When I wrote my first piece of science fiction, “Rock Diver,” I fell back on the safety of two standard plot ideas: matter penetration and the Western. I had a claim-jumper under the rocks. It was not too complex, when you think about it. By setting it underground, you then have all the little problems related to being underground. The gadgetry in the story is integral to the plot. If a story is well written you have complications coming out of the original idea and consequences arising from it.
Hal Clement was not much of a writer, but his stories were successful. He had a story where the planet had very heavy gravity on one side and light gravity on the other, and he worked out all the details. I wrote one story—Wheelworld—where I had a planet with no axial tilt. Intuitively I thought it would work, but I couldn’t be sure. At a convention I was talking to Poul Anderson, and he didn’t think it would work. Harry Stubbs was there, and he thought about it for a while, and he said it was true, and every day is an equinox. When he said that, he solved all my problems. Writers help each other work things out. They come up with ideas that are interesting enough to interest other writers.
Brian said that John Campbell had a little wire that he plugged into every reader’s brain, which tickled them and made them think and the writers too. I sent John a one-page letter about the idea for Deathworld. He sent me back thirteen pages. He didn’t tell you what to write, but a lot of the development of the book came out of his suggestions. He never took credit for his ideas. He came up with the Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov freely admitted.
I wrote a story for the Asimov’s Friends anthology, a tongue-in-cheek piece called “The Fourth Law of Robotics.” Norman Spinrad was around the house one day and he read it, and he said, “You should have called it ‘The Mechanical Schwartzers’!” When I submitted it to Isaac, I put that title on a fake cover page—only for Isaac.
ALTERNATE HISTORY
Science fiction embraces change and the fact that we can change change. This distinguishes it from all other forms of fiction. This quality is what accounts for the fact that a mainstream novel such as Orwell’s 1984 or Shute’s On the Beach can also be regarded as science fiction. Science fiction is not about rocket ships and robots and aliens—these may be present, but they are not essential. Science fiction is an attitude toward change, and explores the impact of change upon people. Throughout the twentieth century the change that has typically been explored is scientific change or technological change, and stories have been set in the present or the future, but SF can explore other forms of change and stories can be set in the past.
During the 1980s and ’90s good science fiction was hard to find, crowded off the shelves by fantasy, and fantasy with science fiction trappings. But one form of real SF became increasingly popular—the alternate history. These stories were accounts of our world as it might have been, or will become, following some hypothetical alteration in history. Alternate history comes in three basic forms:
1. The story set in the past where a change occurs that will bring about a different present from the one we know.
2. The story set in the past where a time traveler arrives to change the future.
3. The story set in the present, which has been altered by a change in the past.
I was pleased to discover—after the fact—that I have written novels in all of these categories. The Hammer and the Cross and Stars and Stripes trilogies are examples of the first; Rebel in Time and The Technicolor Time Machine of the second; and A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! and West of Eden of the third. Alternate histories—like all good science fiction—begin with a what if…?
What if the Germans had won the Second World War?
What if the atomic bomb had been developed during the Victorian era?
What if the Catholic Church ran the world?
The writing of an alternate history novel requires a great deal of time-consuming research, which, unhappily, many authors are loath to do, and the research is not always appreciated by the reader. I was taken to task by one reader who insisted that a novel of mine, set 140 years in the past, contained many “misspellings”—such as “butty” for “buddy.” This despite the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary from 1820 on defines “butty” as a friend or comrade.
The Technicolor Time Machine was structured as a straightforward adventure novel with twists in time, but the humor crept in and it got funny. I tried to be accurate, particularly as it first appeared in Analog. Part of the plot was that they were very short of time; they have only a few days to finish shooting the film. They send Charley Chang, the scriptwriter, back into the past and bring him back an hour later, but he was there for three months. He comes back with a beard and scars and everything. The producer says to pay him the highest rate for an hour’s work that anyone has ever been paid in California. I’d never been to California, but I knew from the literature that on a clear day you can see Santa Catalina Island—it’s about twenty miles off the coast. I put the writer on Santa Catalina Island in the Jurassic and had him staring at the creatures in the sea. I thought I’d better check, and looked it up and Santa Catalina Island is metamorphic rock, so it was there in the Jurassic. After it was published in Analog I got a letter from the Florida School of Mines or something: Dear Mr. Harrison, Santa Catalina Island was there during the Jurassic period but it was two hundred miles in from the ocean! One person out of the magazine’s hundred thousand circulation.
Sam Lundwall published it in Sweden and one academic, a historian from the university, did a review of it for an academic magazine and said it was a very accurate book! He didn’t mention the action or the humor, but he liked the Vikings. I had a good time doing the research, and it’s about as accurate as you can get. There is very good evidence that the Vikings were in North America. I did a lot of research on the Viking map, which turned out to be a fake later on. But they have traces in L’Anse aux Meadows and Newfoundland of Viking ring forts and they have found runes, stone inscriptions, farther north. They interacted with what they called the skraelling, who were probably Eskimos who lived farther south in those days. It’s pretty obvious that they did settle along the coast there.
It was very easy to get there from the tip of Greenland; if you sail that latitude you end up in North America. They would do it in summertime when the prevailing winds were great, and they probably did a lot of fishing and brought dried fish back. They brought wood back from North America too, because there was no wood at all in Greenland and they needed the wood for houses and everything. They were there, in a place called Vinland, which means “vine land” but nobody knows why because grapes don’t grow that far north.
I also used the sagas. The sagas are very straightforward stories: he killed him, and then he killed him, and he was his wife’s brother and he came and killed him—they’re very straightforward tales of murder and rape! They’d attack from the ocean, kill everybody, and take the cows. We made them heroic sagas afterward, but they were just accounts of people killing each other.
Everything in the book taken from the sagas is true, apart from the Jack Daniel’s bottle. There are so many variations of the sagas that you can pick the one you want. At one point they pacify the skraelling—the Indians—by feeding them ice cream. In the sagas there’s this unknown word, a milk product—it’s obviously ice cream! When they sailed they could tell the latitude by the angle of the sun, but the sun isn’t always visible at those latitudes. They had a thing called a húsasnotra, which I think is really an Icelandic spar that is polarized so you can see the sun when it’s low, even in fog. But in the book I have it as Viking for “compass repeater.” All this stuff worked out and in the end the lovely twist is that the only reason the Vikings settled North America was because they went back in time to make a film about the Vikings settling North America. It was a lot of fun to do.
In America and Britain the Vikings you see in books are either sailing dragon boats or wearing horned helmets and wielding axes. I read the history books in Denma
rk, and there the Vikings are treated as what they were—farmers. They had a long wintertime, so they went out raiding for something to do! They’d go south and raid England or wherever, snatch a few cows and a few women. They went from having a farming culture to being landowners. Then they started these family feuds and they started killing each other. Even when they came and occupied York they had these family feuds going on.
My interest in Vikings came from living in Denmark—but I wrote about Hollywood without ever having been there. I’d been working with a lot of cheap film companies in England—I’d never been to Hollywood at that point. I wrote about Hollywood and went there a few years later and discovered I’d got it right! Cheap film-making is cheap film-making. Having been surrounded by Viking culture and then working with these nickel-and-dime companies in England, I had the idea of making a film about Vikings. How do you film Vikings? You get a time machine.
I started thinking about the time machine itself, and I was so bored with all the explanatory details about how a time machine would work, it’s all nonsense, so I had this great cracking machine built by this Yugoslavian professor and they asked him how it worked and he said, “You’re too stupid to understand.” And that was all the explanation you got! That took care of that, and set the tone for the whole thing.
The book has actually been optioned by Hollywood on and off for years. Like most of my books there is a lot of motion and color and action in there. There was a story editor who was looking at science fiction books and somebody recommended The Technicolor Time Machine to her, and she recommended it to Mel Gibson. For a while it looked like it was going to be a Mel Gibson movie.
The Vikings really were very bloody people. Around the merchants’ harbor in Copenhagen the wall was originally made of huge tree trunks driven into the ground, and they’d driven each one through a slave’s body so that his spirit would go into it and hold the wall up. And they launched the Vikings’ ships across slaves’ bodies—using them for grease!—for the same reason, so that their souls would go into the keel of the ship. And I told Mel Gibson about this, and he’s a Catholic, so I told him they drove the tree trunks through Catholic slaves! Maybe they were Catholic slaves, who knows? Mel liked that! I had more Viking stories, but we only had about twenty minutes together.
They actually had the screenplay written, a wonderful screenplay by Marshall Brickman, who wrote Woody Allen films. Allen had agreed to play the Barney Hendrickson character, the second lead: he’s a con man film producer, guilt-ridden, stumbling into an unknown future, perfect for Woody Allen. And Mel would be your perfect Viking. He told me that he hates Vikings. It would have been a perfect role for him since he projects self-hatred so well in some of his roles. He’d make a great lead, he’s very good. In the first Lethal Weapon you look at him and think: The guy’s half mad! He’s very good at that—humorous and half mad—it’s a role made for him! I think Mel Gibson was going to play the actor who breaks his leg and the Viking, do it with a fake nose or something. It was a very neat idea: Marshall Brickman is a very good screenwriter, a very sharp guy. He picked out all the humorous bits, kept the names, came up with some more Old Norse words to put in there, did his homework. You wouldn’t think of Mel Gibson and Woody Allen together. It would have been great.
They paid a bundle for this great screenplay—far more than they paid me!—and they just put it on the shelf. For business reasons, Mel never made the movie. At the end of the novel there’s a throwaway line about them going back to make a movie about Christ. Later Mel Gibson went off to make a movie about Christ—maybe he got the idea from there—the timing was just about right. I may unwittingly be responsible for The Passion of the Christ.…
The Technicolor Time Machine is a humorous adventure story, and it’s also a story about identity. The director, Barney Hendrickson, is really a failed director, and he knows he’s a second-rater who will never quite make it. That’s a very sad position to be in, and I’ve known writers like that. Barney succeeds by bullshitting and talking people into things. He’s always on the edge of failure. The film he makes, Viking Columbus, is filled with compromises and it would probably be a crappy film when it came out. At the end Barney is written into the saga. Barney, spelled Bjarni, is a Norwegian name, and Bjarni was one of the guys who went with Erik the Red, who was nicknamed “Ottar” in the book. Barney ultimately became a historical character—as he says himself, he was written into the story.
* * *
My father was a lapsed Irish Catholic, my mother was Jewish but from an agnostic family. “Rabbi” means “teacher” and out of my six granduncles, five were rabbis. My grandfather was a watchmaker in St. Petersburg, a working-class Jew. My grandmother was a nihilist—that was a big libertarian movement in Russia, it wasn’t just about throwing bombs. He went over to America to work in a clock factory and sent over for the family one at a time. Neither of my parents went to church, they wouldn’t talk about it, and so religion played no part in my upbringing. This was a great big lacuna there, which I felt a little bit guilty about because many of my friends were Jewish and Catholic. When I was about thirteen years old I read an English book published by a society that is the Humanist Association now, and I remember the author’s name was Chapman Cohen—a good English name and a good Jewish name!—and it was called Theism or Atheism and it took every argument for religion, like the watchmaker and original design, and he would explain carefully what the theory was and then he would destroy it! I went through the whole book, and when I finished it I thought, “Oh, thank god, there’s no god!” I became an atheist at that point and never looked back.
I’ve written a number of stories that oppose organized religions as being narrow-minded, bigoted, and medieval in their use of physical and psychological torture. Having lived in Mexico I’ve seen how Catholicism destroyed a whole culture. I’m very much against that kind of destruction of anything that is “against god.”
At the beginning of The Hammer and the Cross I have the quote from Gore Vidal about Christianity being the worst disaster that ever befell the West. Tom Shippey translated it into Latin. I wrote to Gore and he approved of the Latin and corrected the wording of the original quotation, which I’d gotten from an interview in a literary magazine somewhere. It was the perfect quote to start the book with.
Religion does no good. Christianity has been called the slave religion: you give up all of your physical life in this world for a promise of “pie in the sky by and by,” as the old folk song has it. You are kept enslaved by this stupid idea, and it destroys your real life. Not only is there nobody home upstairs, there is no upstairs. I see that as a form of evil—people live stunted lives because of it, especially the poor nuns and priests. It is an unnatural state. It is wasteful of human resources, of human lives.
Why do people feel a need for religion? It’s pretty obvious: they want some death insurance! It’s all black out there. They don’t want to believe that there’s no life after death. That’s why every religion on the planet has its creation myth and its Christ myth. There were seventeen crucified saviors before Christ; it’s a near-Eastern myth that was picked up by this Jewish cult. When the state religion doesn’t work for them anymore they go back to the “new age” stuff—they just need someone to supply them with something. And there’s no shortage of nutcase ideas.
Religion always takes responsibility for the moral system, but there was morality before there was religion. People live with each other and they learn how to get along. There are morality systems like Buddhism that don’t believe in a god at all. Religion takes credit when they don’t deserve it. We don’t need religion, that’s the whole point. It doesn’t supply anything, but it takes a lot of money from people’s pockets. It is very negative. And they end up being very bigoted: religious bigots are the worst in the world. Anti-Semitism comes out of it.
The Hammer and the Cross is an alternate history that explores what the Western world might have been like if it hadn’t been dominated by Chri
stianity, and if there was another religion that wasn’t as narrow-minded or as bigoted.
It started off with a short story that I wrote with Tom Shippey. Greg Bear asked for an alternate history story, and Tom Shippey said, “I’ve always wondered what would have happened if King Alfred had made peace with the Vikings.” Tom and I are old friends from way back. He had already done a lot of work for me on West of Eden—he did all of the linguistics for the different races. And he wrote the Latin joke for me in The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. We kicked the idea around and wrote the short story together. It has a great last line. Alfred has fought the battle and won, and he’s trying to decide whether to become a Catholic or not, and he has the symbols of the crucifix and the Viking hammer on a silver chain.
There was the tiniest sound in the silent room as metal touched metal.
Or was it the loudest sound the world had ever heard?
Tom and I talked about the idea behind the story and decided there was a book there. We turned it into an outline for a book, but it grew so big we decided it should be three big novels.
The books were also an opportunity to use some of the material about Vikings that you couldn’t use in a book like The Technicolor Time Machine. The Vikings were pretty ruthless bastards. That whole “blood eagle” thing that we describe in there and the torture in the snake pit—it was all absolutely true. It wasn’t that they were godless, they really enjoyed their religion, it backed them up. The Norse religion didn’t promise pie in the sky. They worked on this life here. Their tortures were so great because they wanted to make sure you suffered pain in this life before you died. They had a very gloomy vision of Valhalla, and only the top guys could go there. There’s a quote in the book:
… the world seemed like a king’s hall on a winter evening—warm and brightly lit inside, but outside dark and cold, and a world no one could see. And into that hall … flies a bird, and for a moment it is in the light and the warm, and then flies out into the dark and cold again.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 32