|
As in the macrocosm,
so in the microcosm.
CONTINUITY
During this period,
he took the manuscript with him to Milford, where he met Michael Moorcock,
British fiction writer, literary theoretician, and editor of the
experimental magazine New Worlds.
FRAME
In the microcosm of
science fiction, the countercultural literary trend against was called the
"New Wave."
So dubbed by critic
Judith Merril to describe a recondite stylistic revolution within the
genre taking place primarily in Britain under the theoretical aegis of
Mike Moorcock. But by 1968, the term had come to include anything that its
proponents considered taboo-breaking or conservatives believed polluted
the vital bodily fluids of the science fiction genre, as exemplified by
the stories in Harlan Ellison's landmark DANGEROUS VISIONS anthology.
And of course by BUG
JACK BARRON, "New Wave" by all three definitions, and a novel that had
become notorious before it even found a publisher.
It was already
notorious in part because I had already gone public on the subject in
articles in science fiction fanzine, in appearances at science fiction
conventions, even on the radio. I definitely did not want BUG JACK BARRON
published as just another genre sf paperback, but things being what they
were, I used my voice wherever I could make it heard.
And took the
manuscript with me to the Milford Conference.
CONTINUITY
Moorcock was very
enthusiastic about BUG JACK BARRON, and serialized it in New Worlds in six
monthly installments. The magazine had a grant from the British Arts
Council, and when the W.H. Smith bookstore chain refused to stock it
because of their objections to BUG JACK BARRON and the Arts Council
successfully pressured them to rescind the ban, questions were raised in
Parliament, where Spinrad was called a "degenerate."
Meanwhile, Spinrad
was finally persuaded to sell the American book rights to BUG JACK BARRON
to Avon Books as a science fiction paperback original.
FRAME
Mike Moorcock was
not the only one at Milford who was enthusiastic about the notorious BUG
JACK BARRON when they got to read a piece of it. The encouraging reception
it got from writers on both sides of the so-called New Wave controversy
pulled me out of a personal pit and dropped me in the middle of a paradox
with which I have wrestled ever since.
Ever since BUG JACK
BARRON, it has always seemed to me that what I was writing, like much else
that got published as "sf," did not belong in the sf marketing category,
genre sf being commercially targeted at an audience of literarily and
politically unsophisticated male adolescents, and what I wrote, judging
from reader response, appealing to a demographic slice that was older,
more female, more interested in literary and political matters than in the
"action adventure" formula dominant in the sf genre.
A more general
audience, conditioned by decades of sf genre packaging not to seek out
such fiction within such covers, where in fact, paradoxically, much of
the best of it is fact to be found, precisely because the writers thereof
have been ghettoized therein by the mainstream publishing apparatus,
itself conditioned by the very prejudices its own sf lines have done so
much to promulgate.
Like other science
fiction writers of my generation and our older soul-mates of similar
literary ambition -- Ellison, Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Barry Maltzberg,
Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delaney, Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss, Leiber,
Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, to name a few -- I have fought to break
my work out of this literary ghetto. The paradox being that there has
always been more comprehension for this desire to break the bounds of the
genre, more emotional and intellectual support for literarily adventurous
speculative fiction, within the walls of the very ghetto from which it
seeks to escape than from without.
This being the short
form of the long analyses in my teaching anthology MODERN SCIENCE FICTION
and my critical overview of the literature and its place in society
SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD, both published quite later.
FLASHBACK
A year or so of
trying to sell BUG JACK BARRON as a major mainstream novel finally
convinced me that I was banging my brains out against a stone wall. And
indeed, as soon as I gave up and unhappily agreed to let Scott Meredith
try the sf publishers, the book was involved in a kind of half-assed
auction. And after I reluctantly sold the novel to Avon as a paperback
original, I managed to secure a simultaneous hardcover edition from Walker
Books.
Still, I wanted out.
Or rather, in. To larger literary realms. And the only way to do it seemed
to be to write a novel that was not science fiction, and to do it without
a contract.
This, after having
had a contracted novel rejected and bounce around for a year without
selling, was scary. Though, upon reflection, maybe not. After all, the
$3000 I had finally gotten for BUG JACK BARRON via competitive bidding
was still less than what I had made in two weeks writing a Star Trek
script. And my Knight column covered the rent.
And I had a story to
tell, or rather several of them that fit together thematically. I take a
look backwards for a change, and would write THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN,
relating the karmic connections between the roots the Counterculture in
the old Village bohemia, drug dealing, psychotherapy cults, and the
fee-reading operation at a literary agency not entirely unlike Scott
Meredith's.
CONTINUITY
About this time, he
met Terry Champagne, with whom he was to live for the next year or so.
After he finished
THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN and persuaded Meredith to agent it, he and Terry
Champagne moved to London in 1969.
FLASHBACK
Yes, Theresa Louisa
Champagne was her real name, and in retrospect it was a relationship that
was not so much doomed as destined to be a limited run for a certain
season.
Terry was still
married to a friend of mine while she was chasing after me, and I was too
square to let her catch me until she had resolved her situation. Terry was
not into monogamy except perhaps of the short-term serial variety. Terry
was not looking for a permanent relationship, and I was.
Or was I?
For by the time she
moved into my Laurel Canyon apartment, I was committed to moving out. All
the way to London.
The American
publication of BUG JACK BARRON was set, and I was in the process of
finishing THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN. I had become something of a minor
countercultural hero in Swinging London in absentia. Who could resist? Why
should I?
Hooking up with
Terry didn't change my plans. Terry was an archetypal child of the
Sixties. a stone willing to roll what and wherever. An artist, a topless
dancer, a jeweler, a dealer, and when, through me, she got to take a shot
at writing stories and doing journalism, she succeeded at that too,
albeit, on her usual terms. "It's all the same shit," she used to say to
me, to my consternation.
If I had ever
thought of myself as a hippie, living with Terry Champagne disabused me of
any such notion.
After finishing THE
CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, I somehow managed to bullshit the Scott Meredith
Literary Agency into marketing it despite, uh, certain aspects, and off we
went, in March of 1969, via a flood in LA, a blizzard in New York, and a
five day barfing seasick crossing on the SS United States, to London, to a
Europe that neither of us had ever seen.
FRAME
Neither Terry nor I
had been outside of North America before, and now here we were in London,
and at first, it was all an adventure, the scene around New Worlds, the
fringes of the Countercultural underground, Mid-Summer's Eve at
Stonehenge, it was all new, even the smell of everything was subtly
different.
But after we had
sublet at apartment in Bayswater and started actually living in London, it
all settled into a sort of normal routine, something like living in New
York for me, but more alien for a California girl like Terry.
Which is to say that
London in the end was more interesting to me than to her. She was writing
about as much as I was, and good stuff too, but she was never as serious
about the literary scene as I was, or for that matter, about much of
anything else.
Nor was I getting
much writing done waiting for BUG JACK BARRON to be published, waiting
for THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN to sell as it bounced from publisher to
publisher, talking literary theory with Mike Moorcock and colleagues,
playing the minor underground literary celebrity....
FLASHBACK
After J.G. Ballard
and Mike Moorcock backed out, Christopher Priest and I were invited as the
token science fiction writers to the Harrogate Festival of Literature and
Science by the noted publisher and literary figure, John Calder. Off we
went by train, Chris and his wife, Terry and I, Chris nervous about
mingling with all the awesome literary luminaries.
Calder, quite
frantic, met the train with his humongous Jaguar saloon, the four of us
and two Indian professors stuffed ourselves into it, and Calder started to
drive out of the parking lot --
"Oh no, man!" I
shouted. "You're gonna --"
Too late. Calder had
already driven the Jag halfway down a flight of stone steps, where it hung
quivering on its belly-pan.
Calder, freaking,
had no idea what to do next.
Somehow, this grand
entrance into the literary high life ended any trepidation I might have
felt about being a 28 year old sf punk amidst my intellectual betters.
"You stay behind the
wheel and gun the engine when I tell to you to," I told him, "and the
rest of us get out and lift the rear end."
And that's how we
did it, bouncing the car down the steps in stages. It managed to get us to
the hotel before all the oil leaked out, but the repair bill was enormous.
So it goes, as Kurt
Vonnegut would say. So it went.
The theme of the
conference was the interface between science and technology and
literature, but they had one microphone to be passed among twenty
panelists, like an exaggeration of a typical science fiction convention.
My experience therewith served me well, and I sort of began to ooze front
and center.
Then, Erich Fried, a
German Marxist writer, and his attendant groupies decided to organize a
revolution. This was 1969, I was the author of the notorious BUG JACK
BARRON, and thought my heart was surely in the right revolutionary place,
so I attended his evening strategy session in the auditorium as invited.
Fried's thesis was
that the relationship between the speakers up on the platform, and the
audience down here in rows of seats facing them, was hierarchical,
therefore fascist. He would demand that the seats be rearranged in a
circle with the audience surrounding the speakers on the same equal level.
Much more democratic.
Okay....
But when I looked
down, I observed that the chair I was sitting on, like every other seat in
the auditorium, was quite thoroughly nailed to the floor. It would take a
team of carpenters days to move them all.
When I pointed this
out to Fried, he scowled at me with bemused contempt. "Hardly the point!"
he sniffed.
Uh-huh.
The next day, Fried
stood up in the audience and made his demand backed up by many shouts of
"Right On!" from his supporters. There then ensued half an hour of tedious
argument about seating arrangements to the discomfort of the paying
customers, and the total befuddlement of Nigel Calder, the chairman, who
had completely lost control.
After a half hour of
listening to this totally pointless argument, I had finally had enough. I
snatched the one free microphone, and gave Fried what he wanted.
I observed none too
gently that, the seats being nailed to the floor, the argument was moot,
the audience was bored with it, and it was time to get on with the
program.
"You, sir," Fried
shouted righteously on cue, "are a fascist swine and a bastard!" And
stormed out of the audience at the head of his troops, as he had obviously
planned to do all along.
It was the major
media event of the conference. It made all the papers. That's how I got
called a fascist swine and a bastard in every major newspaper in Britain.
Well, not precisely.
Because John Calder had spelled my name wrong in the press kit, the
fascist bastard was "Norman Spinard."
FRAME
BUG JACK BARRON had
been published, THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN hadn't sold, I was still writing
my monthly column for Knight, but had no other significant source of
income, Terry was getting homesick for California, the sublet on the
London apartment was up, so, somewhat reluctantly on my part, perhaps,
after a month staggering about the continent after the car we had borrowed
from Mike Moorcock expired in Germany, we returned to Richard Nixon's
America in the fall of 1969 and rented a house in Laurel Canyon.
FLASHBACK
Coda to Harrogate:
We took the train
back to London in the company of, among others, William Burroughs. We had
to change at York. Burroughs went to a newsstand after reading matter for
the trip and returned with a handful of sleazy British tabloids.
"Look at this
stuff!" he chortled. "Juicy!"
They were all full
of this lurid Hollywood murder story. Pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife
of Roman Polanski, famous hair stylist to the stars Jay Sebring, and
several others had been gorily murdered by a tribe of drug-crazed hippies
in thrall to some weirdo named Charles Manson. I never paid attention to
crap like that, and marveled at how someone like Burroughs could.
Little did I know
how close I was to get to the Manson Family.
Too close for
comfort. And soon.
CONTINUITY
There Spinrad, in
1970-71, wrote THE IRON DREAM, his satire of science fiction, Nazism, and
Adolf Hitler, which had emerged as a concept from a conversation in London
with Moorcock, during the writing of which his relationship with Terry
Champagne ended.
During this period,
he was also writing political journalism, film criticism, and the
occasional book review for the Los Angeles Free Press, America's
best-selling weekly underground newspaper.
FRAME
A crazy time.
My relationship with
Terry was breaking up. I was writing a novel that amounted to channeling
the consciousness of Hitler in order to exorcise the demon of Nazism. And
I had become a main man of the Underground Press on the side.
Arthur Kunkin,
founder of the Free Press, had hired Brian Kirby as managing editor, and I
was one of the writers he brought in. The money was next to nothing, but
as a film critic I was on all the freebie review lists, as a political
columnist, I developed a certain following, and I loved the instant
feedback of weekly journalism, a welcome relief from getting inside the
head of Hitler while my relationship was falling apart.
But what I, and
everyone else at the paper, could have done without was the Mansonoids.
Kirby had brought in
poet and former Fug Ed Sanders from New York to cover the murder trial of
Charlie Manson. As soon as he hit the tarmac at LAX, Ed was writing stuff
about how the Establishment was railroading this innocent hippie tribe in
order to crush the Counterculture.
Charlie and his
Family loved the coverage. They loved the paper. They loved Ed. There
were more of them on the loose than anybody not at the Freep realized. And
as the trial progressed, every stoned-out nut in California seemed to want
to join the Manson Family too...
The Mansonoids
trusted Ed. They trusted him so much that they told him about all these
other neat snuffs they had done that only their good buddies at the Free
Press now knew about, hee, hee, hee....
So early on we all
knew that Manson & Co. were indeed the crazed killers the wicked
Establishment claimed they were, but Kirby had to keep on their good
side, such as it was, the Freep had to hew to the Mansonsoid line, print
Charlie's poems and manifestos, or the murderous creeps hanging around the
paper might not like us any more....
Years later, I met
Ed Sanders in New York.
He told me that even
there, even then, he still slept with the lights on.
One good thing did
come of it, though: one of the best front page headlines ever.
Remember when
Richard Nixon butted into the trial? "MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES,"
screamed the headlines in the Establishment papers.
The next issue of
the Free Press carried a piece by Charlie himself about the then-unfolding
Watergate scandal.
"NIXON GUILTY,
MANSON DECLARES," said Brian Kirby's headline.
How right they both
were!
CONTINUITY
THE CHILDREN OF
HAMELIN still hadn't found a book publisher, and Brian Kirby, editor of
the Free Press, began an unprecedented weekly serialization of the novel
in the paper.
FLASHBACK
CONTINUITY
Ernsberger was later
fired by Minton, and when the paperback of PASSING THROUGH THE FLAME was
published, the dedication to Ernsberger, which had appeared in the
hardcover, was removed. During this period, MCA bought Putnam, and eased
out Walter Minton, and Spinrad changed agents again, signing on with the
Jane Rotrosen Agency.
FLASHBACK
By the time the
paperback came out, Dona and I had moved back to New York, and I saw the
first copy in the Putnam office. In the absence of Minton, I raved on
about how I was going to talk to certain people in Hollywood who would see
to it that he would be gone ere the year was out.
It was admittedly a
cheap thrill. Putnam had already been bought by MCA, and from the
experience of my friends Betty and Ian Ballantine, I knew all too well
what happened to owners who sold their companies to such conglomerates
believing they could cash the fat check and still retain effective
control.
Then too, Minton was
not exactly a hero to his troops. He once fired a couple dozen people at
the office Christmas party, to give you an idea. I was at a big
publishing party when it came down. A whole bunch of people from the
Putnam office arrived, drunk as skunks, and lugging champagne, which they
proceeded to pour for me.
MCA just axed Walter
Minton, they told me. How did you do it? I just smiled enigmatically over
the rim of my glass and toasted his demise.
CONTINUITY
In another attempt
to secure major mainstream hardcover publication, Spinrad wrote THE MIND
GAME without a contract. Though the completed book seemed on the verge of
being accepted by major hardcover houses several times, something always
seemed to happen between the editorial and legal end.
FLASHBACK
Was Scientology or
the fear thereof responsible? They had certainly complained when their
street-solicitor minions appeared in my comic short story in Playboy,
"Holy War on 34th Street," and had tried unsuccessfully to get Anchor
Books to edit my comments on Hubbard out of MODERN SCIENCE FICTION.
And while THE MIND
GAME was bouncing around, we did have this rather peculiar burglary. The
apartment was ransacked, but nothing was taken. Not the stereo, not the tv,
not Dona's mink coat which was hanging in plain view, not even cash.
A search for a
manuscript?
A not-so-friendly
warning?
The cops said it was
probably crazed dopers.
I could hardly tell
them that the burglars hadn't taken my grass either.
FRAME
Whatever the cause,
THE MIND GAME wasn't selling, so I decided it was time to write another
science fiction novel, and wrote an outline for A WORLD BETWEEN, my
meditation on sex roles, feminism, media, and electronic democracy.
My friend David
Hartwell wanted to buy it, and I had been instrumental in securing him his
position, but unfortunately that position was sf editor at
Putnam-Berkley. I had recommended him to Ernsberger, but at this time,
George was already gone and Walter Minton was still in power.
So Jane Rotrosen
auctioned the outline, and the winner was Jove Books, the hot new
paperback line just started by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. And they made a
deal to do new editions of THE IRON DREAM and BUG JACK BARRON. And bought
THE MIND GAME too.
For the first time
in my career, I had some significant capital.
CONTINUITY
Jove published THE
IRON DREAM, but before any of Spinrad's other books there could be
published, corporate upheavals at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich intervened.
The Jove science fiction program expired, and Jove itself was sold to
Putnam-Berkley, under which corporate aegis it finally published THE MIND
GAME in 1980.
Spinrad, meanwhile,
had moved A WORLD BETWEEN to Simon & Schuster/Pocketbooks, where David
Hartwell had started a new line of books, Timescape. Hartwell published A
WORLD BETWEEN as a paperback original, but published Spinrad's next two
novels, SONGS FROM THE STARS and THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE in hardcover.
FRAME
SONGS FROM THE STARS
was a post-apocalypse alien-contact story, among other things, and I
wanted the "narration" of the alien data-packets to be, well, songs,
poetry, that is. Could I pull this off? Fortunately, David Hartwell was
an experienced poetry editor whom I could count upon to tell me whether I
was making a fool of myself.
David thought the
verse worked, with some tinkering, but felt that the 40 pages or so of
description around it should be in metric prose.
"Metric prose?
What's that?"
David proceeded to
teach me, as we went over 40 pages of manuscript, syllable by syllable,
phoneme by phoneme.
Somehow, this
learning experience, combined with a scene that had been kicking around
in my head for years without leading anywhere, synergized into THE VOID
CAPTAIN'S TALE, a (non)-love-story of the far future written in a kind of
"world-speak" called Lingo, my first piece of book-length fiction in
experimental prose since BUG JACK BARRON, although in a style light-years
apart.
I had written three
novels since the publication of PASSING THROUGH THE FLAME in 1975, but
owing to all these publishing upheavals, none of them were published
until 1979-1980, when all three of them were published in a space of 18
months. First it looked as if I had had a four year writing block, then as
if I had written three major novels in less than two years!
CONTINUITY
In 1976, soon after
the writing of A WORLD BETWEEN, Spinrad's relationship with Dona Sadock
ended, though the two remained good friends. In 1980-1982, Spinrad was
twice elected President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. During
this period he also began a quarterly column of criticism for ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, which, at this writing, still
continues. In 1982, Universal Pictures, which had previously had the book
under option, bought the film rights to BUG JACK BARRON for $75,000, the
film to be written by Harlan Ellison and directed by Costa-Gavras.
FLASHBACK
Universal was trying
to get me to sell them another cheap option, I knew that I could force
them to pay me the pick-up money only because Costa-Gavras wanted Harlan
to write it. It was a high-stakes game of chicken.
Finally, I got my
long awaited $75,000 phone call. I had about two hours to enjoy it. Then I
got another phone call telling me that Phil Dick had had a massive stroke
and had lapsed into a terminal coma.
Universal still owns
the film rights to BUG JACK BARRON. To this date, they have pissed away
maybe $2 million on the project, and the film has not been made.
CONTINUITY
During this period,
he began visiting France, the first time as guest of honor at the Metz
Science Fiction Festival. On this trip, in Paris, he recorded two tracks
on Richard Pinhas' album East-West as a cyborged vocalist.
FLASHBACK
"Me sing on a record
album, Richard? Are you nuts? I can't even carry a tune with a fork
lift!"
Not to worry, he
told me, just write some words to this music, chant them into the
microphone, and I, the vocoder, and the computer will do the rest.
So we go into the
studio, and I put on the earphones, and start just chanting these simple
lyrics, we do some takes like this, and then....
And then Richard
tries something. He lets me hear my own voice being processed through the
vocoder circuitry in real-time and something happens.... I'm supplying
analog input to the electronic augmentation circuitry, I'm in a positive
feedback loop with the vocoder, I'm collaborating with it, with whatever
Richard is doing, manipulating it as it's augmenting me, and out the other
end something is singing.... me, maybe, but not quite not-me either, and
then....
And then,
unbeknownst to me, Richard cuts the vocoder out of the circuit like Daddy
surreptitiously removing the training wheels from a kid's bicycle.
And plays the result
back to me.
"That's you," he
tells me, "au naturel." And so it was. And so it is. For better or worse,
you can hear it on the album, re-released on CD in 1992.
I wrote a piece on
the experience for a magazine. And started playing with the first little
electronic keyboards. And got to thinking....
Electronic circuitry
can replace human drummers, even do whole rhythm tracks untouched by human
hands....
And if electronic
circuitry can make a singer out of me, it can make a rock star out of
anyone....
And if out of
anyone, why not out of no one, why not virtual rock stars who aren't there
to not show up for concerts, or get busted for drugs, or command all that
money...?
If the music
industry could do this, they sure would, now wouldn't they?
And that was to be
the genesis of LITTLE HEROES.
FRAME
But LITTLE HEROES
was one book in the future. I had never done a sequel to anything before,
or since, but I wanted to do a sequel to THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE. Sort of.
THE VOID CAPTAIN'S
TALE, narrated in his own "sprach of Lingo," that is, his private melange
of human languages, by the Captain in question, takes place entirely on a
single space ship, and is written in a rather hermetic Germanic sprach.
I didn't want to
keep the characters, or the setting, or even the style. I wanted to write
a wider- screen, more up-beat, joyous bildungsroman from a female point of
view, and in a more Latinate, baroque, wise-cracking sprach of Lingo.....
CONTINUITY
After the hardcover
publication of THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE by Timescape in 1983, David
Hartwell had made a deal for a new thematically-and stylistically related
novel, CHILD OF FORTUNE, and Spinrad once more returned to Los Angeles
and rented yet another house in Laurel Canyon in which to write it.
FLASHBACK
The breakup with
Dona left me emotionally devastated, New York was filled with memories,
bad karma, high rents, I was getting homesick for California, and CHILD
OF FORTUNE, with its long sequence in an alien forest of flowers seemed
like a California book....
But I had friends in
New York, I had plenty of money from various books and the movie deal. So
I decided to give New York one more try. I'd make a fresh start, I'd move
into a nice new apartment. After all, I could now afford twice the rent I
was presently playing for my crappy little three room railroad flat on
Perry Street.
I looked, and
looked, and was finally about to give up when I saw an ad for an apartment
that seemed perfect. Double my current rent, but I was prepared to pay it.
"Large beautiful
four room apt. on tree-lined Village street, eat-in kitchen, sunny garden
view...."
Only wasn't there
something familiar about the phone number...?
Indeed there was, as
it turned out when I called it.
It was the number of
my current landlord.
The wonderful
apartment I could move into for twice the rent I was paying was a clone of
my own in the same building two floors down.
CONTINUITY
Before contracts for
CHILD OF FORTUNE could be drawn up, the Timescape line got caught up in a
power-struggle between Richard Snyder, head of Simon & Schuster, and Ron
Busch, head of its Pocket Books subsidiary. Snyder canceled the Timescape
line and caused Busch to fire Hartwell, simultaneously making a deal with
Scott Meredith for his literary agency to package a new line of science
fiction for the company.
FLASHBACK
David Hartwell used
to throw Friday afternoon parties in his office. Dick Snyder's office had
a private dining room and attached kitchen. One Friday, after Snyder had
left, Dave snuck up to his office to cop some ice from the machine in his
private kitchen.
He returned with a
bucket of ice cubes and a dazed expression.
Snyder's ice machine
had embossed the cubes with his monogram.
FRAME
Which will give you
some idea of the egos involved. But it was corporate hardball too. Busch,
not Snyder, had hired Hartwell to start the Timescape line, and now
Timescape was doing Pocket Books hardcovers, which Snyder chose to see as
infringement by Busch on his turf. So canceling Busch's sf line, and
making a deal with his good buddy and my ex-agent Scott Meredith to
package a replacement was a ploy in a larger power struggle.
Making Busch take
the public heat for a move that was directed against himself was pure
Dick Snyder.
CONTINUITY
The Science Fiction
Writers of America, under President Marta Randall, strenuously objected to
this obvious conflict of interest. Randall had been Spinrad's Vice
President and his choice to succeed him, a task she had accepted only on
condition that Spinrad make himself available if called upon by her in an
emergency. During the period when this crisis broke, Marta Randall found
herself teaching a writers' workshop on an isolated island with only a
payphone as her contact to the outside world.
FLASHBACK
So I found myself
representing the SFWA in a loud national four-cornered media battle
against, my former agent and employer, and two competing powers within the
publisher of my own last three novels!
They never had a
chance.
For an agency to
package a line of books featuring work by its own writers was a blatant
conflict of interest that stank like a codfish in the media moonlight. And
to make my job even easier, when Busch canceled Timescape and fired
Hartwell, he had told the press that he had done it because the literary
quality of Hartwell's product was too high. Meredith would do a much
better job of providing cynical schlock.
Guess whose side
Publisher's Weekly was on? Guess how it looked in the New York Times and
the Washington Post? Guess how happy Gulf & Western, who owned Simon &
Schuster, was with Snyder and Busch as they devoured their own feet in
public print?
For about ten days,
I found myself dribbling Busch, Snyder, and Meredith in the press like a
basketball, not that you had to be a media Magic Johnson to do it.
Then they finally
capitulated, Busch actually complained to the New York Times that the SFWA
had thrown its weight around unfairly, that we had bullied poor Pocket
Books, Simon & Schuster, and Gulf & Western, that I was guilty of
practicing "Gunboat Diplomacy.
CONTINUITY
The winners,
paradoxically enough, were the SFWA and Dick Snyder. For the first time
in American publishing history, a writers' organization used the public
press to overturn a high-level corporate decision at a major publisher. On
the other hand, while Snyder was unable to consummate his deal with Scott
Meredith, he won the power-struggle with Busch, eventually forcing him out
of the company.
Timescape, however,
was still canceled, Hartwell was still fired, and Spinrad was
understandably less than confident in his future at Simon &
Schuster/Pocketbooks.
He moved CHILD OF
FORTUNE to Bantam, who published it in 1985.
In 1984-86, while
writing LITTLE HEROES under contract to Bantam, Spinrad taught the novel
at the Clarion West Science Fiction Writer's Workshop in Seattle, where,
in 1985, he met Nancy Lee Wood, who writes under the name N. Lee Wood, and
was there as a student. In 1986, she moved into his house in Laurel
Canyon.
FRAME
Science fiction
writing workshops had proliferated, and I had often expressed my dubious
opinion thereof, much preferring Damon Knight's old "No Chiefs, No
Indians" formula to the hierarchical structure of teachers and students,
established writers and wannabees.
"Don't knock it till
you try it," I was told, particularly by Harlan Ellison. So finally, when
I was invited to teach a week at the six week Clarion West Conference, on
conditions that I teach the novel, which no one else had tried to do, the
idea being to teach novelistic structure by having the students turn an
idea into an outline.
Somewhat to my own
surprise, it worked well enough to persuade me to do it three years in a
row, which had never been my intention.
Lee, a resident of
Portland at the time, was one of my students in the middle year, and
showed up in Los Angeles a few months later. We met at various events and
venues in between Portland and Los Angeles, during the next year, I went
to visit her in Portland, and she finally moved into my house in Los
Angeles.
Terry Champagne had
written and published while living with me, but this was the first time I
had lived with someone who had been a writer before I had met her, and who
was as serious about it as I was.
And we've actually
been able to work consistently while living together. I've written two
long major novels, 100,000 or so words of short fiction, and much else as
of 1993. And Lee has written two and three half novels and quite a bit of
short fiction during the same period.
If you don't think
this is rare, you don't know that many writing couples. Which is exactly
the point - -a writer has a hard enough time living with anyone and
working at the same time. For two of them to do it sharing the same
space-time, believe me, ain't smooth and easy!
CONTINUITY
In 1987, Spinrad and
Wood traveled together to Europe for the first time, to England, and then
to Paris. The conjunction of their mutual love for the city, and the
political changes occurring in Europe, caused Spinrad to conceive RUSSIAN
SPRING in New York on the way back to Los Angeles, and secure a contract
to write it from Bantam.
FLASHBACK
By this time, I had
been to Paris by myself several times, most of my books had been published
there, I was popular in France, I had a circle of friends in Paris, I had
always fantasized living there at some time, but never gotten up the nerve
to do it alone.
What I had done,
years earlier, while still living in New York, was write the beginning of
something I called "La Vie Continue" in which my future self was living
as a political refugee in Paris, in which the Soviet Union had undergone
a "Russian Spring" analogous to the "Prague Spring" of 1968.... About 12
pages into it, I realized I had the beginning of a much longer work than I
had bargained for, and put it aside.
Now, years later, in
Los Angeles, I owed Bantam a long novella for OTHER AMERICAS, a
collection they were going to publish, which seemed just the right length
for "La Vie Continue," so I sat down and wrote the first draft in LA.
That's right, I
wrote "La Vie Continue" before I moved to Paris. Call it prescience. Call
it a flashforward. Call it a self- fulfilling prophecy.
FRAME
One anglophone
writer living alone in a francophone culture had always been a scary
creative prospect to me, but Lee fell in love with Paris on this first
visit, and together I felt we could live in France successfully for a
protracted period, even though she spoke no French at the time, and my
French was what I had learned on my previous visits.
Then too, I was
between drafts on "La Vie Continue," scouting locations for the rewrite,
going around Paris contemplating the life of this American exile who was
myself living in the very same city, while at the same time, thanks to
Gorbachev, the future I had envisioned for Europe years earlier in New
York was beginning to unfold here in real-time.....
The setting of
RUSSIAN SPRING, the characters, the context, all began to come together,
and so too the adventure of writing it. This would be a novel dealing with
the future of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, would be
primarily set in Paris, and so we had an excellent excuse to live there
for a year or so while I wrote it.
CONTINUITY
In the summer of
1988, Spinrad and Wood moved to Paris, and soon hereafter Spinrad was
elected President of World SF at a meeting in Budapest, an international
organization of which N. Lee Wood was later to be elected General
Secretary.
Shortly thereafter,
Spinrad began writing RUSSIAN SPRING, and after finishing the first draft,
he and N. Lee Wood traveled to Moscow in the winter of 1989 as guests of
the Soviet Writer's Union to do further research for the book, which was
not finally finished until about three months before the August 1991 coup
attempt, and which was published in the United States the month
afterwards.
FLASHBACK
At the World SF
meeting in Budapest in 1988, we had met Vitaly Babenko, then a depressed
Russian writer having a hard time getting anything published. When we
visited Moscow in 1989, he felt he had to sneak into the Peking hotel
where we were staying courtesy of the Writer's Union, and I felt I had to
be circumspect about seeing him.
By 1992, he was the
President of TexT, the second biggest private publisher in Russia, and he
had brought us there for the publication of the Russian edition of RUSSIAN
SPRING. Mad, mad Moscow!
He paid me my
advance in the form of a huge bag of rubles. Spend it all before it
disappears! we were told by one and all.
It wasn't easy, but
we did. Like everyone else in Moscow, we became obsessive shoppers. It was
a crash course in the psychology of inflation, believe me.
And how right they
were. When I was handed the money, the ruble was 135 to the dollar. Less
than a year later it was to be about 1000 to the dollar.
Moscow is a tough,
crazy town, but one of the most exciting places I've ever been at this mad
moment in history, and as we stood atop the Lenin Hills with some Russian
friends the day of our departure, one of them gave me a strange look.
"You like it here,
don't you?" she said in some bemusement. "You could live here...."
Maybe she was right.
Maybe I could.
CONTINUITY
Spinrad and Wood
decided not to return to the United States as residents, though they
returned for visits, and were married on one of them in Florida in 1990.
Norman Spinrad's
latest novel, PICTURES AT 11, though set in Los Angeles, was written in
Paris where he still resides, and deals partially with the strains of
German reunification. Completed in the middle of 1993 under contract to
Bantam, it has at this writing not yet been scheduled for publication.
FRAME, CONTINUITY,
FLASHBACK, FLASHFORWARD
This close to the
real-time of me sitting in my Paris apartment writing this attempt at the
closure of a story that is not yet finished, they all finally merge.
The story of how two
American writers came to Paris for a year or so and ended up staying is
certainly material for a whole novel, several of which have probably
already been written.
The historical
context in which it took place is a novel I have already written, namely
RUSSIAN SPRING, conceived on a one month-visit to Paris, developed in New
York, treatment written in Los Angeles, first draft written in Paris
before Wall came down, before our first trip to Moscow at the time of the
death of Sakharov, and finally published in Russia itself in 1992, in a
society not that much unlike what is described in the book, but which
didn't exist before it was written.
So why is Norman
Spinrad still living in Paris?
The answer is not to
be found in "La Vie Continue." The Norman Spinrad in that novella is ten
yearsolder than the present writer, and the present writer does not
consider himself an American exile, political or otherwise.
I'm not living in
Paris because I can't bear to live in the United States.
I'm living in Paris
because I want to live in Europe.
We've been here five
years now. We've braved the Russian winter. We've walked through the
Berlin Wall in the very process of its demolition. We've both been
officers in an international writer's organization. We've made friends in
France, Russia, the (former) two Germanies, (former) Yugoslavia, (former)
Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland, points between. We've been part of their
lives and they've been part of ours, and at a time of rapid-fire evolution
that is transforming this supposedly tired old Continent into the cutting
edge of the 21st Century.
And I'm doing
another cut on one of Richard's albums via the very instrumentalities I
predicted in LITTLE HEROES.
Why would an
American writer of speculative fiction choose to live in Europe?
Why not?
Or, as I usually say
when asked this question, hey, to an American science fiction writer,
Europe isn't merely another planet, it's a whole other solar system!
Planet France,
Planet Germany, Planet Russia, Planet Italy, and other major bodies, plus
untold scores of ethnic asteroids! And each of them a world entire!
I'm 53 now,
improbable as it seems to me. I've lived by my words for 30 years. I've
witnessed three decades of history in many places, and been part of some
of it. I've been rich and poor. I've been flush and broke. I've fought the
good fights, and I've won and lost. I've achieved a certain amount of
literary recognition, but not, of course, what I consider my just share.
I've had my ups and downs. I have my good moments and my bad.
And when I'm really
feeling down, I remember a 25-year-old kid stoned on mescaline, walking
across 4th Street to the Village, high on DUNE, and dreaming those crazy
prescient dreams....
He was going to be a
famous science fiction writer, he would publish many stories and novels,
and the many of the people who were his literary idols, inspirations, and
role-models would accept him as their equal, would become his allies, his
friends.
And his life's
mission would be to take this commercial science fiction genre and turn it
into something else somehow, write works that transcended its commercial
parameters works that could aspire to the literary company of Burroughs
and Mailer and Kerouac, that would open a new Way....
This is what you're
here for.
And so I was. And so
I am.
When I look into the
mirror and am appalled to see this middle-aged guy looking back, when my
latest novel fails to make the best-seller lists, when the bills start
coming in faster than the checks, and I bemoan all that I haven't done,
all the just desserts that haven't been piled up on my plate, all I long
to be and haven't achieved....
Then that
25-year-old kid grins back at me and gives my 53 year old self a swift
kick in the psychic ass. At my age now, maybe I know much too much to feel
the same, but he's certainly got cause to feel entirely satisfied with the
story so far.
Everything he saw in
that timeless Einsteinian moment has come to pass.
Everything he wanted
to be, I have become.
I look out my window
onto my Paris garden. And when I finish this, I will walk out into the
summer streets of Paris, a minor princeling of the City of Light.
Beyond the wild
dreams of that 25-year-old kid!
I've become what he
wanted to grow up to be and so much more.
I should be
satisfied, right?
Sure.
I've spent my whole
life looking forward not back. Sure, this 53-year-old has got what that 25
year old wanted.
But I'm not him, and
it's not enough, and I'm old and wise enough now to know that it never
will be.
If I live to be a
hundred with a Nobel on the mantelpiece, I'll probably say the same
thing.
I'll probably even
believe it.
This story doesn't
end here.
It begins tomorrow.
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