2017 represents the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first novel, SUNDIPPER, (St. Martin's Press, 1987). The book has been out of print for a while, so I thought I would start this blog to post excerpts from SUNDIPPER and other books of mine. In between I intend to record some thoughts about each novel, its conception, writing, and the processes they underwent to be published.
SUNDIPPER was actually the fourth novel I wrote, but the first to be published. Previously I had attempted a stupendous historical epic titled THE RED HUSSAR, about an Irish girl who masquerades as a man in order to fight in Napoleon's cavalry. I was inspired by a film and a mini series: THE DUELLISTS (Ridley Scott, 1977, from a story by Joseph Conrad), and the 20 part BBC series WAR AND PEACE (1972, with Anthony Hopkins and Alan Dobie). THE RED HUSSAR would have consisted of three long novels, which would have taken the story from the Peace of Amiens in 1803 up to the July Revolution of 1830. I wrote the first book. It was dreadful. I began the second, IMPERIAL GRAY, which covers the invasion of Russia in 1812. If you ever wondered why Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE is so massive a book, well, let me tell you, just describing Napoleon's invasion of Russia is a monumental task. I wrote 200,000 words and only having finished the battle of Borodino, I quit from exhaustion. IMPERIAL GRAY would have been close to 600,000 words long, about 20,000 words longer than Tolstoy's magnum opus.
The third book (BRAVEST OF THE BRAVE) never existed except as notes and sketches. Sanity set in, as I saw no market for a overweight costume historical about a cross-dressing hussar. THE RED HUSSAR remains forever unfinished.
I turned instead to science fiction. I was a member of the science fiction club at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC. I read a lot of SF in those days, though it was never my preferred genre; to this day I would rather read a good history text. Even so, writing SF seemed a good option. I had lots of ideas, and many of my historical settings and characters were adaptable to a science fiction milieu.
My first SF efforts took the form of novellas, longish short stories in the 30-35,000 word range. Even in the 1980s, such length stories were very hard to place, so I spliced two of them together into a single novel, DREAD NYMPH. The title comes from The Odyssey (Kazantzakis translation) in Book X:
We came to Aiaia, an island
Where dwelt Circe of the living hair,
The dread nymph who speaks to mortals.
In my story, a human explorer for hire is illegally dropped on the planet Astarte, which has had no contact with beings from other worlds. His job is to survey the planet for a greedy, exploitative consortium seeking a new world to rape of its resources. He's dropped into a wilderness to avoid contact with the natives but is soon captured by the Astartan equivalent of a forest ranger. He christens her "Circe," and things get much more complicated from that point on.
DREAD NYMPH consisted of two novellas, "Dread Nymph" and "Camouflet." I liked the story so much I wrote a sequel immediately, also made up of two novellas: "A Star Called Wormwood" and "Maenad." This last went unfinished, but the story was completely plotted out.
I sent DREAD NYMPH around to a few publishers, over the transom, as I did not have a literary agent then. It garnered mild interest, but no offers to publish. The most supportive response I got was from Stuart Moore, then an editor at St. Martin's Press. With his encouragement, I sent my next effort, a full length SF novel called RAIDEN (the Japanese word for "thunderbolt"). RAIDEN is the story of a young Martian colonial woman of the 25th century. Mars is partly terraformed, and so has a thin, cold, but breathable atmosphere. The milieu is something like the Old West frontier. A few rich families control "concessions" to produce essential materials for life--air, water, potatoes, etc. Everyone else is dirt poor and treated as dirt. The protagonist, Caspian Geyer, wins an important sporting event, defeating the scions of many wealthy families. This leads to her being ordered off Mars by the offended oligarchs. She finds a quick way out when a unsuccessful suitor offers her a place in a secret space travel program that is developing the first interstellar drive, the RAIDEN device.
Stuart Moore liked RAIDEN OK, but not enough to buy it. Do you have anything else? he asked. Just one thing: a short SF novel I called SUNDIPPER.
The novel was based on (but does not incorporate) an unsold short story I wrote called "Lifeguard." In the short story, a marooned space traveler is rescued by a mysterious being in a space suit. It turns out to be an alien who feeds on the marooned man's life force. He's slowly dying from the alien's ministrations, but in the end he doesn't mind because the process feels so good . . .
The working title of the novel was LAST DANCE, a play on the name of one of the main characters. Unfortunately, "Last Dance" was a popular song title too, so I had to accept SUNDIPPER as the alternative. It was a better title anyway.
St. Martin's bought the novel right away. It turned out my timing was impeccable. The company had recently decided to enter the mass market paperback scene with their own imprint. SUNDIPPER was one of the first titles issued as a St. Martin's paperback. (Another early title was a reprint of Fred Chappell's 1968 novel DAGON. Chappell was Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, just down the road from my home in Chapel Hill.)
The advance was $1,500.00. Not much then and not much now, but who was I to refuse? It was the most money I had ever made at one time. Some months later, another writer I met who was just making her first sale berated me for accepting such a low advance. Fact was, I thought it was fair. It was a first novel by an unknown author. What were they supposed to give me, a million? I thought then and think now it is better to accept a modest advance in the hope of earning good royalties later. Big advances are much talked about, but few check afterwards to see if the titles so lauded earn out.
I quote some copyrighted song lyrics in SUNDIPPER, namely the Buddy Kaye-Ted Mossman standard, "Til the End of Time." The song was made famous by Perry Como in 1945, his first #1 hit. As a kid in the 1970s, I often heard the Ray Charles Singers choral swing version on local radio. In SUNDIPPER the life-draining alien from "Lifeguard" has made it to Earth and develops a taste for mid-twentieth century pop music.
Securing the rights to quote a couple lines of the song cost me about $75 out of my own pocket. I wanted to quote from another song, "Ramblin' Rose," by Noel & Joe Sherman, but the publisher wanted $300 (yes, three hundred dollars) to quote four lines! I didn't pay. Instead I wrote a short 1940-ish lyric of my own:
Whispers in the dark--
Not for laughing or having a lark,
Saying things that always come true,
Except for me and you. (p. 51)
Not exactly Brill Building, but convincing enough for St. Martin's to ask me to clear the quote with the music publisher.
SUNDIPPER did not earn out its advance and went out of print a couple months after its debut in August 1987. This was typical for a paperback original. I learned from Stuart the remaining unsold copies had been remaindered (mostly in Australia). I had visions of a black-painted C-130 skimming over the outback while St. Martin's operatives shoveled unsold copies of SUNDIPPER out the cargo doors.
I never knew the artist's name who did the cover painting, one of the few times in my career I wasn't told. I asked St. Martin's who did the cover and was told "Some guy whose name we can't pronounce." If anyone out there knows who the artist was (or if you are the artist!), please let me know.
It's a pretty good story, youthfully overwrought in places. Since my teens I had been an avid reader of paranormal literature--UFOs, Fortean phenomena, monsters, what have you. I drew on this background and worked out a plot about energy harvesters capturing solar plasma to sell to space colonies as a power source. In addition to money and energy, the sundippers absorb a special wavelength of solar energy called in the book "the Gift," which I later equate with Reichenbach's Od and Wilhelm Reich's orgone. This makes them sought after sex partners. Can you tell I was a lonely bachelor when I wrote this book?
More than just sexual energy, the Gift shows signs of sentience. There are hints that all those who died in the Sun have their consciousness preserved as part of the Gift.
The back cover copy gives away a salient plot point, dammit.
Stuart Moore went on to become a well known editor at DC Comics.
In 1994 I authorized publication of SUNDIPPER in Romania as IN INIMA RECE A SOARELUI, translated by Petru Iamandi and published by Editura Porto-Franco.
The book is dedicated "To Sara/Q.E.D." Sara is Sara Lewis Holmes, now a writer herself.
Next: An Excerpt from SUNDIPPER
No comments:
Post a Comment