Afterword

I’m strictly a spare-time writer these days, and not at all a prolific one; I write a couple of short stories a year, that’s all. Not much of an output, but it does give me one advantage: before I actually sit down to write a story, I’ve usually been mulling it over in my head for months or sometimes years, with the result that my original story idea may have been carried much further out than I’d expected, and a lot of undertones may have crept into the story.

“Ozymandias” happened like that. Originally it was just a notion that came when I’d been reading about cryogenics: Where would they store all the bodies? Maintenance would be prohibitive over the long haul, unless it were automated. And if it were automated, then you’d have a self-contained unit, a modern tomb sufficient unto itself, a scientific version of the elaborate tombs of ancient
Egypt.

Well, why not? Those Egyptian tombs were designed to insure the immortality of pharaohs, nobles and anyone else with enough money and power; today the criteria are the same, and so is the purpose. So . . . put a bunch of cryogenics tombs together and you’ve got a new Valley of the Kings.

It was an eerie image, and I carried it around in the back of my head for several months. Then an apparently different story idea came to me: Cryogenics is, in a sense, a method of time travel, so mightn’t it one day come to be used specifically for that purpose? Rich men and women shut themselves in their tombs and set the mechanism to awaken them in time for, say, the turn of the millennium, or a century later, and another century, traveling forward in these time-leaps.

But if the future of the world should turn out to be as grim as some trends are warning us, then those cryogenic time-tombs could be used not just to travel forward but to escape from something—armageddon, maybe. For the rich, even an atomic war might be just something else to sleep through.

And there I had another analogy to the tomb: a retreat designed to carry a person through death for a reawakening on the other side. And I was back again in the Valley of the Kings, for now it was even reasonable to assume that these people might store in their tombs quantities of tools, weapons, power sources, food . . . whatever they felt they might need on the other side of the catastrophe. Like the pharaohs, who stored food, possessions and wealth for use in the afterlife.

For the pharaohs this inevitably meant that their tombs would be violated by tomb-robbers, because it’s the way of the world that those who need will take from those who have, if they can. And after an atomic war, anyone left alive would probably be very desperately in need, so those cryogenic tombs would become natural prey for robbers, or scavengers.

That was the background I had in mind when I began to put the actual story together; the rest is elaboration in terms of story, character, imagery and even symbolism. The symbolism, frankly, just happened as the story took form; it was an unconscious thing on my part, and I was surprised when I read over the final manuscript to see how many details had a little touch of extra referents . . . nothing major, nothing crucial to the story, but they’re there if you have that turn of mind.

I’d almost finished the story before I realized that it should be titled “Ozymandias.” This story is a comment on modern achievements in much the same way that Shelley’s poem was a refutation of the vainglorious boasts of pharaohs: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

This time a new Ozymandias awakes to look on his own works, but the reaction is the same.