The Synopsis Treasury (7 page)

I am very much with this. Write soon.

Best,

Damon

1/20/64

Dear Damon,

Hope you had as full a holiday season as we did. All seems to be back on the track here and I can get down to some serious work.

You refer to the necessity for the mind to be in two parts for consciousness. At least two parts. There’s a great deal of technical literature in psychology on this, all loaded with terms such as “the dichotomy of awareness” or “self-reflexive consciousness.” What they mean is that there has to be self awareness for there to be consciousness.

Answering your question—yes, the project succeeds, but only when those involved see that they have to aim at something far different from an Asimov robot. (Asimovot?) They see that man is conscious and aware, in part, because of his animal inheritance—all the instinctual trappings out of some 400 million years of primate development. This project must find a substitute for that animal history and condense the development time into a scale manageable in a human lifetime.

The robot has to have instincts, in a word.

This means all the accompaniments of instincts, especially fears and guilts. This last, this guilt, is one of the major keys to the project’s success—call it the “Cain and Abel Syndrome.” The robot has to feel guilty for at least one moment in its development. (Think of the chaplain wrestling with that one!)

The project workers also have to define several other tough ones and find equivalents in their robot—conscience, for one. Is there such a thing as loyalty without conscience? Can the robot be permitted violence? Do they date free its mind to monitor the instincts they have given it?

There’s also the chemical background for consciousness. The chemistry of the awareness function is as complicated as all hell. (Among other things, acid phosphatase apparently plays a key role in awakening and, thereby, in consciousness. But acid phosphatase is one of the cornerstone chemicals of sexuality and reproduction.)

But this is only the mechanical background music for the story. Much of the plotting on this one was completed before I wrote you. I’ve been accumulating notes and ideas on this one for more than three years. Essentially, this has to be a story of people under the stress of finding out about themselves in spite of every attempt to hide their minds from what they discover. They have to find out about themselves, you see; otherwise they can’t duplicate the consciousness process.

Regards,

Frank

January 28, 1964

Dear Frank,

You are evidently way ahead of me on this one, and it continues to sound extremely intriguing. Please send an outline soonest—make it sketchy or full, whichever suits you. Ordinarily I would ask for a brief outline first, but it sounds to me as if you’ve got this one worked out in detail; & in that case, it would be foolish to hold you back.

I finished reading
Dune World
in
Analog
recently, and thought it was a magnificent job. Didn’t even mind the loose ends about the sandworms and the ecology of Arrakis; I have a feeling that the clues are all there, if I were not too lazy to put them together. But I can’t help wishing there were going to be a sequel.

Best,

Damon

February 7, 1964

Dear Tom,

Here is an outline from Frank Herbert for a novel called
When Shall I Awake
? I have high hopes for this one. Herbert has been developing lately into one of the most exciting writers in the field, and I would dearly love to get him for Berkley.

Best,

Damon

November 16, 1964

Dear Tom,

I like Frank Herbert’s
Many Brave Hearts
(an awful title, by the way) very much, but I think the first fifty-odd pages are much too dense and technical for most readers. I also had a good deal of trouble keeping the four characters straight, partly due to the many shifts in viewpoint. I think both these faults, and some other less serious ones, can be easily corrected, and if there’s no objection, I’d like to write Herbert a long letter spelling out these suggestions in detail. If Lurton would like to be kept in the picture, I can send him a carbon of the letter.

Best,

Damon

December 15, 1964

Dear Frank,

Herewith
Many Brave Hearts
, with some comments. I must say first of all that although I liked this on a first reading, my opinion of it went up about 50% on second reading. Large portions of it which seemed more or less haphazardly put together when I first read them now seemed tight and snug; the ending seemed logical rather than contrived; and in short, I think this is a damn good novel on a very tough subject.

At the same time, I can’t help feeling that my difficulties with the story the first time around were not all my fault, and I’m concerned because I’m sure most people who read your book are not going to read it twice. I think for the sake of these readers, and for those who are not technically trained, some concessions ought to be made, particularly in the first fifty pages. I found the story heavy going up to about p. 50. After that it pulled me by the nose, but I’m terribly afraid that if I had been reading for pleasure instead of for professional reasons, I might have given up before that point.

A large part of my trouble, I think, was in keeping the four main characters separated. I never did succeed, throughout the first reading, in remembering for more than a page at a time which one was Timberlake and which Flattery. These names do not look much alike, but they scan the same way and perhaps have too many sounds in common. More to the point, it took me a long time to get any sense of difference in their personalities, and to a certain extent this was true even of Bickel. The physical descriptions of these people are given once, or perhaps twice, and then never referred to again. I would like an occasional glimpse of their faces and attitudes, gestures and so on throughout the book; I think that would help immeasurably in keeping track of the characters and in believing in them as people. It would help the story’s dramatic quality as well, I think, if we could see the physical expressions of these people’s stress and excitement.

The frequent shifting of viewpoints also caused me continual trouble throughout the book, not just in the first fifty pages. If the viewpoint had settled longer on any of the four characters, I felt I would have had a chance to learn who he was. I certainly won’t ask you to give up the multiple viewpoint method, which seems to be a natural tool in your hands, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to consolidate the viewpoints into somewhat larger chunks. Very often it seemed to me that the device was being used for no other purpose than to reveal, as on p. 142, that
A
does not know something
B
and the reader know; and most of the time this is redundant.

I felt a lack of background for all four collectively throughout most of the book, and I blame this partly on the mystification disease which afflicts many s.f. writers including myself. For example, the six previous failures are not mentioned until p. 51-B, although this information is vital to the basic problem which is introduced thirty pages earlier. Only on p. 58 is it explicitly revealed that the crew members are duplicates grown from biopsy material, although this can hardly help coloring all their attitudes toward themselves and each other. In short, I want to suggest that all this material, or nearly all—even including Flattery’s special mission—would be inserted in its natural order near the beginning of the novel, and that we should clearly understand, as soon as possible, the role of each character and of the project as a whole. Holding back information arbitrarily very often decreases suspense rather than increasing it, and I think that is true here. The real suspense here lies in What’s going to happen? And not in Who are these people? Moreover, if this material were dealt with in its natural place, it seems to me it would become easy to clear up the fuzziness about the four characters’ past lives. Bits and pieces of this background are scattered throughout the book; for example, it is never clear until p. 181 that there is always a wall between the manipulators and the sterile-environment people. This background fuzziness is a drawback not only in itself, but because it inevitably arouses the suspicion that the whole shipboard experience will turn out to be subjective or illusory. This suspicion is bound to arise anyhow, merely because the novel takes place entirely in an artificial environment, and I think it would either be exploited or disposed of as early as possible. The first suggestion in concrete terms that the ship may be a phony comes on p. 140, and although it falls dramatically here, it seems to me this is much too late.

(Parenthetically, I may as well say here that I’ve never felt sure I understood why the ship was not a phony. If the primary purpose is to create a conscious artificial mind, and this is to be done in a spaceship solely because it is too dangerous to attempt on Earth, why sacrifice three thousand “colonists” with each failure?)

Finally, I think I may have got off on the wrong foot in reading this story the first time because of the place where it begins. It begins just after a dramatic event which I would have liked to see. I think if you would let the reader see it—alarms sounding, the rush to the controls, the fine balance of power shifting as Bickel takes over and kills the OMC—most of the Who? What? Where? Problems which are now so vexing would be naturally and easily solved at the beginning.

Here are some scattered comments, most of them minor:

P. 14, I think this statement of the problem is premature and much too abrupt. This should wait for Hempstead’s introduction of it on p. 38, and I think the idea should be accepted more slowly by Bickel and Timberlake, to whom it presumably comes as a complete surprise.

P. 20: I found this long technical passage pretty heavy wading. Much later, during a similar long technical dialogue, we have a parallel sequence of Flattery’s thoughts to carry the story. Would some such device be possible here?

Hibernation is misspelled throughout. Do you want to change “dehyb” to “dehibe” or what?

P. 40 and elsewhere, when people think about Hempstead and the UMB labs, could we have something more visual and convincing?

If the UMB project is controlled by a number of nations, I forget how many—five? seven?—why are nearly all the names of Anglo-Saxon origin?

Prudence’s antireligious needling of Flattery, here & there throughout: it seems to be suggested that this is programmed, not merely her own personal bias or caprice, but what is its purpose?

P. 63 or thereabouts, we begin to have a sense of Bickel as a high-wire performer, attempting something exquisitely difficult and dangerous. Need this begin so late?

P. 72 and elsewhere, I find it maddeningly unclear how much Flattery and Weygand know. Flattery here produces as a hypothesis the danger of creating an autonomous conscious robot, and yet he and Weygand evidently know the UMB robot project was a fake. P. 82, top, seems to suggest that Weygand already knows the nature and purpose of the ship; middle & bottom, but that she does not but is beginning to suspect. Which is intended? (I note that on a first reading, I wrote at this point, “simulation device—means not real spaceship?”)

P. 91 A and elsewhere, what do Weygand’s “experiments” on her own body amount to unless she is able to run highly sophisticated analyses of her body fluids—and even then, what can she expect to find out that will have any application to the Ox? The only suggestion of such application comes on p. 200; earlier than that it is not at all clear that she has any purpose in dosing herself.

P. 114, is there a word missing from the last sentence?

P. 123 & elsewhere (186, 215, 224) it is assumed that only humans have consciousness, not other organisms, even higher vertebrates. Do you really mean this?

P. 229, is there any reason why Bickel’s speech and the others’ reactions to it should not fall here?

P. 234, the man’s name was Gandhi; “Mahatma” is an honorific. I’m sure you know this, but Flattery does not seem to. How come?

I have skipped some notes I made about parts of the novel I especially admired, such as Bickel’s going-to-sleep scene with its insight into his thinking processes, and the fine following scene when the others take up his interrupted train of thought like one collective mind—or Flattery’s revelation on p. 222—but really the whole thing is a remarkably muscular and effective piece of work, and I think with these relatively minor revisions it can be a blockbuster.

Cordially,

Damon

cc. to Thomas A. Dardis

Lurton Blassingame

1/9/65

Dear Damon:

Your excellent letter and the ms of
Hearts
arrived yesterday—god bless us all and the United States mails. As nearly as I could determine from the mutilated wrapping it was mailed in New York Dec. 17. part of the delay may have been caused by the fact it was addressed to my pre-August ‘64 San Francisco address, but let’s give the PO Dept. our
Z
for zzzzzzzzzzzzzz award anyway.

I suspect I’m making a similar mistake addressing this letter to
The Anchorage
. Somewhere in all this mess called a desk is (I do believe) a Kentucky address for you. Ah, well—forward, ever forward.

Your comments and notes are much appreciated.

You’ll have to wait for the revised ms to see what I’m doing about most of this story’s needs, but I can include a couple of points here:

It was spelled hybernation deliberately on the convention that a new process deserves a new name—which may echo the term for a similar process. This thing’ll be only remotely like the animal process if we ever achieve it. For one thing, it seems pretty obvious now that all the human body’s water must be replaced before application of any deep freeze—otherwise you get massive and very deadly cell damage. Point two (and this was really the first reason with me; I rationalized everything else to suit): I looked at “dehibe” and I looked and I looked. That there’s an ugly word, friend. It looks ugly. I don’t find the same objection to “dehyb.” You may twist my arm and make me go back to hibernation, but dehibe, never! Death before dishonor!