Read Online The Synopsis Treasury by Christopher Sirmons Haviland - Free Book Online Page B

a reputation as a writer who had published more than a dozen novels. A few years later, when I felt as if I needed to spend my remaining writing time in greater assurance of publication, I began to seek contracts before the project was barely started, particularly for my non-fiction projects. Generally a brief summary of what I intended to accomplish was enough, as it was for the six-volume The Road to Science Fiction, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, and Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (with Matthew Candelaria). But Reading Science Fiction (with Marleen Barr and Matthew Candelaria) took a full prospectus and table of contents.
    When I started my most recent novel, Transcendental , I decided to seek a contract on the strength of a prospectus and the first and final chapters, but even a Grand Master award and forty-one previous books was not enough. Times had changed. Editors no longer had the ability to negotiate contracts without going through an editorial committee and getting the approval of the sales force and the accounting department. One editor said, “We can’t sell this kind of intelligent science fiction anymore.” I may have made the mistake of quoting T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer on the first page.…
    Eventually, I submitted four chapters to Elizabeth Anne Hull’s Gateways , her tribute volume to her husband, Fred Pohl, and asked her to pick one. She said, “I want them all,” and when Tor Books editor Jim Frenkel went over the manuscript he wrote me that he’d like to see the novel when it was finished. That worked better than anything else—it’s always good to find an editor who wants to see a novel. And so—I really liked the synopsis that follows, and I’ve followed it pretty faithfully, including the sequel now in progress, but it took a complete manuscript and an editor who wanted it, to make it work.
    —James Gunn

    Transcendental A Book Proposal

    Transcendental will be a novel about a journey through a colorful world some thousand years in the future when humanity has colonized many planets in the galaxy and met a number of alien species with whom, after some difficulties in communication, it has learned to coexist in relative peace and harmony but at a price: limitation on innovation to prevent any species from gaining a dangerous advantage over the others and leading to a possible galactic competition or even outright warfare that, with planet-busting techniques, threaten the destruction of intelligent life in the galaxy. That stasis has been endangered, however, by the rise of a new religion that speculates about the discovery of an artifact on a remote planet, perhaps left by an ancient race. The artifact, the religion states, has the ability to enhance the mental and physical ability of any creature who submits itself to it, or to destroy if the creature is unfit or not a true believer. The religion, Transcendentalism, offers actual transcendence.
    The novel will be about a kind of hajj by a group of pilgrims, as they make their way across a galaxy and then across a planet to reach the artifact. Modeled after The Canterbury Tales , the novel will offer a variety of characters and their individual stories focusing on the question and need for transcendence, as the protagonist, a skeptical adventurer, gets to know them and analyze their motives, including his own, through the personal conflicts that brought them to this dangerous journey and its problematic conclusion. The protagonist, the narrative slowly reveals, has been hired by a powerful organization—he does not know whether it is alien or human—to infiltrate the group and try to identify among its members the one who may be the prophet of Transcendentalism, the discoverer of the artifact who may already have undergone the transformation; and, if the process is real, to see that humanity acquires it ahead of other species. Transcendentalism and the possible Transcendentals that may result