In the Deadlands (2 page)

I envy the living bejeesus out of “Afternoon With A Dead Bus,” which takes the slightest of all possible jokes and maintains it for many pages of divine visual wit. (And, David, you are wrong: you don't have to live in LA to get it.)

I envy the Minneapolis out of “Skinflowers.” (Sorry. I had no further metaphors.)

And then there's “In the Deadlands.”

Oh, boy.

“In the Deadlands.”

Wow.

Breathless pause.

All these years later, I owe David a sincere apology for that one.

He will explain the precise circumstances in his introduction and afterward, but that particular tale was subjected to some priceless verbal abuse by an editor very talented at that art, who back then made sure we all knew what a turd David had managed to stuff into a manila envelope.

It was hilarious. It really was. I laughed out loud when I first encountered those few paragraphs of eloquent contempt, and have vividly remembered them all these years, treasuring them the same way I treasure Mark Twain's classic evisceration of Fenimore Cooper. They did not mar my appreciation of David's work, but I always took the thrust of those grafs—that he'd dropped a big fat smelly one—for granted. (After all, as all writers can tell you: no matter how good we are . . . we all still occasionally do that.)

I honestly did not know, until today, that “In the Deadlands” did eventually see print, that it was nominated for a major award, and that the mocking editor later repented his negative judgment.

It's a little masterpiece, that one: half-poem, half-story, all nightmare, unrelenting in its language and its imagery, refusing all explanation in its evocation of an apocalypse that defies rational explanation. Money quote: It's Lovecraft if Lovecraft had written Haiku. It'll never be dislodged from this head.

Shit, do I envy that. And boy, do I envy you if you're about to read it for the first time.

One final, personal note.

I have known David slightly for many years. We were friendly nodding acquaintances. I had the great pleasure of watching him float on air the night he won the Nebula for the novelette version of “The Martian Child,” and had the great pleasure of correcting him as he tried to talk himself back down to Earth afterward, by saying things like, “It's only an award; it doesn't mean anything.” (I am proud to say that I quietly told him, “Bullshit.”)

Only recently in the scale of things have we, with the mysterious alchemy that occurs between human beings, moved on to a somewhat deeper friendship, and have I come to know him for his gentle humor, his commitment to the advancement of human rights, his ability to bury know-nothings in tidal waves of fact, his generosity, and his ferocious—I use the word quite precisely—ferocious love of his adopted son, Sean.

I find that all of this is tinged with significant envy, as well.

But, having said all that? Knowing David?

I also envy me.

—Adam-Troy Castro

Introduction

Picasso had his blue period; I had my bleak period.

It was the late sixties and science fiction was having an identity crisis.

Over here in this corner, we had the survivors of The Golden Age—hardy, grizzled, experienced, and legendary. In the opposite corner, the scrawny young challengers of The New Wave—nasty, ferocious, and capable of dazzling footwork. And in this corner … The Trekkies, having staggered into the ring, dazed and confused but wildly enthusiastic. Next corner over, The Feminists, determined to challenge the entrenched patriarchal consciousness of the genre. Also in the ring, The Hard Scientists, The Speculative Fictioneers, The Poetics, The Academics, The Literati, The Illiterati, The Writing Workshop Graduates, The Fabulists, The Wannabees, The Self-Appointed Gods Of Fandom, and The Upcoming Generation Of Authors Who Were Too Busy Writing To Worry About Their Identity Crisis.

Which group was I in?

All of them.

I had grown up in The Golden Age, but I aspired to be as literate as the practitioners of The New Wave; I admired the social consciousness of The Feminists; I'd already proven myself a Trekkie; I was committed to the accuracy of Hard Science; I wanted to be Poetic and Literate and Fabulous; I wanted to survive the rigorous scrutiny of The Self-Appointed Gods. I wanted to
write stories that recognized and included the best of all these subgenres, I wanted to achieve accuracy and literacy and insight and passion. I wanted character and style and vision—

—but mostly I just wanted to write books and stories that would sell so I wouldn't need a day job.

For the record, the only groups I wasn't in (and didn't want to be in) were The Academics and The Writing Workshop Graduates, probably because of some inner conviction that science fiction did not belong in the classroom, but out in the streets, seducing innocent children into a lifetime of unconventional dreaming beyond the leftover boundaries of an obsolete era.

There's this about school—I discovered this the hard way—it's not about liberating you from your chains so you can fly; it's about designing chains so comfortable you'll never notice you're wearing them.

The period after you escape—and it took me six years to escape—is when you realize what pompous windbags some of your instructors were, not all of them, but even one is more than enough. It seems to be an academic hazard that your most critical class will be taught by a professor who bullies students, trampling enthusiasm and flattening dreams like an enraged rhinoceros in a candy store. You know the one, you had his class—he used his position of academic authority to beat you down instead of lifting you up.

I had two of those instructors. That I succeeded in selling a script to a TV series even before graduation must have surprised them almost as much as it surprised me.

The good news was that the script sale, and several subsequent sales to the same market, established me as a professional author.

The bad news was that I still didn't know diddly-squat how to write a saleable story. I had never cracked the market of the magazines. Not
Galaxy
, not
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
—those were my two favorites—nor any of the others that established credibility in the genre. And I really wanted to earn the approval of Frederik Pohl and Ed Ferman. I felt only that would qualify me as a
real
science fiction writer.

But let me backtrack a step.

Here's the other thing about school. If you want to have fun, study computer science, physics, engineering, animation, video, biology—anything, just so long as you stay away from the English department.

If you want to immerse yourself in death and despair, unrequited love, painful odysseys of vengeance and doom, then study English literature. If you want to wrap yourself in anguish and ennui, desperation and self-doubt, be a Creative Writing major.

If you want to spend long hours staring into a glaring white screen, bleeding from your eyes, trying to shit linguistic bricks onto the page, fighting to make every rebellious word behave itself, hoping to reach a genuine conclusion, or at least the end of the sentence—if you have submerged yourself into the delusionary belief that there exists some pinnacle of brilliance and insight that will ultimately transform the soul of humanity—but knowing the whole time that you will never even equal Ray Bradbury's grocery list, let alone reach the end of the page—then be a writer.

Writers aspire toward the unreachable—perfection. All creative people do. Whatever the expression, all you can see is what's not working. The mistakes are gigantic in your eyes; the successes miniscule.

But perfection isn't possible. The universe isn't set up to allow perfection. It's an idea, not a fact.

And down here on planet Earth, the job is even harder. The English language is a rickety Rube Goldberg assembly of hastily made-up neolinguistic-confabustructulations, unbalanced grammar, archaic root forms, inelegant constructions, inbred phrases, misread Latin, misunderstood scientific terms, flatulent psychobabble, inconsistent spelling, and uncategorizable bits and pieces appropriated from any unwary language that passed too close to a desperate writer.

No. Perfection is out of the question. The best one can achieve is excellence—but excellence is sufficient, because it puts your focus on the accomplishment, not the ideal.

There's an old saying. “When you are ready to learn, the universe will provide a teacher.” Hell—even when you aren't ready to learn, the universe will provide teachers. It's your job to wake up and listen.

But it's even worse than that. The whole universe is a lesson. Every human being on the planet is a good example—okay, some of them are good examples of bad examples, but the point still holds. If you're not learning something new every day, then lie down in a hole and let them cover you with dirt, you're done.

Here's the point—at least, here's how I see it—if you're a writer, the single best place to learn, the single best example on the planet, is the one sitting in your own chair.

If you—the person whose fingers are poised above the keyboard—are capable of any degree of self-awareness, if you can catch even an occasional glimmer of what goes on inside that chaotic mass of meat churning behind your eyes, then you've got a wealth of source material that will never run out. (The first draft of this sentence had a lot of his/her constructions. Too unwieldy. Sorry about the patriarchal inheritance of the language. Language is not designed for
accuracy. It's the worst possible tool for specific communication that human beings have ever invented—but it's the only tool we have. Deal with it.)

Writers write to solidify their thoughts. Getting it down on paper—or at least onto the glowing phosphors of the monitor—codifies it, lets you step back, lets you take a second look, lets you see what your thought looks like, let's you reexamine it, gives you the opportunity for detached observation of the self.

Here's the obligatory disclaimer: As much as I champion self-awareness as the author's greatest tool, the hard uncomfortable truth is that self-awareness is not always insight—sometimes, it's just another delusional construction. Real self-awareness is rooted in honesty. Yes, you do have a wart. Cherish it.

Looking at your own words lets you see if you're being a generous contributor to the people around you or just another self-righteous asshole filling a metaphorical diaper.

Which is why
every
story has to be seen as a learning experience. Sometimes you learn what works. Sometimes you learn what doesn't. But mostly, you learn that the road to quality is paved with a million words. You learn to recognize your own mistakes. After a while, you start to see them even before you make them. You learn to find better ways to phrase a thought or a description or a piece of dialog. And best of all, eventually you get lazy enough to sacrifice purple for precision—that's when you finally achieve the real goal of any wordsmith:
readability.

Most of the stories in this book were experiments. Oh hell, everything I write is an experiment. The blank page, the blank screen, it all starts with the same realization: I've never written
this
story before, I don't know how to do it, and I don't know how it will turn out, and if
some publisher somewhere is desperate enough to pay me for the privilege of publishing it, I'll count that as a success just as soon as the check clears the bank.

At the beginning of my career, it was my belief—now it's a conviction, based on evidence—that a writer should not take himself seriously until he has written at least a million words. This is the “muscle memory” argument. Cue Mr. Miyagi. “Wax on, wax off. Breathe in, breathe out. Don't forget to breathe, breathing is good.” Ten thousand hours of anything creates muscle memory.

The stories in this book were all written during my “learning period.” Also known as my “bleak period.” The post-sixties. That time of my life when I was discovering my ability to be truly depressed. (Not without good reason, but apparently anguish is a necessary part of the process. Do writers have to learn how to suffer before they're worth reading? Nobody said anything about that on Career Day.)

Two of the stories in this book are terrible. At least, in my opinion, they are. I'm embarrassed to have written them. (I'll point them out as we go; they're included for completeness.) But even terrible stories are part of the learning process. There are also several stories in this collection that I am still very proud of—if not for the execution, then certainly for the ambition.

Writers worth reading do not spring full blown from their own foreheads like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. They start out as voracious readers, devouring every book in their path. After a thousand or so books and stories, maybe ten thousand in the case of slow learners, you start to notice the difference between a fun read and a tiresome one. (I will not name the author who so consistently disappointed me in my teens that I began to associate his name with
books-worthy-of-being-skipped. He is mostly forgotten today, but I'm grateful for his existence. He became my personal good example of how not to write.)

I think that's the critical lesson.

When you can tell the difference between effective and clumsy in others, then you can start to see it in your own work. If you're too damn stubborn to quit, you start to learn how to rewrite.

I had one advantage—a slight case of OCD. I wanted every page to have a perfect appearance. No erasures, no strikeouts, no penciled-in additions, no half pages. I wanted the whole manuscript to be spotless. I wanted accurate punctuation and flawless grammar. I wanted precise black type on a pristine white surface. I wanted perfect margins and accurate page numbering. I wanted my manuscripts to be easy to read. I wanted them to be
professional.

Other teenagers bought cars. I bought a typewriter. But what a typewriter!—a fabled ecstasy of a machine, from the kingdom of electrical magic, a desktop sports car, easily capable of 120 words per minute on the straightaway. An IBM Selectric! The keyboard had a sublime
chaketa-chaketa-click
that was the mechanical equivalent of an orgasm. Above, an infuriated golf-ball raced back and forth across the page, leaving a crisp trail of words on the clean white paper, looking as if they had been professionally printed. That pristine clarity demanded respect—it demanded equal precision in the language. It demanded eloquence.