Meet Me at Infinity (51 page)

May I tell you how I write, the only two things I know about my so-called writing technique? The first is this—and I’ve found that some other writers at least do it too—I mull over the story in my head, and in notes, until I have a complete
visual-aural
picture of everything; every scene, people, whether somebody hands another person something with their right or left hand, what people who aren’t even mentioned are doing—everything pictured and heard. I’d say, like a movie, but films today are all cut and fancied and are art themselves; maybe like a very dull and complete documentary. The when I have it all pictured, I tell the story, just as I would if it were a piece of life, in what I hope is a punchy way. Oh, I forgot to say that the story takes off from some idea that has fascinated me, or that I want to show in action—so the way I describe it has to build up to that.

And that’s all I know about technique, except this wonderful lesson: A schoolteacher of English once wrote about the idea that children, or “unspoiled” people write
simply.
She snorted in derision. (‘Scuse cliche.) “Simplicity? You ask one of those pure unspoiled childish minds to write a sentence about, say, a hippopotamus. What you get is—this is from life—Tn the case of the hippopotamus, it is big.’ It takes about five years of beating on this ‘unspoiled* writer with a two-by-four to get him to write, The hippotamus is big.’ “

When I grasped that, I knew I’d heard The Word, and went promptly out and purchased a length of two-by-four—one-by-three, actually, because of my age—and started pounding. Some day I hope to attain the sophistication to write clear, simple English.

Now James Tiptree—I’m not trying to be cute here, I mean the voice that murmurs in the darkness when all else is silence, and you’re alone—Tiptree may know something more about writing, but if so he hasn’t told Alice B. Sheldon, and I’m afraid that’s whom you’re talking with today.

CA: Are you pleased with science fiction’s growing acceptance as a genre?

Sheldon:
Very much. Well, yes and no. The thing is, a good book could be written—probably has been—on why science fiction got genre-ized, or rather, ghetto-ized in the first place and in America, not in Europe. What’s happening, I think, is that we’re just becoming part of the mainstream, the way science fiction always has been in Europe. Take Kipling again—he wrote quite a few science fiction stories. An amazing number of Europeans have—I think you could scare up one by Dickens. Any established writer who felt like it just turned his hand to the supernatural or the highly imaginative, the “what if.” There are even some technically science fiction stories—pretty sorry ones—floating around in the U.S. “mainstream” now As for Europeans, take Italo Calvino for example. He’s sold as an ordinary writer in Italy but is occasionally referred to as a science fiction writer over here, because he has the moon talking. If all the poetry in which the moon spoke was taken out of English literature and put into fantasy or science fiction, that would be pretty odd.

CA: David Gerrold has expressed the opinion that science fiction has lost some of its vitality through its increased general acceptance. Do you share that feeling?

Sheldon:
I do have a certain nostalgia for the days when SF was a wild private in-group, and you were “world famous” if three hundred people knew your name. (Would you believe I got fan mail from Finland?) Of course I only came in on the end of it, but it was great to write knowing this audience of bright nuts shared your ellipses and you could use jargon like an “After-the-atom” story and know you’d be understood. Now you have to stop and explain the Law of Gravity in case the damn story is bought by
Good Housekeeping.

The films are the worst menace from that point of view because they are the most banal, cutesy science fiction of thirty years ago. If the films
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
or
E.T.,
or most of
Star Trek
were made into stories with concealing names but the same plots, it would be surprising if any of them could be sold as SF. What they are is an excuse for marvelous visual effects, not good
stories
at all.

Then too there is the danger of science fiction’s being analyzed to death and made compulsory in universities, the perfect killing effect.

But I have a great deal of faith in bright kids. Some way or another some comic magazine or what have you read only by spooky little boys and girls will spring up with a new kind of genre and it’ll be born all over again.

CA: Do you do any writing while you’re on your long trips?

Sheldon:
Yes. As soon as I get to where I know my way around an environment and settle down. It can be difficult, because a new environment to me is fascinating. In New Zealand, for example, where I could actually understand the language, I ran across so much novelty that I kept chasing it and taking notes and got very little done. But I took my writing along. I always take a big pad and expect to come back with at least a plot, if not a whole story or two written up.

CA: Are you glad to be back writing stories again?

Sheldon: Well, yes—the dear old familiar nausea. (I don’t know any writers who love writing—maybe there are some.) The taking oneself by the scruff of the neck and the march to the typewriter and the plonking down before the sheet of paper. There is something great, about one particular blank sheet—the one where you first write in the title of a story that you’ve got drafted. I think that’s one of the most exciting moments in life there is. But aside from that it’s just plain work. In my case there has to be a lot of work; the old adage that what is written with pleasure is read with pain and you must write with pain to be read with pleasure, was never so true. But to me, the magic of seeing a story in print that I’d written by hand is still indescribable. I can’t believe it’s my same story. I keep the magazine and go around with this kind of pop-eyed excited look as though I’d swallowed an egg that was trying to hatch.

CA: Would you do anything differently if you were to do it all over?

Sheldon: Yes. I’d kill all the writers who wrote all those good things that I suddenly realize I am rewriting when I think I’m writing something new. Theodore Sturgeon—I wish to God his parents had practiced birth control. He is so good! And Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, that wild meteor—Oh, uncountable numbers of other people! Cursed be they who’ve said all our good things before us, as was so well said by Amnesia Strikes Again. You see, I’d been reading and loving SF and fantasy for forty-five mortal years before I started writing it. And I just pigged, without keeping track of authors’ names or story titles or anything. I’m only now laboriously tracking down those great tales I remember. Yesterday, for instance I found it was Damon Knight who put out one of the most terrifying images in SF, in his grievously mistitled A for Anything.

Which is all by way of saying that the discovery that the gorgeous plot you just thought of and lay awake all night working out, is a well-known classic you read thirty years ago can be fairly shattering.

A rewrite of “The Cold Equations,” anyone?

Well, enough of all this.

But I’d like to mention that while Tiptree’s good pen-friends were—and of times still are—a real joy of my life, since poor old Tip got himself blown away for good, I’ve met some wonderfully nice people.

—1980-1982

Here is the original ending to the telephone interview, before it was rewritten:

I think that Tiptree’s death was long overdue. I had considered taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean, but I knew I couldn’t get away with that. It’s a little frightening to find oneself almost being possessed by this personality that one isn’t or that only one part of one is. It was an extraordinary experience. He had a life of his own. He would do things and he would not do other things, and I didn’t have much control over him. But I wasn’t faking it, really. As I said in my little autobiographical piece, I never wrote anything that wasn’t true, and my letters were written straight off the way I talked. I never calculated a masculine persona. I think in the very first letter I wrote I asked my husband if a man would use a certain expression, and after that I just wrote as I pleased. It’s pretty funny being somebody else for ten years. But since poor old Tiptree got himself blown away in smoke, I’ve met some very nice people.

And here is her original response to the last question, a succinct answer written on the sheet of paper with the advance questions. To “Would you do anything differently if you had it to do over?”, she replied:

Re Tiptree? No.

Save us. Save me! Save our—is it souls?

(The desperation that calls to you does not

Readily define itself so. No matter.)

Save us your sisters.
Salve!

I pray not to the public pink-candy-cunted madonnas of our shame,

Loving so our tears.

No.

I carry to the secret caves the secret hope

As women, women, women before me have carried, smuggled,

Grubby hopeless hope to the irregular hidden Shes,

The powerful-powerless; of the blood.

Save us.

I bring my stolen candle stub,

I light it before your images, reciting no man’s name.

Salve:
Joanna of the rocks; Ursula of the Waters; Kate burning, burning;

Salve:
Fierce Vonda; Quinn indomitable; desperate Suzy; wild Kit;

Carol-almost-beyond-humanness; dead Shirley; And to all others named and nameless, unknown and lost: Save us. Accept our praise.

I read by the candle the words shining from your images,

Daring to believe: This is a strong new magic. Thus and thus

Will the lies die.

Thus and by this

Will the usurped truth return upon the usurpers

And return the world to light.

And the candle gutters, but I still believe, will believe.

Hearing only faintly the smooth voice from the rocks outside

Where Clio—no woman but the great Drag Queen of all—

Smirks; saying, Write on, dears. Write well! Write your hearts out

In the sand.

In the wave-washed sands.

—July 19, 1975

Originally published under the name Raccoona Sheldon in
The Witch and the Chameleon
4 (undated, 1975), a feminist fanzine edited by Amanda Bankier.

When she was asked for reprint rights for “Houston, Houston” for an anthology of lesbian/gay SF
(Worlds Apart,
edited by Camilla Decamin, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, Alyson 1986), she wrote this note as potential source of material for the editors’ introduction. At the end she noted that she might copyright the piece for use elsewhere.

This story shows, in glimpses only, seen through the mind of the male narrator, what an all-female society might be really like—in contrast to the usual “Queen of the Amazons “-type masculine fantasy. In this world the love and sexuality are by definition all between—or among—women only. (There is a minor, uncommented-on exception, involving those very few women who receive androgen treatments to build muscle necessary for certain jobs; if there is any “unwomanly” sexuality there, it plays no role.)

The main purpose in constructing this all-women world was not specifically sexual, but rather to contrast its relaxed, cheery, practical
mood
with the tense, macho-constricted, sex-and-dominance-obsessed atmosphere of the little all-male “world” of male-dominated culture in the
Sunbird
spacecraft. These men are meeting for the first time a world in which men qua males simply
do not matter.
They cannot absorb the fact that the women aren’t excited by them—neither hate them, love them, or fear them—have only a mild interest in them as object lessons in history, and a much more vivid practical concern about what to do with them in a society in which the male mystique appears as a bizarre illness. (Their reaction is very much like that of the harried mother of four, preoccupied with practical matters, to their mate’s fantasies and demands. In such situations I’ve often seen the man become simply another child with peculiar needs.)

Another “author’s interest”—which I didn’t have time to explore as fully as it deserves—is in the unique culture of a world of clones, where each person has perhaps two thousand living versions and extensions of herself. I saw this as permitting great relaxation, almost a playful response to life—since what “I” don’t accomplish may be—or has been—accomplished by another Me. Each clone keeps a special place, and a record—e.g., “The Book of Judy Shapiro”—where they go periodically and learn about all the different potentials and experiments her “self” has explored. It was my feeling that such an institution would be quite congenial to women, but by definition rather horrifying, or meaningless, to traditional males. (Self-examination is “unmanly”—but is in fact a source of great interest, and incidentally a preventer of loneliness.)

The are a couple of specifically sexual references; in one, the narrator judges—we may assume correctly—that some sex play goes on in the cubicles at night. We are left to visualize it as exactly that: play. The other is somewhat more serious, though not tragic—it is known that certain clones are attracted (“fated”) to each other. Deep and serious and abiding interwoman sexual love is suggested here. But it isn’t “tragic,” because, quite practically, if one member of a clone doesn’t reciprocate, another, identical member may!

There is another feminist theme briefly touched on: In the narrator’s memories of his wife and other women it is suggested, by contrast with the woman’s world around him, that (a) he didn’t understand them at all; and (b) that these women were warped and trivialized by the male-dominant culture. Whatever his wife’s true concerns may have been, to the narrator they were simply registered as endless chatter on the telephone.