"UNPOSSIBLE"
The first two fantasy books I ever read, not counting Herbie the Love Bug, were The Phantom Tollbooth and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. If I read other fantasies first, I can’t remember them, but these two books planted the virus that made me want to tell stories. They lit up my brain from the inside.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and my wife and I are reading those books aloud to our kids, along with Where the Wild Things Are and My Father’s Dragon and eventually the Harry Potter books. As an adult I was struck by all the similarities in the tales, as well as to stories like The Wizard of Oz and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: the plucky young heroes, the magical vehicles and doorways, and the inevitable return home, which always seemed kind of sad. Reading them again with my children, I felt grateful to be able to re-enter those worlds (though only halfway; I would never again be pulled all the way up to my eyeballs as I was when I was ten). But I couldn’t help wondering about the heroes themselves, who (with certain notable exceptions) were never able to return, and certainly not as an adult.
Around the same time, I started thinking about writing a story about Mr. Rogers. I’d watched him growing up, and he was still on the air when my kids were born. He was a kind of hero, a man who from all accounts was as kind and thoughtful in real life as he was on TV, and who genuinely cared about children. When he died, I thought about writing some kind of an homage, a story in which the children come to lift the old man onto the Magic Trolley, and bear him off to the Land of Make Believe. "Unpossible" was as close as I got.
"DAMASCUS"
This story came from the intersection of three ideas.
First, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: After "Second Person, Present Tense," I’d built up a small library of books on consciousness and neurology, and I became interested in temporal lobe epilepsy—TLE. In V.S. Ramachandran’s book, Phantoms in the Brain, he talks about TLE, and I later saw a television documentary in which we meet one of Ramachandran’s patients (search on YouTube for Ramachandran and temporal lobe epilepsy and you should find it). What struck me is that the patient’s hallucinations were accompanied by the certainty that he really was in contact with God. Certainty itself was a symptom.
Any talk of TLE eventually gets around to Michael Persinger, the Canadian researcher mentioned in the story. His "God Helmet," which he used to induce a feeling of "a presence" in his patients has failed to be replicated consistently (Richard Dawkins tried it, and said he felt only a sensation of relaxation), and may be a scientific dead end, but it was too good a detail not to use.
Second, "Your Own Personal Jesus": I knew the Depeche Mode original, but it was Johnny Cash’s cover of the song that I listened to over and over while I wrote this story. From the Persinger experiments I’d decided that everyone’s Jesus would appear differently, but I think it was because of this song that I decided that Paula’s savior would take the form of a rock star beloved by her husband.
Third: Prions. In high school I read Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, which mentioned Kuru, the laughing disease. Then along came Mad Cow disease, and the discovery that it and Kuru were both prion diseases, and I had my vector for a neurological disorder that could be passed on—and passed on through ritual. There must be plenty of horror stories that link holy communion with cannibalism—body of Christ for dinner, anyone?—but when I read about the sacramental aspect of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea tribes, I had found the foundation of my religion.
I wanted to tell the entire story of a religion, from its ecstatic, revelatory beginning, to the secret sharing among a small core of believers, to evangelization and mass conversion. The most difficult part of the story was working out the structure. I wanted to cover several years, so that meant flashbacks, but I wanted each track to have its own momentum and tension. I beat that outline like a dog until I had the shape I needed, and then I regularly broke the outline whenever I thought of something new I wanted to add, forcing me to start over again. I no longer remember how long it took me to write the story, and I don’t think I want to know.
"THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM"
This is probably my angriest, most political story. I know, I know, it seems odd that a story about supervillains and superheroes could be so angry, but the war in Iraq was pissing me off. Remember "shock and awe"? The arrogance of the phrase, a marketing tagline for bombing the living shit out of human beings. During the early stages of the Iraq war, we were told that we "had to fight the terrorists over there, so we didn’t have to fight them here." That strategy, unfortunately, depended on there being a finite number of terrorists, who were either buying plane tickets for the USA or staying home, depending on where the action was. We’d somehow lost track of the fact that the quickest way to turn a moderate into a radical was to kill their friends and relatives.
I wanted to tell the story of someone caught at ground level during one of these wars, watching a superpower flex its muscles. As a comic book geek, the metaphor was obvious. And I took as inspiration books like Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, who told stories from the point of view of mere mortals caught in the crossfire.
I love comic books. I now write comics. But in Iraq, our government tried to turn a real war into a superhero tale, complete with swaggering good guys blithely leveling city blocks, irredeemable bad guys cowering in their palaces, and all but invisible bystanders.
Mission fucking accomplished.
See? I told you I was angry.
"GARDENING AT NIGHT"
Here’s a tip for you beginning writers out there: If you want to write a short story, don’t start by writing a 400-page novel first. However, if you find yourself with a 400-page novel that just doesn’t work, there are worse things to do than cutting it up for parts and selling what you can.
This is one of two stories in this collection (the other is "Dead Horse Point") that had its genesis in my first, unsold novel, The Rust Jungle. The novel had multiple point of view characters and alternating storylines that only gradually converged. One of those plotlines was about a down-on-his-luck temp worker named Reg, who fell in with a crazy homeless ex-scientist growing his own autonomous robots. I’d gotten interested in artificial life back in the ’90s when I stumbled across a collection of science and technology articles called The Reality Club, and one of those articles was on artificial evolution. I soon hunted up everything I could find on the latest research, digging up terms like cellular automata, emergent behaviors, and "fast, cheap, and out of control." Some researchers were demonstrating evolutionary principles in virtual environments, and other folks were building modular robots. I think I was one of the first people to combine the two ideas. And as a boy who was raised up Southern Baptist, the link between software and hardware sounded a lot like those opening verses in John: "In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was made flesh." (Notice that in the story, Reg, that benighted atheist, attributes the verse to Genesis. This is not at all because the author forgot that the verses were in John. Nope.)
While I was writing the novel, New York and a few other cities were experiencing an outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. As I read about the mechanisms of TB, I began to see all kinds of links between bacteria and robots, and how intelligent-seeming behavior—downright trickiness and what looked like strategy—could evolve from simple initial conditions.
But while the tech and the TB and some of the character names survived the transformation from novel to short story, most of the plot did not. In short stories, you have to streamline. So Reg the temp became Reg the roboticist, and the crazy homeless scientist of the novel became Eli the mentor, and Reg’s son doesn’t contract TB, the old man does ... and so on. But I kept the setting of Salt Lake City, where I’d lived for a year, and I kept the dinner with Cora, which is entirely based on my wife’s recipes for lasagna and killer garlic bread.
"PETIT MAL #1: GLASS"
I got an email from Technology Review magazine asking me
to write a story, and the page rate was so wonderful I couldn’t say no. But the conditions were strict: the story had to be 2000 words or less, it had to be hard SF, and it had to be about prisons and incarceration? Why? Because they already had a story about prisons and they thought it could be a theme.
I began frantically trolling for ideas. Luckily, my wife is a psychologist, and you can imagine the kinds of books that turn up in our house. Two of them were about psychopaths, AKA sociopaths (the terms are nearly interchangeable). I’d also been reading some reports in the popular press about mirror neurons as a possible explanation for why we feel empathy. The trick, then, was to tell a coherent story, including an explanation of the science, in so few words. The nods to Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass were added for my own amusement.
By the time I turned in my story, they’d dropped the theme. Algis Budrys had died, so they’d decided to run my story next to his. I didn’t mind, though. Sometimes being told the exact size and shape of the box you have to fill makes you more creative, not less.
"WHAT WE TAKE WHEN WE TAKE WHAT WE NEED"
This story had a complicated birth. In 1988, while at Clarion East, the science fiction and fantasy writing workshop, I wrote a story about a man who manufactured drugs in sacs and blisters on his skin, and about his son, who had inherited the ability. It was set in a non-specific far future, and it didn’t arrive at any kind of ending. I tried to rewrite it several times over the years, setting it in the present day or the near future, rearranging the plot. I could never make it work, but the images stuck with me.
Years later I was writing a novel called The Devil’s Alphabet, about a small Tennessee town named Switchcreek that had been struck by a gene-altering disease. The disease created three clades—three distinct strains of humanity—each with different physical characteristics. I gave the drug-oozing disease to one of the clades, a member of which was the main character’s father.
But I still wanted to see if I could make the story of this father and son work as a short standalone piece, an (almost) two-character drawing room drama, albeit one with syringes and pus and addiction. Out went the clades, the background information on quantum evolution, and most of the other characters. Some of the remaining characters shared names with characters in the novel, but they were not those characters. And why not? The Devil’s Alphabet was a novel that talked about parallel universes, so a story about an alternate Switchcreek seemed well within the rules of the game.
"PETIT MAL #2: DIGITAL"
In some ways this is a companion piece to "The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy," which is all about the illusion that there is a self sitting behind your eyes. I wrote it to read aloud at Fractal 2010, a conference about science, technology, and the arts in Medellín, Colombia. I wanted something short and amusing that would be fun to perform, and liked the idea of reading most of the story with my left index finger in the air. I’d like to say it was a hit, but a good portion of the audience didn’t speak English.
"MESSAGE FROM THE BUBBLEGUM FACTORY"
Here’s another story written on assignment. Chris Roberson had handed Lou Anders a copy of "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm," and based on that, Lou invited me to write a story for Masked, an anthology of stories about superheroes and supervillains, written by both prose and comics writers. Lou’s instructions were to avoid camp and metafiction—just write stories about living in a superheroic universe. I am chagrined to report that I immediately set about disobeying him.
I love comics, and now write them. But the big shared universes of DC and Marvel are messy, irrational places. Everything is true: magic, science, demons, mutations. Laws of physics are violated at random. Industrial accidents don’t kill you, they give you powers. And everybody rises from the dead.
I wanted to write a science fiction story that would explain how such a universe could come to be. The secret mechanism of that shared universe would be the main problem of the story, and the solution. It would also circle back to my bugaboos about free will.
Some people have called this story metafictional, and rightly so. It has a protagonist who directly addresses the reader, and the story itself is what’s under interrogation. But it is also a hard science fiction story, in which, unfortunately, there is space only to hint at the underlying science. (I plan at least two more episodes in this story, so explanations will be forthcoming.) But it is also a straight-ahead superhero story, featuring a supervillain prison breakout, something I’ve always wanted to write. My thanks to my college roommate, J.R. Jenks, the best gamemaster a guy ever had, who convinced me to keep the CyberYeti.
"FREE, AND CLEAR"
Some stories are based on personal experience. Perhaps a little too personal.
At the time I wrote this, I suffered from terrible allergies. (These days, after burying the cat and moving into a house with almost no carpeting, I suffer from merely annoying allergies.) I did indeed go to a very New Agey massage therapist, told her about my allergies, and tried to relax as she went to work on my skull and back. She was no help whatsoever, except that she helped me get this story.
"DEAD HORSE POINT"
As you may be able to guess from the story, Dead Horse Point is my favorite state park. When my wife and I lived in Utah we camped there several times, and a couple years ago we introduced our kids to its epic vistas and vertigo-inducing ledges. As a writer, the park was a ready made metaphor, if I could only find a story to fit.
The idea for Julia’s condition—call it Attention Surplus Disorder—came years earlier. A friend of mine was a genuine mathematical prodigy and very likely a genius. When he was working on a tough problem, he could go into a trance-like state for days, barely talking to anyone, rarely making eye contact, and eating whatever was put in front of him. One day he told me that he very much wanted to have children. I told him, Dude, those kids would be dead.
Julia, Venya, and Kyle first showed up as characters in an unsold novel called The Rust Jungle. I kept coming back to the characters, and their strange relationship: the former helper, the current helper, and the genius they were supposed to support because, well, she was the genius. Science fiction stories are always about the genius who saves the world, with the loyal helpmeets in the background, where the little people are supposed to stand. It wasn’t until I realized that the story wasn’t about Julia that I figured out how to write the story.
Oh, and my genius friend? He’s a wonderful father. Doesn’t get as much math done these days, but he’s happy.
"IN THE WHEELS"
Ah, the first sale. Is there anything sweeter to a writer, or more likely to cause future embarrassment? I wrote the first draft of the story in the first weeks of Clarion. It ended with Zeke possessed, and Joey gazing off into the distance. A week later, Samuel Delany arrived as our new teacher, and he told me the story wasn’t over until Joey went home. I rewrote the story, because when Chip Delany tells you to do something, you do it, damn it. I mean, the guy looks like God, and not the friendly New Testament version. After I showed him the new draft, he said, Congratulations, this will be your first sale. It was a pronouncement. Of course I believed him; He was God.
I can’t read the story too closely without wanting to edit it. I’ve refrained from doing so, however, because it would be unfair to that kid at Clarion who wrote it, and unfair to the story. But if I squint, I can see some of the themes and tropes that I’d keep coming back to in stories and novels: the Bible verses, the rural setting, the demons that aren’t quite demons, the point of view character who is the guy next to the coolest guy in the room. So, here is the story as it is, the first thing I ever wrote that was worth a damn. It turns out that I’m not too embarrassed about this story.
"PETIT MAL #3: PERSISTENCE"
Another story about vision, and another response to "The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy." A lot of the lab work on consciousness starts with experimenting with vision, or talking to people with visual disturbances, and it’s becom
e clear that the eye is no camera, simply relaying what’s "out there." Vision is instead the brain telling stories to itself, composing a meaningful scene—with actors, mood, intentions, and dramatic revelations—out of sometimes minimal sensory information. Oliver Sacks has written about patients with visual disturbances before, but in his latest book, The Mind’s Eye, one of the patients is Oliver Sacks. I listened to an interview with him in which he described being treated for eye cancer in his right eye. He was washing his hands, then closed his eyes, and was startled to see the room still there in front of him. The illusion lasted for several seconds. I thought that was very interesting. But only a few seconds? That’s no place to end a science fiction story.
"THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF ROCKET BOY"
This is my second First Sale. For ten years I hadn’t written any short stories, instead knitting away on a sprawling novel that would never see the light of day. But short story ideas kept percolating in the back of my brain. For years I’d been thinking about the illusion that we exist behind our eyes, each of us a homunculus steering the ungainly ship of a body. It seemed to me that that illusion would be particularly attractive to someone whose body was being abused—someone who wanted out of it.
I often find myself writing about the kind of intense friendships that boys can make—and later break. This was going to be one of those stories, so I set about borrowing details from my own childhood, and from the lives of my friends, including days making Super-8 horror films in my friend Ted’s house.
But for the longest time I couldn’t figure out how the story ended. And then I thought about those lunar capsules, returning to Earth after the rest of the rocket had burned out and fallen away, and I knew where Stevie had gone, he was coming back, and how I would return to science fiction.
About You
Unpossible Page 30
