The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Philip Athans

  Richard went on to explain his theory to me. I’d call it a “wild story,” except that I didn’t think it wild. I’m still amazed by that.

  “There was a moment in human history,” Richard declared, “a definite beginning when humanity was separated from the animals, when Homo sapiens were given that special spark of conscience and rationale.”

  “By what?” was the logical question. “By God?”

  Richard called it a “collective human soul.”

  I was more than a little excited by all of this, especially since I’d just witnessed what he was describing. He went on to tell me that I was not his first—he said “client” for lack of a better word, but I felt that he should have said “friend” or even “kin”—who had been at Genesis.

  “Were you there?” I asked him.

  I knew he had been, and knew, too, at that moment, that his being there was the whole reason he was conducting this research. What Richard was hinting at, what I had felt at that dawn of human history, was something beyond anything this world could offer to me: perfect serenity, the completely religious experience.

  It occurred to me as Richard went on that his finding me, finding someone who had been there, even given my growing belief in reincarnation, went against astronomical odds. How many people were there at the dawn of humanity? Certainly not five billion. And since my personal regressions went across racial and gender lines, how could Richard logically rule anyone out?

  His pained expression when I asked him that question told me that I wasn’t going to get my answer at that time.

  “You’re going on another trip,” he said after we had shared a silent lunch.

  “Today?”

  Richard nodded.

  “Back to Genesis?” I asked hopefully.

  Richard shook his head. “Your pilgrimage,” he explained. “You’re almost there, and I think you should see its end this day.”

  I started to blurt out a dozen questions, mostly concerning why I had to do it that same day. Regression takes a lot out of you, and I was tired.

  But Richard would hear nothing of delays. He promised that my journey would teach me much.

  ***

  “No, I was not on the boat anymore. And I was alone. Maybe this wasn’t a pilgrimage.”

  “Just follow where the memory leads,” Richard interrupted, a bit sharply.

  “There are timbers all around me, standing. My feet are in sandals. The grass is torn.”

  My breathing got heavy on the tape. I looked up.

  “Not timbers. Crosses.”

  A long pause.

  “Fucking crosses!”

  “Where are you?” Richard demanded.

  There came a shuffling. I was trying to run out of the room. Richard shut off the tape.

  He caught me by the door, just as I was opening it, hit me with a flying tackle that slammed me against the door and sent both of us into a crumpled pile at its base. I squirmed around to face him, to get away from this wild man. And God, his eyes were wild! He scooted to his feet quicker than I could react and shifted so that he was against the closed door, holding it fast.

  “Where were you?” he demanded again as I turned on him and backed off a cautious step.

  I stared at him, horrified. I thought Genesis was something spectacular, but this was too much for a sheltered Catholic guy from New England.

  “Where?” Richard stepped out, grabbed the front of my shirt, and spun, slamming me hard against the door. He wanted to tear the name from my mouth.

  I returned his grasp and straightened, pushing him back to arm’s length.

  “Calvary,” I said quietly.

  “And what did you see?”

  I remember shaking my head back and forth. I remember Richard slapping me hard across my face.

  “I saw him,” I admitted, and I was crying. I was fucking crying like a baby.

  “And what did you see?” Richard asked, suddenly calm. He let go of my shirt and smoothed it with sympathetic hands.

  “In his eyes?” he prompted after many seconds slipped past.

  “I saw ….” What did I see? “It was like those people on the savannah,” I tried to explain. I thought I sounded foolish, but Richard nodded eagerly, understanding. I drew strength from that, felt as if I was not alone, and not insane.

  “I saw … a perfect human soul?” I asked as much as stated, for I really didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about.

  Richard backed away another step—I could have left the room then, if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to—and he knew I didn’t want to. He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. He was sad, and I was, too, though I didn’t understand why.

  “And perfect human souls were rare, even in that time,” Richard remarked as he walked back to the table.

  It was the most curious thing I had ever heard. And perhaps the saddest.

  So Jesus Christ had a perfect soul. No surprise, right? Of course not. If he had possessed anything less, I would have been surprised.

  But what the hell was I talking about? How could I possibly know that Jesus Christ had a perfect soul? What distinction can you find by merely looking into someone’s eyes, even if that person just happens to be your savior?

  ***

  I got the shock of my life (and by this point, you can see that’s saying quite a bit) the very next day. I went back to Germany, was again that young kid running frantically along the streets.

  A young kid running to see his leader.

  And I did get a glimpse of that monster as his open-topped car passed along the waving crowd. Adolph Hitler looked right into my eyes.

  Right into my eyes.

  The son of a bitch. The monster with the perfect human soul.

  “It makes no fucking sense!” I later screamed at Richard. “I can almost buy it all. Genesis. Calvary. That’s good, that’s right. But this guy?”

  Richard didn’t seem surprised. “There are burdens to possessing a perfect soul,” he explained, “burdens that can break the strongest of men.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I demanded. “And what does it mean to possess a perfect human soul? Wouldn’t we all—”

  “No!” His answer sat me back in the chair as surely as if he’d slugged me. That fear flapped up around me again, so many black wings.

  “Suppose that it was a finite thing,” Richard remarked.

  “Suppose that what was a finite thing?” I asked.

  “The collective human soul, the spark of Genesis.”

  “So?”

  “How many people do you think were caught in that spark?” Richard asked. “Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?”

  “What difference can that make?” I replied angrily. I really didn’t see where his logic was headed.

  “How many people are around now?” he asked pointedly, and I couldn’t reply, though suddenly I knew the answer. “Suppose that the collective human soul was a finite thing,” Richard reiterated. “A finite amount of energy, or whatever it was. It filled the fifty thousand beings, or hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand. Five billion might stretch that a bit far, wouldn’t you say?”

  The implications stole any forthcoming responses from my mouth. I sat back and stared blankly as Richard elaborated on his theory. “Human beings multiply—physically—of course, but the collective soul is finite. And,” Richard assured me, as serious and determined as I’d ever seen him, “that soul is not divided evenly.”

  “Some have it and some don’t?” I asked.

  Richard nodded halfheartedly. “Some have it and some don’t. Some have a lot and some have a little. It’s a random thing, as far as I can tell.”

  “And we have a lot?” I asked.

  “Look at my eyes,” Richard implored me, and I did, and I knew that he had a perfect soul. And I knew that if I looked into a mirror, I would see the same spark. I could recognize it now.

  “Perfect souls,” Richard went on. “You and me. And by the way, if you ha
d none, you couldn’t go back to any past lives, because you wouldn’t have any past lives. And if you had a little, then you might grab bits and pieces of one previous existence. Or maybe none at all.”

  It sounded logical; the soul is what remembers, not the body. I could buy that, but still, so many things were out of place.

  “What about…?”

  “Hitler?” Richard finished, following my trail of doubts. He chuckled and flashed that sad smile once more.

  “I’ve been wondering about that one since I started doing this twenty years ago,” he explained. “You can imagine my excitement when we first discovered you were in Berlin before the war.”

  “He should have no soul!” I declared. “It makes no sense.”

  “Oh, but it does,” Richard assured me.

  “So now you’re a fucking Nazi?” I wanted to take the stinging words back as soon as I uttered them. Of course Richard was no Nazi; from everything I had seen, the man was truly compassionate and tolerant, if a bit blunt at times. But the image of that murderous butcher with full-souled eyes—any image that put him in the same light as Jesus made me sick to my stomach.

  “Hardly,” Richard answered, taking no offense. “But I was curious about Hitler. It seems that the most outrageous characters of human history are either perfect or empty. People in the middle—regarding souls, I mean—don’t seem to be earth-shakers.”

  “How could someone as horrible, as repulsive as Hitler have any soul at all?” I asked with conviction. Up to this point, everything I had learned, particularly the revelations on Calvary, reinforced my spiritual and religious beliefs, actually strengthened my faith in God. But I wanted little part of any God that would endorse the monster that was Nazi Germany.

  “I told you there were burdens,” Richard explained. “Suppose this repulsive person—and I agree with your description—came to recognize as you have, a degree of soul within someone’s eyes. He wouldn’t understand it, of course, he would simply react to what he saw. Perhaps young Adolph Hitler looked into the eyes of a Jew—”

  “So Jews don’t have souls?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Please!” Richard yelled at me, and he seemed thoroughly disappointed. “Would you please throw away your religious prejudices?”

  “You said it, not me!” I argued.

  “I am giving you a possible example,” Richard retorted. “I already told you that the soul-getting game is a random thing. Religion has nothing to do with it. Race has nothing to do with it. Gender has nothing to do with it.”

  I put my face in my hands and rubbed hard. I wasn’t used to being scolded by Richard; it went against the bond we had forged.

  “So if a young Hitler was wronged by a person, and when he looked at this person he recognized the emptiness of soulless eyes, and this person just happened to be a Jew ….”

  “He might carry that with him forever,” I reasoned, and it began to make perfect sense. “In his twisted mind, he might come to instinctively believe that all Jews were bad.”

  Richard nodded in perfect agreement.

  “That doesn’t excuse—”

  “Absolutely not,” Richard strongly agreed. “The man was a beast, a butcher, but I’m not surprised that he was a butcher with a soul. That, I tell you, is what broke him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knew!” The sheer weight of Richard’s heavy tone knocked me back. “Can’t you see the implications of what I’m telling you?”

  I wasn’t sure I could, wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “How did you find me?” My question seemed logical enough.

  “The same way you were drawn to Calvary in your previous life,” Richard answered.

  “You were drawn to me?”

  “No, not like that.” He was chuckling again, and I was glad. This conversation needed a little levity.

  “I’ve found that soul-filled people tend to enjoy Mark Twain,” he explained. “I’ve spotted at least portions of souls in nearly half the people I’ve encountered in Twain classes, and you’re the second perfect soul I’ve found in one. I’m taking another Twain class, at Sister Diane Community this semester, though I hold no illusions that I’ll find another one like us in my lifetime.”

  “But why Twain?”

  “We can relate to the guy, I guess,” Richard answered. “I met him once, in a previous life, of course, and can assure you that he had a perfect soul.” Richard paused and chuckled again, then looked at me, his expression incredibly sad. “Look where it got him,” he said with a helpless—so very helpless—chuckle. “The Mysterious Stranger and a bitter end. Some humorist, huh?”

  It struck me then how many of the most notable comedic talents wound up dying in despair. Was that profession naturally attractive to people with perfect souls? I guess it made sense. When you can’t do anything about something this dark, you might as well fucking laugh about it.

  “Where’s the other guy you found with the perfect soul?” I had to ask. “Did he find his way back to Genesis?”

  Richard nodded. “And I think he was on his way to Calvary, too, but he got killed before we could find out.”

  “Got killed?”

  “In that previous life,” Richard explained. “A robber on the road, I suspect.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Richard shrugged. I suspected he was hiding something from me.

  ***

  And I still do. Sitting here now, I suspect that Richard’s first perfect soul killed himself. You probably think I’m a ranting lunatic, and I don’t blame you if you do. I know that I’d think you one if I hadn’t seen these things with my own eyes. I’ve even considered the possibility that Richard has implanted all of these thoughts into my head during hypnosis.

  Except for the recognition. Damn it all. I can look into a person’s eyes, any person’s eyes, and weigh the degree of soul within him. Any person. And it’s gotten to the point where I can’t shut this damning talent off. Everybody I see gets measured, and whenever I notice a soulless one, I want nothing more than to run up and punch him in the face, to kill him because I know he is less than human. And I know that we need less people.

  All of our hopes and dreams are determined by our beliefs that things are getting better, that mankind is moving in a positive direction. But if the collective human soul is indeed a finite thing (and I know that it is!) then we are moving in exactly the wrong direction. And nothing short of nuclear holocaust or a horrid plague can even begin to bring us back to better days, can even begin to shrink the population so that it is once more in accord with the collective human soul.

  I cannot even fathom the many implications. Is it any wonder that, though by any logical measure people are better off now than at any time in our history, the degree of simple happiness is inevitably shrinking? It has to, don’t you see, because the level of positive energy, the very spirit of humanity, inevitably diminishes as population expands. No, not diminishes; it just gets spread thinner. Perfect souls were rare even in Jesus’ day. If there were two hundred thousand perfect souls at Genesis, there could be no more than one in twenty-five thousand people now! And that’s assuming that the souls were distributed evenly. And Richard says they aren’t. He says that people like us, like him and me, and that poor bastard he found twenty years ago in a Mark Twain class, are likely one in a million, a number that diminishes with each generation.

  And empty people? People without a hint of a soul? “Seventy out of a hundred,” Richard insists.

  What a burden it is to know this. What a burden it is to see the futility of it all. A “vagrant thought,” Mark Twain called us, “a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.”

  I think Twain was being kind. Better a vagrant thought, I say, than dying angels.

  Still, this is the second draft of my note. The first was strictly an explanation, a cry to anyone who would listen, but certainly not a suicide note. I was interrupted while I was writing that one. A
young man’s hand tapped my shoulder, accompanied by my son’s voice.

  “Dad?”

  I looked up at him. I looked into the perfectly soulless eyes of my only son.

  SOME THOUGHTS ON “HUGO MANN’S PERFECT SOUL”

  “Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul” was written in the early 1990s, after R. A. Salvatore had already established himself as the bestselling author of novels like The Crystal Shard. The author, who was in his early thirties at the time, explains that he “had met then editor for Amazing Stories, Kim Mohan, out at Gen Con, and he mentioned that he wanted to see something from me, and since I had (and still have) tremendous respect for this guy, I wanted to get in his magazine. So I wrote ‘Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul,’ and was crushed when he rejected it.”

  A good object lesson right up front. Even bestselling authors don’t sell everything to any editor—sorry, Mr. Capote. And rejection can shake the confidence of even a veteran author.

  “As a writer, you’re always wondering if you know what you think you know,” Salvatore continues. “With every work you put out, there are people who take from it something completely different than you intended. You write something you think is great, and it flops. You turn in something you think isn’t quite up to speed and see the most amazing reviews for it. So you’re always wondering if this will work or if that will work better, or if you have any clue at all about what you’re doing.

  “So when I turned in ‘Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul,’ thinking it was quite good, and got summarily rejected (as in, don’t even rework it), well, that hit hard. Tempered now in the realities of the writing business, I can laugh about it, of course; it’s always hit or miss, with every reader and every editor.”

  IS IT FANTASY?

  The story is an interesting example of the wide range of subject matter—the range of specific execution—that can still fall within the confines of “fantasy,” or a broader classification of “speculative fiction,” which includes fantasy and science fiction in all their myriad subgenres. But what is it about “Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul” that makes it a “fantasy” story?