The Way the Future Blogs

For years I have held to the theory that the trouble with sf films is that the people in charge of making them in the studios are, at the highest level, demented little animals. That would explain it all. However I am no longer quite as sure of this as I was, since my dearly beloved daughter-in-law, as a senior vice president of one of the biggest organizations, says it certainly isn’t true of her own bunch. She even says that, in many years of dealing with executives at other outfits, she has encountered several who are hardly demented at all, and, as I know that Meg would never lie to me, my theory must be wrong.

Still. . . .  Well, let’s look at the record.

In the task of turning my written words into performable scripts there has been one recurring problem. (With English-language producers, I mean. With Europeans — German, Spanish and Italian — there have been other problems, but at least they got something made.)

There are three books of mine — rather two of mine, Gateway and Man Plus, and one that was half mine and half Cyril Kornbluth’s, The Space Merchants — that have struck any number of Hollywood people as good bets for dramatization. So they have repeatedly ponied up money for option or purchase — over the years a not negligible sum — and then tried to find someone to write a script.

This is where every one of these ventures has come to grief. They’ve never been able to find a writer who could figure out a way of translating the novel into a shootable script. In the process they have given employment to quite a few scriptwriters all over the world, at a cost of quite a few dollars apiece — apparently totaling, in a single case, close to a million — but the one person they have never once asked if he had any ideas to solve the problem was the guy who wrote the things in the first place, namely me.

Honestly, now. Is this not pretty close to madness?

I am, of course, not alone in this; approximately 99 out of every 100 people who have sold the rights to a published story to a moviemaker have similar stories to tell. Still, it rankles. Oh, I do not deceive myself that I know more about scriptwriting than a Hollywood pro does. I do know more about those stories than they do, though.

I don’t mean to say that every producer is an imbecile. I can testify that there is, or was, at least one Hollywood producer who knew a good story when he saw it and immediately set about getting it made as a film. His name was Larry Schiller, and the novel was my book Chernobyl, the story of the nuclear power plant that took out a whole industry when it blew. Larry acquired the rights, lined up financing, developed a script, began casting and arranged with the suddenly independent country of Belarus, which owned a power plant identical with Chernobyl but more prudently managed, to do location shooting there … being careful to stop in Chicago now and then as he passed through to let me know how things were going.

Oh, vision of delight! Everything was going just as one ignorantly dreams. . . .

And then at the last minute, thirty-six hours before principal shooting was to start, one of the pledged backers pulled his money out of the deal, and the whole house of cards irretrievably collapsed.

I regard that as one more symptom of an industry-wide dementia, and it broke my heart. It didn’t help Larry’s any, either, because after that happened he abandoned his career as a big-time motion-picture producer and turned himself into a vastly successful writer of bestselling books. I’m glad for Larry. But I do wish the damn film had got itself made.

One of the nice things about running a blog is that you can conveniently republish things that people have asked for. Another is that you can sometimes republish things that hardly anyone has ever requested … like this.

Among my childhood vices was the writing of poetry — sometimes quite quirky, like the first exemplar, sometimes pretty banal, like the second. (The best thing about the banal ones is that I quite often got some editor to buy them.)

I wrote “!” for the very first magazine I ever edited (and published, and ran off on the mimeograph machine, and bound), a tiny semi-fanzine called Mind of Man. It is also the very first thing I ever wrote that got favorable comments from people as astute as Cyril Kornbluth and James Blish, who memorized it and was known to recite it at parties.

              !

         ,   ,   &
        ! my frand
        ;  $
        - - . . . . . . . 

The second poem is significant even to me only because it is the first thing I wrote that some editor bought and published and paid cash to me for.

Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna

Darkness descends and the cluttering towers
Of cities and hamlets blink into light.
The harsh, brilliant glitter of day’s bustling hours
Gives place to the glowing effulgence of night.
The Moon, that pale creature, the queen of the sky,
Peeps wistfully down at the life forms below,
Thinking, perhaps, of the eons rolled by
Since life on her bosom lapsed under the snow.
A dead world and cold, this satellite bleak,
Whose craters and valleys are airless and dry.
No flicker of motion from deep pit to peak,
No living thing’s ego to shout, “I am I!”
But once, ages past, this grim tomb in space
Owned living things on its surface now bare
Till grim Time in his flight, speeding apace,
Swept life, motion, thought away, who can know where?

All right, all right, the Moon isn’t a planet and it never had any living things, or snow, either. Sue me. When I wrote it I was a fairly ignorant fifteen.

Then, when I was sixteen, the editor of Amazing Stories, T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph. D., accepted it, and when I was seventeen he published it in his October 1937 issue, and when I was 18 he paid for it. Two dollars.

 
Related post:
Verse Decoded

Goltzius's Right Hand, Hendrick Goltzius, 1588

If you find yourself moved to write me about something, you may reasonably expect to get an answer. That isn’t likely to happen, though, and I’d like to tell you why.

Three or four years ago I woke up one morning, showered, dressed, gtabbed a cup of coffee and jumped in my car to go somewhere. That was when I discovered that overnight, without warning, my right hand had so enfeebled itself that I couldn’t turn the key in the ignition. The rest of my body seemed to be all right, so I reached over with my left hand to start the car, meaning to ask my doctor what the hell was going on this time at the next chance I got.

I will skip to the chase, omitting a year or so of talking to neurologists and neurosurgeons and being subjected to various high-tech tests. What’s going on appears to be a neurological problem. In order for my brain to tell my fingers to twist an ignition key — or do anything else — it has to send them a message through a nerve which passes along my spinal column. Unfortunately my cervical vertebrae have become so attached to those nerves that they’re squeezing them to death. So the messages don’t get through; lacking orders from above the muscles don’t do anything at all; lacking exercise they atrophy.

Fortunately for me, they take their time about it, but they’re pretty thorough. The fingers of my right hand are the worst affected so far. What makes that annoying is that I use that hand for writing. At least the first draft of a lot of my books was written by hand, with a ballpoint pen on lined yellow pads, often while on a train, plane or ship that was going somewhere. That option is no longer open to me, because my handwriting, always atrocious, is now often quite illegible even to me.

Remains the computer. That still works for me, but not easily. I can still touch-type with my left hand (in the old days at almost a hundred words a minute) but the right hand can only hunt-and-peck with the forefinger.

This is bad news. It’s horribly slow and prone to myriad mistakes, which I have to correct as I go along, and, worst of all, after a page or two my right index finger begins to get pretty painful. So my writing time, whether for books, letters or any other task, is limited. Therefore, at least until I finish a couple of things I really want to write, correspondence time is squeezed even harder than my cervical nerves.

And listen, this isn’t a plea for sympathy. Hey, I’m 89 years old. That means that I am far luckier than most of the people I’ve known in being still able to write at all — or, for that matter, to still be breathing. It’s just to say that if you ever happen to think you should properly have had a longer letter from me, or indeed any letter at all, it isn’t that I don’t treasure you, it’s just that my finger hurts.

Lava fall from Kilauea

As all you trained navigators out there know, that latitude and longitude means that my wife, Betty Anne, and I are on a ship, dodging around the islands of Hawai’i. Why? you ask. Cruising around the Pacific beats staying in Illinois in January, for one excellent reason. Because this is a beautiful part of the world, for another. And because there are things to be seen here, even from shipboard, which are simply unique. We saw one of them last night — an erupting volcano — and not for the first time.

 

Our first occasion for wandering around these islands on a giant cruise ship came more than a dozen years ago. A total solar eclipse was about to occur. Hawai’i would be one of the best places to see it. Omni magazine sent me to cover the event, which we did from the deck of a former transatlantic liner, the Independence, commanded by Captain Richard Haugh. He did a wonderful job for us, too. On eclipse morning, that whole part of the Pacific was overcast with thick clouds, with few and tiny breaks. Captain Haugh was getting minute-by-minute weather reports, though, and he managed to find one opening just in time for a perfect four-minute observation of the whole eclipse (but that’s another story).

People on shore on the Big Island saw nothing but the bottoms of the clouds.

Then, that night, Captain Haugh outdid himself. We were sailing around the southern tip of the Big Island toward the port of Hilo and he advised that we all be on deck around ten that night. We obeyed. What we saw, all along the gentle slope of the mountain to the sea, was a scattering of what looked like campfires — like, I thought, King Kamehameha’s army poised to invade the other islands — with a vast conflagration just at the water’s edge.

But that wasn’t the actual case. What we were seeing was in fact lava streams oozing down from the vent of Kilauea. As the lava streams flow, the lava on the outside hardens and forms a pipe through which the molten rock continues to flow. But the shells of the pipes are not very sturdy. Occasionally they crack open at random points revealing the hellfire within. These were Kamehameha’s “campfires.” And when the stream hits the sea, it makes an explosion of violent instant steam, firing glowing fragments of lava in all directions … and that’s what we saw again last night.

It is a wonderful — I’ll say it again, a wonderful — sight. If you ever get the chance, I urge you to take it in. You may not need to hurry, either. That flow has been going continuously for fourteen years now and shows no sign of stopping.

What may one day stop it once and for all would be for the added weight of that rock to cause the southern end of the Big Island to split off and plunge to the bottom of the sea, creating a huge tsunami. (Readers of the last book in my Gateway series, The Boy Who Would Live Forever, will remember that this is a plot element in the story. Waste not, want not. That’s what I always say.)

By the way, we’ve kept in touch with Richard Haugh, though he has moved on to more serious jobs than captaining a cruise ship. Last time his travels took him to the Chicago area, he gave us a call. “Hey, this is Captain Dick!” he cried.

But it was our daughter Cathy who answered the phone. When she heard that she hung up on him. She thought it was an obscene call.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

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