A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (23 page)

AFTERWORD

First Novel, Seventh Novel

In February 1975
, Ballantine Books published my first novel. A paperback, it bore the rococo title
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
. My seventh novel, published in 1980, was also called
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
,
except that, of course, it wasn’t. This may take some explaining.

In 1975, my career as a science fiction writer was about five years old, and I had already published stories ornately dubbed “On the Street of the Serpents,” “The Windows in Dante’s Hell,” “The White Otters of Childhood,” and “Death and Designation Among the Asadi.” One of the reasons that I liked science fiction, in fact, was that Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and even J. G. Ballard—icons in the late 1960s/early 1970s—often used titles of a nakedly poetic stamp; and my own love of language put me immediately in tune with the field they represented.

Ellison, for instance, had published “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin.” Delany had written “We, In Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” and—wow!—“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” Zelazny had by then offered up “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and “. . . And Call Me Conrad,” while J. G. Ballard had given us “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,” “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon,” “You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe,” and, a miracle of evocativeness, “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.”

A new writer, I felt, could not hope to walk among these word-drunk visionaries without jousting with them. So my early stories usually arose less from a fascinating scientific concept, or a nifty metaphysical notion, or a dazzling plot twist than from a lovely phrase, a would-be title. And if a story did not grow from an exotic concatenation of syllables, I labored to find the concatenation
afterwards
, for I had the titles of Ellison, Delany, Zelazny, and Ballard—plus those of an earlier influence, Ray Bradbury, he of “Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed,” “A Medicine for Melancholy,” “All Summer in a Day,” and
Something Wicked This Way Comes
—to live up to.

I no doubt went overboard.

Anyone who still has a copy of the first, and only, Ballantine edition of
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
—a text I don’t want reprinted, ever—will see that the novel consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and fifteen intervening chapters, and that I gave every chapter not one, but two, titles. My tenth chapter, for instance, appears on the contents page as “PERFIDY: Out of Our Several Sleeps We Ascend.” Other chapters include “BEDFELLOWS: A Seduction Rich and Strange,” “COVENANT: Derringer and Dascra,” and, most convolute of all, “USURPATION: Two Meteors, Prodigal of Light.” Today, I read these titles with incredulity and embarrassment, but also—forgive me—with a rush of excitement and exhilaration. The words, even those in clunky combinations, still sing (at least for me, albeit with some Dylanesque wheezing), and I recall again the youthful energy and idealism, the naive poetic fervor, with which I tackled the scary, and heady, task of writing my first novel.

As a result, I still feel affection for the original version of
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
,
its callow narrator, and a few of the baroque images and metaphors with which I salted the text. But I also recognize the fumble-fingeredness and immaturity of that initial version. I recognized them soon after my novel appeared to a mostly unimpressed, if not rabidly indifferent, American public.

Not soon enough, I’ll admit in this aside, to keep me from lifting a line from Archibald MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” and calling my second novel, and first hardcover,
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees—
a title that Donald A.
Wollheim at DAW Books, publisher of its mass-market edition, could not envision on the cover of an SF adventure in a whirl rack in a bus station in Mokena, Illinois, or a grungy five-and-dime in Pueblo, Colorado. And so
Ecbatan
, as a paperback, became
Beneath the Shattered Moons
,
with a nod to Edgar Rice Burroughs and a silent raspberry for the jilted MacLeish.

You may now wonder if I wrote an entire novel on the dubious foundation of a preconceived title. No, I didn’t. If I had any literary forerunner in mind during the writing of
Funeral
, it was Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning Ace Science Fiction Special,
The Left Hand of Darkness
(1968).

As I have noted elsewhere, I may owe my career as a science-fiction writer to this novel. I read it when I was consciously trying to indoctrinate myself into the best that science fiction offered: Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and all the profane radical New Wavers then cropping up in Damon Knight’s
Orbit
series, Ellison’s
Dangerous Visions
, and an occasional Judith Merril anthology such as
SF 12
and
England Swings SF
(UK title
The Space-Time Journal
).

Even among this glut of invigorating stuff,
The Left Hand of Darkness
stood out. I realized that Le Guin’s novel demonstrated, unequivocally, that SF provided a legitimate vehicle for adroit speculation about both technology and the human condition. Therefore, and because Le Guin writes like a seraph, I admired her novel hugely . . . but I still wasn’t ready to start one of my own. In fact, I was several months away from placing my first story, “Piñon Fall,” with Ejler Jakobsson at
Galaxy
. I had some heavy lifting to do, a writerly apprenticeship to fulfill.

I subscribed to
Fantasy & Science Fiction
and
Galaxy
. I bought new paperbacks off the racks of the Hallmark gift shop near the May D&F department store in Colorado Springs, notably the Ace Science Fiction Specials edited by
Terry Carr. (At this Hallmark shop, I found
The Left Hand of Darkness
, Alexei Panshin’s
Rite of Passage
, Zelazny’s
Isle of the Dead
, Keith Roberts’s
Pavane
, Joanna Russ’s
And Chaos Died
, Michael Moorcock’s
The Black Corridor
, R. A. Lafferty’s
Fourth Mansions
, Bob Shaw’s
The Palace of Eternity
, and many other fascinating titles.)

From the dusty bins of second-hand emporia in Colorado Springs or Denver, I salvaged used or out-of-print sf classics. I began to write “imaginative” tales of my own. Along with Klaus Krause, my English-department officemate at the Air Force Academy Prep School, I attended meetings of the Denver Area Science Fiction Association, all held in the basement of a branch bank several blocks from downtown.

One noteworthy evening, Harlan Ellison himself showed up—late, of course—in the company of a club officer. He read from a copy of his story “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,” soon to appear in
Orbit 8
.
He held up the cover proof of his Avon story collection
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
(1969). He signed autographs for those of us who had brought copies of his books. (The young Ed Bryant, whom I met that night, was a DASFA member on hand for Ellison’s visit, and Bryant, the dog, had already
sold
some stories of his own.)

In asking for a signature for my well-fingered copy of
Paingod
, I got Ellison’s back up by inquiring if he had ever written a novel. With audible annoyance, he let me know that he’d done several—four, if memory serves. I was delighted as well as abashed to have yanked
his chain, for although I still haven’t read a
full-length novel by Ellison (who later told my wife, Jeri, that my “marmoset eyes” made me an untrustworthy companion), I left that unforgettable meeting, knowing that even a short-story writer, including a
natural
one like the Harlequin, may have the ability to go long as well as short. Although that lesson did not sink in on our drive back to Colorado Springs, or even in the following three years, it registered on
some
level, and one day I would surely have need of it.

A love of arresting, multiword titles.

Ursula Le Guin’s novel about a planet called Winter and its population of alien but
human
androgynes.

A self-directed crash course in contemporary science fiction.

And a meeting at which an energetic short-story writer told me that, yeah, he’d written a novel, several, and why didn’t I wake up and smell the java?

These are the foundations of my first novel,
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
. . .
or, at least, some of them.

As noted earlier, my first sale was to
Galaxy
. That occurred in the spring of 1970, and “Piñon Fall” appeared in the Oct.-Nov. issue. I then placed several pieces with Edward L. Ferman, editor of
Fantasy & Science Fiction
: “Darktree, Darktide,” “A Tapestry of Little Murders,” “Spacemen and Gypsies.” I sold a novelette in my Urban Nucleus series, “If a Flower Could Eclipse,” to Jakobsson at
Worlds of Fantasy
, and a second UrNu story, “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” to Damon Knight at
Orbit
. These stories were SF, horror, fantasy, or hybrid mongrels of these forms.

My sixth or seventh sale proved my most important, although I did not understand that
until later. Best known for his
Star Trek
script “The Trouble With Tribbles,” David Gerrold was editing original paperback anthologies for Ballantine (
Protostars
) and Dell (
Generation
). In the spring of 1972, he was assembling a second Ballantine anthology, presumably the beginning of a series,
Science Fiction Emphasis
.

To David, I sent my first novella, a work pushing seventy pages, a projection of
myself as a character into a future Spain in which the dying Franco has had his brain transplanted into the body of a healthy Nordic; meanwhile, the artist Picasso, reconciled to the old generalissimo and kept alive by mechanical means, returns to Spain to take part in its first free elections in decades. This story was “On the Street of the Serpents.” After I mailed it off, David replied with a letter noting that it was exactly the sort for which he’d inaugurated
SF Emphasis
.
He wanted—hallelujah!—to buy it.

Eventually, Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books read “On the Street of the Serpents.” The cofounder of that trail-blazing paperback house liked it, too—enough, at least, to ask David to ask me if I had a novel in the works or if I could at least show her a proposal for one. She would look with favor on almost anything I sent her. This news flattered me, but I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, a rank beginner with only a few sales to my credit, and I had pushed my limits to write one coherent story of seventy pages. How could I do a hundred, much less three hundred, without my prose degenerating into jargon and my story into surreal argle-bargle?

Actually, I was
afraid
to write a novel. But an image began to haunt me, a striking mental picture of a humanoid alien with gemstones for eyes, a vestigial scar for a
mouth, and a skin structure permitting it to absorb nutrients through the palms of its hands. But I had no story, only this outré concept. I fiddled with it. I scratched out notes on the blotter of my desk at the Prep School. Either before drifting to sleep at night or while driving to work in the morning, I tried to figure out some of the likely metabolic consequences of my alien’s unlikely anatomy.

During all this futzing about, I wrote a novelette deploying representatives of my imaginary species. In it, I called them
Doukhobors
after a sect of Russian Christians who advocated loyalty to one’s own spiritual light and the rejection of all external authority. My models were the modern Canadian Doukhobors, immigrants from Russia, who, as recently as the 1950s, had stripped naked and marched in groups to protest what they saw as official, and godless, discrimination against their faith. I set my story on another planet, in an island chain virtually identical in topography and ecology to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, and I called this novelette—forgive me—“A Far Galapagos, an Inward Heart.” I then afforded every editor in the field a chance to reject my earnest mishmash. All of them did, but Ted White at Sol Cohen’s
Amazing
and
Fantastic
did offer me the consolation of encouragement.

So I filed the abortion away, shoving its inchoate conceits into mental limbo, fearing them too pulpish and grotesque for credible fulfillment and doubting my ability to devise a story that would redeem them. I also doubted my ability to expand “A Far Galapagos, an Inward Heart” to a strong end 85,000 words from its opening sentence. I had a deep-seated novel-writing phobia. Meanwhile, I wrote two other stories; each grew to approximately the length of my
SF Emphasis
sale: “The White Otters of Childhood” and “Death and Designation among the Asadi.” These novellas landed on the final Nebula ballot for 1973. Also, I secured a position as an instructor of freshman English at the University of Georgia, left the service, and returned to Athens with Jeri and our infant son, Jamie. There, I finished the last sections of “Death and Designation” and the stories “Allegiances,” “Cathadonian Odyssey,” “Rogue Tomato,” “Blooded on Arachne,” “The Samurai and the Willows,” “In Rubble, Pleading,” my first draft of “The House of Compassionate Sharers,” and a Vietnam War story, “The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves.” I began to believe, sort of, that I could write a novel.

Here, my memory gets fuzzy. As Joseph Brodsky puts it in his memoir
Less Than One
, “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.” I pulled out my old notes about the aliens with gems for eyes and my scruffy copy of “A Far Galapagos,” etc., and, at David Gerrold’s urging, wrote the first three or four chapters of the book that mutated into
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
. I sent these chapters, again at David’s urging, to Ballantine Books (which, at that point, still had not published the anthology for which he had acquired “On the Street of the Serpents”), and Betty Ballantine liked them well enough to ask for more.