Before They Were Giants (36 page)

o author has done more to popularize shared-world fiction than R. A. Salvatore. With the creation of his signature character, the, dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden, in the second Forgotten Realms novel for Dungeons & Dragons, Salvatore started a wildfire that has burned steadily ever since. -Along with further tie-in novels for D&D and Star Wars, he’s also published numerous creator-owned series such as The DemonWars Saga, the Spearwielder’s Tales, and the Crimson Shadow series. Of the more than 50 books he currently has in print, 18 of them have been
New York Times
best sellers, totaling more than 10 million copies sold. And with his highly detailed action scenes and classic roleplaying-game flavor, Salvatore’s name is ubiquitous among fans of both fantasy and gaming alike.

Though Salvatore launched his career with the Forgotten Realms novel
The Crystal Shard,
in 1988, “A Sparkle for Homer” represents his first foray into short fiction, and epitomizes the fast-paced, high-adventure fantasy for which he’s known.

Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

The charm of it. I fear that we’re losing the charm of fantasy. As we profess our grittiness and willingness to let the bad guys win or as we “gray down” the heroes, we are pushing aside a very important paradigm of escapist fantasy fiction: the good feeling. I’m not saying this lightly, and certainly not calling for a Polyanna genre, but there remains room on those many shelves for a tale that fills you with a sense of adventure, a sense of heroism and a feeling at the end that things got a little bit, or a lot, better.

If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?

I never follow this kind of reasoning and won’t answer. When I had the chance to rewrite my first novel before its reprint with Del Rey, I read the book and cringed often. Some of the ideas were so dated—the Bermuda Triangle angle for example—and quite honestly, some of the mechanics were less than perfect. But I didn’t change a thing. Novels and stories are a snapshot in time, both reflective of the world around them and indicative of where the author was when he/she wrote the piece. Rewriting is cheating everyone.

What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

This was initially a story about Drizzt and Wulfgar, my signature characters in the Forgotten Realms. I wrote it for
Dragon
magazine, but to my surprise, they rejected it. I really liked it, though, and so when this opportunity came up, I sent it to Brian Thomsen at Warner Books. He liked it and put it in the anthology
Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows and Wee Folk.
To my ultimate satisfaction, the story got great reviews—I still needle the
Dragon
editor about that whenever I hear from her. It’s all good-natured, of course. One man’s steak is another’s hamburger, and it’s all perfectly valid.

Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

It was early on, but I had a few books published already. The most important thing for me was that this anthology got me out of Lake Geneva again, and with some well-known New York writers like Craig Shaw Gardner. It was quite a thrill being in print beside some of those folks. I don’t know that it had an effect on my career other than that, but I got to publish a story I really enjoyed writing.

How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?

In ways good and bad. Mechanically, I can fly through now with little problem. I think in terms of story structure and tightness, I’m better now, as well. But experience brings a cost, I fear, and I have to battle the downside all the time. When I first started, there was an energy there that couldn’t be contained. I had to write—all the time! I can draw a sports analogy: when I was twenty-five, I could run up and down the court for an hour without a gasp. Now at fifty, that court seems awfully long, doesn’t it? Of course, I’m smarter now, and I know how to cheat.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

Boy, this is a tough one. My general advice remains the same: if you can quit, then quit. If you can’t quit, you’re a writer. This has to come from inside; you have to have stories clawing at the inside of your skin, demanding release. If the actual writing isn’t like that, this business will destroy you in short order. On a more specific and pragmatic note, things are changing very quickly in the publishing business, and anyone trying to break in had better understand those changes and be on the front end of the wave. A couple of years ago, I would never have recommended self-publishing, for example, but now I’m hearing that some folks are having success with that. Using the Internet, conventions and local markets, these authors are building a following and that then attracts a publisher. Getting published the old fashioned way—sending a manuscript to a publisher—seems like a dead end right now.

Again, I’m shooting half-blind here. I’ve been writing contracted books for a lot of years and haven’t been on the market.

Any anecdotes regarding the story or your experiences as a fledgling writer?

I still giggle when I think about the biggest break I ever got, the luckiest choice: the creation of Drizzt Do’Urden. When auditioning for the Forgotten Realms’ second novel, the only written reference I had was the first novel, Douglas Niles’ excellent
Darkwalker on Moonshae
(I still love that book). In that book, the only maps portrayed the Moonshae Isles, a small cluster of small islands that afforded no room for stories that didn’t at least touch upon the dominant characters Doug had created. Nothing of substance could happen there without Doug’s heroes knowing about it.

So when I wrote the sample chapter for my audition, I used one of Doug’s characters to introduce Wulfgar, the protagonist of my book, and then get out of the way, as I didn’t want to use Doug’s character. Soon after, TSR explained that they didn’t want me to set my book on the Moonshaes, which confused me because all I saw other than them was ocean. However, they had decided that I would write the book. So they sent me the maps of the Forgotten Realms, this vast, sprawling world. After a couple of weeks of back-and-forth, figuring out which game designers and which writers were doing books and modules in various parts, I exiled myself to this tiny strip of land as far out of the way as I could get, and decided that would be Icewind Dale.

I thought no more about it and went about trying to flesh out the outline of the book when, while sitting at my day job (I was a financial analyst at the time), I got a call from Mary Kirchoff, my editor. Mary had a problem. She was going into a marketing meeting to “sell” my book to the sales team, but since I was now thousands of miles from the Moonshaes, and since Doug was writing sequels to his book, I needed a new sidekick for Wulfgar.

“No problem,” I said. “I didn’t want to use anyone else’s characters anyway.”

“I’m going in to sell the book and I need a new sidekick for Wulfgar,” Mary replied.

“No problem. I’ll get back to you next week.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’ve got a meeting on your book and I need that sidekick.”

With a sigh, I answered, “Okay, it’s almost lunch time. I’ll try to come up with something during the break.”

“No, Bob,” came her exasperated reply. “I’m standing outside the room where the others are waiting because I’m late for a meeting about your book, and I need a sidekick for Wulfgar.”

“A black elf,” I blurted a moment later (the drow used to be called “black elves,” not “dark elves”).

“A drow?” I could hear the hesitance in her voice.

“Yeah, a drow ranger. That’ll be cool. No one’s done that before.”

“There’s probably a reason for that, Bob.”

“No, no, it will work. A drow ranger, a good black elf.”

She was late for the meeting and couldn’t stand there arguing with me, so she just said, “Okay, since it’s a sidekick character, I’ll let you get away with it. What’s his name?”

Without hesitation, without having any idea of why or how or anything else, I said, “Drizzt Do’Urden of Daermon N’a’shezbaernon, the Ninth House of Menzoberranzan.”

“What?”

“I don’t know!”

“Can you spell that?”

“Not a chance.”

And it was true. I had no idea of how that happened, of where that idea came from. I had never thought about a drow character, had never played one in a game, or anything like that. I knew not what a “Daermon N’a’shezbaernon” might be, or what a “Menzoberranzan” was or why this was the ninth house. It just happened. Poof. Out of the blue.

Changed my life.

Poof.

<>

~ * ~

The Boys

by Charles Stross

he boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of authority: the boys didn't care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead, stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose.

Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver.

"Boys; He's been dead for half an hour." The constables flinched and whined; she noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste.

"Nothing here," she told the autopilot. "Get the skull, then take us home."

The small noises of relief were drowned out by the roar of the fans. Some of the cyborged dogs muttered and scratched their implants as the carrier turned and rumbled back towards the castle. In the wake of the hovercraft the cobblestones were darker than before, by an increment of congealing blood.

~ * ~

The castle, a cube with edges a kilometer long, shone with an ominous red glow that filtered through the grime of centuries. The degenerate bioforms of the landscape twisted away from the laser-veined monolith of lunar basalt; nerve-trees bubbled into fatty shapes and acantho-pods bristled as they crept past. The clouds above it reflected a red glow, megawatts of energy expended in a display of power. The ceiling of the world, a continuation of the floor, hung thirty kilometers overhead, masked by clouds: cylindrical storms and spiral winds induced by convection from the algae-fogged solar windows were the predominant weather pattern. The world existed in a soyuz-shell; TransLunar Seven, the Islamic Revolutionary Shogunate, had seen better days.

The view from the incoming drifter would have been spectacular if anyone had bothered to observe it. The pod closed in on the habitat slowly, waiting to be picked up by a tug as it drifted past. Its self-sustaining ecosystem basked in the glare of sunlight close to the sun, pulsing out a call sign to the tracking systems of the orbital city. At a range of a hundred kilometers the orbital nation was a slowly rolling wall of grey metal and ceramic. Outlying parabolic light farms provided a hook for the eye, stationary mylar mirrors focussed on geodesic domes that could contain anything from algae tanks to laser cells. Thin stems of plastic fastened them to the hub regions at either end of the colony. They were huge, kilometers in diameter, as were the gigantic solar windows set into the wall of the world. The drift pod was a bacillus approaching a dinosaur.

But the pod was bigger than any reptile, and carried a varied cargo of sentience. There were the pod's native bionics and their supportive life- system, and more -- a human cargo. Nike was a fully gender-identified female human; she had the right complement of arms, legs and sensory organs, which was not mandatory. Coming from Troy-Jupiter, where lots of things called themselves human, this was quite a surprise. But Nike wasn't bothering about the scenery; she was worrying about customs.