April 15, 2009
Another birthday yesterday. I remember when Jack Benny turned 39. (That actually happened. They did a show, back in the forties, I believe, when they celebrated the birthday. His age --38-- had by then been a running gag for a long time, and someone asked him how it felt to be 39. ’I’ll get used to it,’ he said, ’after a few years.’)
I’m currently working on the copy-edit for Time Travelers Never Die. The copy edit is what remains after the copy editor’s input. I take a final run through the manuscript. This one has been more difficult to get right than anything else I’ve done, not least because of the sequential stuff. I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, so I won’t go into it here. But anybody who reads it will see what I mean.
Incidentally, readers have asked questions about the relationship with the 1996 Asimov’s novella of the same name. The novel uses the same setup and the same characters. But the rules are different. The novella postulates a universe in which you can change the past, but you get rifts in space and time if you do. In the novel, the past is immutable. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an impact; but you can’t do anything that changes what we know to be true. Can’t save JFK. Can’t shoot your 8-year-old grandfather. If you try, bad things happen to prevent it. (Think heart attacks, etc.) You can make your presence felt, however, as long as you don’t create a loop or a contradiction. If you go back to watch the signing of the Magna Charta, you were always there. There was never a signing ceremony at which you were not present. (One of the time travelers, e.g., suggests to H.G. Wells that he might write a novel about time machines.)
The critical thing, though, is that the novel heads in a completely different direction. And the outcome is different. I’m not sure that wasn’t cheating. In the past, when I’ve used short fiction as a take-off point to launch a novel, as with, say, “Dutchman,“ (which set up A Talent for War) or “Melville on Iapetus,“ (The Engines of God), I’ve kept it consistent. I started to do that with TTND, but I just couldn’t pass on some of the ideas that showed up. And in the end I decided to go with my instincts. Which, by the way, is what we always tell people in writing workshops when they’re wondering whether they should do this or that. Trust your instincts. I should add that I‘ve never gotten so much pure pleasure out of writing a novel.
One of the effects: Yesterday, one of the sections I looked at dealt with a conversation between Dave and Shel --my time travelers-- and Tom Paine. Last evening I found myself reading “The Age of Reason.”
I’m headed for Ravencon, in Richmond, the weekend of the 24th. If you plan to be at the con, please stop by and say hello.
Jack