{"id":87,"date":"2009-10-31T02:19:05","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T02:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/?p=87"},"modified":"2017-02-20T22:55:51","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T22:55:51","slug":"twenty-years-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/31\/twenty-years-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Years After"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently completed the first draft of Realms of Light<\/I>, a sequel to Nightside City<\/i><\/a>, which was originally published by Del Rey Books in 1989.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d started Realms of Light<\/I> shortly after Nightside City<\/i> was accepted; I was very enthusiastic about Nightside City<\/i>, which I thought was the best thing I\u2019d written up to that time. Unfortunately, the market was significantly less enthusiastic. I was already typecast as a fantasy author at that point, and my science fiction novels had not sold well. Del Rey was not at all interested in a sequel to a novel that hadn\u2019t done all that well, so I shelved Realms of Light<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Except I kept pulling it back out every couple of years and looking it over and adding a paragraph here, a few pages there. And finally, in 2008, having established that it was possible to make a modest amount of money by serializing novels on the web, I decided to go ahead and write it as a serial, to be published by a small press, FoxAcre Press<\/a>, which had picked up the reprint rights to Nightside City<\/i> a few years back. And now it\u2019s complete, though it still needs to be revised and edited.<\/p>\n

So it took me twenty years to write it.<\/p>\n

Twenty. Years.<\/p>\n

A lot of things changed in those twenty years. Jumping back into a setting I\u2019d created in 1986 and hadn\u2019t seriously worked in since 1989 was a challenge.<\/p>\n

It was not, though, that I didn\u2019t remember it; I did. It\u2019s that the real world had changed in ways that make some of my 24th-century setting look curiously dated.<\/p>\n

That paragraph suggests two separate topics \u2013 did I really remember it as well as I thought? And how was it outdated?<\/p>\n

How well I remembered it \u2013 well, let me put it this way: I didn\u2019t bother to actually re-read Nightside City<\/i>, nor the notes I used when I wrote the first novel. I remembered Epimetheus about as well as I remember, say, Boston. I did check a few details here and there, such as making sure I had the full name of the New York right, but mostly I worked from memory. Did I get it all right? I don\u2019t really know; that\u2019s one of the things I\u2019ll be looking at when I write the second draft. I thought<\/I> I remembered it all. I know the floor plan of Carlisle Hsing\u2019s old office on Juarez Street, I know what the Trap looks like, I know the geophysical structure of Epimetheus.<\/p>\n

I did catch a couple of errors when I checked myself against the original novel; I\u2019d misremembered part of the Nakada family tree, for example. Mostly, though, it was still in my head. After all, I\u2019d lived on Epimetheus, in Nightside City, for a few months back in 1987. (I finished writing Nightside City<\/i> in November, 1987.) It was as familiar to me as other places I\u2019d lived in, such as Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n

I probably got some stuff wrong, but then, I\u2019d probably make a few wrong turns trying to get around Pittsburgh after all this time. And some stuff may not be so much wrong as just different; anything that wasn\u2019t in the first novel I was free to change, so if the version I remember isn\u2019t exactly what I\u2019d thought up back in the \u201880s, who cares? Who\u2019ll ever know? I mean, a lot of it was never written down in the first place.<\/p>\n

But then we get to the outdated stuff.<\/p>\n

Nightside City<\/i> was inspired by the cyberpunk movement. The actual style owes more to Ross Macdonald, but there are a lot of cyberpunk elements, and cyberpunk reflected the 1980s.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s set in a society dominated by Asians \u2013 or rather, people descended from Asians. The wealthiest families all have Japanese names, while the managerial class is a mix of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian; the white people in the novel are generally working class or worse. The cyberpunks often extrapolated a Japanese-dominated future, because in the 1980s that looked plausible \u2013 we didn\u2019t know the economic bubble was going to burst. If I were writing it now the future would probably still be dominated by Asians, but the Japanese would be much less prominent, and I might mix in some other ethnicities. I couldn\u2019t really change that for the sequel, though; the Nakada clan is central to the story.<\/p>\n

Some of the computer stuff hasn\u2019t aged all that well. In 1987 the invention of the World Wide Web was still a few years in the future, and my guesses about the future shape of the networked world \u2013 well, I did better than some authors, but some of it looks slightly quaint now. All that jacking in, and using hardwired connections rather than wireless, feels a bit off, too.<\/p>\n

I did correctly anticipate a few things, though, even if I got the names wrong. The word \u201cmalware\u201d didn\u2019t exist in 1987, so far as I know, but I could see that there was going to be a need for a word like that, and coined \u201cgritware.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mostly, I think it still works. I\u2019ve had to abandon stories because the real world made them obsolete, and I never considered abandoning Realms of Light<\/I>; the flaws were pretty minor, and could be explained away as the result of stuff happening in the next three centuries that we don\u2019t expect now.<\/p>\n

And picking it up again after twenty years should have been hard, but it wasn\u2019t. This story\u2019s been in my head all along. It\u2019s changed over time \u2013 the present version is not what I\u2019d have written in 1989 if Del Rey had asked for a sequel \u2013 but most of the changes are plot-related; it\u2019s basically the same setting, basically the same characters.<\/p>\n

But you know one thing I did forget? If you\u2019re a donor and got to read the first draft, you may have noticed the dedication to Ed Bryant, who I credit with giving me the clue I needed to make the plot work.<\/p>\n

He did. I remember that. But I don\u2019t remember what it was. I remember him talking about a movie I haven\u2019t seen, and that up until then I hadn\u2019t had a viable plot for a sequel, and after listening to him it fell into place and I had a set-up and an ending. (The middle came later.)<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t remember what it was he said that made it all work.<\/p>\n

Sometimes writing fiction is a very weird business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently completed the first draft of Realms of Light, a sequel to Nightside City, which was originally published by Del Rey Books in 1989. I\u2019d started Realms of Light shortly after Nightside City was accepted; I was very enthusiastic about Nightside City, which I thought was the best thing I\u2019d written up to that… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}