Neptune Crossing
Page 83
*****
—Continued in Book 2 of THE CHAOS CHRONICLES:
Strange Attractors—
Afterword to Neptune Crossing
FOR THE BETTER part of twenty years now, I have been living with John Bandicut and company—either in realtime while writing the books of The Chaos Chronicles, or between times while working on other projects. The Chaos series actually sprang from a feeling of total exhaustion—like a hangover from a long night of celebration. I had been writing a sequence of books, every one of which had turned into something longer and more complex than I’d originally dreamed. (From a Changeling Star. Down the Stream of Stars. Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger.) I found the writing immensely satisfying—at least once the books were done—but the complicated stories and endless rewrites were leaving me physically and emotionally wrung out. Also, it was hard to even think of making a living from fiction when two or more years were going by between books.
Something’s gotta change, I thought. My problem was that I seem hard-wired to write long, twisty stories. I don’t know why; that’s just the way my subconscious works. I’ve never been a prolific short story writer, and most of my novels have grown in the telling. (And you should see what I cut out of them. Or no, on second thought, maybe not.) I’m also a slow writer. What was I to do?
The inspiration came like a couple of strobes in the night: Flash! Flash!
I don’t recall which hit me first. One was the idea of writing a nice, long story like my subconscious wanted, but—hah!—breaking it into short, snappy, stand-alone volumes that I could write quickly. The other was chaos theory itself: I’d read James Gleick’s Chaos, and also an article in The Planetary Report about the chaotic movement of objects in the solar system. These chaotic influences bring comets and asteroids into Earth’s neighborhood from time to time, and occasionally down on our heads. That, combined, with some photos of Neptune and Triton from the Voyager spacecraft, provided the tiny nucleus I needed. I don’t remember as clearly where my hero Bandicut came from, but his dazed and confused state at the start was probably a reflection of the chaos in my own mind as I struggled to compose the story.
I sketched out the general story arc, which at that point was intended to run four volumes. I ran the idea past my agent—always after me to write more quickly—and he ran it past my then-editor at Bantam Spectra, Amy Stout. Based on the outline, Bantam signed me up for the first three volumes.
And then I got to the “writing quickly” part. That didn’t work out quite as planned. It took longer to get the first book written than I’d hoped. A few years longer. During that time, Bantam decided to cancel most of their SF program, and they canned my editor in the bargain, along with my overdue contract. Oof. Talk about a body blow. But it could have been worse. At the time I had two publishers. My editor at Tor Books, Jim Frenkel, picked up the contracts with enthusiasm, tempered by a touch of annoyance that he hadn’t been offered the books in the first place. And so Tor became the publisher of the Chaos books—first for three volumes, and then for a second set of three (which I’m still writing, in 2010). I’ve worked with Jim on every book I’ve done since.
A few writing sidelights:
I started writing Neptune Crossing as a first-person narrative, from Bandicut’s point of view. Partly that was because I hadn’t done much first-person writing, and I wanted to try something new. Partly it was because I was aiming for a particular kind of immediacy that I hoped first person would give me. I gave it every chance. But sixty or seventy pages in, I had to face facts: It sucked. It just wasn’t coming together. So with frustration, sorrow, and more than a little cursing, I threw out several months’ work. And I started over from the beginning, this time in third person. It was painful—damn, was it painful—but it was also fortuitous in the end, because it gave me a chance to explore the viewpoints of a number of other, alien characters as the story progressed. I hadn’t seen that coming.
Sometimes people have asked me where certain scenes in the book came from, the mining scenes in particular. Well, you probably know the saying, “Write what you know.” I’ve never worked in a mine, but when I was in college I spent a couple of summers working on an auto assembly line. It was not a happy experience. Moron bosses. Weird, scary, hissing machinery that I was supposed to operate after five minutes of training. The expectation that I would keep up with a demonically driven assembly line, one new car every sixty seconds. The inescapable smell of oil and electricity. The ceaseless noise, the yammer of pneumatic tools and the inexorable rumble of the conveyor line. And worst of all, the mind-numbing boredom overlaid with a constant fear of falling behind. “College boy!” That was my experience of working in a factory, and I had a strong intuition that it was fundamentally the same in factories around the world, and probably in mines on the surface of Triton, too. From the gestalt of that experience came several scenes: the interplay with annoying bosses, the mindless charge into the tunnel after the robot, and the Dodgem ride in the surface-mining crawler.
Write what you know!
And when necessary, make it up.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far. I’ll confess that, at the end of this volume—with Bandicut’s arrival at this strange outpost beyond the stars—I didn’t have much more idea of what was coming next than Bandicut did. To learn that, I was going to have to write the next book.
Next stop: Strange Attractors!
Strange, indeed.