by Eric Del Carlo
Eric Del Carlo returns to Analog with “And Wear a Golden Sorrow” in our March/April issue, [on sale now!] Here, Eric discusses his road to writing, and five of the stories that influenced and inspired him.
I knew this, early on: I was in it for distance, not speed.
It was a long view, and an ambitious one. But I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer, wanted to have my words put into print by magazines and publishers. I couldn’t think of any better use of my stretch on Earth; still can’t.
Something else I knew: that I hadn’t come out of the box imbued with writerly talent, suffused miraculously with all the instincts and knowledge I would need to even make a first sale. The road would be rough. It would be long.
So, what do you do when you have ambitions like these? I was already a science fiction reader, and that was what I wished to write. Well, fine. But what concrete action do you first take? You read with intent. It’s not a hobby anymore. This is work. Read a story or a novel—and FIGURE THE THING OUT. This writer wrote something and somebody else deemed it worthy of publication, so deduce that process.
An initial step here is to find out why you like a particular story. Science fiction has all sorts of subgenres, invites every kind of approach. If you come across something which especially appeals to you, try to discover why that is. What grabs you about the story? The characters? The clever narrative? The prose? This calls for self-analysis. These are surely the types of stories you eventually want to write yourself, so it behooves you to examine the finer details of what in said stories is exciting you and hopefully firing your own imagination.
I read and read, as a boy, as a teen, as a young adult. I had favorites. I reread certain books and short stories. The wonder didn’t go away with these, where other stories faded, leaving only minor impressions behind.
As the years piled up, I had several authors whose works I was strongly drawn to. Novels I admired were like gleaming literary monuments to me, and I was desperately seeking the hidden entrance, eager to get inside and see how the machinery moved. It was, of course, fantastically frustrating. In my first attempts at stories I was clumsily slapping words and derivative plot devices together, making mud pies of prose. So be it. But I held to the notion that writing could be decoded, the process laid, if not bare, then comprehensible. These were, after all, just words, and they could be strung together in pleasing patterns, to elicit positive emotional responses. It wasn’t alchemy. Or, if it was, then it was a brand of the mystical science that could be codified. And comprehensively studied. And replicated.
So, what about these stories I would read over and over, that never entirely lost their luster for me, even after I had them practically memorized? They inspired me. They egged me on. Would I ever write anything as good as these radiant works? Did I dare dream that big?
Now I can look back with a certain satisfaction, having sold a good deal of science fiction to the pro-level markets. I can see where my early ambitions paid off. I can also distill those early inspiring works down a neat five, all short stories. Here they are…
I came across Robert Silverberg’s “Passengers” in, of all things, a thick collection of horror stories my father had. The tale did, in its way, qualify as horror fiction, as it depicted a near-future reality where an inexplicable event had reshaped society. In the story, people are randomly taken over by unseen beings, who make humans behave in often terrible ways, toying with their lives in a manner that was childish and sadistic. A person could be taken over at any time, anywhere, and so the world lived in a constant state of tension/terror. There was no communicating, much less negotiating, with these vicious creatures.
Wow. What a concept! I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Silverberg deservedly took the 1969 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for this seminal work. I was mesmerized by it. It was told, smoothly, in the first person, present tense, giving an immediacy to the main character’s dreadful plight. That person was a melancholic sort, shuffling through his days in a kind of hopeless resignation, getting “ridden” occasionally by one of these beings. The prose was glossy and finely tuned. I pored over individual sentences, amazed each time at how images and texture were so masterfully evoked. The story was heartbreaking, but not in a melodramatic way. The payoff was incredible, a solid punch to the chest.
This story, maybe above all the others, was like a beacon lighting the way for me. This was more or less exactly what I wanted to create: something this sophisticated, this profound, which used plot and character and ambience in such a balanced fashion. Here was my sweet spot. Someday, somehow, I would get to this level, or at least within throwing distance of it.
The Cyril Kornbluth story “The Altar at Midnight” was included in a collection of vintage short-shorts I bought, probably at a B. Daltons, in high school. I knew Kornbluth had written with a favorite writer of mine, Frederik Pohl, and that he had died relatively young, before science fiction had broken out of its “Golden Age” and become more adult and literary.
This story, however, was a revelation. In it a man who turns out to be an important scientist is wandering around a Skid Row of the future, observing human behavior through a cynical eye. It is eventually revealed what brought him to these lowly straits. But it was mostly a mood piece, replete with jaundiced views and an ongoing sorrow. It was vastly different from other stories in the collection, and well ahead of the curve—I thought—of what science fiction generally was from this era, where square-jawed heroes almost always triumphed and human ideals were upheld, as though the whole SF field were in the grip of a literary Hay’s Code which wouldn’t let anyone write anything too downbeat or, frankly, genuinely insightful about the human condition.
Kornbluth’s story carried off something remarkable and adult in the short-short (called flash fiction today) format, leaving me stunned. How had he done it? I could practically smell the musty bars and see the rundown streets depicted in the tale. Here was a work I studied, reading it repeatedly, seeking the secrets.
Stephen King’s “Trucks” appeared in his early collection Night Shift. Again, my father had a copy, and I co-opted it. This was years before the ghastly film adaptation, before King was even the juggernaut he would become. There were several stories in the book that were quite good, but this one truly seized me. Like “Passengers,” it presented a world-changing event without any explanation. Here, big rig trucks had, impossibly, come to autonomous life and were trying to murder people stranded inside a roadside diner.
It was the small story with huge implications. The tiny slice of characters and jeopardy with a vaster, overwhelming apocalypse rearing up behind it—because this horror was happening everywhere, a vehicular uprising on a global scale. As the people in the story fight to survive, those greater matters only loom larger, until in the end humanity is foreseen to be driven back to the caves or else enslaved by the sentient trucks.
The little story telling the big story. I absorbed this lesson. It was a crucial one. It’s why when I have something epic happen in something I write—say, some immense galactic conflict—I always remember to show it at least in part on the small scale, where the reader will care about the individual or individuals, even ahead of the great masses.
Well, I couldn’t have a list like this without including Harlan. Here is a writer who, like Silverberg, has been pivotal to my own development. There are actually several of Harlan Ellison’s stories in the running for one of my top five slots of influential works, but since I must decide, I choose “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” If you have read it—and you should—then I almost don’t need to explain.
This is a tale written in fire. It makes the blood pound and freezes the heart. It’s full of nightmare imagery that mainlines right into the soul. After an apocalypse brought on by rebellious technology, a group of people are tortured below ground by a mad all-powerful computer. It is a story that still feels dangerous, bleeding with raw honesty, giving us humans pushed to their gruesome extremes.
It was and is a difficult one to decode, as the words rise up around you when you read them, and suck a reader down into an explicitly drawn phantasmagoria. Nonetheless, I limped away with a shellshocked understanding of what prose could do in fearless, fearsome hands. I didn’t want to write my own version of this story, but it was useful to see the intensity with which such fiction could be infused.
The last story is an obscure one. François Camoin is the author, who I haven’t heard of before or since. His story “Some of My Best Friends Are American” appeared in a 1980 issue of Omni, a top-flight SF magazine to which my parents, sympathetic to my interest in the field, had gotten me a subscription. Much of fiction in those pages went somewhat above my head, and this story was no exception. But in this near-future story of an Arab economic and social takeover of the United States I found elements which deeply appealed to me.
As with Silverberg, the mood was melancholy. Understandably: here Americans were a subjugated people, where criminals had their hands chopped off and Jews were exterminated. It was a dystopia rendered in very personal terms, through the eyes of a character just trying to survive a brutal reign which had become day-to-day. That was a key for me, how this terrible world was delineated through such ordinary particulars. The author didn’t glare a spotlight at any particular aspect of the oppression, just mentioned it in passing, as part of the main character’s familiar landscape.
Recently, I found the very issue I used to read containing this story, and gave it yet another perusal, this time as an adult, as someone who understood better than he ever had how a story was constructed. I saw many subtle things I’d missed in earlier readings, and I saw how François Camoin had worked his particular magic. I even saw how the tale had left its lasting impressions on me and had influenced my work, for the better.
So. Those are my five, which have accompanied me on the long lonely road.
Writers, what are yours?
The Astounding Analog Companion 