In Darkness Bound

I think I was always captivated by space, fascinated with science and technology. I can recall sitting at the dining room table in the house we had on Kingston Avenue (Ottawa, Canada), drawing rockets on a large, yellow-papered pad my father had bought for me. I was three or four at the time, but even then I felt the stars beckon. I watched the launch of Gemini rockets on TV and dreamed of the day when I might go into space. When Lost in Space first aired in 1965 I was an eager fan, too young to realize how wretched the show actually was. All I cared about were the spaceship, the traveling to other worlds, and the technologies that seemed beyond anything we had. That show nurtured a keen interest in science fiction, further enhanced when, on my eighth birthday, I was given a copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, probably the first SF related book I read. Star Trek came along in 1966 and I was in awe; but it was in September of 1968, just before my family and I left to go live in Pakistan for a few years, that I had my real awakening.

My oldest brother Brian, who would soon be off to university, took me to Montreal to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was simply blown away. I felt like I had had an epiphany, and there are times when I think that that film alone did much to change my life. I wanted so desperately to live in that world, to fly in a Pan Am shuttle up to the vast rotating wheel of the space station. I wanted to journey on to the Moon and walk the corridors of that sprawling base built into the rock of Earth’s lone satellite.

Nine years old and full of optimism, I never thought it wouldn’t happen by the prescribed date. I continued to dream and believe, and that fueled a desire to experience more of what 2001 had had to offer. As a consequence I discovered Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, voraciously digesting Starman Jones, The Rolling Stones, I,Robot, The Red Sands of Mars, and anything else I could get my hands on that spoke optimistically of the future.

In Pakistan my older brother Terry and I followed the American space program as closely as we could from afar. We sent away for material from NASA and eagerly went through all the books, pictures, and pamphlets the agency sent us. We amassed drawers of the stuff, all the while experimenting with rocketry, dreaming of the day when we’d build our own vehicles and launch ourselves into space. The bedroom we shared in the colony we lived in near Khaipur had drawings and pictures of rockets and rocket fuel plants we had designed and seriously thought we'd some day build. Our large, wooden desk was littered with books and articles about space and spaceflight. Often, when we were supposed to be working on our correspondence course lessons, we’d actually be conceiving our grandiose schemes for flight into space.

Terry ended up being sent to boarding school in England and the dream just faded away without his impetus. But I retained my passion for science and space. I continued to read anything related to it. When we moved to Iran I discovered Tintin and followed his adventures to the Moon in Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. When Terry and my sister Elaine came to visit us in Isfahan, they brought Airfix models of Russian and American rockets that left me spellbound. I made my own models of the American Command and Lunar modules out of cardboard and had them on display in the house. And when a piece of Moon rock made a tour of Iran in ’71 it was an event I eagerly lined up to see. Though it was a pebble-sized chunk, it was, for me, more important and more valuable than the Crown Jewels. It was a piece of another world, so close you could touch it, if not for the glass case in which it was enclosed.

In the summer of that year we went back home for a holiday and I remember being glued to the TV set, watching astronauts cavort on the moon, driving about it on their lunar rover. I couldn't get enough of it. But the great age of manned space exploration was nearing an end. The Apollo program ended a couple of missions later. Skylab had a certain appeal, but it seemed so pale a thing when compared with Kubrick's space wheel and Pan Am shuttle. Science fiction was the only thing really keeping alive the hopes of reaching the stars.

In ’74, while we were living in Tanzania, Brian came to visit and brought me several books for Christmas. Among these was Arthur C.Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, a book that seemed to rekindle hope in me-- if only because it hinted at the possibilities, at the wonders that might await us if we could ever get our act together and summon the political fortitude to press ahead with the manned exploration of space. By then I was seriously beginning to think about one day writing my own novel. I made several attempts to start one then and there, banging away on mom's electric typewriter in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. But I was a teenager at the time and there were just too many other distractions. It was only after our second stint in Pakistan that I would actually sit down and hammer out a complete novel. Two hundred pages of fantasy inspired by Tolkien and Star Wars. I thought it wasn’t good enough for publication so I bundled it up and threw it in the garbage – something I now regret. It lies buried in the Trail Road dump in Nepean, lost forever, perhaps to one day surface as part of an archeological dig. (It's amazing how long paper can last in one of those landfills.)

I kept trying to write, and began a sprawling science fiction novel that grew to be longer than War and Peace. No surprise there, because Tolstoy’s book had greatly inspired me, and I had had dreams of creating something of the same breadth and scope. But after more than two years of work I just felt it wasn’t ready. I struggled on, doing odd jobs to try and support my art and writing, trying to live a dream. I helped build green houses with Terry and custom homes, meanwhile pecking out short stories that I sent off in hopes of striking it lucky with one of the SF magazines. But luck wasn’t on my side. On one occasion I received an offer of publication if I would make a few changes to the submitted story. I set to work, but in the few weeks it took for me to do this and get the story back to the editor, the editorial staff had been changed and the new editor decided my work was no longer what they were looking for.

I tried a few more times, then decided to give it a rest.

In ’83 my brother bought a Commodore 64 computer. Mostly he played games on it, but in an issue of COMPUTE! magazine that year there was featured a free wordprocessor called SpeedScript. I spent hours typing in the hex code for that piece of software. It was mind-numbing work, but the end result was a functioning tool that inspired me to start writing again. There are writers who can't stand the things, but for me wordprocessors the best thing since the Gutenberg press.

I had several false starts on my next novel, but by ’85 I had started work on a book called Evangeline. It took more than a year to write the first draft, every word of it saved on the cassette tapes of the Commodore 64’s glacial slow data drive. I set Evangeline aside and began work on the sequel, finished that and worked on the third novel. The Commodore gave way to a PC and WordPerfect, and work continued.

I wrote a short story called Zero Option that won first place at the ’89 Pinecone II SF convention. I thought for sure that would be the turning point. The story was supposed to be published in a book along with the runners-up and some of the honorable mentions, but the people responsible for the convention didn’t have enough money left over to do this. My first chance at seeing my work in print was once again the victim of bad luck. Somewhat discouraged, I kept working on rough, first drafts of novels, cranking out a fourth book in the series I loosely referred to as Chronicles of the Earth Empire. I was working on the fifth book when I was offered employment I couldn’t refuse. Writing came to a complete stop. It wasn’t until my father’s death in March of 2000 that I decided to take out Evangeline , dust it off, and have another crack at it. It took a year to rewrite. I printed out copies and gave them to friends and relatives to read, took their comments and worked the novel over some more. Then I finally summoned the courage to send the book off. The first publisher I sent it to didn’t get back to me in the promised time of six months, so I inquired (several times) and waited three more months before they deigned to tell me that a rejection had been sent months prior via e-mail. It had never arrived. Nine months wasted.

I looked over the novel again, did more editing, trimming material from it to quicken the pace of the opening, changing the flight mechanics of the ships from a rather fantastical Star Trek/Star wars model to a somewhat more realistic one (though, of course, it could be argued there’s no realism whatsoever in faster than light travel).

Evangeline became Obsidian, a harder-edged title, I thought. I sent it away again, and waited.

Another publisher, another rejection – though at least this time with kind words of encouragement from the editor. More rewriting. More fine-tuning. And then, in a serendipitous moment, I discovered Publish America. It seemed the perfect fit. I sent my manuscript to them and heard back in a matter of weeks. They wanted to publish my novel. I was astonished. I had resigned myself to another rejection, to never seeing publication (since I could not afford, nor did I want to go the vanity press route). I was ecstatic. To be published at last. It almost seemed too good to be true.

And maybe it is.

The sad fact is that although I’d like to think all the long years of working on this book and others will have a big payoff, the reality is much more sobering. It is doubtful In Darkness Bound (formerly Obsidian) will sell enough copies to allow me to continue with the series. A second draft of the sequel is completed, but because of alterations made to In Darkness Bound the manuscript for the sequel will have to go through another rewrite before I can consider seeking publication. Each draft takes times, and I’m not sure how much of that I have left.

Presently I’m working hard to get the final draft of book three of my young adult fantasy trilogy completed. I’m hoping there will be more of a market in this genre. But when it all comes down to it, few of us will ever be as lucky as Dan Brown or J.K.Rowling. And there is a lot of luck involved, no matter what some successful authors will tell you. If the right person takes a liking to what you’ve written and spreads the word you can have a bestseller on your hands before you know it. But for most writers selling a few thousand copies is probably the best they can ever hope for.

And let’s face it: It may just be that the time for science fiction is past. Science and technology are advancing so quickly that there are many who say we presently live in a world of science fiction. The wild imaginings of SF authors no longer leave us with the same sense of wonder they once did. In some ways you might almost say SF has become mainstream (although it’s unlikely you’ll ever get a mainstream author--who has written a book that is for all intents and purposes science fiction-- to ever admit that fact).

In Darkness Bound was a much weirder novel in the first draft, filled with all sorts of unusual political, sociological and technological speculations. In the end I thought it too strange and alien, and felt those strong SF trapppings detracted from what I was trying to say about war and the moral ambiguity that often suffuses much of it. And truth to tell, I’d like to attract people who don’t normally read science fiction, which is why I put an emphasis on the characters rather than the technology in this book. This isn’t ‘hard’ SF. It’s about relationships, about how people deal with crises. It’s about love and fear and hope and sorrow. It’s about living and dying. The strong and the weak. But mostly it’s just a good story, which will hopefully have you eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next. And if, at the end of it all, you put it down and find yourself taking a moment to think upon what you’ve read – if it has somehow resonated with you emotionally – then I will have succeeded, and all those years spent will not have been in vain. Because in the end that’s all that really matters: writing something that speaks to people and maybe changes their lives the way so many books have changed mine.

It's my legacy; the only one I really have.

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