Among the Powers (34 page)

If some of that sounds very slightly like
part of the plot of “Babylon 5,” well, I thought it up in 1971.

I didn’t make the mistake of assuming the
Cold War would last forever, or that it would turn hot, which puts
me ahead of a lot of SF writers of the time as a
prognosticator.

I did plan it out in considerable detail,
but when I actually began writing science fiction professionally I
wound up not using most of the stories I had originally intended as
the key components of the whole thing. Some of them get mentioned
here and there as background detail, but that’s all.

Among the Powers
, in fact, is a
sequel to stories that were never published—never even finished,
really.

My first attempt at writing a novel that got
anywhere near completion was called
Tales of Shadowdark
. It
was a fragmented mess of a story that never got close to
publishable form; I wrote about 40,000 words of it between 1972 and
1976 before realizing it was hopeless and abandoning it. Some of
the descriptions of Shadowdark’s past in
Among the Powers
are based on it.

At some point in the 1970s—I don’t remember
just when—I started writing a novel with the working title
The
Rise and Fall of the Second Imperium
. I had a complete (if
skimpy) outline but never got past about Chapter Three in writing
it; still, it provided the background for Thaddeus the Black in
Among the Powers
. The possibility of actually writing the
whole thing has never been entirely forgotten; I think that it,
unlike
Tales of Shadowdark
, had a viable plot and some
interesting characters.

In a way,
Among the Powers
is a
direct sequel to it.

There were some other fragments about
Shadowdark, Thaddeus, and Thaddeus’ brother Peter that never
developed far enough to have titles or coherent plots. They’re
probably still in a drawer somewhere in my office.

So
Among the Powers
wasn’t meant as a
stand-alone novel at all, but as part of an elaborate series; it’s
just that most of the rest of the series never got written, let
alone published.
Among the Powers
was actually meant to be
the last in the series—I had nothing planned any further in the
future.

So my future history provided the
background; what about the foreground?

Well, I used to make a habit of writing
stories inspired by specific authors—not imitating them, exactly,
but playing with some of the themes they wrote about. I would
happily borrow from multiple sources, but generally had a specific
author in mind as the inspiration.

To name a few examples,
The Lure of the
Basilisk
was inspired by Michael Moorcock,
The Chromosomal
Code
by A.E. Van Vogt,
Shining Steel
by Lester del Rey,
The Misenchanted Sword
by L. Sprague de Camp.

Among the Powers
was inspired by
Roger Zelazny.

I’d been reading a lot of Zelazny, and
decided that I wanted to write something where high-tech humans are
taken for gods by their low-tech fellows—something with a trickster
character in a lead role. I put together my list of twenty-eight
Powers. Zelazny had sometimes based his on real pantheons, but I
saw no reason to go that route; instead I tried to come up with
roles that bored immortals might want to play to amuse themselves.
The locals then interpreted these as gods, and assigned
mythological roles fitting the personae the Powers had created.

As I already mentioned, though, two of my
twenty-eight were pre-existing characters: Shadowdark and his son
Thaddeus. I already knew their history in some detail, including
why they would have been with this group.
The Rise and Fall of
the Second Imperium
was to have ended with Thaddeus aboard a
starship, flying off in disgrace to look for Shadowdark. I decided
that he found him, and a few centuries later the two of them were
among the Powers of Denner’s Wreck. They fit in perfectly.

None of the others were natural immortals,
but those two were; that’s why they’re so big, as the nature of the
mutation that made them effectively immortal is that they never
really mature, never stop growing. The growth slows down to almost
nothing, but by the time of the story—well, they’re huge.

Once I had the Powers I needed some human
characters, to provide a look at the Powers from outside, and from
there everything followed naturally.

I thought I had a novel’s worth of plot, but
to my surprise the first draft was too short. I noticed the
coincidence that I had twenty-eight chapters and twenty-eight
Powers, and decided to fill out the word-count by adding the little
folk-tale excerpts at the start of each chapter. I had a pretty
good grounding in myth and folklore, so it wasn’t difficult at all,
and gave me a chance to show off a lot of background I’d devised
that didn’t come into the main story directly. People have told me
that those vignettes are the best part of the book, and I had fun
writing them, but originally their purpose was simply to add
wordage.

The observant reader will notice that
they’re credited to two different storytellers, Atheron and Kithen,
who have slightly different styles, and that one or two are
supposedly quoted from conversations, rather than actual
storytelling. That seemed the best way to convey the information I
wanted to convey; trying to make everything fit Atheron’s customary
style was too limiting.

I wanted the physical setting to be
believable, as well as the cultural one, and gave my fictional
planet a good bit of thought. As the note at the front of the book
says, the planet was designed with the help of a program called
“World Builder,” created by Stephen Kimmel and Dean R. Lambe. I no
longer have a copy of the program, and I don’t remember much about
it; it was a DOS program, not especially fancy, but it came in
handy in assigning the planet’s physical characteristics. [But see
"Websites of Interest" below—ed.]

It was that program that suggested that
young, moonless Denner’s Wreck would probably have much shorter
days than Earth. The planet’s day is only about thirteen hours
long, much too short for humans to handle comfortably, so the
colonists think of a day as lasting twenty-six hours. This is
divided into two lights and two darks, rather than just night and
day; they sleep every other dark, and a day consists of firstlight,
midwake dark, and secondlight.

Denner’s Wreck is about the size of Earth
but slightly less dense, resulting in marginally lower gravity.
It’s lacking in heavy metals, which is why the survivors of the
original wreck couldn’t maintain a technological culture.

Yes, I do know that a young, moonless planet
probably wouldn’t have a breathable atmosphere. Tough. I cheated. I
did give the planet its own native life, though, as a partial
justification.

The native life forms called “watersheets”
are based on the notion that life had happened, and had reached the
level of multicellular organisms, but not all of it had yet
developed the tube shape that eventually became the gut, the vein,
and the basis of virtually all life on Earth. Watersheets are just
one or two cells thick, but can grow indefinitely in the other two
dimensions.

Native life had
definitely
not yet
emerged onto land, which is why all land life is completely
terrestrial in origin.

Denner’s Wreck was originally going to be a
planet of Lambda Aurigae, a star that just happens to have a
spectrum very similar to our own sun, but younger. I decided,
though, that Lambda Aurigae was too close—a colony there wouldn’t
have been lost for a thousand years. So I relocated it to the third
planet of 246-Aurigae. I have no idea whether such a star exists or
is possible; for all intents and purposes I was still using Lambda
Aurigae, but calling it by another name.

I did map out the inhabited portion of the
planet, all on a single continent, showing where each Power’s
demesne was; alas, I lost the map long ago. It may still be
somewhere in my house, but I have no idea where.

That’s all the background of any
significance, but there are also a few obscure references or
in-jokes in
Among the Powers
—I do that a lot, actually,
working things most readers won’t recognize into my stories to
amuse myself. There are three here that I remember immediately.

First is the code phrase “Ka nama kaa
lajerama!” It’s from Robert E. Howard’s stories about King Kull of
Atlantis, as adapted by Marvel Comics; the serpent men trying to
overthrow Valusia can be detected despite their shapeshifting by
their inability to say these words.

Second is the name “Walren,” which appears
in the tale of Lord Carlov. Walren Vanse was a pen name I sometimes
used when writing for my high school’s underground newspaper. I’ve
used the name Walren in Ethshar stories, as well.

And third is the protagonist’s name, Bredon,
which came from Dorothy Sayers’ detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey.
His name in full is Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, and I borrowed his
second middle name for my character.

One final note—the original title,
Denner’s Wreck
, was the choice of my editor at Avon. My
title was
The Light of Another Sun
, but he thought that was
too generic. It may be generic, but
Denner’s Wreck
seems
downright misleading, since Captain Denner never appears in the
story and the wreck itself is ancient history. I have therefore
yielded to temptation, and this edition has been retitled. I hope
readers and book-buyers won’t be confused. If you bought this under
the mistaken impression it’s a new story, I apologize.

—
Lawrence Watt-Evans

Gaithersburg, Maryland

May 2008

Book author’s website:
www.watt-evans.com

webpage for this book:
www.watt-evans.com/dennerswreck.html

or
www.watt-evans.com/amongthepowers.html

Cover artist’s website:
www.gwtoddart.com

A spreadsheet version of World Builder can be found
at:

www.angelfire.com/trek/ussdestiny/files/world.xls%20

Please note that websites come and go. The above
addresses are

current and correct as of the publication date of
this book.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of more than forty
novels of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as over a
hundred short stories, including the Hugo-winning “Why I Left
Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.” He has served as president of the
Horror Writers Association and treasurer of SFWA, and was the
managing editor of the Hugo-nominated webzine
Helix
throughout its brief existence.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, he has
lived for more than twenty years in the Maryland suburbs of
Washington. He has a wife, two grown children, and the obligatory
writer’s cat.

Visit his website at
www.watt-evans.com
,
or find him on Facebook.

from
FoxAcre Press

Nightside City

A Carlisle Hsing Adventure

Nightside City will die in the coming dawn—so why is
someone trying to buy up the town? A blend of hard science fiction
and hard-boiled film noir detective story. Everyone thinks the
farside of the planet Epimethus is in permanent shadow—a safe place
to plant a city, safe from a dangerously close sun. But the planet
is rotating. Dawn is coming, and the value of property and life in
Nightside City is rapidly depreciating. Detective Carlisle Hsing
needs to find out who is buying up all the doomed property—and
why?

Realms of Light

A Carlisle Hsing Adventure

Return to the universe of the classic SF
detective-noir novel
Nightside City
and to the casebook of
hard-boiled, soft-hearted Carlisle Hsing Someone is trying to kill
a powerful business magnate, and it looks like an inside job. He
needs an outsider to investigate the case—an expendable outsider.
He offers Carlisle a deal. Risk her life and everything she has,
return to Nightside City, save those she left behind, unmask her
client’s deadly enemy, and have riches showered upon her—or else
die in the attempt.

Shining Steel

John Mercy-of-Christ was born and raised on
Godsworld—a planet settled by Christian Fundamentalists who then
lost all contact with the rest of humanity. With no external
enemies to fight, the people of Godsworld fought among themselves.
But then John encounters people he can’t fight, people with
technology far beyond anything Godsworld has seen in centuries. The
ways and powers of the newcomers are vast and incomprehensible, and
the odds against him seem insurmountable—but he’s not about to just
give up. After all, God is on his side. Or is He?

Crosstime Traffic

Twenty tales of Fantasy and Science Fiction by
Hugo-Winning Author Lawrence Watt-Evans, master of many genres.
Includes the Hugo-winning story ‘Why I Left Harry’s All-Night
Hamburgers.’

Celestial Debris

Celestial Debris
includes stories that have
long out of print, a story never before published in the United
States—and ‘One Million Lightbulbs,’ published for the first time
anywhere.