Sailing to Byzantium (19 page)

I remember 1973 as a very difficult year. Life was pretty crazy for most of us that year—the United States was suffering the gigantic hangover of the post-Vietnam years, and, even for the most prosaic suburban people, it was a time of weird clothing, weird hair styles, massive drug consumption, and outlandish sexual revelry. Here in California, we were churning through some sort of societal revolution every six weeks or so. My first marriage was falling apart, besides. And I was simply worn out after years and years of super-prolific writing. All that work had left me fairly independent financially, however, and although I was not yet 40, I was beginning to think of abandoning my career and spending the rest of my life traveling, reading, and caring for my new Californian garden of exotic semi-tropical plants.

As a result, I wrote practically nothing in 1973—my output for the entire year was a piddling 81,000 words, which would have been two weeks’ work ten years before. Though whatever work I did manage to produce was, I thought, of a high level of quality, every word was an effort, and it was only the pressure of other people’s deadlines that got me to do anything at all.

Nevertheless, in the middle of that deadly year, I embarked on a long story that surely ranks near the top of my entire vast array of work. Weary as I was, reluctant to work as I was, I found myself unable to keep this one from coming into being—thanks to a little timely encouragement from Ed Ferman of
Fantasy & Science Fiction
.

For most of its sixty-plus years of existence, the magazine formally known as
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, but more usually called
F&SF
, has been a bastion of civilized and cultivated material. That was true under its founding editors, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and under such succeeding editors as Robert P. Mills and Avram Davidson. By the 1970s, editorial control had passed into the hands of Ed Ferman, who also happened to be the publisher of the magazine, and who functioned, in admirable fashion, in both capacities for many years thereafter.

My fiction had been appearing on and off in
F&SF
since the days of the Boucher–McComas administration; but it was Ed Ferman who turned me into a steady contributor. He published a flock of my short stories in the 1960s—of which the best known was the much-anthologized “Sundance”and then, as I began to turn away from shorter fiction in favor of novellas and novels, Ferman let me know that he would be interested in publishing some of my longer work as well.

In December, 1972, just after the publication of my novel
Dying Inside
, I got a note from Ed saying that he had just received a review copy of that book. “I simply wanted to tell you what a fine and moving and painful experience it was to read it,” he wrote, going on to compare the novel favorably to recent works by Bernard Malamud and Chaim Potok. And he added in a postscript, “The editor in me has just popped up, and I can’t help asking what I have to do to see your next novel. If it’s anything near the quality of
Dying Inside
, I’ll go higher than our top rate.”

I already knew that I wasn’t going to write another novel just then, not with all the turbulence going on in my life, and perhaps would never write one ever again. Therefore, I felt uneasy about committing myself to any very lengthy work. And I was already working on a longish short story called “Trips” for an anthology Ferman was editing in collaboration with Barry Malzberg. But, despite everything, I did have another long story in mind to write after that, one that would probably run to novella length, and I could not keep myself from telling Ferman it was his, if he wanted it. He replied at once that he did.

The story was “Born with the Dead.”

It had the feel of a major story from the moment I conceived it. I had played with the idea of the resuscitation of the dead in fiction since my 1957 novel
Recalled to Life
, and now, I felt, I was ready to return to it with a kind of culminating statement on the subject. A few days after I began work on it, I let Ferman know that it was going to be a big one. To which he replied, on April 16, 1973, that I should make it as big as it needed to be, because he proposed to make the story the centerpiece of a special Robert Silverberg issue of the magazine.

That had real impact on me. Over the years
F&SF
had done a handful of special issues honoring its favorite contributors—writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, James Blish. Each special issue featured a portrait of the writer on the cover, a major new story by him, several critical essays, and a bibliography. All of the writers chosen had been favorites of mine since my days as an avid adolescent reader; and now, suddenly, in my mid-thirties, and at what was plainly the peak of my career, I found myself chosen to join their company. It gave me a nice shiver down the spine.

But of course I had to write a story
worthy
of that company—and this at a time when my private life was in chaos and the world about me, there in the apocalyptic days of the late Nixon era, was pretty chaotic, too. So every day’s work was an ordeal. Sometimes I managed no more than a couple of paragraphs. At best, I averaged about a page a day. Writing it required me to do battle with all kinds of internal demons, for the story sprung from areas within me that I found it taxing to explore: I had to confront my own attitudes toward death, love, marriage, responsibility, and the like in every paragraph. I was, in addition, growing ever more uneasy about my relationship to the science-fiction readership, and found myself wondering constantly whether one more Silverbergian exploration of the dark side of existence might not be asking too much. And I was mentally exhausted besides.

The weeks dragged by. I entered the second month of the project with more than half the story still to tell. (By way of comparison:
Dying Inside
, also a difficult thing to write and three times as long, took me just nine weeks.) And now it was the middle of May; I had begun the story in late March. But somehow, finally, I regained my stride in early June, and the closing scenes, grim as their content was, were much easier to write than those that had gone before. One night in early June, I was at the movies—Marlon Brando’s
Last Tango in Paris
, it was—when the closing paragraphs of the story began to form in my mind. I turned to my wife and asked her for the notebook she always carried, and began to scribble sentences, in the dark, during the final minutes of the film. The movie ended; the lights came on; the theater emptied; and there I sat, still writing. “Are you a movie critic?” an usher asked me. I shook my head and went on writing.

So the thing was done, and I knew that I had hooked me a big fish. The next day, I typed out what I had written in the theater, and set about preparing a final draft for Ed. On June 16, 1973, I sent it to him with a note that said, “Here It Is. I feel exhausted, drained, relieved, pleased, proud, etc. I hope the thing is worthy of all the sweat that went into it. What I’m going to do tomorrow is don my backpack and head for the Sierra for a week in the back country at 10,000 feet, a kind of rite of purification after all these months of crazy intense typing.”

“I could not be more pleased with ‘Born with the Dead’,” Ferman replied four days later. (E-mail was mere science fiction in those days.) “It seems to me that it brings to a peak the kind of thing you’ve been doing with
Book of Skulls
and
Dying Inside
.” (I had not noticed until that moment the string of death-images running through the titles of those three practically consecutive works of mine.) “I don’t think there is a wrong move in this story, and it comes together beautifully in the ending, which I found perfect and quite moving.”

The story appeared in the April, 1974
F&SF
, which was indeed the special Robert Silverberg issue—with an Ed Emshwiller portrait of me in my best long-haired 1970s psychedelic mode on the cover and essays about me by Barry Malzberg and Tom Clareson within, along with a Silverberg bibliography in very small type (so it didn’t fill half the issue). “Born with the Dead” went on to win the Nebula Award in 1975 and the Locus Award as well. In the Hugo voting, though, it finished second, an event which seemed to confirm what I had already come to believe, that my current output was far removed from the needs and interests of the science-fiction mass audience. But, Hugo or no, the story has, since then, been generally acclaimed as a classic. It has been reprinted in innumerable anthologies, translated into ten foreign languages, and optioned for motion-picture production.

Perhaps I should underscore the fact that this is a story I wrote in 1973, when the year in which it takes place—1993—was still quite some distance in the future. 1993, of course, is pretty far in the past by now, and getting more so every minute, and I hardly need say that the world of 1993 that I imagined in the story is not the world of 1993 that we all lived through. Time marches along, and even the most visionary of science fiction gets out of date. The science fiction of Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is supreme in our field for its soaring vision of the billions of years to come—as his great novels
Last and First Men
and
Star Maker
demonstrate—but even he, though he could tell us all about the dizzyingly far future, got almost everything wrong at shorter range. Writing in 1930, Stapledon completely failed to foresee the rise of Adolf Hitler just three years later, and spoke of the Germany of his day as “the most pacific [of nations], a stronghold of enlightenment.” Instead he singled out Benito Mussolini, who was already in power, as the strongest figure in Europe (“a man whose genius in action combined with his rhetoric and crudity of thought to make him a very successful dictator”). Most—not all—of Stapledon’s portrait of the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is equally wrongheaded—“awkward and naive,” as Gregory Benford said in his introduction to a 1988 edition of the book, and even “ludicrous,” as Brian Aldiss once observed. Stapledon’s account of the near future was so far off the mark that in a 1953 American edition of
Last and First Men
the publisher simply deleted most of the first three chapters of the sixteen-chapter book.

I did not intend “Born with the Dead” as a work of prophecy—I never seriously believed that by 1993, when the story takes place, a process would exist by which the dead could be brought back to life. I was writing a parable, a strange love story, a speculative view of a new kind of society that might arise provided one big assumption (that of the possibility of rekindling the dead) were granted, but not any sort of literal prediction. And time has left the story behind, to the extent that 1993 did not see any such rebirth process as the one I depict. I can only beg your indulgence for that: Take the story as a portrayal of what Jorge Klein, an imaginary character, would have done if he had been confronted with the problem, which is purely science-fictional, of coping with the fact of his wife’s return from the dead. The theme is not exactly a new one: The Greek tales of Orpheus and Eurydice and of Alcestis and Admetus, both of them more than twenty-five centuries old, have dealt with it in somewhat different ways, as do the multitude of stories over the years that tell of zombies and other formerly dead persons.