Read The Synopsis Treasury Online
Authors: Christopher Sirmons Haviland
Tags: #Reference, #Writing; Research & Publishing Guides, #Publishing & Books, #Authorship
The Synopsis Treasury (13 page)
21 Their research is strained by their personal feelings. Anita feels that Walden maneuvered Zacharias into a position where he would be killed. Not even Egad can convince her that Walden acted to save Zacharias rather than kill him. She aligns herself more closely with Sorbatchin, who plays on this to keep his human enemies divided.
They manage to come up with a stopgap measure that will halt the unravelling of the alien DNA and innoculate all those aboard
Starlight
. For many aliens it is too late; they die. But the survivors are protected for the time, if not entirely safe. Walden must delve into the function of the extra alien chromosomes to get an idea about how the infinity plague works.
To Uvallae and the surviving Frinn, Walden has proven himself. However, it is apparent that Colonel Sorbatchin—and Miko—are not friendly toward the Frinn. They view the aliens as enemies and the plague as a chance to reap huge gains.
Jerome Walden will continue working to find a cure for the plague. Uvallae reluctantly agrees to give Captain Telford the coordinates of the Frinn homeworld. The alien realizes that his race’s only hope for survival lies with Walden.
But the soldiers.…
***
Orson Scott Card
(Photo by Terry Manier)
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels
Ender’s Game
,
Ender’s Shadow
, and
Speaker for the Dead
, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools. His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series (
Pathfinder
,
Ruins
,
Visitors
) and the fantasy Mithermages series (
Lost Gate
,
Gate Thief
) are taking readers in new directions.
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (
Magic Street
,
Enchantment
,
Lost Boys
), biblical novels (
Stone Tables
,
Rachel and Leah
), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with
Seventh Son
), poetry (
An Open Book
), and many plays and scripts, including his “freshened” Shakespeare scripts for
Romeo & Juliet
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, and
The Merchant of Venice
.
Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University.
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local
Rhinoceros Times
and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons on the patio.
I first came up with the Columbus project when I read a fascinating biography of Columbus, and then several other books that attacked Columbus as some kind of devil because he was not sufficiently “modern” and “enlightened” in his attitude toward the natives of the lands he discovered.
What astonished me was the naked hypocrisy of Columbus’s critics. Columbus was vilified for not being understanding of cultures and languages different from his own; yet his critics seemed oblivious to the fact that in so judging him, they, too, were being just as contemptuous of cultures and languages different from their own—namely, Columbus’s.
I wanted to write a novel that would view Columbus from his own perspective, but I realized that would not be sufficient. What I needed to do was write a novel that would take into account all the anti-European viewpoints that absolutely condemn the European conquest of the Americas, and find, not the opposite view, but a middle ground that would recognize how culture clashes can be destructive but, with wise management and reasonable doses of good will, the destruction can be averted or ameliorated.
Thus I hit upon the idea of having time travelers, who were intending to intervene to stop Columbus’s discovery of America, realize that Columbus’s discovery was actually prompted by previous time travelers who wanted him to discover America when he did in order to avert the worst event in THEIR history: the Aztec (or post-Aztec) discovery of Europe.
Since this project required a mechanism for time travel, I fitted it in with a story that I was already working on about Noah’s flood. I wrote a version of that story called “Atlantis,” using Kemal as a character who discovers the true location of Noah’s flood. So I worked him into the story as one of the time travelers.
Originally, though, I still intended the bulk of the novel to be about Columbus’s fascinating life. Instead, the story of the time travelers became my focus, mostly because in the story I was telling, Columbus was relatively passive, reacting to what others told him, while the time travelers were the ones making the hard choices and the deep sacrifices. They were therefore the more interesting characters (that is, if I succeeded in writing them well enough).
So between the outline and the execution, Columbus was reduced to several key vignettes from his life, a few of his preexisting relationships; Columbus became, in Alfred Hitchcock’s words, the “maguffin” in the time travelers’ story.
The plan had been to publish this novel in 1991, so the paperback would come out in 1992, in time for the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America.
But no publisher is so good they can publish a novel that doesn’t yet exist, and since I didn’t finish writing the book until too late for that publishing schedule, when I finally did finish it, it sat with my publisher for more than two years.
Not that the book went unread during that time. I had uploaded the entire manuscript to the area I maintained with AOL in those pre-Internet days, and about five hundred people downloaded it and read it in manuscript (free of charge). I only took it down from the site when the hardcover was finally published.
The reason the publisher waited so long was a good one: All the hooplah and anti-Columbus rhetoric of the quincentennial had made it highly unlikely that any book about Columbus, whether pro- or anti-, would do anything other than disappear. By waiting, and by having Columbus mentioned only in the subtitle, the publisher was able to give the book a chance to find its own legs in a quieter marketplace.
I still think the resulting novel is the best science fiction I’ve written to date. Even if it doesn’t follow the original outline all that closely.
—Orson Scott Card
The Redemption of Columbus
A novel by Orson Scott Card
It’s 1492, and Christopher Columbus discovers America right on schedule—but waiting for him on the shores of Cuba are three Chinese. They come, not from the Middle Kingdom of 1492, but rather from the far future; and they keep interfering with Columbus’s search for greatness. For one thing, all three of Columbus’s ships blow up in the water, so he can’t get back to Spain. And then there’s the way that the Caribees keep stealing Spanish muskets and gunpowder even as the “savage” women and children converse with the priests in halting Latin.
After sometimes dire, sometimes comic conflict with the Caribees, the Arawaks, his own crew, the priests, and the meddling Chinese, Columbus manages to forge them all into a workable community. They are a mixed lot, a people of tenuous compromises, speaking a mixture of three languages, worshiping jealous gods, combining native agriculture and European technology.
But together they are able to build and navigate a powerful Caribbean fleet, and over the course of years they unite the islands and finally face the monstrous Aztec Empire. It is Columbus, not Cortez, who ends the human sacrifices of the Aztecs—but when he’s through, he forges a new, cooperative federation of tribes and sets out to build the two fleets that will sail to Europe and China to announce the existence of the New World.
The three Chinese did not live to see even the conquest of Mexico. But they did leave a message, encoded in a way that is not grasped until an Aztec scientist deciphers it for Columbus near the end of his life. They came from the far future, and they had used time travel to undo the single most devastating event of human history: the European conquest of America. In doing so they uncreated their own time; but they believed that Columbus himself was such a man that, if he were placed in the right circumstances, he would be able to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Columbus dies knowing that they were right, and appalled at what he might have caused, had they not come to him.
*
*
Published as Pastwatch:
The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
in 1996. —CSH
***
David Brin
David Brin’s popular science fiction novels have been translated into more than twenty languages, including
New York Times
best-sellers that won Hugo, Nebula and other awards. His 1989 ecological thriller,
Earth
, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare, the World Wide Web and Gulf Coast flooding. A 1998 movie, starring Kevin Costner, was loosely adapted from his Campbell Award winner—
The Postman
. DC/Wildstorm also released a groundbreaking hardcover graphic novel
The Life Eaters
.
Kiln People
portrays a coming era when a simple advance in technology allows anyone to achieve the ancient dream of being in two places at once.
Foundation’s Triumph
brought a grand finale to Isaac Asimov’s famed Foundation Universe.
David Brin is also a noted scientist and speaker/consultant who also appears frequently on television, discussing trends in the near future. He serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as astronomy and space exploration, SETI, nanotechnology and national defense. His non-fiction book—
The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?
—deals with issues of openness, security and liberty in the new wired-age. It won the 2000 Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association and a prize from the McGannon Foundation for public service in communications.
The Out of Time series emerged from a discussion among authors and editors concerning an apparently difficult tradeoff between what young readers find easy to read, what they want deep-down, and what they might need.
We all agreed that the surge in consumption of Tolkien-imitating magical fantasies offered, best, candy-like adventures about characters whose life experience would never overlap with the reader’s. Unless the reader lived in a fairy castle and could hurl fireballs at red-eyed villains with a word.
Oh, sure, wish-fulfillment escape is fun. But might escape also be combined with characters who go to school in today’s world, face real problems … and then solve major crises using the REAL magic? The kind we can aspire to actually use, someday? Courage, brains, teamwork and skill?
I pondered that challenge and came up with a scenario where each episode would start with one or more anxious young protagonists in this, very gritty and real decade … hurl those characters into amazing sci fi circumstances where their best inner strengths have a chance to come forth … and then put them back home again, stronger and more confident with the experience.
During the adventure, I wanted to emphasize things like cooperation among people of many cultures, agility and learning, plus a touch of discipline and hard work … all wrapped in a belief that plucky perseverance can eventually save the day.
Achieving this combination took a little plot-magic. Plus a maguffin that would ONLY let teenagers solve special problems in a future world, where adults find themselves stopped short.
Avon books loved the concept and bought three novels by nebula award-winning authors, Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch and Roger Allen. We seemed to be on our way …
… Only then an in-house shakeup replaced the editorial staff. New people wanted a complete changeover. Our books were given the cheapest, most wretched-looking covers imaginable and shipped in dribbles to just a few stores, without a trace of marketing. Ah well.
I still get ecstatic fan letters over this series, from the few kids who got their hands on copies.
—David Brin
June 19, 1996
Proposal for a Science Fictional Universe
With an Optimistic Premise
Targeted at Young Adult or Pre-YA readers.
Dear Lou and Ralph,
Thanks for thinking of me, to conceptualize a potential YA-oriented series aimed at presenting images of an optimistic tomorrow. These are my preliminary thoughts about such a universe—code named Yanks.
(Does it stand for Young Adults Need Kind Speculations? Bear with me!)
• Optimism is difficult to convey in fiction. Because of the need to keep your heroes in jeopardy for X00 pages, or 90 minutes of film, most authors and directors prefer to start with the assumption that civilization is stupid, its citizens are sheep and its institutional leaders corrupt. For all its flaws,
Star Trek
managed to avoid this trap, because the externalities (aliens and opposing star empires) are so vast the Federation can be competent yet still get in enough troubles for the individual transcendence of heroes to matter. Yanks ought to achieve the same effect, without mimicry.
• This difficulty is especially hard if our intent is to have an ongoing series in which children and teens enter jeopardy in book after book. A decent civilization would try not to allow such an eventuality unless forced to by dire need.
• A futuristic setting may be stimulating, but the ideal would be to have kids of our present time involved, so that marvels can be juxtaposed against the problems the reader feels from everyday life. This, I believe, is one of the attractions of Goosebumps. Young readers think—“That might be me.”
• Ideally, our kid protagonists will fight for something worthy and greater than themselves. They will see their own problems diminished in comparison. They will gain a little confidence to tackle their home situations. Above all, they’ll acquire a tad more faith in their own future and their civilization.
All these desiderata point to a possible scenario. A future semi-utopia, finding itself in ongoing peril must snatch kids from the late 20th century to help solve their problems. This need is dire and cannot be satisfied any other way. The kids are called “yanks” because they are yanked out of their home timeline and asked to join a team that will help save the day.
Why are kids from “the past” needed? Because in a utopia few people suffer extreme danger. There will be risky sports and adventurers, but civilization has eliminated most of the truly horrible catastrophes that test humans to the utter limit. Yet, there is a certain quality that some people have. A quality that enables them to face soul-searing crises. To endure, prevail, and emerge whole and wise. People of the year 2565 have a name for this trait, taken from an old film.
Grit.
Outrageous premise alert! The thing is … grit isn’t learned. It goes beyond mere courage and character. Either you have it or you don’t. And if you do, it means you even had it as a kid, years before you face whatever tragedy eventually brings it out. Historians of 2565 know who the heroes were, during the Troubled Times of the early 21st century (2022 to 2075). They know the heroes’ names and they know how to find them further back, when they were just kids in 1998!
Why yank kids, and not their skilled, powerful older selves from, say, 2030?
Outrageous premise alert—Only kids can survive time travel! Above all, only kids can survive being put back after the adventure is over. And kids better endure the selective amnesia they must be given, when sent back to their own time.
Paradoxes? You’re worried about paradoxes at a time like this? Hey trust me a little while.…
Normally, each book will feature four phases:
Phase One: The protagonist is shown in real life in 1999 America, facing quandaries a kid might face today. Then, usually at a moment of decision on some issue … he or she is yanked!
Phase Two: The kid from our time adjusts to year 2565. Descriptions of life in that year, and the training program, should be brief, since this phase is shared by most books.
A crisis team is formed of six kids and an adult advisor. Two kids are yanks taken from our own time (known as the finest era for finding gritty types who have at least a smidgen of technological experience). Two others are yanked from times much further in the past … allowing authors to bring in, say, a Mongol kid from Ghengiz Khan’s tribe, and/or an American Indian, or a pioneer. Just so long as it’s someone who was known to have suffered and overcome terrible trials later in life.
The final two kids are contemporaries from 2565. Smart, savvy, sometimes smug, but fundamentally untested. It’s anyone’s guess how much grit they have. An adult advisor fills out the team.
Phase Three: The adventure! Their job? To travel space and/or time putting out fires and solving problems together.
Some books may feature ongoing characters, in which case phase two can be abbreviated. But the majority of tales would feature protagonists who are original to the particular book.
An interesting bit of referred-to back story will be hints at what out central figure will wind up going through and accomplishing during the Troubled Times (2025-2070). In other words, the crisis that lies ahead of our hero, when, as an adult, he/she will achieve wonders worth noting in history books. In some of our tales, the future kids, and even the adult advisor, treat our protagonist with awed reverence!
Phase Four: After each successful adventure, there is a secondary story dealing with the sending back of the yanked kids. Our classic ending is for the 20th century kids to slip back into their lives, bemused by scars they can’t explain and skills they don’t remember learning … but above all, self-confidence that seems to well outward from somewhere within. To their cynical friends, who keep grousing about the future, they reply … “Yeah, maybe it’ll be tough … but I figure it’s gonna be all right. We’re gonna be all right.”
In other words … I’m going to make it be all right.
Ideally, the series will be mapped out so the adventures are mutually consistent and build with time, with adversaries who get peeled back a little more in each book. At the same time, each books can be planned to deal a different lesson.
I envision a special episode in which the young hero fools the controllers and foils the amnesia. He goes back with full knowledge of what happened. It leads to a whole different perspective as he figures out how to use his knowledge without triggering paradoxes … and perhaps proving to the folks in 2565 that they ought to use him again.…
I perceive a talking control computer. In time, we learn that he was once a yank himself! And a hero of the Troubled Times. In fact, he’s keeping mum, but he just might be one of our continuing protagonists, in a far future incarnation.
THE GIFT GIVERS: They arrived about 20 years ago and gave Earthlings “sally ports” that enable 3 kinds of teleportation. I see them as having come recently to our galaxy for a purpose they won’t explain. They are aloof (but sometimes intervene). They give teleportation to lesser races as sort of a way to pass the time (like a bored kid teaching a mutt some tricks) while waiting for their Big Event to happen.
Adversaries: We need several threats that may smash utopia, unless our heroes save the day. At least one threat should be continuing, building in malevolence even as its schemes are foiled. Above all, the civilization of Earth/Humanity is not to be depicted as stupid/venal/inane or a hopeless society of non-violent lotus eaters. It is a better world, with average people being fairly bright and leaders who are both smart & accountable. Therefore the threats must be both dire and imaginative. (The future is allowed to have blind spots that our gritty heroes will point out, as we go along.)
Some scenarios:
1) INVASION. When we were given the sally ports, and their gravitational influence DISTURBED THE KUIPER BELT OF COMETS. This precipitated a crisis that’s still going on. Maybe one’s already hit Earth, leaving certain portions in semi-tribal chaos. Other comets have to be constantly fought by a corps of dedicated spacers. We send out hordes of robot spaceships to fight comets, each one with a tiny port booth aboard, so a kid pilot can jump in and handle the actual encounter. STORY—The enemy has started purposely increasing the number of comets heading Earthward! Their base must be found and destroyed!
2) RUNAWAYS. Some past Yanks have escaped from their teams and hidden in 2565, rather than go back to their awful home times, and especially rather than face the crises they know they will face, back home. The time stream is flexible. It can do a cross-over loop and even survive if a yank is killed and never is sent back. But the cumulative effect will be “swiss cheese”. A damaged time frame that Earth’s enemies can exploit by sending agents into our own past. The kids must be found and persuaded to go home, eliminating the holes.
3) ENEMIES IN TIME: If a kid doesn’t make it home, the Time Frame adjusts. Some relative or neighbor often absorbs the “grit”, and goes on to perform the task the missing kid would have. But a hole is left, and enemy agents use these to slip in, trying to harm our past. They usually don’t do it with brute force. Simply killing an important past human seldom works very well, and it sends a signal that gives their activities away. But there are subtle things they can try to do. Nasty, with long term effects.
In fighting these foes, the technique is to yank a grit-kid from that time, give her/him instructions, then send her back to foil the foes in her own home town.
A subcutaneous capsule will dissolve after a few weeks and give her the needed amnesia. But this can lead to complications! What if it takes more than a few weeks! (We START a novel with our kid finding a note she wrote to herself, explaining that she must do a bunch of crazy-sounding things, or history will be bent! She’s forgotten … and is skeptical … yet there remains a job to do.)