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The All-Time, Prime-Time, Take-Me-to-Your-Leader Science Fiction Plot

Earlier I offer the continuing dialogue a number of plots or conceptions which would be—at least from my perspective, and perspective I have—unsaleable. Truthful as this material is, it is anything but helpful; if there is any audience for this book (in truth, there is no other) it is one comprised of aspirant writers, and I would not want them to regard science fiction as an endless series of Thou Shalt Nots.

Science fiction, to the contrary, represents perhaps the last open and relatively accessible market in America (if one can write to format one can still, although just barely, sell without personal acquaintance) and needs all the new material that it can acquire; the old writers are beginning to perish (if not mortally at least productively) by the scores now and the middle-agers like myself are retreating to despair, editing books of ruminant essays, or continuations of the Albderan Raiders on the Moon series.

Accordingly and generously I would like to contribute to the gene pool a number of plots, all of which, granted that you are a writer of routine proficiency, fluency, and dedication (a drinking acquaintance with the editors in all cases would not hurt), almost certainly will sell. Why shouldn't they? They have been good enough for the markets for decades; they should be good until at least the millennium. Perhaps even the next millennium. Too much of a good thing is not nearly enough is the motto of science fiction; we want more of what we've got could be in Latin on the seal of Science Fiction University, good old Ess Eff You, weak major sports but good javelin and outstanding in track, water polo, and wrestling. The aspirant writers are welcome to them in full measure, and I seek neither thanks, praise, blame, a share of the advance, or a collaboration credit—only honor.

 

* * *

 

"The Underground": Henry Walker Smith is a youth in the future, let us make it 2312 and be done; this particular extrapolation is based upon some mad extension of present-day circumstance that has overtaken the society.

Okay, let's get some use out of the things and use automobiles. In 2312 in Henry's world (it is America but let us be futuristic and call it, say, "Occidentalia") automobiles are banned. The ownership of an automobile, driving it, even concealing knowledge of anyone who owns or drives are criminal offenses. Citizens move around Occidentalia via tramways, chutes, corridors, and the like. Most live and work within the same Domicile and only the elite are in need of far conveyance, which is fast jet. Henry has little to do with the elite, accepting his position as a subclerk in the Bureau of Fabrication and Design with the feeling that it is all he could deserve, and to travel more than a very few kilometers from Domicile would be self-indulgent.

We know that Henry is agoraphobic and terrified and can write some amusing scenes in which he reveals this tendency while justifying it to himself as "loving Domicile." That will be one of the key phrases of the book—"loving Domicile"—and perhaps will catch the eye of the fans who will make it part of their lore.

Henry is twenty-three. He enjoys his culture and aspires to be nothing other than a Senior Overclerk in Fabrication & Design, but shortly after the story opens, of course, in Chapter Two, things begin to rapidly change. He falls in because his girlfriend's father is a crook (Marge confesses this tearfully to him the night that he tells her he would like to Co-Domicile) who works with a rowdy bunch keeping forbidden automobiles on a private estate dozens of kilometers from Domicile. "That's horrible," Henry says as the full implication bursts upon him, "something has to be done for his own sake; I'll turn him in to the Overlords."

"You can't," Marge says, "I love him and besides if you turn him in the Driverists will know exactly who did it and will run you over in a corridor with one of their miniatures." She caresses him soothingly. "Besides," she adds, "cars aren't that bad, they're kind of fun. In the old days before Daddy got seedy and turned into a Narcotics Degenerate he used to take all of us out to the estate for drives and let us crash things and watch the great races and it was kind of fun." Her eyes twinkle madly. "You might like it yourself, Henry, not that I'm asking you of course."

"I'd hate it," Henry says, "are you saying that part of our Co-Domicile is the condition that I become a Felon? I won't do it," and he decides that he must look at Marge in a new light. Perhaps she is not quite the woman with whom he wants to Co-Domicile. He is awfully young to get into a permanent arrangement anyway, although the Overlords encourage early pair-bonding for their own sinister reasons.

It is, however, too late for Henry; Marge's father, a bumbling but fearful sort, has kept an eye on her relationship and comes to know almost immediately that she has told him about his double life. Before he can go to Headquarters and report the situation, Henry is abducted by the rowdies, spirited from Domicile, and taken to their crude and automobile-ringed estate far from there. His struggles during the abduction scene are quickly subdued, his protests are met with laughter, his pleas that he will be thrown out of Fabrication & Design are met with contempt. "Please forgive me, Henry," a tear-streaked Marge says to him when he recovers consciousness (they have finally had to Overnarcotic him so valiantly did he protest) on the estate, "I didn't think that they would do this to you but they're desperate men. Anyway, why don't you just listen to them and try to learn about the situation? You may find that you like automobiles. I know that I did."

Henry shakes his head, bitterly retreats to silence, resolves that he will have nothing further to do with her. He may be enchained by desperadoes but he does not have to lose his integrity even though Marge appears every evening after her own shift in Reconstruction & Reminiscence to plead with him to be reasonable. He finally begins to change his attitude when Marge tells him that her father has been imprisoned by the Overlords for circulating a Pro-Automobile petition in a tramway and is now being beaten by them daily. "That's a little excessive," Henry says, breaking his silence. "I mean, they're not even giving an old man a hearing. And besides, those cars outside that I can see through the bars are kind of attractive; they glisten in the sun, which is much brighter here than back in Domicile. They said it was all poisoned here but it isn't. Hey, if they lied to us about that one thing they could lie about a lot of things? Am I right? Marge, do I have a point there? Not that I'm ready to question the authorities to the point of defying them. At least not yet."

"But someday, Henry, you will," Marge says, and the first (and last) scene of gentle sexual foreplay is written as Henry and Marge make love Oldstyle (but the scene terminates long before do their thrashings and moanings).

A new and chastened Henry is then educated by the rowdies—who all turn out to have degrees in Traffic Control & Reconstruction; they have been falsely portrayed as ruffians when actually they are scientists whose search for personal freedoms as transmuted into their love for automobiles have become threatening to the Overlords—into the realities of the situation. What he comes to realize is that in the name of "energy survival" and "cleaning up the environment" the Overlords have managed to erode virtually all personal freedoms. The first encroachments via restriction of automobiles were seen in the last third of the twentieth century; hundreds of years later the Overlords' control is virtually complete except that the scientists have managed to set up the underground kilometers from Domicile and with the use of the retrieved, sacred, reconstructed automobiles are ready to mass an attack upon the oppressors. They need, however, someone who knows everything about the Department of Fabrication & Design for it is deep in that department that the machinery which controls is hidden, and would Henry like to help them?

"I don't know," Henry says, and he is truly uncertain until word reaches them that Marge has been abducted by Overlords who have gotten wind of the situation and are torturing her for information. "I can't save her," her father says, "but I'm going to try, by Cadillac I will. I did this to my only daughter and I'll die to get her back."

Looking at the old man Henry hears the thunder of his own heart. "You won't go alone, old man," he says. "I'm going to go with you. They lied to us from the beginning but now we know the truth. Don't we?" The scientists nod. "Now we know the truth," Henry says.

He takes driving lessons—there are some comic scenes here—on a replicated 1962 Cadillac Calais Coupe in brown with red leather interior and autotronic eye; at length he is at the head of an invading driving corps of the scientists who in seventy automobiles roar through the barriers of Domicile and descend upon Fabrication & Design. Marge's father unfortunately dies in the second wave, being chased by the Overlords' distracting robots, who dazzle him with mirrors and cause him to crash into a retaining wall, impaling himself on the steering hub of a replicated 1955 Chevrolet. Henry barely has time to weep at the spectacle before he is plunged into the sweeping combat scenes of the last chapters; he overcomes the Overlords' defenses, fights his way to the heart of the bureau, and confronts the Chief Overlord. "You're dead, Henry Walker Smith," the cowardly Overlord says from behind his shield, but Henry (still in his car) uses the autotronic beam to dazzle the knave and then does away with him by backing the car with its protuberant, deadly tail fins into his belly. The Overlord expires with a gush.

Henry, breathing hard, is barely able to enjoy the triumph before he remembers that Marge is unaccounted for. She falls, however, from behind one of the walls of the Overlord's Chamber in deshabille; she had been tied up for subterranean sexual purposes but, fortunately, not yet ill-used. "You did it, Henry," she says, "now we can Domicile together forever."

"Not so soon," Henry says grimly, holding her. "Marge, not so soon." His face has the look of eagles; a spare and haunting cast. He has matured greatly within these months as who, granted his experiences and insight, would not? "It isn't that easy and it isn't over."

"Oh Henry—"

"We must return to the countryside, find more automobiles and continue the liberation. There are other Domiciles."

"You're magnificent, Henry."

"But at the end of all of it," he says, holding her lightly, "a little peace and the reconstruction of the internal combustion engine, the turbomatic transmission, dual radials with sidebar kit and the luxury package with two-tone strips and soft-ride finish."

Marge kisses him lightly. "We'll get there," he says.

 

* * *

 

"Remembering the Old Man": The Old Man, let us call him Lothar, is a beggar on Mule IV in the Vegan system; very old and dirty he lives at the virtual bottom of the corrupt, feudal, technologically oppressive society of the 87th Century Human. "There is a better time for all of us coming," he chants as he pleads for coins and sweetmeats from the occasional tourists who comprise the only element of the economy of this picturesque but poverty-stricken backwater planet. "We have had a great history and our time will come again." The tourists think that he is crazy but harmless; the governmental forces on Mule IV are too sparse and corrupt to pay any attention to Lothar at all. This is a good thing since Lothar is the last representative of a fallen hierarchy which was obliterated before the memory of all presently in power, to say nothing of the tourists who admire the views, pick up their illegal drugs, and return to the rockets as quickly as possible.

Lothar finds a baby abandoned in a nest of concrete pilings. He takes pity upon the child, the government tending to make waste products of humanity, as he thinks, and the poor thing's mother being desperate, and takes him into his humble dwelling where he gives him a name and raises him as his own. Corear goes on the streets with him at an early age, showing intelligence by ingeniously adding some tricks to the nuances of begging.

A great bond of affection unites Corear and Lothar, and although their surroundings can hardly be said to improve, their relationship is magnificent. When Corear is eighteen, Lothar dies, passing on as his legacy in an extended and touching deathbed scene a coin to he who is as his son. "For you are my son and were always of my flesh," he says mysteriously as he expires. This leaves open-ended as is only proper the question of paternity and imparts ambiguity to the novel. Ambiguity is not to be scorned, particularly when it can be managed with a device as simple as this, one which will not need constant further reference or tie up the progression with dull explanation.

The coin invests Corear with vast psychic powers. He can perceive the thoughts of anyone on whom he focuses, traverse thousands of light years by taking a deep breath and concentrating, move planets in their orbits, and cause any human being to submit to his desires. He discovers these powers one by one and slowly over a period of many months, trying to ascertain what might be the best use to which they can be put. (He is sure from the outset that he does not want to take advantage of women to obtain sexual favors.) Through this period he lives in obscurity. However when he sees Lothar's memory being sullied on Mule IV—the old man, for reasons he cannot understand, becomes the object of virulent attacks by the government—he decides that he can stand mute no longer. LOTHAR IS ALL EVIL he sees inscribed on public squares; LOTHAR WAS A BAD MAN is the title of a column in the weekly journal in which scurrilous (and untrue) tales of the old man are told. Corear becomes angry.

He uses the magic coin to quickly dethrone the government and achieve power. Having done so he discovers that Lothar was the deposed ruler of Mule IV thrown out of office decades ago because he had discovered that the planet was merely a front for an enormous, intergalactic drug trade. (Drugs were used then to wipe his memory from the minds of his subjects; no one remembered who he was.) His death had, by preordainment by Lothar himself, caused old holograms to stalk the palace waving accusing fingers and hence the repudiatory measures. They came out of guilt. Corear is saddened to learn all of this but at the least he feels that he has redeemed the good name of Lothar, who in a final revelation—he goes through the palace documents slowly—turns out to be his father who had sired him unthinking in a final night of lust before he was deposed and who had found him in the streets when his mother had come to him nine months later to report that the government had seized her child upon birth and taken him from the Great Creche.

Corear is moved by all of this and wishes that it had been different, wishes too that at least he had been able to share with Lothar a filial love. Still, it is too late, isn't it? He assumes the throne and rules justly and wisely for thirty-seven years using the coin when necessary to get him out of scrapes. He continues to refuse its possibilities for sexual submission, however, and hence never marries. Or has a relationship with a woman. Although from time to time there might have been opportunities.

 

* * *

 

"Vigilante": The brawling and lusty crew of North Carolina Tarheel, a medium-sized space surveyor, lands upon a subsidiary planet in the Antares Cluster for a shore leave. There they find themselves—the canny Scot, the redheaded naive kid eager to learn, the shrewd old engineer, Sparks the Communicator, Lila the Mysterious Captain—in the midst of a planetary revolution.

A corrupt system based upon slavery is being attacked by a disorganized group of vigilantes who have driven them to their plantations but have then run out of weaponry, energies, and ideas. The vigilantes plead with the Survey Team their first day on the planet to use their technology and wits to help them, and although Lila feels that the crew should be detached, she does not interfere when the others decide to take part in the revolution. "After all," as Sparks says, "we have to take a position sometime as representatives of a decent galaxy."

The bumbling redheaded kid gets into amusing difficulties in constructing the world-wrecker and is captured by the oppressors, but they are otherwise no match for the Team, who bloodlessly unseat them when the Team persuades that resistance would be hopeless against a world-wrecker. The world-wrecker of course turns out to be papier-mache and the scheme a bluff but too late for the oppressors. The slaves are freed.

Sparks is asked by the grateful freedom-loving slaves to be King but declines in favor of Lila, who he has always known had as her secret wish a planet to rule. She takes charge of matters—calling herself not King but Queen—while the Team fuels up matter-of-factly and prepares for further adventures. The redheaded kid is taken at one point for a renegade oppressor but just in the nick of time his identity is revealed and he is saved; on this note of comic and joyous relief the Team sails away under command of Sparks, who has always wanted to command a Survey Team, and why not? He gets all of the credit and none of the responsibilities.

(Special note: If the regime being overthrown is antislavery and this is cleverly masked, it might be possible to get a magazine sale on this. The regime corruptly wants to give the barbarians the freedom for which they are not prepared and so on and so forth. Whether one wants the better distribution but somewhat lower word rates and ephemeral aspect of the magazines is an individual decision to be sure. It would be difficult to get both. Keep in mind that foreign sales can be an important proportion of the eventual income on a book, whereas the magazine publishers purchase world serial rights.)

 

* * *

 

"Come and Get It": Jones is an old, sickly, half-blind Terrestrial Scout; he is about to be pensioned off after this, his final expedition. Congestive heart failure, failing gall bladder. Unluckily—he has never had extreme luck but in the end gets through, he thinks—he is abducted by a fleet battalion of Rigelians seeping through the stars in search of Terrans who might be able to give them information that can be used in the continuing great war. Jones uses his two pieces of wood in confinement to construct a solar generator, no small feat considering that the two weak suns overlooking this Rigelian outpost are dwarf stars in the last moments of their celestial lifetime.

Nonetheless, a lifetime as a hobbyist engineer is converted to use as Jones stupefies the Rigelians during interrogative sessions with threats of apocalypse; he then brings about a simulated solar eclipse which panics them as myth has informed that darkness portends ten thousand years of nightfall. Oh boy. "Help us," the senior Rigelian begs Jones, "I speak in telepathic hookup for all the millions of us when I beg you most sincerely to let the sun shine again. We can't really deal with this. How much of this do you think we can take?"

"You must surrender," Jones says shrewdly, "and turn over all of your treasure, to say nothing of the prisoners you've taken to Earth."

"Absolutely," the panicked Rigelian says, "just get us out of this!" Jones nods and causes the illusory eclipse to dissolve. The Rigelian babbles gratitude and as a gesture of thanks cures Jones' congestive heart failure (he cannot do much with that gall bladder) and installs him as ruler of the Rigelians, who become a subrace of the Rigelian outpost of Empire Earth.

 

* * *

 

"Amazing Grace": A prophetess appears amidst the superstitious and primitive peoples of a prehistoric Earth and forecasts the wonders to come: Pyramids, Sphinx, television, radar, automobiles, time travel, and guns. The primitives, awed, commit her to death by fire shockingly reminiscent of the death of Joan of Arc. In fact it is the death of Joan of Arc.

In an epilogue-flashback the prophetess is seen as an ordinary time-traveling citizen of the fourth millennium about to try an amusing experiment. In going to prehistory she knows she flouts canon, and in planning to tell the natives of the future she lurches into Temporal Apostasy, but she is a stubborn lass. In a further epilogue it is disclosed that none of the events described occurred since, of course, her death by fire would render impossible those events which brought her to it, but in a final final epilogue the first paragraph of the story is repeated, indicating that Temporal Paradox is nothing to be trifled with by anyone.

 

* * *

 

"Hold That Tiger": A child in the American Midwest of the early twentieth century is escorted by his father through a marvelous circus in which he sees—

A green beast, a three-horned beast, a magician with taloned hands, a spider with golden web, a polar bear who plays cello (but only in the first position), and a camel who plays violin (but without vibrato and shaky intonation; the duets are dreadful). And similar marvels. "This is wonderful, daddy," the child says, "who made it up?"

"You did," the father says, and would say more except that the polar bear cellist puts down his instrument with determination and whisks the child away. The child is terrified but his roistering screams are thought by the sparse audience to be merely part of a Wonder Screaming Child Presentation, and he obtains little satisfaction. The polar bear places him in a tent and waits for the camel, who appears carrying both instruments. The two then play (execrably) the third movement of the Brahms Double Concerto in A Major for Violin and Violincello. The carnival attractions mass to listen and the child sees the magician become a marvelous flower, the flower opening to speed him from dream to the reality of his deathbed at the turn of the millennium.

(Please note: If the intent is the young adult market, the child does not awaken on his deathbed but in his father's arms outside the circus. "Would you rather see this stuff or save a few dollars and go right home?" the father asks. "I'd just as soon take you home now but it's up to you. Everything's up to you. You have to be responsible, you're a young adult now."

("I go home, dada. I go home right now. I go home from this rotten place and I never come back again."

("That's a mature and responsible decision. After all, it's all phony anyway."

("I hope so, dada. I really do.")

 

* * *

 

I cannot guarantee a sale on any of these plots. There are no guarantees in our complex, painful, and competitive business. On the other hand I have done the best that I can and I assure you that if you use them you are on the right track. I can in fact promise—assuming as always that you have friends among the editors, and every one of you, as Damon Knight once said, had better make them where you can—a swift and sympathetic reading, a concerned and passionate response, a delayed but viable contract, and some time beyond that an advance to speed you through the writing of all these novels and all of their sequels through all the eight to twelve to (if you are a saint) twenty-five years of your productive and creative, your artistic and dedicated, your daring and soul-testing writing career.

 

—1979/1980: New Jersey

 

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