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OtherRealms Issue 27 Part 02
Electronic OtherRealms #27
Spring, 1990
Part 2 of 11
Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Behind the Scenes
The Quiet Pools
Michael Kube-McDowell
Copyright 1990 by Michael Kube-McDowell
April 4, 1990, Lansing, Michigan
The Locus containing the first review of The Quiet Pools arrived in
today's mail. Bookstore-haunting friends and fans across the country are
reporting initial sightings of the Genuine Article, the first
Kube-McDowell hardcover. And -- finally! -- there's a new contract
coming, a new novel to write. I've been living with this one for a long
time, but it looks like it's time to move on.
Time to reshelve these reference books, which have been living on the
worried old work-in-progress bookcase for the last two years. There goes
Nancy Tiley's Discovering DNA, Helen Fisher's The Sex Contract,
Corning's The Synergism Hypothesis, Robert Powers' The Coattails of God.
There goes Francis Crick's Life Itself -- hmmm, I really should have
made a photocopy of the appendix on the DNA/RNA code, instead of marking
up page 173 that way.
Time to pack up the unwieldy stacks of notes, file cards, partial
drafts, maps, newspapers, magazine articles, photographs. There go the
clippings about the Amazon, the Time article about the Human Genome
Project. There goes the pamphlet about the Bonneville Dam, in the
Columbia Gorge. There goes the paper plate bearing Dr. Jordin Kare's
sketches of the laser-cannon launch complex.
And oh, sweet memory, look at this ancient artifact, hiding at the
bottom of the pile -- the file containing the ten-year-old novelette
which started it all, and the rejection slip from George Scithers which
prompted me to put it away. "A good idea, but awkwardly handled," George
advised me, before going on to dissect the manuscript in some detail.
"The Quiet Pools" would not be my second Asimov's sale.
Awkward, indeed. "Amateurish" would not have been too strong. At that
time, I had written only a dozen stories, and sold but five of them
(though I would eventually sell four more from that group, and fold a
fifth, "Mothball," into Empery). So perhaps I can be forgiven for not
realizing "The Quiet Pools" wanted to be a novel.
The novelette was ten thousand words of explaining in search of a story.
The power of its one evocative moment depended almost entirely on a vision
I could see, but -- as I realized after George bounced the story --
hadn't written. Reading "The Quiet Pools" was a lot like catching only
the last two minutes of a movie -- with the person you sat next to
whispering like crazy, trying to tell you everything you missed.
I never submitted "The Quiet Pools" anywhere else. I had a very clear
sense that I didn't yet have the tools to tell the story the way it
needed to be told. And I didn't want to trash the vision with my own
ineptitude. I filed the manuscript, my cut-and-pasted typewritten drafts
(I said it was ancient), and my notes, made an appointment with the
future, and moved on to other things.
The future took eight years to arrive -- eight years during which I left
teaching for full-time freelancing, wrote and sold six novels, became a
father, left Indiana and returned to Michigan, suffered through a
divorce. By the end of 1987, I had completed work on Alternities, and my
editor, Beth Fleisher, wanted to know what I was going to write for the
book Berkley/Ace had tacked onto the Alternities contract.
Because it was the "novel to be named later," there was never an
outline, or even a formal proposal, for The Quiet Pools. But I knew with
some clarity what I wanted to write. At the heart of "The Quiet Pools"
was this question: is it really inevitable, as so much SF assumes, that
humanity will colonize the stars -- and, if it is, why? And the most
interesting time to ask that question is when the deed becomes at least
marginally possible, which I projected to be late in the next century.
In January, 1988, I promised Beth (in a letter) "the story of the
struggle between those who are fighting to end the starship project and
those who are struggling to complete it -- of a few men and women caught
between a dimly understood destiny and a dimly apprehended horror -- and
of the interface between the conscious and the unconscious, the free
will of the mind and the determinism of the body."
And all of that turned out to be true. But it doesn't go far enough.
Because it doesn't address the question "Who does it hurt?" -- the
answer to which, in my opinion, is what turns an idea into a story, and
breathes life into the moments you hope to share with your readers.
When I can clearly see the people who are caught in the pincers, when
I've found a place where I can stand to be silent witness to the turns,
travails and small triumphs of their lives, then -- and only then -- am
I ready to start writing. Because a novel is not about its theme. It's
about life as the writer sees it, and ordinary people as the writer
understands them. The writer shouldn't sit down at the keyboard to
confess, or to invent, but to give witness. And a novel ought not be an
essay, or a tract, but a story. Not my story. Their story.
(Enough schizoid writers' workshop pontificating. For now.)
I already had the missing piece in hand, and it didn't take me too long
to realize it. Months before, I had become aware that parents in
general, and fathers in particular, had gotten short shrift in my
novels. I took that as a clue that I might be ducking looking at
something difficult, and promised myself that I would tackle a story
about fathers and sons as soon as an appropriate idea presented itself.
One night, somewhere in my neural net, that promise ran head-on into the
kernel of "The Quiet Pools," and the two fused into one. I suddenly knew
who was hurting, and why. So I said good-bye to my friends, retreated to
my basement office, and set to it.
For me, the actual writing process is one of a sort of dynamic
synthesis. Even when I'm not working on a book, I write down bits of
overheard conversations, record idle thoughts and observations, take
photographs of intriguing faces, write "sense essays" about interesting
places I visit, clip and file news items in thirty or so broad
categories. When I begin writing, I cannibalize those resources, pulling
them together and finding connections between them. They come together
in and around the conflicts of the story in unexpected, often
serendipitous ways.
It's this process of synthesis which helps put flesh on the naked
skeleton. For instance, I happened to see extended-marriage advocate
Stan Dale on the Sally Jessie Raphael show, later found that a friend
had attended one of his workshops, and came away from listening to both
with a new understanding of how the family had changed by the time of
the novel. I went to the Pacific Northwest for Orycon and Norwescon,
stayed to explore the woods and waterfalls, and came away knowing where
Christopher McCutcheon had grown up, and how it still touched him. And
so forth.
I suppose some zealous researcher could take this box I'm packing up and
have a field day correlating it with the pages of the novel. ("Ah-hah!
So this was the inspiration for page 106.") But doing so would probably
miss the point.
When I begin work on a novel, I have to know where it ends -- the
moment, the feeling, sometimes the exact words. The first decision I
face is where to begin telling the story. Two points define a line, but
a story is not a straight line. Past Chapter One, I'm embarked on a
journey of discovery, learning as I write how the beginning and the
ending are connected. It does not seem to me that I'm "making it up" --
rather, that I'm sorting out what must have happened, like working out
one of those letter-substitution puzzles where you have to turn SPURT
into CHOKE in five moves.
The Quiet Pools was a vastly more complex puzzle, since it contains five
distinct but interrelated threads of conflict. It wrote almost painfully
slowly, and took me six months more than I had thought it would to
finish -- the first time I've seriously missed a deadline. And when I
finally turned it in, in April, 1989, I was so emotionally drained that
months passed before I was productive again.
But the result is a novel I'm greatly pleased with and proud of. The
narrow sfnal theme broadened in the writing to become a question
everyone confronts -- who are we, and why do we do what we do? At the
same time, the abstract speculations drawn from Fisher and Crick faded
to a supporting role behind an intimate portrait of two troubled
families. In short, I wrote the book I wanted to write, told the story I
wanted to tell.
Just don't expect me to be able to tell you in two sentences What It All
Means. The question I dread most as a writer is, "So, your new book --
what's it about?" I hate it when editors ask. I hate it when other
writers ask. I hate it when friends, family, and readers ask.
Because, ultimately, The Quiet Pools isn't about the plot, or the
characters, or the setting, or the theme, or the deconstructed analysis
of its literary entrails. It's about a place I found to stand, and
something I saw from there, and the feelings and thoughts that
experience evoked in me. The Quiet Pools, in its totality, is nothing
more or less than my carefully worded invitation to come and stand where
I stood, and experience it for yourself.
Hope to see you there.
Past Imaginings
SF in the Comic Books
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Copyright 1990 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Science fiction has been in comics almost from the start. The first
monthly comic sold on the newsstands (following a handful of giveaways,
one-shots, and tabloids) was Famous Funnies, in 1934, and from the third
issue on good ol' Buck Rogers was a regular feature for more than a
hundred and eighty issues. These were just reprints of the newspaper
strip, but what the heck, you've got to start somewhere.
For those of you who are unforgivably ignorant of SF history, Buck
Rogers was a comic strip (and may still be going, for all I know) based
on Philip Nowlan's novel Armageddon: 2419, which appeared in Amazing
Stories in the late twenties; the Buck Rogers strip did more to create
SF's image in the popular mind than just about anything else from 1930
up to 1960 or so, with its spaceships, rayguns, and so forth. The
drawing was crude -- even by the standards of comic strips of the time,
or the standards of comic strips now, for that matter -- and the writing
wasn't anything terribly impressive, either. The original story involved
Tony Rogers being put into suspended animation for five hundred years by
a mysterious gas in a mining cave-in, then returning to life to help a
small band of American rebels defeat the Asian hordes who had conquered
the U.S. Once the yellow peril was disposed of, he went on to explore
outer space and battle Martians, mad scientists, and the like -- every
cliche the field has ever known, in short, many of them already cliches
even fifty years ago.
Unimpressive as Buck's adventures were, they were immensely popular; in
addition to the strip there was a radio show, and in fact there was a
Buck Rogers comic book in 1933, even before Famous Funnies, that was
given away by Kelloggs as a radio premium. Everybody knew Buck Rogers --
and therefore everybody thought they knew everything worth knowing about
SF. It was full of ridiculous stuff like rayguns and spaceships,
badly-written, with stereotyped characters and cliche situations -- and
thanks to good ol' Buck most of us grew up hearing SF dismissed as "that
Buck Rogers junk".
That image had finally faded by the seventies, though -- and then Star
Wars came along, so that now SF is "that Star Wars stuff". The only real
consolation in this is that Star Wars was a lot better than Buck Rogers.
At any rate, Buck appeared in, all told, one hundred and ninety- nine
issues of Famous Funnies -- there was a break of a year or two between
#190 and #208, but he was brought back as the cover feature for a few
issues in the early fifties, when SF was a brief fad, ending with #218.
A few of the late issues had covers by Frank Frazetta, before he made
the jump from comics to book illustration; these can cost over $100 each
on the back-issue market, where most of the run are about a tenth as
much. Buck got his own title briefly, as well, and turned up in various
giveaways, and established SF firmly in the comics.
Comic books evolved out of comic strips; the earliest were simply
collections of strips reprinted in a convenient package, often, but not
always, with color added.
SF as we know it, on the other hand, evolved in the pulp magazines;
despite earlier works by Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and so
forth, SF wasn't really a recognized genre, and had no real name, until
Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories. There are still lingering traces
of those pulp roots, including the widespread idea that SF isn't quite
respectable.
As comics evolved in the thirties, they grew away from their strip
ancestors, however, and began borrowing from the pulps, and even
hybridizing with them. Comic strips, intended for consumption in tiny
daily doses, just weren't as well suited to use in comic books as were
the high-speed, all-in-this-issue pulp stories. The first comic book
with a single theme was Detective Picture Stories, and it did everything
it could to look like one of the zillions of detective pulps then on the
stands (this was in 1936). Adventure Comics, originally following the
compiled-strip format, got more and more like a pulp. And the process
was accelerated when pulp publishers got into the field -- as many of
them did. The comic book superheroes evolved out of the pulp heroes;
comic detectives from pulp detectives. Comic book SF, however, took
longer to develop. Buck Rogers had been around forever, but the sort of
non- series SF that filled the pulps just didn't appeal to the comic
publishers of the thirties and forties. I have no idea why they were so
reluctant to try it, but they were. There seemed to be an unshakeable
conviction that comic books needed continuing characters, and one-shot
SF stories therefore weren't tried much.
Ah, but SF series! That was another matter. Fiction House was the great
success story in that field. They were publishing a line of pulps such
as Planet Stories, Fight Stories, Wings Stories, Jungle Stories, and so
forth, and when their first attempt, Jumbo Comics, did well, rather than
try to come up with new ideas they simply started putting out Planet
Comics, Fight Comics, Wings Comics, Jungle Comics, and so on. Planet
Comics ran seventy-three issues, from January 1940 to Winter, 1953, and
was one of the more successful comics in the Fiction House line. It's
now one of the most sought-after of all titles; even the worst issues in
nice condition will run you $50 or more, and a perfect copy of #l can't
be had for under $1,000.00. And like its namesake, Planet Stories, it
mostly ran space opera and adventure, with little pretext of scientific
accuracy or real innovation. Virtually all the stories were in
continuing series with titles like "Auro, Lord of Jupiter" (which
completely ignored the fact that Jupiter was known, even then, to have
high gravity and no breathable atmosphere) or "Mysta of the Moon", and
were really little more than superheroes with spaceships and rayguns.
That was typical of comic book SF throughout the forties; besides
Planet, there were heroes like Spacehawk, Flash Gordon, and Tommy
Tomorrow cavorting through various titles, and nothing that we would
recognize as decent science fiction -- until 1950, and I'll get to that
in my next installment. There were comics that took their titles from SF
pulps, such as Marvel Comics (which became Marvel Mystery Comics) from
Marvel Science Fiction, and Startling Comics from Startling Stories, but
these almost invariably were simply superhero comics that took nothing
but the name (though Startling did eventually run a fair bit of space
opera and several nifty covers). In short, SF in comics in the forties
owed far more to Captain Future than to Astounding -- perhaps because
Street & Smith, who published Astounding, never made it as a comic
publisher, and never tried an SF comic.
Oh, yes, I should probably mention that the entire Fiction House line,
including Planet, attracted a lot of adolescent male readers with the
time-honored device of displaying lots of half-naked women on the covers
and in the stories. Planet followed the hero/girl/BEM pattern on dozens
of issues -- but also had some where the sexy girl was the hero,
rescuing somebody else. Some comic collectors figure that what put
Fiction House out of business was the introduction of censorship in the
form of the Comics Code, which would surely have eliminated the blatant
cheesecake covers -- actually, though, it was apparently distribution
problems that did them in.
The closest thing comic books ever had to a John W. Campbell, Jr. was
the team of Al Feldstein and William Gaines. Prior to their entering the
field, SF in comics had been the worst sort of space opera and superhero
stuff, despite the fact that several respectable SF writers, such as
Edmond Hamilton, Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, and Gardner Fox
wrote for comic books (mostly DC).
William Gaines wanted to be a teacher, but his father, Max C. Gaines,
who had invented comic books in the first place, wanted him in the
family business. The elder Gaines had packaged comic books for Dell and
Eastern Color, then worked for DC and DC's subsidiary All- American,
before finally winding up running his own company, Educational Comics.
That name didn't sell, so he modified it, adding a second imprint,
Entertaining Comics, that used the same symbol -- EC. Then Max Gaines
got killed in a boating accident in 1947, and Bill Gaines found himself
owner and publisher of EC with no idea what he was doing. He was
publisher of such all-time obvious hits as Picture Stories from the
Bible and Animal Fables, which did not interest him at all, and a few
more ordinary titles, such as Moon Girl.
One of the first things he did was to hire a young man named Al
Feldstein, who had mostly worked for Fox (another comic publisher) --
but Fox was going under. Feldstein was a triple-threat writer, artist,
and editor, and was promptly assigned to the big fad of the day -- love
comics.
Gaines and Feldstein got along well, though, and as EC sank deeper and
deeper into the red they got more and more willing to experiment. After
all, what harm could it do when the company was going bust anyway? So in
March, 1950 they converted five of their titles to genres that
interested them, rather than what was traditionally supposed to sell
comics; three were horror, based on the radio shows like "Inner Sanctum"
and "Lights Out", and were called Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, and
Crypt of Terror; the other two were based on the science fiction pulps
and carried the titles Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.
Despite the titles, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy tried very hard to
do serious SF stories, and often succeeded. Instead of heroes with
rayguns blasting innocent aliens into dust, the covers would depict Mars
rising, as seen from Phobos by Terran explorers (WF #13), or a dog
terrified by weightlessness aboard a spaceship (WS #12), all done as
accurately as possible. The stories inside had no mad scientists
threatening the Interplanetary Police, but instead tales of very sane
scientists trying to cope with alien races or strange discoveries. There
were rather a lot of man-eating aliens and killer mutants in there,
true, but after all, these were comic books aimed at kids from eight to
fourteen -- and that's probably why both titles were financial
disasters. Kids that age seem to prefer mighty-thewed heroes blasting
Martians to dust. After twenty-two issues each, Weird Science and Weird
Fantasy were merged into Weird Science-Fantasy, which lasted another
seven issues, then became Incredible Science Fiction, which died after
four issues -- not because of poor sales (though they were very poor),
but because Gaines got into an argument with the newly-established
Comics Code Authority about an anti-racist story he wanted to reprint in
ISF #33, and pulled out of comic books entirely, switching EC to
magazines, of which only one still survives -- Mad.
While they lasted, though, the EC SF mags provided readers with some
truly nifty stories, including adaptations of several stories by Ray
Bradbury, and some of the finest artwork to ever appear in comic books,
so fine that it's hard to believe that it was just for comic books.
And EC's example, together with one of the periodic resurgences of
interest in SF in other media, resulted in scads of SF comics, to be
looked at in future installments.
------ End ------
