Read Labyrinth of Night Online
Authors: Allen Steele
Labyrinth of Night
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —
Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —
Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —
OtherRealms
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —
The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —
The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —
Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —
Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of
Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —
Rave Reviews
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
The Engines of God
“With
The Tranquility Alternative,
Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of
Ammonite
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In
The Jericho Iteration
he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Allen Steele
This one’s for Frank Jacobs…
Who wouldn’t take no for an answer
Part Three: In a Handful of Dust
19. The Running of the Minotaurs
B
EFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER
, let me make one thing clear, so there won’t be any misunderstandings:
There is no Face on Mars.
And there are no pyramids, either.
As stated in the opening acknowledgments,
Labyrinth of Night
is a work of science fiction … and in this instance, the word
fiction
needs to be emphasized. When I published the novel in 1992, I was already skeptical—more than skeptical; disbelieving, really—that there were any extraterrestrial artifacts on Mars. Since then, NASA has sent nearly a half-dozen probes to the Red Planet, and high-resolution photos taken from orbit have settled the issue. What was spotted in the Cydonia region by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976 was a collection of natural landforms which, due to the angle of sunlight falling on them and the fuzziness of the images themselves, vaguely appeared as if they might be artificial in origin. Yet they weren’t. They were nothing more than hills the Martian winds had eroded into shapes which—if you looked at them in just a certain way—resembled familiar objects: a giant face and a nearby collection of pyramids.
So why did I decide to treat them as if they were things left behind by an alien race? There lies the story …
In late 1986, I was getting close to finishing my first science fiction novel,
Orbital Decay
. I was still working as a newspaper reporter at the time, but Ace Books had already expressed interest in publishing this work in progress. My job had become frustrating, and I was seriously considering, if the book sold, turning in my resignation and taking a stab at writing SF full time. But if I did so, that meant I’d need to be ready to follow
Orbital Deca
y with another novel.
But what would I write about?
Orbital Decay
had absorbed my SF-writing attention for the previous three years. I had no other ideas, except that I wanted to continue writing about space exploration. Mars seemed like the natural next step. There hadn’t been very many stories about the place lately—during the 1980s, Mars had fallen out of vogue as a setting for SF novels—but I didn’t want to simply do another first-mission story; there had been too many of those already. I needed to find a new angle.
Then the November 1986 issue of
Analog
came out, and that month’s nonfiction article was a piece by science writer Richard C. Hoagland concerning a strange astronomical anomaly. Titled “The Curious Case of the Humanoid Face … on Mars,” it told how, several years earlier while examining old Viking orbital images, NASA researchers had stumbled upon an object that somewhat resembled a human face, and how the author himself had located nearby objects that somewhat resembled pyramids. It was Hoagland’s assertion that these things might be artificial, indicating that Mars might have once been inhabited.
Whereupon I leapt to my feet, shrieked, “Oh, my God! There’s aliens on Mars!” and then dashed to my typewriter, where I … . . .
No. That’s not what happened.
Hoagland’s article was intriguing, but I couldn’t have been more skeptical about his conclusions. I was an investigative reporter who’d also been trained as a science journalist; Hoagland’s hypothesis was based almost entirely on a handful of blurry ten-year-old photos, and that left too many unanswered questions for my liking.
As science, I couldn’t take it seriously. But as science fiction … well, there might be something there.
All serious SF is based on one simple question: “What if …” followed by the speculative query of your choice. As long as the story is based on science or technology that is in the realm of possibility, it’s fair game. However improbable the underlying premise may be, it can be the basis for a story if it hasn’t yet been proven to be impossible. So while the Face and the so-called pyramids might have been unlikely, until there was evidence against their existence, I could use Hoagland’s hypothesis as the springboard for a novel.
I finished
Orbital Decay
, sold it to Ace, quit my job, and—after a mild detour to do things like get married, establish a part-time career as a freelance journalist, and move to a log cabin in New Hampshire—I went to work on what then had the generic title
The Book of Mars
. But I’d barely written the first forty pages when I hit a block. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to do—an adventure story revolving around the discovery of alien relics in the Cydonia region—the whole thing just sputtered out on me.
I fought with it for a while, but finally gave up. This book just wasn’t ready to be written yet, if ever. So I threw the incomplete manuscript and my notes into a desk drawer and turned my attention elsewhere. By then, I’d begun selling short stories to
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, and its editor, Gardner Dozois, wanted more from me. It occurred to me that I had enough material to turn an aborted novel into a pretty snazzy novella, so I did major surgery on the fragment, provided the story with an ending, and sent it to Gardner under the title
Turn to Stone
. Gardner liked the story, but since he planned to use it in an issue for which he’d already scheduled a novella by Lucius Shepherd called
The Father of Stones
, we needed to come up with a different title. A skull-busting session on the phone and a long walk in the woods with my dog yielded a new name:
Red Planet Blues
(which was inspired by a chapter title in Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
—“Blues for a Red Planet”).
Red Planet Blues
appeared in the September 1989 issue of
Asimov’s
. It was my first published novella, and since it appeared shortly before
Orbital Decay
came out, it helped cement my status as a promising new writer. By then, I’d signed a two-book deal with Ace, so I went to work on my second SF novel,
Clarke County, Space
, and followed it with
Lunar Descent
, all three of which comprised a thematic trilogy set within what I’d eventually call the Near-Space series.
Yet
Red Planet Blues
felt like unfinished business. I wanted to know what happened next … and now I had a much better idea of where the story should go after the events of the original novella. So a few months after I turned in
Lunar Descent
, I went to work on what is now called
Labyrinth of Night
, rewriting
Red Planet Blues
slightly so that it was now Part One, and also fitting the novel into the Near-Space chronology.
Things had changed a bit, though, between when I’d first written
Red Planet Blues
and when I set out to expand it into a novel. For starters, the Soviet Union had fallen, leaving me in the same predicament as countless other novelists who’d been deprived of a convenient superpower Bad Guy. And worse, the Face on Mars had gone from the inside pages of
Analog
to the front page of the
Weekly World News
. It was harder than ever for me to take the Face seriously now that it was sharing space in the public consciousness with Bat Boy and the giant alligators of New York’s sewers. So I had to work around that, and my solution was to reinvent Russia as a political and economic rival to the United States—I wasn’t too far off, as things turned out—while surrounding the Face with so much scientific and technological verisimilitude that the Cydonia artifacts would seem a little more plausible.
Labyrinth of Night
came out in the same year that three other Mars novels were published:
Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson,
Mars
by Ben Bova, and
Beachhead
by Jack Williamson. I called it the Great Martian Land Rush, and it was only beginning; other SF writers soon followed us with their own Mars novels (and they’re still coming; my friend Robert J. Sawyer recently published a book called
Red Planet Blues
, and yes, I gave him permission to reuse my novella’s title).
Red Mars
overshadowed everyone else’s books and rightfully so, but
Labyrinth of Night
held its own. It received great reviews and remained in print for quite a while, with British, German, and Italian editions published not long after.