The Skies Discrowned

THE SKIES DISCROWNED

Tim Powers

www.sfgateway.com

by Tim Powers

In February of 1975 I was twenty-two years old, just finishing up my Bachelor of Arts in English at California State University at Fullerton, and beginning to take classes that would apply to getting a Master’s degree; my vague goal was to be a college literature professor. I had known Jim Blaylock for three years, and we had already invented our imaginary poet William Ashbless, who has occupied a fair amount of our time ever since. And Blaylock and I had known K. W. Jeter for a year or so, and the three of us frequently got together at a bar in Orange called O’Hara’s, where we would discuss the stories we were writing.

We were college students, so we spent a lot of time in cheap bars and going to movies like Bergman’s
Scenes From a Marriage, Russell’s Mahler
, and Antonioni’s
The Passenger
(none of which I’d see again now; though de Palma’s
The Phantom of the Paradise
, which impressed me then, still impresses me). Among the books we were admiring were Thompson’s
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, Donleavy’s
The Ginger Man
, and Cary’s
The Horses Mouth
(all of which still strike me as admirable). Bob Dylans
Blood on the Tracks
was a new and splendid album (and now it’s old and splendid). When friends got married, the people setting up the weddings often strove for “the
Godfather
look.”

Blaylock and I were each working on a long, plotless novel—mine was called
Dinner at Deviants Palace
(which had not much similarity to the book eventually published with that title—I just liked the sound of the phrase, which I had derived from Robert Downey’s movie
Greasers Palace
and E. R. Eddison’s book
A Fish Dinner in Memison)
, and Blaylock’s was called
The Chinese Circus
. Jeter—a more accomplished writer—had already finished
Dr. Adder
, and also a novel called
Seeklight
, which he had, dazzlingly, sold to a publisher. It was to appear in July.

The publisher was Harlequin Books, famous for their sappy-looking romance paperbacks; but they were going to try out a science fiction line, edited by Roger Elwood, who had edited any number of respectable anthologies.

And Jeter told us that the new line was looking for several more authors to discover! Blaylock and I immediately shelved our interminable novels and began scribbling fresh things.

I wrote about 4,000 words of a novel, and an outline, and I showed it to Jeter—and he told me that it was no good, because nothing happened in it. This was true, actually—these Harlequin novels had to be precisely 55,000 words, which seemed like an awful lot to me—so I was starting slow, wary of using up my whole outline’s-worth of events too quickly. I suppose I would have said I was “developing my characters” or something, but the result was that for three chapters my characters hardly did more than eat lunches and … well, all I can recall now is the lunches. Talk, too, I expect—“filling in background,” I might have said by way of excuse. I can’t go back and check, because I threw the chapters into the fireplace one day.

“Start where the action starts,” Jeter told me. This seemed like a spendthrift way to write a book, but I tried it his way and in March I put the chapters-and-outline in the mail.

And on Tuesday the 22nd of April, 1975. I got a letter from Elwood. He said he liked what I sent him, but needed to see one more chapter, since I was an unknown, before he could send me a contract. Of course I agreed to write another chapter, and promised he’d have it in a week.

Like many young English majors, I was keeping a “journal” in those days—and I see I wrote on April 29, “this letter was the first concrete evidence I’ve ever had to believe that my writing is at all worthwhile. Even if Elwood should decide that subsequent chapters were terrible, I’d know I’m good enough to
interest
a big editor.

“So I wrote the fourth chapter, typed it last night, and mailed it early this morning. Air mail. If he doesn’t take it, I’m in a bit of inconvenience. I’ve spent a week writing the chapter, and would have to write two term papers (20 and 10 pp.) and read four books and do a considerable bit of research, all in two weeks. If he takes it, which I think he will, I’ll take an incomplete in those two classes and devote my time to writing. I’ll keep my political science class because when it’s finished I’ll have my B.A.; and I’ll keep fencing because it takes no time outside of class.”

And on the 5th of May Elwood did accept it, with a deadline of August 15—and so I quit the classes I’d been taking toward a Master’s degree. In my journal I noted, “I am, for the time being, at least, a
writer. I’m enjoying writing the thing; working from a previously-worked-out outline eliminates the kind of snags I was running into in
Deviants Palace
—I always know more-or-less what’s going to happen next.”

By the beginning of June I was half done with it, and by the beginning of July I was confident enough to take a long weekend off and drive up to San Francisco, with Jim Blaylock and his wife Viki, to attend the Westercon science fiction convention. Roger Elwood was there, and we learned that Harlequin’s science fiction line was to be called “Laser Books.” As I noted in my journal for the 5th of July, “Jim and I agreed that almost anything would sound better, but what the hell.”

On August 7 I finished typing the handwritten manuscript—which now had a title,
The Skies Discrowned
—but somehow I still hadn’t received a contract for the book. Elwood had been assuring me for months that the contract would be along very soon, any day, in fact—but in the meantime I didn’t have it, and didn’t want to send the completed manuscript to him until I did have it. What if, I thought, he doesn’t like the book? Why would he issue a contract for a book he knows he doesn’t like?

So I told him I needed to have the contract before I’d send the manuscript to him.

And on August 9th, I went to a party at Philip K. Dick’s house. I hadn’t seen him since about mid-’73, though we’d been good friends for a year or so before that; he had got married, and become a bit of a hermit. But his marriage was looking unsteady now—he was “scheming on” some girl at the party—and we were quickly back on the old footing.

I finally mailed the manuscript to Laser Books after getting a Western Union Mail Gram from Elwood dated the 25th of August, assuring me that a contract would definitely be along very shortly; and he accepted the book, and in fact before the end of the month the contract did arrive.

I showed it to Phil Dick, and he told me not to sign it. He said Harlequin was keeping the foreign rights, and this wasn’t acceptable. I thanked him, but when I got home I signed the contract and put it in the mail.

What, after all, did I care about foreign rights? If it were to have no foreign editions, or if it had hundreds of foreign editions for which I would be paid nothing, didn’t concern me at all. I could write other books, and deal sensibly with the foreign rights on
them
. All I wanted right now was to get the thing safely published.

And it duly appeared in May of the next year. On the cover, along with my name and the title, were the words “General Editor Roger Elwood,” and Phil Dick was with me when I first found copies at a
bookstore. I bought several, and Phil told the clerk, “This guy wrote this book!” The clerk smiled and looked at the cover and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Elwood!”—which Phil thought was pretty funny.

And I wrote a second book for Laser,
An Epitaph in Rust
. This one was published in so grossly rewritten a form that I resolved not to sell to Laser again, and in any case Harlequin folded the line soon after, having decided that science fiction couldn’t measure up to romances.

For a few years after that I was back to sending manuscripts to publishers and getting them rejected, but the publication of these two books (the correct versions of which you have here, with no intrusive editing) had effectively deflected me from wanting to be a college literature professor; I didn’t go back to graduate school. And eventually I sold a third book, to Lester del Rey, and then a fourth to Beth Meacham at Ace Books—but if it weren’t for K. W. Jeter and Roger Elwood, and the heady experience of seeing these first two books in print, I’d today be teaching “Twain to Modern,” and “Analysis of Literary Forms,” and maybe—with a wistful air, I like to think!—“Creative Writing.”

—Tim Powers
San Bernardino, California
October 2, 2003

Though the many lights dwindle to one light,

There is help if the heavens have one;

Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight

And the earth dispossessed of the sun,

They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,

When, refreshed as a bride and set free,

With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,

Night sinks on the sea.

—A.C.Swinbrune

The crowd in front of the Ducal Palace always fascinated Francisco Rovzar. The great stone arch of the barbican seemed to frame a picture of all human endeavor and misery. Here a curbside magician produced gouts of flame from his mouth, there a cowled priest shambled along, flicking passersby with holy water from a leather bag at his belt. A knot of moaning women waved rolled, ribbon-bound petitions at the procession of judges who hurried out of the cleric’s gate to get some lunch before the afternoon sessions commenced. Grimy children in tattered clothes or none at all howled and chased each other through the gutters. Smoke from the fires of sausage vendors and jewelsmiths curled in gray ribbons up into the blue sky.