about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.
Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.
After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.
Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read “War and Peace” twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship
Hello There
hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.
The
Hello There
was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life support equipment and all, from thespaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shanty-town.
We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing, and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.
The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.
The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own hand-picked ones.
I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.
It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every exbum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.
To Howard Hughes:
A Modest Proposal
One good reason for a novelist to write short stories is that they serve as a proving ground for new techniques. If a structure or texture doesn’t work in a short story, you’ve only lost a few days, and learned something. If a novel goes sour, and I do speak from experience, you lose a thick stack of paper and more. And you might not learn as well, be cause of your deeper involvement, as a parent might see his child go wrong and never see how he’d caused it.
I admire the work of John Dos Passos, especially the USA trilogy, and wanted to borrow his intricate technique for a science fiction novel. * I wanted to boil it down, make it even more rapid and nervous. This story was the test case, and I liked it, so I used the technique for
Mindbridge
(St. Martins Press, 1976), which I think is my best novel, so far
.
When I wrote this I was in the process of putting togetheran anthology of science fiction alternatives to war, which languished for some years before St
.
Martins Press published it as
Study War No More
(1977). The story was written for the anthology, and was meant to be sarcastic. But at that time its basic premise seemed rather absurd
.
Some few predictive elements of some of my stories have come true. I’m afraid
Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.
After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.
Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read “War and Peace” twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship
Hello There
hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.
The
Hello There
was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life support equipment and all, from thespaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shanty-town.
We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing, and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.
The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.
The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own hand-picked ones.
I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.
It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every exbum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.
To Howard Hughes:
A Modest Proposal
One good reason for a novelist to write short stories is that they serve as a proving ground for new techniques. If a structure or texture doesn’t work in a short story, you’ve only lost a few days, and learned something. If a novel goes sour, and I do speak from experience, you lose a thick stack of paper and more. And you might not learn as well, be cause of your deeper involvement, as a parent might see his child go wrong and never see how he’d caused it.
I admire the work of John Dos Passos, especially the USA trilogy, and wanted to borrow his intricate technique for a science fiction novel. * I wanted to boil it down, make it even more rapid and nervous. This story was the test case, and I liked it, so I used the technique for
Mindbridge
(St. Martins Press, 1976), which I think is my best novel, so far
.
When I wrote this I was in the process of putting togetheran anthology of science fiction alternatives to war, which languished for some years before St
.
Martins Press published it as
Study War No More
(1977). The story was written for the anthology, and was meant to be sarcastic. But at that time its basic premise seemed rather absurd
.
Some few predictive elements of some of my stories have come true. I’m afraid
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