Ariel
Page 40
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6. Don’t ask me why I thought that people in a hugely depopulated world would have to defend their property from squatters. Ditto the need for some kind of border patrol in empty cities. It sure seems as if there’s enough to go around. I suspect I had retained my father’s attitude toward the supreme importance of home ownership.
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7. Nowadays I would ask myself a series of questions about the necromancer that would flesh out him and his “army” into what I hope would be more believable dimensions. The first question being, Why are these guys with him in the first place? What do they get out of it? I would answer it and show you—it’d be a great opportunity for upsetting depravity. I like that he really isn’t interested in Pete & Ariel, though. He isn’t Eeeeevil; he just wants the horn. I don’t think I believe Evil exists. I believe selfishness does.
I also kind of like it that the Big Scary Evil Army turns out to be kind of dinky and unprepared.
Nowadays I probably would try to avoid using the word “necromancer,” too.
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8. The Change drives a lot of hardcore SF people bonkers. I used to defend myself by conspiratorially whispering to them, “It isn’t reeeeal.” It’s fun to do but unsatisfactory: the truth, of course, is that I simply know a lot more about how the world works now than I did then (remember my main interests in school?), and nowadays I would at least try to address some of these frustrating inconsistencies.
But as it stands, the Change is an awfully inconsistent phenomenon, isn’t it? I mean, how come a bicycle doesn’t work but George’s watch does? They’re essentially the same thing, using gears to transfer motion. Ditto fires: people smoke cigarettes and light campfires all over the place, but guns don’t work. Why one combustion and not the other?
The origin of the Change as milieu is pretty simple: as a long-time martial artist, I really hated guns. I wanted to make them all didn’t happen no more, so I did. Firearms don’t work because I said so. Again I say to you: nonny nonny pooh pooh.18
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9. A few people have suggested that I revise the World Trade Center hang gliding sequence for reprint editions of Ariel, or in some way incorporate the destruction of the towers into Ariel’s own amorphous post-apocalypse. I have resisted doing so for any number of reasons.
Ariel was written at a time and in a world in which the towers existed. A world, in fact, in which the towers had been constructed relatively recently.
Since that time, of course, the World Trade Center has become much more than that, and will remain so—in the American national conscience, at least—for generations. A great deal has been written about what that loss means. I am not here to add to it but to discuss why I feel it is wrong to retrofit an old novel to suit events subsequent and irrelevant to its birth.
To be honest I’m not comfortable addressing the issue at all. I do not want to be perceived as trying to ride a small novel on a shock wave of national tragedy. I address the issue here only because—precisely because—the fall of the towers has become so iconic that a failure to address it would also seem to stand out, by omission.
In Ariel the World Trade Center isn’t a symbol or a tragedy or a metaphor. The biggest onus its author placed on it was as a pointed reference and contrast to The Lord of the Rings. When the film version of The Two Towers was released there was discussion of changing the title. To New Line Studios’ credit, their reasons for not changing the title were largely the same ones I am giving for not revising Ariel to accommodate history: it was written before those events, and it isn’t about them.
I also feel that to revise the implicit history contained in any form of art is an act of capitulation—in this case, to the very people who brought the towers down.
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10. One last thing. Ariel seems to have had a strong effect on a lot of people who read it at a certain age—between twelve and eighteen, or thereabouts. I remember my certainty, when the book came out, that Ariel would not have been one of my favorite novels had I encountered it as a novel written by someone else. It was an odd feeling; I wanted to write the kind of books I looked for but couldn’t find anywhere. I chalked it up to the gulf between where I was and where I wanted to be.
It took me a while to realize Ariel would have been one of my favorite novels had I encountered it somewhere between twelve and sixteen. Since its author was only a few years older than that when he wrote it, perhaps he should cut himself a little slack.
But the responses to Ariel have been more rewarding than those to anything I have written since. People have named their children after it. (I’m glad I didn’t name my unicorn Murgatroyd.) I’ve received a lot of mail from people telling me it really had an influence on their lives and helped them cope with growing up.
A teacher in Louisiana once wrote to tell me about a kid she was having a problem with. He was flunking out and didn’t care. Wouldn’t read. Wouldn’t do homework. At the school library he found a copy of Ariel and liked the cover.19 He read the book, and something about it struck a responsive chord in him, kindled something. He started reading like gangbusters. Couldn’t get enough. Improved his grades, passed his classes, ate all his green vegetables, and for all I know went on to save the President from an assassin’s bullet and negotiate land-rights treaties for dispossessed atoll dwellers. All like that.
I didn’t expect any of this when I wrote Ariel; I just wanted—needed—to tell this story, see? Write from my heart. Say something true as well and beautifully as I could, whatever guise it ended up wearing. But there isn’t a writer out there who doesn’t want to believe his or her work makes some kind of difference. Who wouldn’t like to be somebody’s favorite writer. I don’t believe those who claim otherwise, or I think they are fooling themselves. Or, hell, maybe they’re sincere, but I just don’t understand them.
But knowing that some concrete good has arisen—for whatever reason—from something you created, something fabricated from whole cloth by an imagination not content to idly conjecture but to give those musings form and pattern—nothing else feels that way for me. It’s redeeming.
—Steven R. Boyett
PERMISSIONS
The epigraph is from For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, by T.S. Eliot, ©1928. Published by Faber and Faber Ltd. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher.
SELF RELIANCE, by Duane Locke, from the anthology A White Voice Rides a Horse, ©1980 by Duane Locke. Published by the University of Tampa Press. Permission to reprint granted by the author, Duane Locke.
Excerpt from Broca’s Brain, by Carl Sagan, ©1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Carl Sagan. Published by Random House, Inc. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher.
Excerpt from Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein, ©1973. Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher.
Excerpt from The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan, ©1977. Published by Ballantine Books. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher.
Quote from “For Your Eyes Only,” by Paul J. Nahin, Omni magazine, December 1980. ©1980 by Omni Publications, Ltd. Permission to reprint granted by the author, Paul J. Nahin.
Excerpt from The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle, ©1963. Published by the Viking Press. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher.