The Iron Maiden (42 page)

I'm getting older. At this writing I am 65 and on Medicare, and suffering from what answers the description of shingles: a pain in my left side, just over the ribs, that is quiescent except when I aggravate it, such as by coughing, sneezing, running, lifting, exercising, or rising from a chair. Shingles is a complication of chicken pox: the one strikes early in life, the other late. It's one of the herpes family, and it hides for decades until the body's immune system relaxes, then comes out to aggravate a nerve. I had it four years ago, in my right upper jaw, and it made my teeth so cold sensitive that I could not eat or drink anything cold; in fact I had to heat water to brush my teeth, because room-temperature was painful. I understood at that time that I would not get it again, but elsewhere read that there can be repeat episodes. It has been about two weeks now, and it is slowly, reluctantly easing. Could be something else, I suppose, but I didn't strain anything or do anything extraordinary; it just started slowly and built up for three days, giving me a small hint of hell. Meanwhile I am uncomfortably aware that several other genre writers I knew and interacted with, like Roger Zelazny and John Brunner, are dead. I am comparatively well off. Age, with all its complications, is certainly better than the alternative. But the game as I knew it is ending; the old order passes.

But apart from the complications of age and nostalgia, I'm not slowing down much. I'm still writing, and involved in other significant projects. I don't expect ever to retire; I'm a self-employed workaholic, so don't have to. But I am making a conscious effort to catch up on things that I want to have done before I kick the bucket, and this novel is one such. In fact it derives from the confluence of two of my life projects. The first is to get all of my 115-and-counting books into print by republishing all those that have gone out of print, so that any readers who want them all can have them; and the second is to make it possible for every other writer or hopeful writer to do the same. In 1997 I heard from one John Feldcamp, whose ambition was to set up a publishing facility that would enable anyone to be published. I told him that I liked the idea, but thought he didn't know what he was getting into. But as our dialogue developed, he satisfied me that he did know, and was quite serious. Thus I became an investor in XLIBRIS, and learned through experience about the perils of venture and angel capitalization. Venture capital pays for things like Internet Dot.com startups, and if they don't go bust and lose all the money, they may become powerful new forces and repay their investors many times over. I'm not sure what the ratio of successes to failures is, but I suspect it is small; more investments are lost than gained. It's really a very pricey gamble. So why does anyone do it? Because the few that do pay off may be so rewarding as to make up for a number of losses elsewhere. That is, a venture capitalist might invest in ten startup companies, and eight might fail, one might break even, and one would become a success, repaying twenty times the investment. Thus, taken as a whole, the investor might double his money in a fairly short period. Angel investment is even more so, because that's the one that invests in what the venture capitalists pass up as too risky. Now I'm not a gambler; I won't buy a lottery ticket. I won't even match pennies. I was raised as a Quaker (The Religious Society of Friends), and though I did not join that religion, a number of its precepts rubbed off on me, anti-gambling among them. Another is doing well by doing good--trying to invest money in socially responsible ways that are also good business. So my wife and I invested in Xlibris not in the wild hope of making a lot of money--we really don't need more money at this stage in life--but in the hope of enabling all the writers of the world to realize their dreams of being published and read. I figured it was 50-50 that we would lose our money, but we had to give it a try, just in case we might in this manner forever change the face of publishing for the better. That was a dream worth gambling on. So we became in effect an angel investor. This was a considerable education, and at times it seemed rather like a roller coaster ride, with no assurance that the track would continue beyond the next bend. At one point it seemed that we had doubled our money; a day later it seemed that we had lost it, with the company on the verge of collapse. So we doubled our investment, to enable the company to continue, and thereafter things improved. After another bad scare or two Xlibris obtained major venture capital investment, and was on track to become perhaps the dominant force in this type of publishing. Chances are that every writer will be able to publish, and that our investment will prove to be very good. It is nice when doing good does mean doing well.

So now I am republishing my back novels at Xlibris, and by the time I am done I expect to be the single largest author there, as it were, with fifty or more titles. But it's a job, because we have to scan the old books into the computer, and proofread them, and I had to write author's notes for them, and send them in, and proofread the galleys, and ponder new covers, and so on. If I set out to proofread every novel I have had published, it would take me perhaps two years, without doing any original writing in that time.

So this will be somewhat spaced out. I started with the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, and as I went through each novel I made notes, character lists, timeline, and whatever else I needed to keep it all straight. Then, because the material was now organized and fresh in mind, I wrote the concluding novel.

This one. So it has a certain significance. You might say that in order to do this project, I had to help set up a publishing services company, and republish the five prior novels. Only when I had done those things was I ready for The Iron Maiden. Eventually this novel, too, should be republished at Xlibris, but first I'll try to give it its chance at Parnassus, the conventional publishing establishment, because that's where the money is. Some critics profess to be horrified by the discovery that I write for money, as if that's not true of every commercial writer. If a writer can't earn his living through his writing, he will not remain a writer long unless he is independently wealthy. Except via the agency of companies like Xlibris, where writers publish more for the love of it than for money.

Now for Iron Maiden itself. It was a challenge to do a novel that is in a sense a sequel to a complete prior series. I had to cover existing material accurately, without making a collection of excerpts. Spirit Hubris's whole life was tied in with that of her brother Hope; she was always dedicated to his interests. If I skipped her interactions with Hope, I would leave most of her life a blank. If I included them all, it would become merely the same story seen through another viewpoint. So I compromised by including most of them, but abbreviated or summarized, and interspersing them with Spirit's own private thoughts and events that were not shown before. My effort was to make a separate story that could be read and understood by readers who had not read the original series, and that would also add significant material for readers who were familiar with the others. It may be that some will read this novel first, then go on to the prior novels; if so, I hope they discover things there that were not fully developed here. It may be that some who read the series when the novels were first published will find pleasant reminders in this novel. I hope so.

I wrote and adapted the first 88,000 words (of about 140,000) in July and August 1999, then had to break off to work on a movie project with a deadline, Princess Rose. When that was done I had to move on to the Xanth novel Swell Foop, also on a deadline. Then I took two months to catch up on backlogged reading and other chores, such as my participation as a member of the board of directors of Xlibris. Then in February I returned to write the last 50,000 words of Iron Maiden, and finished it in March, 2000. I don't like interrupting projects this way, but my career is a constant weighing of projects, and I work on those that require it, when they need it, rather than on those I might prefer. This comes under the heading of commercial writing: the project I did because I felt it was time for it had to wait on the paying projects. I'm used to it.

I receive huge reader input for my Xanth series, as fans suggest puns, characters, and stories, but very little for my other projects. That's all right; I have more notions of my own than I will use in my lifetime.

But on occasion other novels are affected, and that happened here. Marisol Ramos maintains a web site devoted to my works; my own hipiers.com has a link to it. She is of Hispanic descent, and caught an error of mine in the Space Tyrant series: since Halfcal is supposed to derive from Haiti, how can the refugees be Hispanic when Haiti is not? So I scrambled for the explanation, as given in this novel: they are at the fringe, in a territory that changed hands. So now I'm covered, thanks to Marisol. I hate to make significant mistakes, and that might have been a disastrous one.

As I read the first novels, after a lapse of about fifteen years, I must say I was impressed by their quality.

I feel that the Space Tyrant series is some of my best writing. Commercially it paled compared to my fantasy, but commercial success is not the same as quality. Neither is critical success, incidentally. Both commercial and critical success are functions of a complex of forces, and merit is only one of those forces, and probably not the main one. So my judgments of my own work (and that of others) are independent of sales or ratings. But to be specific: do I feel Space Tyrant is superior writing to Xanth?

Yes. That does not mean I think Xanth is bad, just that it's a different type that happens to appeal to a larger audience. So Xanth is more commercial. As for critical ratings--Space Tyrant garnered some of the lowest. I think that's a reflection on the inadequacy of the critics rather than the series. Ideally, reviewing and criticism are good and necessary things, but in practice they can be degraded to the point of uselessness. I think that's too bad. So my opinion is only my own--but that is the one I value most. I am glad to have these books available again, and the series complete.

So do I plan to write any more Space Tyrant novels? No. I feel that this novel catches up some loose ends and completes the story of the Tyrant. The exploration and human colonization of the galaxy will be left to other hands.