The Synopsis Treasury (10 page)

Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop has lived in Pine Mountain, Georgia, forty straight years. His latest publications include handsome trade paperbacks from Patrick Swenson’s Fairwood Press of revised versions of his novels
Brittle Innings
(2012),
Ancient of Days
(2013), and a Thirtieth Anniversary edition of
Who Made Stevie Crye?
(Aug 2014), released under the author’s exclusive imprint, Kudzu Planet Productions, both as book and e-book, with the photomontage illustrations by J. K. Potter from the original Arkham House edition and a brand-new Author’s Afterword.
Count Geiger’s Blues
, also revised, appeared from Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet in the same formats in Nov 2014, and other Bishop titles, some brand-new, will achieve print and e-book status in the near future.

After finishing a novelization of my long story “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” (by adding to the narrative rather than simply expanding it from within), I called my book
Transfigurations
and pronounced myself ready to write a novel about human prehistory, specifically hominid evolution in Pleistocene East Africa. I had been researching this material for a couple of years, reading Louis B. Leakey, Jane Goodall, Richard Leakey, Roger Lewin, Donald Johanson, and Carl Sagan, among others, and had used some of this research in Transfigurations. David Hartwell, who had edited my mosaic novel—okay, my fix-up—
Catacomb Years
before leaving Berkley/Putnam for Simon & Schuster, indicated that he would prove receptive to a proposal for this paleoanthropological novel. To secure a contract at Timescape Books (the sf division of Simon & Schuster that David had recently formed), I needed to shape and submit such a proposal.

Frankly, I had no idea how to proceed. I had sold my first novel,
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
, to Ballantine Books by impressing Betty Ballantine with a novella in an original anthology of David Gerrold’s and then writing a longer work because Betty wanted to see a novel. I struggled with this project, but eventually, with lots of editorial help, brought it to completion. My long novella,
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees
, sold to Harper & Row because my agent, Virginia Kidd, submitted the manuscript to Buz Wyeth and he snapped it up for publication. I had expected only a magazine sale. Learning that Harper & Row would release Ecbatan as a hardcover flabbergasted me. How had I gotten so lucky? As for my third novel,
Stolen Faces
, I wrote it in a little over a month, and Harper & Row took it, too.
Catacomb Years
, my fourth book, comprised a series of tales against the same backdrop, the Atlanta Urban Nucleus, material that I spliced together with interpolated bridge passages and several recurring characters. And
Transfigurations
? It wasn’t a conventional novel, either, but a long dramatic gloss on the text of a popular anthropological novella that I had published in 1974.

How did a writer put together a proposal—a prospectus—in short, a come-on—for a novel not yet written? Well, if anybody could do it, surely an sf writer could. In fact, I think I had read Robert Silverberg’s detailed proposal for his thick colorful sf fantasy,
Lord Valentine’s Castle
, in a fanzine not long before I sat down to write a proposal for
No Enemy But Time
. Sad to say, reading his proposal did little to help me with mine. Silverberg can plot, and he laid out his narrative strands carefully. I, on the other hand, employ haunting mental images and amorphous quasi-scientific notions as springboards and then leap in not knowing whether I will do a graceful Australian crawl or just flail about spastically and drown. In any case, I wrote the formal come-on that follows, and it led my agent, the long-suffering Howard Morhaim, to say that he had never encountered a client who wrote more egregious proposals than I.

David Hartwell knew my work from earlier projects and surely decided to go to contract with us on
No Enemy But Time
because he understood that I find my way (or fail to) in the act of writing. Further, he trusted that either I or the two of us together would fashion from the specious generalities and hifalutin horsefeathers of my proposal an engaging narrative. Perhaps we did. (Readying the book for publication required that I visit David in Pleasantville, New York, and go over the manuscript a chapter at a time, laying out and ordering the chapters in a pattern different from my original arrangement.) In 1982,
No Enemy But Time
appeared on the final Nebula Award ballot against daunting rivals, namely, novels by Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Wolfe. It still astonishes me that
No Enemy But Time
took the Lucite trophy, and I suspect that the membership of SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America, as we called it back then) rewarded me more for my promise than for my achievement. I did not, however, offer to hand my ill-gotten trophy off to Brian, Isaac, Phil, Bob, or Gene.

The point of all this? I still don’t know how to write a book proposal. And the clunky proposal that follows, believe it or not, reads better than did the version that I had Howard submit to
Timescape
. I’ve cleaned it up. I’ve dropped some words—adverbs mostly—and tried to smooth out, as well as tighten, its prose. Even this sanitized version would unquestionably fail to sway an editor who did not already know me, however, and all young writers hoping to crash the publishing big time should probably study just about any other proposal elsewhere in the contents of Chris Haviland’s beneficial, niche-filling compendium.

—Michael Bishop

No Enemy But Time

The book I want to write demands a reconstruction of hominid life in Africa, either at Olduvai in present-day Tanzania or at Koobi Fora on Lake Turkana in present-day Kenya, approximately two million years ago. The protagonist will be a modern man dropped back in time to this period by a combination of his own psychic susceptibility to temporal relocation and a government project’s technological exploitation of this unusual trait.

The time-travel element will be downplayed, however, in favor of a detailed portrait of a hominid community and the protagonist’s necessary involvement with it. He must become a protohuman to survive; at the same time, in order to live with himself, he must find ways to validate his modern identity even in this arduous and unlikely context. For him, what we ignorantly call prehistory has become vividly, and hazardously, historical.

The book will deal with nurture and growth among the hominids (members of
Homo habilis,
whom many paleoanthropologists regard as the first decidedly human species of the three or four East African hominid families); the emergence of language; the division of tasks by sex, and an exception to this rigid female/male dichotomy in the person of a large but barren female whom the protagonist calls “Helen Habiline”; African ecology; and the time traveler’s struggle to discover himself in the distant origins of his own species.

The only other contemporary novel that deals with this subject matter—or the only one that springs to mind—is William Golding’s
The Inheritors,
which takes place some 30,000 odd years ago rather than two million. Further, Golding’s most basic concern is not hominids (little was known about these creatures when he was writing his book), but the ascendancy of Cro-Magnon Man over the doomed Neanderthals, whom he treats as incipiently telepathic.

One of the main assets of
No Enemy But Time,
as I envision it now, will be that it handles recent paleoanthropological findings within a psychologically realistic narrative. I intend to write both an ethnography of a species that no longer exists (honoring the known facts and extrapolating from them the outline of a workable hominid community) and a character study of the man who almost literally dreams himself among these habilines. And even though
No Enemy But Time
will be as far from melodrama as I can make it, the dangers posed by the harsh Pliocene ecology of East Africa should ensure that the novel lacks neither suspense nor otherworldly “local color.”

The Protagonist
: At this stage, I plan to make my protagonist either an orphaned American Chicano from southeastern Colorado or the son of a black serviceman and a young Spanish girl disfigured by a spidery birthmark whom the serviceman has met on his tour of duty at Morón Air Force Base near Seville, Spain. I propose either the one or the other because my main character must be small and dark. These physical attributes will facilitate his acceptance into the hominid band of two million years ago and his adjustment to the severe African heat of that period. From whichever background he hails, my protagonist will grow up blessed—or afflicted—with vivid dreams in which the boredom and terror of ancient veldt life rumble through his sleeping mind, giving him a shadowy psychic umbilicus to the past. In fact, these dreams make him susceptible to the efforts of the secret government project to relocate human subjects in time by mechanical means and the subject’s own suggestibility. In addition, my method of bringing about this temporal dislocation will suggest an ambiguity—similar to that used by Philip K. Dick in
Ubik
and elsewhere, and by Ursula K. Le Guin in
The Lathe of Heaven
—that the narrative may profitably exploit. Namely, has the protagonist really gone back in time, or does his total immersion in the past constitute a protracted but vivid fever dream? In either case, the reality of his experiences among the hominids will occupy the heart of the narrative. In either case, he will define himself for the reader, and for himself, by these experiences.

Tentative Development
: These are points that I want to include in my story after the protagonist’s “dropback” to prehistoric Africa:

1. A struggle for acceptance as a member of one specific band of
Homo habilis
. Because of his size (even if he is small by present-day standards), his relative lack of body hair, his dress, and his sudden appearance near the habiline camp, the protagonist will have to insinuate himself among these creatures gradually. To them, he is at first a monster of alien incomprehensibility, more terrifying in some ways than the giant hyenas and walrus-tusked elephants. He must prove that he belongs.

2. Socialization. Once tentatively accepted by the habilines, the time traveler will begin to distinguish them by identifying physical features. He will name these early tool-using creatures. This naming will raise the question of language as it exists among them. They will have a “call system” of some complexity, involving screeches grunts, panting sounds, ululations, and even a few onomatopoeic words. The protagonist will attempt to learn what he can of their system, meanwhile teaching them a few words with which to refer to objects in their immediate environment.

3. Scavenging, hunting, foraging—all more or less parceled out by sex. These activities will constitute the background for many of the relationships that the protagonist develops with the habilines, especially the adult males in this band of 18 to 25 members. Females, it seems, outnumbered males in these bands, and I must calculate possible ratios among males to females, adults to children, etc.

4. “Helen Habiline.” A major character will be a large barren female hominid who insists on hunting with the males (or scavenging with them, since that may have been their more common food-accumulating method) rather than staying near camp to grub and forage. Because she has no children, and because her size allows her to enforce her desire in this, the males accept her on their hunting or scavenging forays. A complex relationship will develop between Helen and the protagonist, whose responses to her will vary from tenderness to disgust.

5. Infant and adult mortality. Death is an inescapable fact among the habilines. They fall to predation, accident, disease, and even intramural scuffling. The protagonist will find that they have a reliable remedy for wounds in the plant today called Olduvai—from which the Olduvai Gorge takes its name—or, in scientific circles, Sanseviera. An incident during a heavy thunderstorm will dramatize a glimmer of religious or mystical feeling among the habilines; this feeling will later be repeated in a different context when the group falls into ritualistic behavior to dispose of the corpse of a fellow.

6. Sexual behavior, including pair bonding, the meaning and frequency of genital displays, and the likely nature of sexual receptivity among habiline females (i.e., whether it is tied to a cycle, as among most primates, or exists as a virtually day-to-day condition, as among contemporary human beings). These questions also connect with the enigma of habiline social relationships, including the structure of the family, food-sharing behaviors, and such things as grooming and “kiss feeding.” The protagonist and Helen form a pair, but only over time. I hope to show the poignancy of the relationship, which many readers may initially see as bestial and unnatural. I hope to handle these topics with a degree of delicacy as well as with realism.

7. Interspecies relationships. Conflicts among other bands of habilines, encounters with representatives of
Australopithecus africanus
and
A. robustus
, and even run-ins with baboons or chimpanzees are highly likely occurrences in this narrative. Of course, the protagonist’s anomalous presence in Helen’s band will eventually prove a distinct advantage in these encounters, because of his size and his knowledge—but maybe not always.