Cluster (40 page)

So the present novel,
Cluster
, is part of a cluster of seven to nine novels, depending whether
Tarot
counts as one or three. As it happened, it was published in the same year as the first Xanth fantasy novel,
A Spell for Chameleon
, and my reputation as a fantasy novelist soon eclipsed my indifferent fame as a science fiction novelist. Many readers don't even know I write anything but funny fantasy, and critics who condemn me as a lightweight for fantasy are careful never to read my serious science fiction. Such as
Cluster
.
 

After thirty years, I found I had forgotten whole chapters of this novel, and was able to read them as new fiction. That enabled me to judge what kind of writer I was. There were some bad habits, like using too many dashes, that I cleaned up as I retyped, but I found the novel itself to be solid. I like Flint of Outworld, and see echoes of him in my subsequent fiction, such as the ChroMagic series in which a smart barbarian villager is required against his will to become king of the planet instead of marrying the girl he loves. Actually the barbarian hero in a future culture theme is hardly original with me, and I had already used it elsewhere in my writing. Alp was the barbarian hero in my 1976 novel
Steppe
, doing well in a setting that emulated his Asiatic nomad origin. I was not conscious of those echoes until I retyped
Cluster.
I suppose a writer never can be quite sure of the background from which he draws.
 

It was a challenge to do the illustrations; I had to skip over them, then learn how to use my word processor's drawing program to make the appropriate circles. The original novel had two appended pages: one of the stars of Sphere Sol, the other of the Vicinity Cluster of Spheres. I concluded that the first was complicated and not especially useful, so deleted it for this edition. The second I referred to constantly, to get my bearings, so I moved it up to be a frontispiece. It is imperfect, because I wasn't able to control the drawing program very well, but should give the general idea of Sphere Sol and its neighbors. It helps me to have at least a crude map to give me a sense of place.

The problem with the drawing program was that sometimes it allowed me to move a circle, and sometimes it didn't. The operative rule seemed to be that I could move it only when I didn't really need to. When I did need to, then I couldn't. Instead it insisted on starting a new circle within the original one. I had to erase and start over several times, and still wound up with a messy job.

Figuring out that map originally was a challenge. I thought there would be information about the distances the stars were from us. There wasn't. I bought an expensive star map book, several feet on a side, and it was marvelously complete, but didn't provide distances. I had to struggle to run down estimates of particular stars, and finally settle on those I nailed. Thus what may be a somewhat random assortment came to be, and I built my Spheres on those. Maybe there is better information now, thirty years later, but it's too late for this novel.

I had several impressions as I typed and proofread the novel. I had forgotten how fully it addresses sapient alien cultures. Adventure science fiction novels I have read tend to assume that alien cultures must be variants of humanoid, with vertical two-legged males and females dominating. Or horrendous blobby monsters whose main purpose is to get blasted to bits by a human hero just before gobbling a luscious half bare screaming human damsel. I regard this as inadequate, and tried to devise aliens who were both un-humanoid and realistic. Thus the swimming Spicans, wheeled Polarians, and musical Mintakans. Where alien humanoids did exist, in Sphere Canopus, they turned out to be unworthy.

I also addressed alien sex. I was concerned for a time about the three genders of Spica, because Isaac Asimov had a novel with three sexes; was I copying him? Then I discovered one of my early notes on the novel: I had the idea for tri-sex before Asimov's novel was published, and of course I did it differently. That was a relief. Then there was the way Polarians do it, which I think makes sense while being quite unlike anything on planet Earth. Apart from that, I find myself rather taken with the Polarian Tsopi; she's my kind of girl in every way except the physical.

I was pained by the fate of Honeybloom. Yet this is the way it would be likely to be, when a man travels far and long. She was in effect a war widow. At least Flint did right by her, in his fashion.

Readers may assume that writers write novels from beginning to end. That's not necessarily the case. My charting of the novel indicated I needed at least one Elizabethan or Victorian sequence, to show the progression of the culture from Stone Age to Modern, so I set that for Chapter 6. But though I love ancient history, I'm less keen on that interim period. In fact I dreaded having to write in that setting. So I left it until last. Then when I finally had to tackle it—lo, it came together and I had no problem. Writing can be like that, too; scenes that should be difficult can be easy, while those expected to be easy may be difficult. I love that high-Kirlian dragon, and the way Flint dealt with the palace dandies.

And the Tarot theme. This has its own history, as it spreads across this series of novels and comes to fruition in the novel
Tarot
, set before the others. I have no belief in the supernatural, but found the tarot cards useful, and they do have powers in this series. Melody of Mintaka, in the sequel novel, is a skilled tarot reader.

At any rate, I liked this novel, thirty years later, and hope you did too.