Authors Notes
Dad (who was a writer) and Mom (who
was not) assured me that the second book would be the hardest to write. The theory
is that everyone has one great story inside them, waiting to be told, but once that’s
gone you have to start from scratch.
Damn if they weren’t right, too.
At this point I had some fantasy material I wanted to explore,
revolving around the concept of a medieval Catholic occultist: the Faustian saga
of a man of true faith who hungered for knowledge that his beloved Church had declared
off-limits. I recognized that the story was a big one and needed a universe large
enough and complex enough to do it justice, and I didn’t feel I had that ready quite
yet. So I put that material on a back burner to simmer for a while and looked for a one-book concept to develop in the
meantime.
(Warning: serious spoilers ahead!) As vampires have always
been an interest of mine, for a variety of thematic reasons, I decided to broach
the ultimate cross-genre “what if?” question.
That is to say...if vampires really existed, and if they were a natural part
of our world, what would happen to them when and if we made contact with alien civilizations? How would said aliens view them?
How would they, with their unique perspective, view aliens? This led
to perhaps the most bizarre concept I have ever come up with, which I fondly refer
to as “Vampires in Space”, and ironically it required as much research as the more
realistic things I have written. After
all, you not only have to come up with reasons why your vampires would have evolved
in the first place, but why they had not taken control of the Earth after doing
so...a key point most novels in the “top of the food chain” mold do not bother to
address.
As I needed an alien species for the book I decided to tackle
a couple of themes that had been tried before in science fiction, but rarely handled
well. The first was the concept of
a “hive mind”, that is, an entire species sharing a single consciousness.
Despite the fact that many authors had played with the idea, very few of
them were able to present a believable vision of what such a consciousness would
be like. (To Marry Medusa by Sturgeon
is a noteworthy exception). Thus the
Tyr were born, a true communal consciousness, as complex and flawed as anything
which evolved on earth. Figuring out
how such a creature would have evolved in the first place (evolution is based upon
competition, so what happens when individuals have no reason to compete?) and what
their mating practices would be like was half the fun.
I also invented the Marra, a delightfully quirky species
that had no bodies of their own, and hence had very little real understanding of
any facet of human culture that depended upon physical reality.
I must admit this is the only time in my writing career I ever based a character
upon a real person, in this case the personality of a student named Lori Cook who
worked with me in the costume shop. I also was delighted to write in the destruction
of the football stadium at the University of Georgia, an act long overdue, in my
humble opinion.
Lastly, I had to determine how memory storage would be affected
by the extended lifespan of both my main characters.
Does a human being who lives for a thousand years simply accumulate ten times
as much information as the rest of us, with all of it as easily accessible as a
recently-dialed phone number, or does the vampiric mind have some special means
of handling storage-and-retrieval that makes the burden tolerable?
The answer became a unique quirk of my vampiric species, a “timefugue” state
in which current events could trigger vivid emotive flashbacks from previous time
periods, linked thematically to the current moment.
Déjà Vu Files, Part One: Years after The Madness Season
came out, the TV show “Forever Knight” introduced a vampire who responded to current
events with vivid emotive flashbacks from earlier time periods, linked thematically
to the current moment. Imagine that.
Déjà vu Files, Part One: The struggle of a particular
member of the Tyr to comprehend the nature of individuality, and to develop a sense
of self divorced from the greater whole, was a central part of my story.
In one of my favorite scenes, a human tried to explain to him what a name
was for, and the alien asked him to name him.
He did so...resulting in an alien named Fred.
Several years later, a friend sent me a tape of a Star Trek
episode, in which a member of the Borg, attempting to comprehend the nature of individuality,
and to develop a sense of self divorced from the greater whole, asked to be given
a name, and wound up...an alien named Hugh.
Imagine that
:-)
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