by Larry Niven
“Why not?”
Oh my God. He didn’t know! And I realized that I was going to have to tell him. Who else would?
So I did. “Nobody deals with Ace Books unless all the other choices are used up. Nobody expects royalties; the advance is it. Overseas money is never reported…”
Tom Doherty is a careful businessman. He didn’t take over Ace without checking first. He checked back for two years and found no complaints lodged against Ace…not because there weren’t any, as he thought, but because no writer ever expected to get money due from the old Ace Books.
The encounter with Larry Niven was his second awful shock of the day. He had already met Jerry Pournelle that afternoon.
“I’m Jerry Pournelle, President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and we want to look at your books!”
Tom wound up paying several hundred thousand dollars in back fees to authors.
After he and James Baen parted company with Ace, Tom formed his own company, Tor Books. Then Jim dropped away and formed Baen Books. In this field we tend to train each other.
I see Tom fairly frequently. Once we met at a Boskone (annual Boston convention) and he took Marilyn and me off to Loch Ober, along with his editor, his wife and his daughter. He talked four of us into ordering lobster Savannah.
The lobster is cut open along the back; the meat is cooked, chopped and mixed with herbs, then put back. Lobster Savannah looks like it could heal. These beasts ran three pounds each. I started talking to my dinner:
“Doctor McCoy will see you now.”
“The Federation doesn’t think you can defend yourselves without our aid.”
“Now, wretched bottom-feeder, you will tell us of your troop movements!”
By dinner’s end I had arranged a mutual defense treaty with the baked Alaska. And by the time we reached the hotel, I had been dubbed Speaker-to-Seafood.
The last time Marilyn and I were in New York, I came to realize that Tom had bought me five meals! Though he was only present at two!
I was told early: when you eat with an editor or publisher, that’s who pays the check. It’s surprisingly easy to get used to such a tradition…but enough is enough. Hell, I’d never even sold him a book.
This book started with a phone call from Bob Gleason, one of my favorite editors. He and Tom had got to talking over a dinner…and it emerged that Larry Niven was going to have been a published author for twenty-five years, real soon now. Why not publish a retrospective volume? So Bob called.
It sounded good to me.
In May 1989, Tom Doherty and Bob Gleason stayed at my house for a few days before the SFWA Nebula Awards. We did a fair amount of work on the book. And I fed Tom Doherty by cooking several meals.
I even picked up a restaurant check once, by previous negotiation. He tried to back out afterward, but I wouldn’t let him.
We called Don Simpson the Eldritch Doom because of the things he kept in his room. He’s an artist and inventor, of that breed that never gets rich, because he invents new art forms. By the time anything could become successful, he’d be on to something else.
He had a wonderful time with some glass engraving equipment.
I’d been leaving Michelob beer bottles all over the clubhouse: the old lovely vase-shaped bottles too tall to quite fit in a refrigerator. At my fanquet (the banquet given for a LASFS member who has made a professional sale) Don presented me with a beer bottle engraved with Jack Gaughan’s illustration of one of my aliens. I got him to do two more for me, then a Baccarat decanter and some Steuben crystal…
He was in the LASFS then. Later he moved to San Francisco, but I don’t think he gave up his habits.
Frank Gasperik was an oddity. When I met him he was a biker and a hippie and a science fiction fan. Among bikers he carried a guitar and called himself The Minstrel. At science fiction conventions he sang filk.
Jerry and I put him in LUCIFER’S HAMMER as “Mark Czescu.” We put his song in too. He makes a good character…though he tends to take over a book, like kudzu.
We put him in FOOTFALL too, as “Harry Reddington,” and commissioned a ballad from him. By then Frank had been through major changes. He’d been rear-ended twice within two weeks while driving two different cars, neither of which had headrests. His insurance company was giving him the runaround and his lawyer told him he’d look better on a witness stand if he didn’t get well too quick. So he was avoiding major efforts to walk normally. It’s all true…and Jerry and I screamed at him separately and together until we made him see that he wasn’t being paid enough to stay sick!
We were working near the end of FOOTFALL at my house when Frank phoned about another matter. I told him, “We’re at the poker table deciding Hairy Red’s fate.”
“Give me a heroic death,” he said. So we killed him.
Dan Alderson. Dan is classic. At Jet Propulsion Laboratories they called him their “sane genius.” He designed a program used by most of the Free World countries for deep space probes. Computer nerd, sedentary, white shirt with infinite pens and pencils in a plastic holder in the pocket. Diabetic.
Characteristic cry: “Weep! Wail!”
From Dan came the germ of a short story, “There Is a Tide.” He worked out the exact instability of the Ringworld; it took seven years. I went to him for numbers for the Ringworld meteor defense. He was “Dan Forrester” in LUCIFER’S HAMMER. The list of what Forrester would need after Hammerfall is his, because Jerry asked him. He’s the hero of one of Jerry’s tales of asteroid colonization.
He likes Known Space. He’s published intricately plotted outlines for stories that would vastly extend Known Space if they were written. I’ve described his multiple Ringworld system elsewhere. His extended outline requires putting the Warlock on the Ringworld at one point. When I killed off the Warlock in THE MAGIC GOES AWAY, Dan had to include the Niven-Pournelle INFERNO in his background, in order to bust the Warlock out!
NOREASCON, 1989: LOUIS WU’S BIRTHDAY PARTY
For twenty years Boxboro Fandom threw parties at the Boston regional conventions. Their themes were strange; their promotions imaginative. Now they’ve self-destructed, but they did it with a bang. Their swansong was a tremendous party at the Boston World Science Fiction Convention.
They sequestered the entire second floor of the Hilton Hotel for Friday night. They decorated the halls and rooms to fit environments real and imaginary, with doors designated as displacement booths: a teleport network running world-wide and then some. They called it “Louis Wu’s Birthday Party.”
The advertisements were movie ads altered by Niven quotes. They were everywhere.
They photographed me for an ID badge: RINGWORLD ENGINEER. I smiled a wide-eyed, toothy maniac’s grin for their camera.
The Convention had booked Marilyn for a late panel; but I was at the party the whole time. It was full but never crowded…because the Hilton kept it that way, and the crowds waiting to get in reportedly ran around the block.
The Mad Tea Party included a croquet match with stuffed birds for mallets. A chef served vegetable sushi at the Japan site. There was a band, and dancing, in Paris. A kzin wandered about: Drew Sanders in the costume Kathy Sanders made for the 1984 Masquerade. There were several Pierson’s puppeteers in the Kzinti Embassy; one was Kathy’s costume, without Kathy in it, and one was a wonderfully baroque portrait. The Map Room was covered with Ringworld maps and Niven quotes.
And now I’ve got a T-shirt that says they’re too tired to do it again.
At the Boskone convention last Sunday (February 1990) two perpetrators recognized my Ringworld Engineer badge and its maniacal grin. They told me stories:
The Hilton people loved them. Several asked if the Friday party would be repeated Saturday.
Boxboro’s Hotel Liaison was a straight-looking guy who never raised his voice or appeared without a tie: a proper gent. And heck, they were taking the whole second floor! So the Hilton Manager was cooperative. She signed the thick contract without rea
lly noticing a clause near the end.
Getting the prop walls for the Kzinti Embassy into the hotel was tough. They’d measured the largest doors—the front lobby doors!—but hadn’t measured them open. Open, they were too small. Boxboro considered taking them off their hinges, with and without permission. They considered junking the props. They were sure the prop walls wouldn’t come apart; but someone tried it, and they did.
Still, the only feasible way to get them out after the party would be to hack them apart with a chainsaw! That would also allow the debris to fit into a dumpster. So they put it in the contract.
“I can’t believe I let you use a chainsaw at four in the morning!” the Hotel Manager wailed. But she didn’t stop them. It was in the contract.
• • •
• • •
“The point is, diving straight into a sun is a rare thing in the Service. It doesn’t happen every trip. I thought someone ought to tell you.”
“But, Mr. Whitbread, are we no about to do exactly that?”
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974
FOREWORD
PLAYGROUNDS FOR THE MIND
When every page has been read and the book has been put down, is the story over?
Some stories flow onward through the reader’s imagination. Some authors leave playgrounds for the reader’s mind. That was what charmed me about Andre Norton’s stories: all the endings were wide open. I could close the book and continue moving further into the unknown.
As I grew older I began demanding endings.
As a writer I learned that endings are not so easy. They do make better art; at least most critics would say so. Poul Anderson is king of the powerful ending…but when his story is over, the playground remains.
Something should be left behind at the end of the story. There are characters unkilled, and actors who never reached the stage. Esoteric technologies. Alien ecologies. Worlds. The laws by which the universe behaves. The playground.
I knew it long ago: I’m a compulsive teacher, but I can’t teach. The godawful state of today’s educational system isn’t what’s stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot “suffer fools gladly.” The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can’t handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.
I knew what I wanted when I started writing. I’ve daydreamed all my life, and told stories too: stories out of magazines and anthologies, aloud, to other children.
One day my daydreams began shaping themselves into stories. I wanted to share them. Astrophysical discoveries implied worlds weirder than any found in fantasy. I longed to touch the minds of strangers and show them wonders. I wanted to be a published science fiction writer. I wanted a Hugo Award!
Money formed no part of that. Science fiction writers didn’t get rich. (Robert Heinlein excepted. Kurt Vonnegut excluded.) I used royalty statements to keep score: how many minds had I reached?
I had my Hugo Award three years after I sold my first story. Among science fiction fans one becomes a Grand Old Man fast. Now what?
Now: become a better writer. I’ll always have things to learn. In my earlier novels almost nobody got old or sick. I still have trouble writing about the things that hurt me most.
But I’m learning.
I used to get allergy attacks. Alcohol, dry air, lack of sleep, or any combination could cause me to wake up blind and in pain, with deep red eyes and puffy eyelids. I had to use a humidifier, or go to sleep with a wet towel.
I stopped smoking in August of 1987, and the allergy attacks went away.
And they’d be none of your business if I hadn’t made it all public. I gave the allergy to Gavving in THE INTEGRAL TREES and Rather in THE SMOKE RING, for story purposes, and I had to nerve myself up to it. I still have trouble writing about what hurts me.
Also, parts of my life are private. My computer erases my early drafts, and that’s fine. My mistakes are not for publication.
Writing is the ideal profession in many ways. It’s not always easy, but—
You set your own hours.
You’re being paid to daydream.
In psychoanalysis you would hire a professional to listen to you. You’d have no idea whether he was seriously interested. You’d operate on his schedule. The most you could expect from him is that he’d force you to face the truth about what you’re saying.
But a writer has several tens of thousands of psychoanalysts. He knows they’re listening because they’re paying him for the privilege. Writer and reader both set their own hours. And he will seek the truth within himself, because more realistic writing is more convincing.
This feedback to the author: it’s rare outside of fantasy and science fiction.
A few years ago, while the Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy was in session in my living room, I snatched a moment to read my mail. Then I ran in to announce, “Hey, I just got a love letter!”
It sure was. A woman in Britain wanted me to write a congratulatory letter for her husband’s birthday. He was a fan, and she was in love.
Hard science fiction in particular is a game played with the readers. They try to spot my mistakes. I see mathematical treatments of the dynamics of neutron stars, design alterations for the Ringworld, detective story outlines for Gil “the ARM” Hamilton. I get a constant flow of letters from strangers to keep me current on transplant technology, Bussard ramjet possibilities, black holes, magnetic monopoles. There are songs about the Motie Engineers and Lucifer’s Hammer, sculptures of Pierson’s puppeteers in every conceivable medium, and paintings of the Ringworld.
All of this is proper use of playground equipment. A reader need not be satisfied just to read the book. He paid his way in; he can stay as long as he likes.
I know where to go to talk a story over, to be admired, to get criticism, to meet my peers, even to do some business. There’s always a science fiction convention going somewhere.
I was never sane until I became an established writer. So why do some writers go crazy?
There are occupational hazards.
It’s lonely. How many professions are there such that you spend most of your working time alone with the door locked? (Terrorist, maybe. Does Stephen King qualify as a terrorist?) A nice view from your window is a liability. An interruption from your loved ones can break a valuable chain of thought.
Collaborations? Not everyone can stand to share a dream, and nobody in his right mind would collaborate with a novice, not even another novice.
Writing is a collaboration with the readers. I sensed that long before I wrote my first real collaboration. It goes like this: Somebody out there, thousands of somebodies, are entertained by the same things I am. They like to play in their heads, and I’m out to help them. I’m writing a dialogue between me and the paying public. I’m not really alone in here.
The money is lousy. After you’ve got a few books in print, and if they’re any good, you’ll be paid for them forever via royalties and foreign sales. But you really need to be born with a trust fund to survive the first several years.
Gene Wolfe says that what an aspiring writer generally wants is to quit his job. Gene argues that his job frees him to write what he likes, and spend as much time as he likes on any story—which to Gene is important, as he’s the world’s prototype nitpicker—and he can do it without worrying about deadlines.
I wouldn’t know. I was born with a trust fund. And now I don’t need it, but I lived off it for the first ten years of my career.
Marijuana is death on writers. I’ve seen several go that route. Typical behavior for a long-time marijuana user is as follows. He gets a story idea. He tells his friends about it, and they think it’s wonderful. He then feels as if he’s written it, published it, cashed the checks and collected the awards. So
he never bothers to write it down.
Alcohol can have the same effect.
The suicide rate is high among writers. Maybe you have to be neurotic to write and sell your first story. H. Beam Piper’s agent had neglected to send him a check. Piper may have felt that his work was no longer popular, since he thought his story hadn’t sold, and he needed the money, too. For us, love and money may be nearly indistinguishable.
“I suppose I’ll say this again sometime,” Steve Barnes said, “but I just love being a writer!” We were finishing up “Achilles’ Choice,” a novella, “the story we were born to write.” And yeah, it was fun.
Too many would-be writers are really would-be authors. They want to have written.
But a writer can pay moral debts by dedicating a book. He can put friends in his stories, changing them to suit his whim. The feedback can be wonderfully soothing to the ego. There’s the opportunity to sound off without being interrupted…
I suppose there was always a fanatic inside me, demanding to be let loose; but I was lazy. I didn’t get fanatical about anything until the organ transplant problem entered my soul.
If organ transplants become easy and popular, who are the donors? Condemned criminals have already donated their eyes and such to hospitals. The Red Cross must ultimately see the obvious, that a man on death row could donate five quarts of blood as easily as he faces the gas chamber.
The problem is this. While Jack the Ripper has five quarts of healthy blood in him, and a working heart, lungs and liver and kidneys, the same holds true for a political dissident, or a thief, or for a man who gets caught running six red traffic lights within the space of two years. You can go too far with this!
I wrote “The Jigsaw Man” two years before the first successful heart transplant. It seemed to me that nobody else had seen the problem, nobody else was worrying about it, and I had to sound off. Then came the heart transplant in South Africa, and suddenly a dozen doctors’ groups were studying the ethics of the situation.
Maybe I was worried needlessly. We could have been executing criminals by exsanguination for these past ninety years, and we haven’t done it. I’ve had to find other things to worry about, and when I find them, I sound off.