The Synopsis Treasury (21 page)
Read The Synopsis Treasury Online
Authors: Christopher Sirmons Haviland
Tags: #Reference, #Writing; Research & Publishing Guides, #Publishing & Books, #Authorship
Nancy Varian Berberick
When Nancy Varian Berberick began her writing career, she lived in a far, cold corner of northern New Jersey and scratched out a garden from the stony hill and the woods behind her house. Then she lived on the very hot, very damp southern edge of North Carolina, where she only had to wish for a garden and the rain would fall, granting her vegetables, flowers, herbs, and kudzu. Lots of kudzu. Now she lives in warm (and sometimes very hot, but almost always dry) New Mexico, near the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. She finds it just right. Nancy is the author of eleven fantasy novels, most recently
Prisoner of Haven
in the Dragonlance series and from Margaret Weis Productions,
The Lost Sword
, a choose-your-own-adventure book for kids. Nancy has also written three dozen or so short stories, in the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres, some for children and most for adults.
Unlike other synopses of mine, this for
The Jewels of Elvish
is very short indeed. That’s because I wrote it after having completed the novel. When I’m proposing a novel I’ve not yet written, I spend a good deal of time “working out” the story for myself and for an editor. While the novel I ultimately write won’t be exactly as outlined, the initial synopsis shows an editor (and me!) that I have a fully developed story to tell, and have already discovered one way to tell it. But because I wrote the synopsis for
The Jewels of Elvish
after the fact, I was able to briefly summarize a story already told.
I wrote
The Jewels of Elvish
, my first novel, during the years of 1984 and 1986. My agent agreed to represent the novel in 1986, and sold it to TSR, Inc. early in 1987. At the time of the sale I was writing Stormblade for TSR’s Dragonlance series, and my editor’s thinking was that
The Jewels of Elvish
would do better if it followed right after my Dragonlance title. (I believe he was right, as both books spent time on the WaldenBooks trade paperback best seller list.) And so my first novel was the second one to be published, following
Stormblade
in April 1989.
The Jewels of Elvish
has the dubious honor among my novels of having had the most editors—four TSR editors had the novel at various stages of its life. The editor who wrote the contract had suggestions for revision, but when it came time to hand in the revisions I found that he’d gone freelance and left his in-house projects to another editor. Among those projects was
The Jewels of Elvish
and
Stormblade
. My new editor read
TJOE 2.0
and had more suggestions. Came time to hand in
TJOE 2.1
and I had still another editor. (Who was also the new editor for
Stormblade
, still being written.) She read the manuscript and liked it, and had more suggestions. By that time her baby was due and she headed off for maternity leave, having handed my babies off to other editors.
Stormblade
went to another editor for a while and then got bounced back to the original editor. (He who went freelancing.) And
TJOE 2.2
went to editor 4.0.
This was a remarkably confusing and tense two and a half years.
Stormblade
suffered the most from the bouncing around, for the various editors and I didn’t have the same idea about how the story should be told. However, and to my great delight,
The Jewels of Elvish
met a kinder fate, for author and editors were all in agreement about what the story was, and how best to tell it. I’m not sure whether one editor actually passed his or her notes on to the next, but it seemed to work out that way. Editorial advice was always consistent. In the long run, I made very few changes to my original manuscript, and most of those took place at the end of the story, with some people living who’d been written to death, and some attitude adjustments among the surviving major characters. Otherwise, from the first editor to the last, changes called for were on the order of cutting, clarification of characters’ motivations, and defining personal conflicts more sharply.
—Nancy Varian Berberick
The Jewels of Elvish
A synopsis by Nancy Varian Berberick
The story takes place in a mythical world reminiscent of feudal England. It concerns Nikia, Princess of Elvish, and her struggle to avert the destruction of the Two Kingdoms.
The alliance between the kingdoms of Elvish and Mannish provides that Nikia will marry Garth, the second son of the Mannish king, Alain. It also provides that the Ruby of Guyaire, one of the symbols of the Elvish royal house’s right to rule, accompany her to her new home. The alliance is forged between these two warring kingdoms in recognition of the fact that a greater evil is awakening in the North: The Sorcerer, defeated in legendary times, is now stirring, and threatening the Two Kingdoms with destruction.
Nikia weds as her duty dictates. She goes to live among the Mannish folk in the Citadel at Damris. She takes with her, her father’s admonition to forsake the inherent magic skills which all Elves possess. “For these folk fear magic, daughter,” Dekar warns, “they view it with a superstitious dread.” There is only one mage at Alain’s court and Nikia soon learns why her new people fear magic.
Nikia comes to learn that despite her good intentions and best efforts, she will never be accepted by her beloved husband’s people.
She is always, to all but a few, ‘The Elvish witch.’ One of her few friends, Dail, the chief bard, soon comes to feel more than friendship for her.
Against the backdrop of war, of court intrigue and the treachery fostered by Reynarth, the King’s Mage, Nikia learns that the Ruby of Guyaire is a powerful magic talisman which could help the alliance win the struggle against the Sorcerer. At the same time she learns this, so does the spy Reynarth. But before Nikia can advise the alliance and before Reynarth can steal the Ruby, word comes to Damris that Garth is missing. Lost during the great battle for the Mannish port of Seuro, there is no word to say for certain whether he is dead or captured.
Nikia is summoned home by her father who dislikes her ambivalent position. Knowing well how the Mannish, who have viewed her as a witch, feel about magic, Nikia accepts the summons and determines to put the Ruby in her father’s hands, who at least will not view it as evil simply because it is magic. There she will await word of her husband’s father. She is escorted by her few friends, among whom is Dail.
Before Nikia can reach her father’s hall, her party is waylaid by Reynarth’s agent. The mage desires the Ruby and the princess. Reynarth has fled Damris to command the Sorcerer’s army from the fallen city of Seuro. Planning more treachery, he hopes, with the aid of the Ruby, to defeat not only the alliance but his master, the Sorcerer, as well.
Nikia now faces a struggle far greater than the one of being accepted by her husband’s people: she must retake the Ruby and stop the evil northern forces. She must learn to channel its great power and in so doing save the Two Kingdoms. And yet, if she triumphs, Nikia faces the loss of her husband, who, alive and captured at Seuro, cannot accept that his ‘little wife’ has demonstrated great power born of the magic he has been bred to loathe. It is Dail who helps Nikia when Garth cannot. This he does at the risk of his life.
Her enemies defeated, Nikia returns to the Two Kingdoms. Her husband is a bitter man, Dail who loved her, is dead. She is pregnant. Although she has lain with Garth during their captivity, she has also been raped by the traitor Reynarth. Her pregnancy is suspect. The war is averted. The Sorcerer retreated in ruin. For political reasons Nikia does not dissolve her marriage, but separates from Garth to live with her own people.
She still loves Garth, and wishes for a reconciliation. Her child, as it is hers, is accepted by most of her father’s kingdom as heir. But Nikia, soon to rule as regent, has learned a bitter lesson. Repression of her magic when she was at the Citadel of Damris made her miserable. And yet, in the end, the assertion of it in order to save the alliance, ruined her marriage. She learns that sacrifice is often thrust upon us. Courage is not the acceptance of the opportunity to make a sacrifice, but in accepting the results of the sacrifice.
***
Robert J. Sawyer
Robert J. Sawyer—called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen and “just about the best science fiction writer out there these days” by [Denver’s]
Rocky Mountain News
—is one of only eight writers in history to win all three of the science fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year:
The World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award, which he won in 2003 for his novel
Hominids
;
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award, which he won in 1996 for his novel
The Terminal Experiment
;
and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won in 2006 for his novel
Mindscan
.
Rob is also the only writer in history to win the top SF awards in the United States, Japan, France, and Spain. In addition, he’s won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada as well as nine Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”).
Maclean’s:
Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine
says, “By any reckoning, Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever,” and Barnes and Noble calls him “the leader of SF’s next-generation pack.”
Rob’s novels are top-ten national mainstream best sellers in Canada, appearing on the
Globe and Mail
and
Maclean’s
best sellers’ lists, and they’ve hit #1 on the best sellers’ list published by
Locus
, the U.S. trade journal of the SF field. His novels include
Frameshift
,
Factoring Humanity
,
Flashforward
,
Calculating God
, and the popular Neanderthal Parallax trilogy consisting of
Hominids
,
Humans
, and
Hybrids
.
Rob has taught writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, Humber College, the National University of Ireland, and the Banff Centre. He has been Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond Hill (Ontario) Public Library, the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library, the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, and at the Odyssey Workshop. And he edits Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Calgary’s Red Deer Press.
Rob has given talks at hundreds of venues including the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada, and has been keynote speaker at dozens of events in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Boston, Tokyo, and Barcelona. He was born in Ottawa in 1960, and now lives just west of Toronto with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink.
The farther along you go in your career, the less you have to write to get a book contract. That’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s good to know that your publisher has faith in you. On the other hand, it may not become apparent until you are well into a project that it really isn’t going to come together. I’ve twice had to abandon books that I’d sold to Tor based on brief outlines. I ended up writing other books to fulfill those contracts. As it turned out, Tor was thrilled: the replacement books—
Calculating God
and
Rollback
—turned out to be two of the most successful titles I’ve ever done.
Fortunately, though, the short proposal that landed me the three-book contract for what became my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy proved to be fertile enough to produce a Hugo winner in
Hominids
, a Hugo finalist in
Humans
, and a starred review from
Booklist
—denoting a book of exceptional merit—for
Hybrids
. I probably could have gone on writing Neanderthal novels endlessly. Indeed, my editor at Tor, David G. Hartwell, invited me to just keep on going with books in the series after I turned in
Hybrids
.
I know some authors like to do really detailed outlines—not just a paragraph for each proposed chapter, but sometimes even a sentence for each paragraph that will be in the final manuscript. But I find that although I can come up with big SF ideas at the outline stage, I can only discover the fine details in the actual writing. In the case of
Hominids
, who knew that Ponter Boddit, my modern Neanderthal, had to be a quantum physicist? I sure didn’t—until I sat down to write the opening scenes. Heck, I didn’t even know his name was Ponter, or that he had two daughters, until I got down into the nitty-gritty of writing the actual chapters.
I do wish I could see the plotting details earlier. I really had only a vague idea how the trilogy was going to end when I wrote book one, and yet Tor published the first book,
Hominids
, locking its text in stone, before I began writing the third,
Hybrids
. But, looking back on the trilogy now, I have no regrets: there’s really nothing in
Hominids
I’d change if I had a chance, and
Humans
turned out to contain what I think is the finest scene I’ve ever written, a long encounter at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington that I hadn’t envisioned at all when I wrote the outline.
And now I’m on to writing a new trilogy, which again was sold with only the vaguest of outlines. But it’s exhilarating taking something inchoate and (hopefully!) turning it into structured, compelling drama.
You’re not only getting the outline that sold
Hominids
and its sequels here; you’re also getting a synopsis of
Hominids
. I’m a huge fan of serializing novels in
Analog
prior to their publication in book form.
Analog
is the number-one best-selling science-fiction magazine in the world; its long-time editor is Dr. Stanley Schmidt, and I hold the record for selling him novels for serialization, with four to date. It’s too early to say how the most recent,
Rollback
, is going to do in the awards, but the other three were all Hugo Award finalists, two were Nebula Award finalists, and one—
Hominids
—actually won the Hugo, and another—
The Terminal Experiment
—took home the Nebula. (And my
Starplex
was the only novel from its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula.) I credit the enormous exposure in
Analog
, which ran the full text of each of these books in four 25,000-word chunks, with the award nominations, and also, although it may seem counterintuitive, with the good sales these titles had in book form. Recently, a small cadre of writers who have been releasing their commercially published books for free online act as though they’ve invented a new publishing paradigm—but serialization in SF magazines has amounted to much the same thing, and it’s been going on for decades, and with a much bigger positive effect on actual book sales. Lois McMaster Bujold serialized three novels early on in
Analog
, and there’s no doubt that that helped launch her career, just as it’s boosted mine.
Analog
requires synopses of the first three quarters of the novel, to appear in chunks in front of the second, third, and fourth installments of the book. I always push ahead and synopsize the full book, including the concluding quarter, even though
Analog
doesn’t require that. But having a detailed synopsis is very useful in marketing film rights (as I write this,
The Terminal Experiment
and
Hominids
are under option, and my Hollywood agent is using the synopsis originally prepared for
Analog
to drum up film interest in
Rollback
).
In the end, it’s really only the book itself that matters—not the tools used to sell it or to help in its completion. But working out at least the major points before starting to write your first sentence can be a great asset, both economically and creatively—and I hope these samples help you with your own work.
—Robert J. Sawyer
Hominids
Synopsis
The present day. Ponter Boddit and Adikor Huld are male quantum-computing researchers living on a parallel version of Earth, where Neanderthals survived to the present day and our kind of Homo sapiens did not. While attempting to factor an enormously large number, a portal opens between their timeline and ours, and Ponter, as well as all the air in the quantum-computing chamber, is transferred here. Ponter and Adikor’s lab had been built in a unique location: Two kilometers beneath the surface, in their world’s deepest nickel mine, where their sensitive equipment would be shielded from cosmic rays.
For similar reasons, in this version of Earth a physics facility exists at the same subterranean location, in what we call northern Ontario: the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. SNO consists of a giant acrylic sphere filled with heavy water suspended in a six-story-tall chamber full of regular water. The arrival of all the air transferred with Ponter bursts the sphere apart.
Ponter almost drowns in the neutrino detector, but he is rescued by Louise Benoît, a postdoctoral physics student from Montreal. Ponter is taken by ambulance to hospital, accompanied by Reuben Montego, the mine-site physician. There, an astonished doctor with a degree in osteology identifies Ponter as being a Neanderthal, based on his cranial morphology—although how he could possibly have come to be here, no one yet knows.
Meanwhile, Mary Vaughan, a geneticist who specializes in recovering DNA from ancient specimens, is raped on the campus of Toronto’s York University, where she works. She makes her way home and finds a message waiting from Dr. Montego: he wants her to fly up to Sudbury to authenticate a Neanderthal specimen found there “in remarkable condition.” Mary, still devastated by the rape, reluctantly agrees to go.
Ponter, like all modern Neanderthals, has a Companion implant embedded in the skin of his forearm. His is a sophisticated model with significant intelligence; it goes by the name of Hak. Although Ponter is severely disoriented by what has happened to him, Hak manages to figure out where they are, and even begins to learn some English.
Back in the Neanderthal world, in which males and females live mostly separate lives, Adikor, who was Ponter’s partner in life as well as his research partner, is stunned to be charged with murder. The disappearance of Ponter has suggested foul play, at least to Daklar Bolbay. Bolbay, a female, had lived with the recently deceased Klast, another female; Bolbay had been Klast’s woman-mate. But Klast had also had a man-mate, a male she consorted with when Two became One, the four days out of each month during which male and female Neanderthals come together. Her man-mate had been Ponter, and she had two daughters by him, of whom Bolbay is now legal guardian. And on their behalf, she has put forward the charge that Adikor has murdered their father.
END OF PART ONE
Despite it being “Last Five”—the final five days of a lunar month, during which all female Neanderthals, whose menstrual cycles are synchronized, suffer from PMS, Adikor goes into the Center, the female-occupied territory. He entreats Jasmel Ket, Ponter’s elder daughter, to speak on his behalf at the preliminary murder trial. If the charge against him is substantiated, Adikor, and everyone who shares 50% of his genetic material, will be sterilized in order to remove the murderous genes from the Neanderthal gene pool.
Adikor explains to Lurt, his own woman-mate, why he has chosen Jasmel to speak on his behalf. Lurt, a chemist, agrees with Adikor’s choice, and promises to render any assistance she can.
Adikor has at least an inkling of what has really happened to Ponter, and he and Jasmel head back to the nickel mine to attempt to replicate the factoring experiment, in hopes of retrieving him.
But when they arrive at the elevator that leads down to the quantum-computing lab, Adikor is confronted by an Enforcer. When Daklar’s charge against Adikor was filed, Adikor was placed under “judicial scrutiny.” Companion implants transmit everything they see to the central “Alibi Archives.” But the 2 kilometers of rock overhead would cut off Adikor’s Companion transmissions if he went down to the lab, and so the Enforcer won’t allow him to do so. It seems that Adikor will have to get the judicial scrutiny lifted before he’ll be able to try to retrieve his beloved Ponter.
Mary Vaughan, who had recovered DNA from the original Neanderthal fossil several years before, meets Ponter in the Sudbury hospital and takes samples of his DNA. She transports the specimens to Laurentian University in Sudbury, and, using the genetics lab there, sets about duplicating Ponter’s DNA through the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
While the duplication is occurring, Mary goes to the Laurentian University rape crisis center; after all, she has much more anonymity here than back down south in Toronto.
Hak, Ponter’s Companion implant, has identified the strange human-like creatures populating this world as Gliksins: a form of humanity long extinct on Ponter’s world. Since there’s nothing wrong with Ponter, Dr. Montego sneaks him past the journalists prowling around the hospital, and takes Ponter, and Louise Benoît, out to his country home. Hak is getting better at understanding English, and Louise manages to determine that Ponter is a quantum physicist.
Mary completes her study of Ponter’s DNA: he really is a Neanderthal. She joins Dr. Montego and Louise for a barbecue dinner at Montego’s house, but Ponter takes ill there, collapsing. Dr. Montego makes an emergency call Health Canada’s Laboratory Centre for Disease Control.