minds encompass whatever we find in the vast depths of cosmic space? Clearly, the problem posed by the alien machines, and by the lurking presence of The Others themselves, is a test not only of our ability to understand, but of our ability to survive, as well.

  There you have the beginning of the saga of The Others, written a decade after the first novels in the saga appeared.

  In the novel Orion we see the culmination of the saga. We are brought face-to-face, at last, with The Others—although we may not recognize them as such right away. Because the saga of The Others is an organic evolution, rather than a mechanical serial, Orion is very different from As On a Darkling Plain. There are no one-to-one explanations. The reader has to do some thinking, some imagining, to see how the two ends of the saga fit together. Alternatively, because Orion was not written as the final chapter in a tightly interlocked series, it can be read entirely on its own, with no foreknowledge of other works necessary—as, indeed, As On a Darkling Plain can be read by and of itself.

  One final note about Orion. If you should read it (or have already read it) you will notice that it is very different in nature from As On a Darkling Plain. Where Darkling Plain is straight, “hard core” science fiction based on Einstein’s relativity and solid anthropological principles, Orion appears to be more of a fantasy, dealing with time travel, superheroes, and even gods and goddesses. Yet the physics in Orion is just as valid as that in any other novel of mine: the discoveries in quantum dynamics and cosmology have opened new doors
for the science fiction writer, doors that lead to time travel and all its inherent paradoxes and beauties.

  So, here you have the beginning of the saga of The Others. In Orion you have the culmination—but not necessarily the end! There are plenty of additional stories about The Others to be told. Perhaps we will all travel through time again to see them unfold.

  Ben Bova

  West Hartford, Connecticut

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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