It's hard to imagine two books more different than Dreamsnake
and The Moon and the Sun. The latter is set in our past, in 1693, at the
chateau of Versailles and the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The former is
set in our future, in a place never specified. The material possessions of the
people in Dreamsnake are as spare as the trappings of Louis' court were
elaborate.
Yet I had the same feeling about The Moon and the Sun,
while I was writing it, as I had about Dreamsnake. The books have a
number of unusual similarities. Both novels involved characters who demanded to
have their stories told. Though Dreamsnake is based on speculation about
genetic engineering and The Moon and the Sun is based on speculation
about human evolution, and neither contains any magical elements — SF if I ever
heard it — they are often perceived as fantasy. Each book was rejected by the
first publisher I offered it to, which then asked to see it again. In each
case, my response was “Thanks, I've already sold it.” Both books were fortunate
in their publishers.
The strangest fact about the two books is that I know where
they came from.
As most writers will tell you, this is unusual.
We all dread the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”
Not because it’s a stupid question. It’s a rather profound question, and often
one that’s difficult, or impossible, to answer. The question inspires such
apprehension that various cynical, sarcastic, or amusing answers to it have
evolved. The most common is “I subscribe to the Plot of the Month Club,
published in Schenectady.”
(I’m sorry, I can’t pass on the subscription address: I was
sworn to secrecy when I joined Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.)
But Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun are
unusual. When someone asks me how I got their ideas, I can answer the question.
I described the evolution of The Moon and the Sun in
its afterword: scribbled note in response to a taped speech by Avram Davidson;
research, screenplay, novel. (Update: Jim Henson Pictures optioned it.)
Dreamsnake began as a short story that I wrote at an
early Clarion West writers workshop. By an interesting coincidence, Avram
Davidson was the writer in residence who inspired the story.
On the first day of his teaching week, he made up two lists
of words (one list pastoral, one technological), cut them apart, and put the
slips into two Styrofoam cups. We each drew one random word from each of the
cups.
We went off to lunch, moaning piteously about the ridiculous
assignment: to write a story using both words. How could you write a story
based on “Alpha Centauri” and “laughter,” or “psychoanalysis” and “lizard,” or
“snake” and “cow”?
I was never clear on how I ended up with “snake” and “cow.”
Maybe the slips got mixed up. Maybe Avram didn’t consider snakes pastoral.
Maybe it was a joke. In any event, I thought life was hard.
“Why don’t you write a story with a main character named
Snake?” said one of the other students. Then she laughed. She was one of the
few people in the class who thought her two words were promising. (I don’t
remember now what they were, but I do remember that she wrote a good story
around them.)
“All right, I will!” I said, provoked.
That evening, the dorm hallway was deserted. Nobody stood
around talking, nobody climbed the walls. Only one member of the class actually
did climb the walls — and hide behind the ceiling beam to drop down on unwary
passersby — though another liked to climb the roofs and try to figure out how
to steal the gargoyles. Everybody was typing.
Almost everybody. I was stymied. I had a main
character named Snake, but what was I to do with the wretched cow?
Somewhere around midnight the secondary meaning of cow, the
verb form, wandered in out of left field (or possibly the back 40), and I
wrote, “The little boy was frightened…”
I got twelve pages into the story before I bogged down
again. It’s tempting to claim I was tired, but in truth I couldn’t figure out
what a serpent named Grass would do.
I turned in my twelve pages the next day. As I remember it,
almost everybody else turned in a completed story (good ones, too — at least half
a dozen were published), but I had excuses. I wasn’t a student. I was the
workshop organizer. I had a lot of organizing to do. I had to sulk
because one of the local students threw a party and didn’t invite me. I had to
track down some chicken feet so Avram could make soup.
My story languished for several weeks, very badly stuck on
page twelve. People asked me about it. I glared.
Finally, during Terry Carr’s week as writer in residence, I
realized that a serpent named Grass should have hallucinogenic venom. The idea
came from out in the ozone (or maybe the back 40 again), and my only excuse for
not realizing it sooner is that during the 1960s I was a science geek. I’m one
of the few people around who understood Bill Clinton when he said he couldn’t
inhale. My response to the question “Did you smoke dope in the ’60s?” is the
minority reply: I admit I was too chicken.
(The majority answer is “Of course — didn’t everybody?”)
I stayed up all night writing the story of Snake and her
serpents. In the morning I staggered to class and turned in my story and
struggled to stay awake. That day’s stories came back, photocopied, and we all
picked up our copies. I staggered back to my room (safely guarded by a poster
Ursula K. Le Guin gave me: two buzzards on day-glo pink, the caption,
“Patience, my ass! I’m going to kill something!”). I fell asleep.
The door of my room burst open and slammed against the wall.
Someone stormed in.
I sat up, half asleep, completely disoriented.
She flung the manuscript to the floor. She was, as it
happens, the student who told me to name my protagonist Snake.
“How dare you,” she cried, “write a story that makes me feel
sorry for snakes!”
And stormed out again, slamming the door behind her.
“Huh,” I said, and went back to sleep.
The next day the story got a pretty good reception, though
the class snake expert and boa constrictor owner said that even genetic
engineering would not excuse a venomous python. Never mind, I said, it’s too
heavy to carry, I’ll make it a cobra. Terry Carr said he would be willing to
look at the polished story for his extremely prestigious anthology, Universe.
I was pretty puffed up by the end of class.
A week or so later, as I was putting the finishing touches
on the story, I got a postcard from Terry telling me not to bother submitting
it; he didn’t want to see it after all. I never did sell Terry Carr an original
story.
Instead, I sent “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” to Analog.
It isn’t what you’d normally think of as an Analog story, but Analog
was the magazine I grew up reading. It was the place I always sent my stories
first, even though John W. Campbell always rejected them without comment. (He
was renowned for sending reams of comments on stories he rejected. Other
people’s stories.)
Ben Bova had recently taken over as editor, and to my
astonishment and pleasure, he bought the story.
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” won the Nebula (despite a
review that said it was a bad story because it shouldn’t have been published in
Analog) at the 1974 Nebula Awards Ceremony in LA, organized
fantastically by Jerry Pournelle. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, one of the guest
speakers, handed me the award — a thrill equal to winning.
I hadn’t planned to expand the story, but the characters
didn’t like being left, figuratively, hanging by their thumbs. They protested.
That’s another thing many writers will tell you, besides that they have no clue
where they get their ideas: a writers’ characters will walk into the writer’s
mind and start talking.
When this happens, any smart writer won’t ask where the
ideas came from — she’ll shut up and take the dictation on the story of her
characters’ lives.
— VNM
Thank you
Houghton Mifflin first published Dreamsnake in 1978,
a couple of years before I got my first computer, a tan case Osborne I
“portable” with a four-digit serial number, a machine the size and weight of a
portable sewing machine, with two single-sided single-density 5.25" floppy
drives: one drive ran WordStar and the other could hold thirty entire pages ― a
whole chapter! ― on the disk. More years passed before publishers regularly
accepted (and soon afterwards required) electronic files for novels.
Dreamsnake had a successful hardcover edition, but
its paperback editions were not so fortunate. The rights were tied up for some
time, and the book was hard to get. As a founding member of Book View Cafe, I
decided electronic publication was the perfect venue for a reprint. Getting a
book originally written on a typewriter (my beloved Selectric II) into
electronic form is a bit of a challenge ― OCR is remarkably effective these
days, but the results still have to be proofread.
In addition, there’s the question of a cover.
Thanks to Tanith Tyrr
for her remarkable albino cobra photograph.
Thanks to Andrew Burt for advice, and to Kathleen Gatliffe, Tom McCluskey, and Sara Creasy for their kind help in proofing the
text.
Sara’s first novel, Song of Scarabaeus, is
scheduled to be published by Eos in May 2010. Check it out!
— VNM
