The Synopsis Treasury Read online

  Chapter VI, the dream, has been shifted from diary to third person, and has been cut at least half. Inasmuch as the key to the rest of the story and all the basic ideas are contained in that chapter I do not believe that it can be cut much more without destroying some of the force and literary value of the story. But you’re the doctor—let me know. Chapters VII & VIII have been greatly trimmed as well, and I believe that they are now satisfactorily fast story.

  Chapter XIII, the fight with Brinckley et seq., has been greatly expanded in accordance with your instructions. I added about the amount of action and dialogue to this chapter that I had struck out of exposition in earlier chapters (leaving the total length of the story about the same). This action could be spun out for any desired additional number of words, but I don’t favor doing so. It is packed with implied action now as well as a great deal of additional explicit action, which gives the story a fast pace in its conclusion which I think is desirable in any story and which can be lost through too detailed treatment. I think the story should rush pell-mell to a conclusion once Huxley makes the decision to fight Brinckley personally.

  In any case, here it is—with time left to chew over any remaining details.

  I enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope. The airmail stamp is a gentle hint—I am always anxious to hear editorial reaction at the earliest convenient date.

  Cordially yours,

  Robert A. Heinlein

  17 January 1941

  Dear Heinlein:

  “Lost Legacy” arrived okay, and I decided to scan it hastily—and read it attentively. Which is another way of saying that no additional changes will be necessary. I’ll take it as it stands.…

  Cordially,

  Frederik Pohl

  From the Frederik Pohl Correspondence collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries at Syracuse University.

  ***

  James Gunn

  (photo by Jason Dailey)

  James Gunn has worked as an editor of paperback reprints; as managing editor of Kansas University alumni publications; as director of KU public relations; as a professor of English; and now is professor emeritus of English and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He was awarded the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement and the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching, was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America for 1971–72 and president of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980 to ’82, and has been guest of honor at many regional science fiction conventions, including SFeracon in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and Polcon, the Polish National SF convention, in Katowice. Gunn was presented with the Pilgrim Award of SFRA in 1976, a special award from the 1976 World SF Convention for Alternate Worlds, a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo) by the 1983 World SF Convention for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, the Eaton Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement. SFWA’s Grand Master Award in 2007, and was a Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2013. He was a KU Mellon fellow in 1981 and 1984 and served from 1978 to ’80 and 1985 to present as chairman of the Campbell Award jury to select the best science fiction novel of the year. He has lectured in Denmark, China, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union for the US Information Agency.

  Gunn is also the distinguished author of numerous science fiction novels and shorter works, including The Listeners, The Dreamers, The Witching Hour, The Joy Machine (with Theodore Sturgeon), Crisis!, The Burning, The Magicians, Station in Space, The Immortals (on which the 1969 TV movie and 1970–71 TV series The Immortal was based), and his current novel Transcendental. He also edited a series of science fiction anthologies intended for use in teaching courses on the subject, published as a six-volume work entitled The Road to Science Fiction.

  The Synopsis Saga

  When I started writing novels in 1952, the only way I knew to write a novel was to start at the beginning and work my way sequentially to the end. There was no point in writing a synopsis, since I had no prospect of getting a contract to write a novel until I had written it. After the first two, I started writing my novels as a series of novellas or novelettes, the way Isaac Asimov wrote The Foundation Trilogy, like tinker toys, each new one attached to the one that came before. Sometimes I would discuss work in progress with an editor on my annual visits to New York, and sometimes that would result in a contract before the work was finished. The only occasion on which that required a synopsis was when I submitted to Fred Pohl a couple of chapters of my novel-in-progress Kampus, when he was the science fiction editor at Bantam Books, and he told me he’d give me a contract for it, but he wanted a synopsis. “But you never wrote a synopsis,” I protested. “I just need it for the editorial committee,” he replied. “You don’t have to follow it.”

  Later in my career as a novelist, however, I found other ways to write a novel. I wrote the final chapter of The Millennium Blues and then went back and wrote the preceding eighteen, and I did write a synopsis in hopes of getting a contract. That was when I had 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 acr
oss 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 threaten the political equilibrium that has preserved the galaxy until now. Violence, romance, and death, from outside and inside the group, come as a inevitable accompaniment of their journey, and one revelation follows after another, all of it focused around the great SF theme of transcendence, as the protagonist is gradually transformed from a disillusioned skeptic into a believer in humanity and its quest for transcendence.

  The novel ends as the protagonist reaches the goal and submits himself to the process he had originally scorned, but we do not learn whether he achieved transcendence or death. A sequel (Transubstantial?), or even a trilogy, is possible.

  In addition to the theme of transcendence, the novel will deal with the theme of stasis versus change. The questions to be answered during the progress of the novel are: who hired the protagonist? who is the prophet? who (or what) doesn’t want the pilgrimage to reach its goal? The answers to these questions, and others, will undergo many transmutations as sides and motives are unveiled.

  A parallel might be drawn to Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man.”

  ***

  Frank Herbert

  Frank Herbert, the visionary author of Dune, wrote more than twenty other novels, including Hellstrom’s Hive, The White Plague, The Green Brain, and The Dosadi Experiment. During his life, he received great acclaim for his sweeping vision and the deep philosophical underpinnings in his writings. His life is detailed in the Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune, by Brian Herbert.

  There are many fascinating windows into the mind of Frank Herbert. He possessed an astounding intellect that stretched to the very limits of human consciousness. Everything interested him. My father once told me that he could not look something up on one page of an encyclopedia without wanting to read the opposite page that lay open on the table. A reviewer for the New York Times once quipped that Frank Herbert’s head was so overloaded with ideas that it was likely to fall off.

  Some of Dad’s literary characters were like that, as he spoke through them. In God Emperor of Dune, he described Leto II, who through genetic processes acquired all human information. Outside the Dune series, Frank Herbert wrote of a vast Galactic Library, a storehouse containing the written wisdom of humankind. The author, like Leto II and the Galactic Library, was a repository of incredible, wondrous information. His words captivated millions of people all over the world.

  Frank Herbert was a human dynamo, a force of nature. Everyone who knew him benefited from the relationship. He shared as much as he could with me, with his friends, and with his legions of fans. He wrote many letters, and in the days before faxes, e-mails, and text messaging, he sent his correspondence by what we call “snail mail” today. The letters he exchanged with Damon Knight between 1963 and 1965 are particularly interesting, focusing as they do on a novel about the creation of artificial consciousness (Destination: Void*).

  Just before that exchange, back in the 1950s, Americans had been inundated with visions of a future that involved robots performing household chores for them and other tedious or boring tasks. Television commercials and science fiction stories depicted homes that were fully automated, with mechanical servants flitting about, and well-dressed housewives enjoying the benefits of futuristic kitchens. In that Utopian future, automation was supposed to make it possible for people to have more leisure and productive time—allowing them to more fully achieve their human potential.

  In Dune and Destination: Void, Frank Herbert portrayed situations that were far different from those halcyon depictions of friendly, trouble-free machines that performed work we didn’t want to do. Flipping utopia over into dystopia, the author wrote about scenarios that might exist if machines were either given (or developed) artificial intelligence, and in the process became something quite dark. He asked the familiar science-fiction question, “What if?” What if AI-machines sought to dominate their creators, and in the process tried to take away human freedoms? What would be left of our humanity then?

  Throughout the Dune series and other stories, Dad liked to explore myths and assumptions, and to compare them with reality. One of his major themes was to ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” In his February 25,1965 letter to Damon Knight, he wrote, “The enlightened person sees what underlies all things, including himself, but he is always something other than what he sees.” This is, of course, a very Zen view of the universe, where wordless realities trump all human perceptions. Though he did not practice any religion, he said that he found Buddhism the most appealing of all religious and philosophical concepts.

  During his newspaper career, Frank Herbert worked as an investigative reporter. Similarly, in his creative writing he liked to (as he put it) “turn over rocks and see what scurried out.” In the process, he analyzed the unexamined assumptions and myths under which we were living as a species. Ultimately, this was all about human consciousness. He saw people around him just plodding along with their lives, without really thinking much about their actions, Frank Herbert came to see that humans were actually perceiving the world around them through filters, and were expending the energies of their lives in seeking myths that they often didn’t even know existed. Thus, humans were driven by forces outside themselves, forces that involved the human species as a collective organism.

  As Dad wrote to Damon Knight on January 20,1964, the project to create artificial consciousness (in Destination: Void) succeeds “only when those involved see that they have to aim at something far different from an Asimov robot.… They see that man is conscious and aware, in part, because of his animal inheritance—all the instinctual trappings out of some 400 million years of primate development. This project must find a substitute for that animal history and condense the development time into a scale manageable in a human lifetime.”

  That’s an ambitious goal for Frank Herbert’s characters, and for his story. But big objectives did not deter Frank Herbert. For the planet Dune, he extrapolated what it might be like if all of Earth were to become like the Sahara Desert, and sand covered what had once been lush greenery. Then he asked what people would need to do in order to survive in such a hostile environment, and what sort of society and religion they might develop. Ultimately, people living on his desert planet would need to adjust to their environment—yet another aspect of the human condition. As he wrote in the novel Dune, “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” This human ability to adapt better than other species has led to its dominance on Earth, but Frank Herbert took that historical fact a step further, and asked what conditions might emerge that could further tax (and possibly break) this ability. As an author, he liked to keep raising the stakes, increasing the perils and challenges that his characters had to face.

  In Dune, he also warned of the dangers of machines, envisioning a westernized, galaxy-spanning civilization of humans that—paradoxically—had no legal computers at all. This was because of past abuses thousands of yea
rs before, when humans were enslaved by “thinking machines”—a legendary time for Dune fans when mankind ultimately rose up in a heroic “Butlerian Jihad” to overthrow the mechanical masters and regain their freedom.

  As he explored the alternate story of Destination: Void, Frank Herbert wrote to Damon Knight about the need for humans in a confined environment to survive against a hostile force—but in this case his story setting was a spaceship that was ostensibly full of cloned-human colonists bound for the Tau Ceti solar system. With the colonists in hybernation+, the vessel and its sophisticated computer systems would be operated by a conscious artificial mind that he called the OMC—the Organic Mental Core. Similar to his world-building for the novel Dune, Frank Herbert now speculated on what sort of religion might develop around the OMC, and on what humans would need to do in order to survive in a hostile environment.

  Ultimately, the artificial sentience of Destination: Void would become godlike and uncontrollable, with a religion developing around it. On February 25, 1965, Dad wrote to Damon Knight; “Question: How do you escape from the domination of an omnipotent, omnipresent being?” This was a question that the fictional Dr. Frankenstein might well have asked after creating his powerful monster. As Mary Shelley and Frank Herbert knew from considering such matters in detail, the plans and intentions of human beings often go awry. It is a line of reasoning that can lead to speculation about the folly of attempting to control the science of atomic bombs, or of commanding the superhuman Kwisatz Haderach that the Bene Gesserit of Dune sought to produce through generations of careful breeding. It’s the old problem of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle once it’s out. Something always goes wrong when events spiral out of human control, and that makes for intriguing story possibilities.