The Path to Pandora
Bill Ransom
IN APRIL, 1975, Harlan Ellison invited the country’s top science fiction writers of the day to participate in a unique science fiction conference at UCLA. Four of the writers would create a basic world and planetary system; they and others, including Frank Herbert, would brainstorm story possibilities before, and with participation from, a live audience. These authors would then write interrelated stories, possibly even a group novel. Cross-communication in a typewriter-and-carbon-paper, dial-telephone (no call waiting, no call forwarding, no caller i.d.) world seemed an insurmountable task. Harlan, ringmaster and choreographer, ultimately wrangled, collected and arranged these stories into the greater story of Medea (Bantam).
Each writer received a transcript of the brainstorming sessions, a transcript of student questions from the audience, and the original planetary system/conditions provided by Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Fred Pohl. Frank Herbert came into the live brainstorming session on tax deadline day in 1975—as did Tom Disch, Ted Sturgeon, Bob Silverberg and the UCLA audience—having seen the planetary specs, a considerable document, a mere one hour earlier. Bob Silverberg remarked, “We were handed twenty-three single-spaced pages without margins, full of data … and we got this at—oh, about six o’clock—”
Harlan: “Six-thirty.”
Each of these very successful authors already was committed to major novel or film projects, as was Frank Herbert, who was tasked with finishing and promoting his recent Children of Dune. By 1976 Frank moved toward revising a re-issue of Destination Void, and figuring out his next novel project. Berkley wanted to reissue Destination Void in hopes of reaping some of the publicity tailwind from Children of Dune. They had been disappointed in its original sales, and suggested to Frank that the problem was with the math and technology detail that supported the story, which actually was questioning the nature of consciousness. Since we met every day for coffee and conversation anyway, Frank asked me to read Destination Void with an eye toward suggestions for replacing as much of the math as possible with plain (American) English. Both of us were re-reading Destination Void through fall of 1977. The story and project were science fiction, so asking counsel of a regional poet with modest national recognition was risky. For me it was an opportunity to learn first-hand how to sustain a novel-length narrative. My fear: I might bungle this learning opportunity and risk the friendship. In the process, I learned the identities of people who were unwitting models for his characters. Those secrets remain safe with me.
Harlan’s letter to all participants in Medea on September 3, 1977 included a specific message to Frank:
“Frank, I haven’t heard from you as I write this. You’re the only one. Please get in touch with the others.… Don’t forget, we have to have it done and in Fred’s hands by the 20th of November, which isn’t that far off.… Please, each of us, don’t let the others down.” Frank’s newsman blood respected a deadline.
One Fall morning the crunch-crunch of gravel outside and quick bangbangbang on the door interrupted my rush to meet a noon deadline on an article on carpenter ants. My house was off the grid, and my wife and I were practicing separation, so drop-ins were rare.
“Ransom?”
Early morning, Frank’s prime writing time, and very unlike him to interrupt mine. I swung the door open to a Frank I’d not seen before—pale, disheveled and scared.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Frank blurted, “Can you write like me for 750 bucks?”
Frank was notorious for his practical and impractical jokes, but his voice quavered and his eyes were red.
“I can write like anybody for 750 bucks,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I just took Bev to the hospital,” he said. He was near tears and took a moment to get control. “Coughing up blood, don’t know what it is yet but it can’t be good.”
He came inside for a coffee and listed his other pressures, which included being over deadline for Destination Void revision and for a story for Harlan Ellison’s Medea project.
“There’s a lot of background info for that story,” he said. “About eighty pages of data altogether, and another 100 pages of brainstorming transcript.”
Harlan wanted 12,000 words. I would have two weeks to draft the story, which would leave Frank only a day or two to give it the final “Frank Herbert”. Did I mention that I didn’t have a phone? Manual typewriters with three carbons? No internet?
Frank’s offer was a huge compliment and a vote of trust; I was 32, separated, with a nine-year-old daughter. I took a deep breath, left the arts foundation I’d been working with and plunged headlong into the world that became Pandora.
Problem: Everyone thought Frank was writing the story, so the other authors called him to inform him of elements in their stories—history, biology, etc.—that might affect his story. Sometimes I had elements to add to the mix or questions for the others. In either case, I would drive the mile to Frank’s with a notepad so that he could make the essential calls. Clunky, but it worked. He was quick to point out that my working title, “The Ship Who Sang,” would be great except that Anne McCaffrey beat me to it in 1969.
Frank added a fair amount to the beginning and ending before shipping it out, and this brought the story up to novella length. I had not read Frank’s version of the story until I was asked to write this introduction—neither in manuscript nor in print. I still don’t know why. I discovered that I like my version better, and Frank would get a hearty laugh out of hearing me say that. Harlan was happy with the story; Frank got paid, and I got paid as agreed. All is well.
During this time, Bev was recovering at home and heard our conversations around the Medea and Destination Void projects.
“What you’re talking about is a novel,” she said, when “Songs of a Sentient Flute” went into the mail. “And you’re having way too much fun to stop now.”
Frank always followed Bev’s lead. Frank’s editor agreed. Fans like books in series, but Frank wasn’t ready to return to Dune so soon after Children of Dune. He’d mentioned several times about the importance of always leaving an opening for a sequel. Destination Void was being rewritten, and it ends with the Ship who claims to be God saying, “You must decide how to WorShip Me!”
Frank wanted to have a stronger tie to his own work in case some flap arose around my role in “Songs of a Sentient Flute.” The answer started out to be that the Medea system is where Ship took humans after Destination Void. Some of the elements of Medea didn’t work for us—we wanted a contrast to Dune’s Arrakis—and some separation from the Medea project. Frank and I brainstormed a sequel proposal, and Frank took it to New York. The story of the argument with the publisher around having both of our names on the cover is long, distasteful and thirty-four years dead, so let’s leave it that way. Because of that argument, authors’ collaborations are now acknowledged on covers without a fuss. We were on our way to mating Destination Void with “Songs of a Sentient Flute.”
Destination Void was already on Frank’s mind in 1975, and I found some of this thinking in the transcript of Harlan’s brainstorming session on April 15th of that year. Frank wasn’t finished chewing on the notion of an entity of human manufacture coming to sentience and claiming to be God. His overarching interest was the relationship between “conscious” and “conscience.” Recent (1970s) experiments with AI (Artificial Intelligence) had him speculating over many a cup of coffee on the relationship of intelligence to consciousness and sentience. One of the largest kelp beds in the north Pacific grew only a few hundred meters from my house, so one time I joked with Frank, “What does the kelp think?”
When the UCLA discussion moved to planetary details, Frank brought up our kelp bed: “The problem is: what are the evolutionary lines to produce [two co-existing intelligent races]? If one of them is plant and if, let us say, they’re like sea weed which grows up in the ocean … a bladder creature. And that at one stage in their evolution they break off. They’re no longer plants, they are free-floating creatures in the air.” Frank referred to the “blue book” of data they were given, then said, “We’ll have lightning, and that means if lightning ever touches one of those damn things it’ll go ‘bang’. And that could be a very religious experience.… And it could have something to do with their reproduction, too. What if when they burst in this way it’s necessary to their reproductive cycle?” Finally, he wanted one of the main characters to be “a mystic—maybe a poet-mystic.”
Frank’s first comment in brainstorming for Medea got right to basics: “The thing we’re concerned about is: what kind of a system is it? What kind of a system is at the ground level that the people are living in? Because if there is any life on that [planet], it has to be related in some kind of a system or arrangement.”
The second thing he did was to inform the group that their conclusions regarding the tidal effects on the planet were off by more than an order of magnitude—which Bob Silverberg verified from the data they’d been handed an hour before. Then he shifted from the mathematical data to his primary concern in every story: “We’re not going to get anywhere, though, if we don’t put people in the situation.… [T]hen we see through the reflection of what happens to them the conditions of the planet.”
We were only three years away from inventing sentient kelp, aka Avata. Frank loved brainstorming and compared it to jazz, and jazz perfectly defines our subsequent collaboration.
What follows is Frank’s two-page summation of our Fall, 1977 brainstorming sessions around the materials he gave me:
“Among the colonists is a poet. Young, ship-raised, trained by a master who died en route. Among his attributes is an incredible memory for detail and an ability to make associations and conceptual jumps in language that only a few humans succeeded in doing with mathematics. He is an ideal communicant with the balloons. His partner—a middle-aged woman sociologist. Attractive, bright, aggressive. Since romance is often desirable, this combination might prove interesting to our liberated readers. These two would be in a position to manipulate human/balloon affairs and, ultimately, most of Medea’s social structure since they control human/balloon communications, much like political control of the media (sorry) as we know it here.
“How about the hydrogen reacting with the tissue of the balloons to form a high-energy plasma system that would act as medium for intellectual activity and as a target for lightning?
“Anyway, protagonists should opt for communications control and ultimate deception of humans for moral reasons. It should be a hard choice, probably costing human lives and at least a major part of the scientific progress of their community. But readers should remain sympathetic with them.
“We will view the whole matter four ways: through his eyes, through her eyes, through their notebook entries (tapes) & poems, and through occasional flashbacks to his mentor’s sage words of advice while teaching him the perceptual and mystical skills of the poet. Mysticism and enlightenment would play the major role in the story. Perhaps true enlightenment would destroy human society as they know it and, consequently, the human individuals. Humans, including themselves, are not far enough evolved spiritually. Make the notion of a natural spiritual evolution the key—the notion that certain species are inherently more enlightened than others and that no species is enlightened before its physical/social state is ready. (One answer to the persecution of messiahs.)
“So poet and sociologist wind up sacrificing themselves to prove themselves, achieve a sudden, premature anachronistic enlightenment and save humans from a deadly shortcut to spirituality that we, as a species, are not yet prepared to face.
“She is interested in linear thought—logic as we know it. The scientific method as best it can apply to human (or sentient) behavior is her forte. The poet functions on an intuitive level. His associations are more Jungian, zen-like. This is what endears him to the balloons. So much of his conversation and his poetry would read like zen koans and stories. As would the balloons’.
“Fuxes and most other humans are peripheral to the story. This one belongs to the poet, the sociologist and the balloons.
“The poet is locator, namer, definer. Through him comes the vision of the natural phenomena, a clear definition of place.
“Balloons have the ability to function as individuals or as cells in some ethereal cortical matrix. Enlightenment is the death that allows the poet and sociologist to be one with the balloons’ cortical matrix, which is one with THE life source. Death would be a total loss of individual identity and acquisition of a total spiritual identity. The balloons on this level are a community of spiritual beings with no social structure and a shared, total wisdom (knowledge, perhaps.) And ‘community of beings’ is misleading because there is no identity or sense of number at this level.
“Begin as a short story—but what about playing the game out? Would make a fun novel and then, perhaps, a posthumous collection of poetry. fun. Would be great fun. And a great practical joke on our literary establishment.”
Two weeks later, I handed over “Songs of a Sentient Flute”; Frank added some opening and closing material and shipped it off to Fate, the ultimate practical joker.