The Synopsis Treasury (11 page)
Read The Synopsis Treasury Online
Authors: Christopher Sirmons Haviland
Tags: #Reference, #Writing; Research & Publishing Guides, #Publishing & Books, #Authorship
8. One odd side effect of the protagonist’s dislocation in time is that he will stop dreaming prehistoric landscapes, to dream instead about the modern world. Twentieth-century images will skate across these dreams: jukeboxes, automotive grills, comic-book characters, scenes from television programs, and so on. At times, he may find himself living out hallucinatory modern scenarios within the realistic, dream-actualized state of his life among the habilines. These flash-forwards will occur during periods of repose or respite, and they will be brief, like commercial spots projected to him across a thousand millennia. One consequence will be a greater sense of isolation, and a developing sense of irony, as he realizes that he is shepherding Helen and her conspecifics toward the very future—his native “present”—from which he has so often fled in dreams.
9. Fire as both life-giver and destroyer on the plains around Olduvai. Writes Norman Myers in
The Long African Day,
“An African fire is a stirring sight … quick enough to clear and cleanse without destroying everything in sight. The animals step lightly through its path.” Although the center of a burning tussock may soar to over 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, Myers points out that the soil does not heat up much a fifth of an inch below the surface of the plain. One climactic scene will involve a fire on the veldt, set by a bolt of lightning. This fire will prompt an important ritual display among the habilines.
10. The sexual liaison between the protagonist and Helen will prove productive, in spite of her obvious barrenness with her own kind. Her pregnancy will occur because the protagonist, having developed a truly caring relationship with Helen, has taken the time to discover the obstacle to insemination posed by her anatomy—for, in contrast to that of most other habiline females, her body has evolved to accommodate face-to-face coitus. Ultimately, the protagonist will assist at the birth of their child, a birth requiring a dangerous Caesarean section.
11. The ending will turn on the protagonist’s apparent death in our reality and the escape of his consciousness to the ancient African grasslands where Helen Habiline has delivered their hybrid child. Someone in the here-and-now (I would like to establish the year as the same one in which the novel is actually published) will say that the protagonist has died “alone, with no surviving family.”
Sources
: I have read a number of popular and scientific accounts of the recent discoveries—many quite controversial and open to different readings—allowing us to imagine the development of these hominid species in East Africa. Before beginning to write
No Enemy But Time,
I hope to query, directly, the paleoanthropologists now involved in the search for our origins: Mary D. Leakey, Richard Leakey, Glynn Isaac, Donald Carl Johanson, Timothy White, Owen Lovejoy, and others. I especially need facts about the paleoecology of Olduvai and Koobi Fora.
Final Comments
: Although I would like enough time to complete my research and to develop this material with proper care, the core of a potentially exciting novel already resides within this prospectus. I believe the material has a potential audience wider than that associated with the typical sf novel, and I intend to handle it with that fact in mind. I submit this outline hoping that it will suggest the market possibilities of such a work and that any ensuing contract will reflect the determination of the publisher to reach that audience. I have given myself to this project as something inherently valuable, not merely as an avenue to another slam-bang sf thriller, and I ask the publisher’s help in doing it right.*
Not long after
No Enemy But Time
won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1982, Simon and Schuster terminated the Timescape program that, under David Hartwell’s direction, had published the book. —MB
First published in Thrust #23, Winter 1985. —MB
***
Joe Haldeman
Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Joe Haldeman has earned steady awards over his 45-year career: his novels
The Forever War
and
Forever Peace
both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he has won four more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Three times he’s won the Rhysling Award for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His latest novels are a trilogy,
Marsbound
,
Starbound,
and
Earthbound
, and just out this year is
Work Done For Hire
. Joe was a combat soldier in Vietnam, which strongly influences some of his work. Ridley Scott has bought the movie rights to
The Forever War
. When Joe’s not writing or teaching—he’s just retired from M.I.T., where he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints and bicycles and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for 49 years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.
About half my novels nowadays don’t go through a synopsis presentation, at least not a written one. I have dinner with my editor and pitch the book, and she usually likes the idea and sends my agent a contract. The contract is just for “the next science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman.”
In fact, I do have a synopsis-style letter to my editor, which she asked for after such a conversation … here it is, written from Norton Island, a small retreat for writers and artists off the coast of Maine.
—Joe Haldeman
Funny thing, Susan … out here on the island people ask “What is your novel about?”—and I realize how hard it is to sum it up in a few lines. Because it doesn’t seem all that complex or complicated from my point of view, “inside” it. But it’s hard to explain to other people, especially if they aren’t science fiction readers.
It goes like this.
Old Twentieth
is set a couple of hundred years in the future. People’s bodies are self-repairing; they can die of catastrophe, but not of age or disease.
This world is enamoured of the twentieth century, the last century in which people were born in the sure knowledge that their lives were a rainbow arc of accomplishment—or failure or mere existence—comprising less than a century, from birth to death. They visit the twentieth century in an all-pervasive “time machine,” a virtual-reality environment that is realer than real life, more addictive than television.
There are two main characters in the book. One is Jacob Brewer, a virtuality engineer who’s in charge of the time machine aboard the starship
_Ad Astra,
headed on a thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, with a crew of eight hundred.
The other main character is the time machine. It’s designed to evolve, improving itself as years go by. But it starts to evolve in a strange direction, toward a nonhuman self-awareness.
The immortals start to die, inexplicably, and they die in the machine. It invites Jacob to come inside and investigate.
Of course a novel is more than a plot line.
Old Twentieth
is about the 75-year span that comprises the actual twentieth century, from the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The American Century, yes, but a period that can also be characterized by the waxing and waning of German imperialism and international communism. That’s a subtext of the novel, never brought up directly.
Another subtext, which is discussed obliquely, is the nature of self-awareness. We can agree that a rock is not self-aware, and neither is a radio, even though it speaks and can appear to think. Is a computer, like a radio, just a collection of electronic parts that can be made to mimic human behavior in certain ways? How complex and self-directed does that behavior have to be before we have to wonder whether the machine is aware of itself? Or does that question have any actual meaning?
At an elementary level, that’s the Turing Machine problem: You have two boxes, one with a machine inside it and one with a human, and you communicate with both of them via teletype. If you can’t tell which one is the machine, then you’ve arrived at an interesting watershed of computation.
It goes further, though. The machine that can pass the Turing criterion is a so-called Type I Artificial Intelligence: it can mimic human self-awareness because its programming and database are so sophisticated and huge that a person can’t tell that it’s
not
a person. It lies, it makes mistakes; it does all sorts of things that a “machine” doesn’t do. Unless it’s programmed to.
A Type II Artificial Intelligence would be something else—something that arrived at self-awareness through its own consideration of the universe. It isn’t human at all. It could be our most dangerous rival.
In the book, Jacob comes to realize that the machine
subsumes
the simpler kind of self-awareness; it seems very human in a Turing-machine way. But that’s only one talent, one facet of its alien awareness and intelligence. There’s no way he can tell what it actually intends to do. It claims to value human life and experience; it claims that without the time machine clients to commune with, its life would be meaningless.
But of course it can lie.
Then he finds out that the machine has put itself in control of the entire space ship, including its communications to and from Earth. Including its own on/off switch. And it wants to talk.
I’ll bow to your judgment, or the art director’s, about the cover. I do like the recurrent theme with the raven, the gull, the butterfly, but I don’t immediately come up with a flapping image that’s relevant to this book. I’m further handicapped because I’m a prisoner on this lovely island, and don’t have my books to look at and ponder.
I liked the constellation image that surfaced in the interior art in
Guardian
. Maybe we might do something with that. The only constellation referenced in the book, unfortunately, is Indus—hell, even I don’t know what it looks like.
The book doesn’t have any actual description of the starship, except that it’s really big, and broken into five interchangeable parts, so I guess the artist could have carte blanche in that regard. Of course nobody wants a generic cover, but I guess that’s what I’m pitching.
If Jim Burns is available and affordable, I’d like to have him do the cover. The last couple he’s done for me (and the collaboration with my brother), it was like he was reading my mind.
peace
Joe
***
Terry Brooks
(photo credit)
A writer since the age of ten, Terry Brooks published his first novel,
The Sword of Shannara
, in 1977. He has written over thirty best-selling novels, as well as movie adaptations of
Hook
and
Star Wars
:
The Phantom Menace
and a memoir on his writing life titled
Sometimes the Magic Works
. He has sold over thirty million copies of his books domestically and is published worldwide. His Magic Kingdom series is currently under option at Warner Brothers with Steve Carell attached to the project as producer and star. The Shannara series has been optioned by Sonar Entertainment and MTV and the first season will air in 2015. The author lives with his wife Judine in the Pacific Northwest.
The core of the plotline for
Magic Kingdom for Sale
(once upon a time known as Holiday’s Magic) came from Lester del Rey, my editor back in the early ’80s, who by the way also changed the title to its present form. He gave me the idea on loan for one year. The understanding was that if I wrote the book, the idea was mine. If I didn’t, he got it back from me. It seemed a fair deal to me, so I took it.
Of course, two such diverse minds ended up going in opposite directions. Lester envisioned the book as a sort of Piers Anthony Zanth
(sic.)
story with lots of jokes and humor. I saw it as something much darker. I kept thinking about how desperate someone must be to buy such a ridiculous item out of a catalogue. A magic kingdom? Really? Why would anyone do that?
Flying home from New York after deciding to write this book, I found myself wondering who would be so desperate. Clearly someone who was very dissatisfied with his life. The mind goes where it wants to, and mine began to mesh the story of Ben Holiday with my own. I was a lawyer, not happy in my life in almost every respect, desperate to leave it behind.
Holy cow, I thought. This is my story!
A year later, the book was published, and I had left the practice of law and moved to Seattle to write fulltime.
I don’t often talk about how I see
Magic Kingdom
as autobiographical. But this is how I wrote my way out of the practice of law and into a writing life. That’s as true as it gets.
—Terry Brooks
Magic Kingdom for Sale
By Terry Brooks
How much would you pay for a magic kingdom? Not one with a Disney logo and a lot of mechanical rides, but the real thing—a land that you once believed only existed in fairy tales?
That’s the question facing Ben Holiday. It isn’t the money that gives him pause so much as it is the preposterousness of the idea that such a place could even exist.
But there it is, all spelled out in black and white in the current edition of Rosen’s, Ltd. Christmas Wishbook:
Magic Kingdom for Sale
Landover—Island of enchantment and adventure rescued from the mists of time, home of knights and knaves, of dragons and damsels, of wizards and warlocks. Magic mixes with iron, and chivalry is the code of life for the true hero. All of your fantasies become real in this kingdom from another world. Only one thread to this whole cloth is lacking—you, to rule over all as King and High Lord. Escape into your dreams, and be born again.
Price: $1,000,000.
Personal interview and financial disclosure required.
Inquire of Meeks, home office.
A high-powered trial lawyer with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Ben Holiday is tempted. The deaths of his wife and unborn child in a car accident and his disillusionment with the practice of law have left him ready for a change. But this kind of change seems impossible. There must be a gimmick, even though the offer is advertised in the catalogue of one of the most highly respected department stores in the business. Places like Landover don’t exist. Places like Landover can be found only in children’s books.
Ben decides to find out anyway, wanting to believe, hoping that maybe there is just enough truth to the ad to make it worth his while. So he goes to New York and a meeting with Meeks, the intimidating old man who is invested with the power to decide if Ben should be given a chance to make the purchase. To Ben’s astonishment, Meeks decides that he should. To his further astonishment, he decides that he will.
Abandoning his law practice and his life, Ben goes off to the magic kingdom of Landover and discovers that it does exist and is indeed what was advertised in the Christmas catalogue—a place out of time and dreams, a fairytale come true.
Unfortunately, it is a few things more, as well, and none of them are good. Ben is a King in name only. His court consists of an inept wizard, a talking dog, and two monkey-faced kobolds with sharp teeth. The treasury is depleted and the army disbanded. The castle that serves as his home is falling apart. No one in all of Landover cares whether Ben is King or not, save the Iron Mark, the Demon Lord out of Abaddon who has made a practice out of disposing Landover’s Kings for the past twenty years.
Ben has been tricked into making a bargain that will either cost him the money he has paid (along with a good chunk of his self-respect) or his life. He is threatened at every turn—by the Lords of the Greensward, who prefer life without a King to rule over them; the River Master, who commands the fairy folk and thinks the King an anachronism; the witch Nightshade, who hates Kings of any kind and Ben in particular; and the Dragon Strabo, whose power is exceeded only by that of the King’s champion, the Paladin.
But the Paladin has been absent since the death of the old King, and no one thinks he exists anymore.
Then he appears several times after Ben arrives in Landover, twice saving his life, and opinions begin to shift. When Ben decides not to quit, as Meeks had intended he should, but to stick it out, even with his life at stake, opinions begin to shift further. A journey through his kingdom persuades him that he has found a place worth fighting for. He finds an unexpected ally in the beautiful sylph Willow, who tells him on their first meeting that she is destined to be with him forever, even though she turns into a tree every twenty days or so. He wins friends in unexpected quarters, some better than others, some truer of heart. One by one, he confronts all those who stand against him and whose allegiance he must win. One by one, he wins them over.
But, in the end, it takes a battle to the death with the Iron Mark to take the measure of Ben’s determination and to reveal to him the truth about what it really means to be the King of a Magic Kingdom.
***