Magic, Theft, Time, and Money

2. Theft

Myself, I started with Westerns. As a born-and-bred city kid and a Jew besides, naturally I was fascinated by horses, six-guns, and the wide open spaces of the Wild West, as typified in the Lone Ranger series of books and Roy Rogers’ movies. When that got to be too tame, I moved on to science fiction, and suddenly spaces were so wide open there were hardly any horizons at all: just the way I liked it.

I used to stand at the magazine racks in my corner drugstore on 83rd St. and Columbus Avenue and read all the SF magazines cover to cover (the store folks didn’t much like this, but since I often bought a chocolate malt or an egg-cream there after school, I guess they figured I was kind of renting the pages with my malt-money). Stories by Avram Davidson, Robert Silverberg, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, and many many others were my mental meat and drink for years — until well into my college career, actually, when I finally stopped reading SF.

Why? Because I experienced the feminist click and SF, for the most part, didn’t.

That click is when you read about the high figures on wife-beating and its under-reportage in middle and upper income homes, and you suddenly remember your mom showing up at breakfast with a black eye and explaining it, ridiculously you thought at the time, as the result of having walked into the closet door. Or you read about girls being discouraged from studying science and you remember being ridiculed by your science teacher in class in the seventh grade right in front of everybody for giving an answer with more imagination than fact in it. Or you read an essay called "The Grand Coulee Damn" in a book called Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan, and wincingly recognize the unchallenged relegation of women in radical groups to the copying and the mailing and the making of coffee — because you remember yourself accepting that kind of position yourself, just to be part of a movement you believed in but that was completely dominated by males. And so on and so on, ad nauseam (not all clicks work for all women, of course, and even if they do, sometimes you risk so much if you acknowledge the reality of that click that it feels better to deny the click and with it all of feminism; which is why more women are not outspoken, self-identified feminists).

SF at the time recognized none of this; most SF barely acknowledged the existence of women at all, except as prizes, unnatural villains to be eradicated or else instantly converted by being screwed with or against their will, or as wholesome girl-Fridays and scientists’ daughters whose main function was to be rescued from lustful aliens and to program the microwave in their kitchen on Mars in order to feed the spaceman’s kiddies.

I didn’t see myself as a villain, had no plans to trot along asking the men to explain things to me, and was already determined to avoid the kitchen-and-baby trap; so, like many female SF readers, I left. I started reading more mainstream novels, many of them concerning adventures in newly post-colonial nations in the Third World, like Robert Ruark’s Something of Value, about the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, or Island in the Sun, about the changing of the guard in a mythical Caribbean country.

Now, I knew I was going to be a writer, had known it forever; so these are the sorts of books that I thought I was going to write. But I didn’t. I didn’t write a Western, either, though god knows I tried. My first book finally came out as SF after all.

That is to say, The Story, which I had been carrying around for years without knowing exactly how to tell it, eventually cast itself successfully in that form. I had appropriated some characters, see, from my reading, and I had to figure out how to make them and their story my own. This is how a lot of authors get started. It’s part of what we mean when we talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, or trying to follow in the footsteps of presumably those same giants. Here’s what that meant in my case: in my teens I read a book called The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope. it was a Victorian (or is it Edwardian?) adventure tale about a stout-hearted Briton who finds himself involved in a plots, counter-plots, and romance in a mythical European kingdom. Zenda is full of derring-do and loyal minions and the conservatism of its author, but it has two wonderful villains, the cavalierly evil Rupert of Hentzau and the scheming, ambitious, embittered Duke Michael of Strelsau who has the rightful king kidnapped in order to usurp the throne.

I just loved those guys. I thought they were magnificent. I had to write a story about them, and eventually I did: it was my first novel, Walk to the End of the World, in which the astute and well-read reader will no doubt instantly recognize them. Mind you, I turned the ambitious Duke upside down in order to come out with Eykar Bek, because in my story you see him from the inside out instead of just watching him from outside, which turns out to be much more interesting (well, that’s kind of why I bothered: to get to the inside and see what was going on in there). D Layo, on the other hand, is my attempt at Rupert of Hentzau kicked forward into a rougher future and making his way without benefit of social privilege; luckily his humor, selfishness, and audacity survived pretty much unchanged.

Until the sequels, that is, because once you make borrowed characters your own, they start to change and grow way beyond their original parameters. This is at once powerfully rewarding and a bit sad, since you can look back later and see how in the process of borrowing beloved characters you have, necessarily and virtuously, betrayed them into becoming other people. What was originally theft (motivated by admiration, rather than greed) is transmuted into something entirely different: creativity.

(If that doesn’t happen, then you’d do better to write for a TV series, where the point is that the characters don’t change, just in case the episodes get shown out of order or in incomplete series. Besides, that way the fans will never be disappointed and nobody has to keep much of that bothersome old stuff, personal history, in mind when turning out an hour’s worth of screenplay. All this puts you, the writer, at a great advantage financially: much more money is paid for scripts guaranteed to avoid unsettling character development than for books and stories devoted to it.)