I worked on this book for a long time before it finally got published. All the way back in 1975, when I was still in college, I was writing a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles book that I mostly called Dinner At Deviant’s Palace—it never got finished, which is just as well, but I remained fond of the title. I derived it from E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison—I hadn’t read it, but I loved the idea of a book being about a dinner somewhere—and Robert Downey’s 1972 movie, Greaser’s Palace.
Shortly after graduating from college, I read Ted Patrick’s 1976 book, Let Our Children Go!, which described Patrick’s hair-raising adventures in finding and deprogramming people who had been brainwashed by crazy cults. In those days, you’d see a lot of robed characters handing out incoherent religious fliers on Hollywood Boulevard, and even at my college, my friends and I would often be approached by weirdly smiling young zealots of one obscure sect or another, and it was impossible not to speculate on what had bent their life story in this direction, what peculiar power the cults brought to bear. And I wondered what a cult would be like if its messiah really did have some sort of superhuman powers.
After I had graduated and sold a couple of novels, I went back to the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles setting, but now I made my protagonist a deprogrammer—a redeemer, as the characters in the book call the job—of such a cult.
Often, post-apocalyptic stories involve characters who are trying to restore civilization; they’re working to get electricity functioning again, or to rediscover penicillin. I’m all in favor of civilization, but in my book, I wanted not to do that. My characters, except for the bad guy, take their world as it is, and even my fairly curious and intelligent protagonist is only mildly interested in the legendary “bright electrical world” of previous centuries. Gregorio Rivas has more immediate concerns.
Samuel R. Delany used the Orpheus myth as a basis for his first novel, The Einstein Intersection, but it’s an intriguing myth and I figured he had not exhausted it, so I made my protagonist, too, an Orpheus figure—a musician who loses his true love to a sort of underworld and sets about getting her back, partly through the use of music. (In the first draft, her name was Urania Dice—Uri Dice, Eurydice?—but upon sober reconsideration, that seemed a bit heavy handed.)
I sold the book to the Timescape line of Pocket Books in 1983, but Timescape was being discontinued right about then, so I returned the advance and got the rights reverted and sold the book instead to Ace Books. There, it fortunately fell into the hands of editor Beth Meacham, who made me re-write the thing entirely, to its enormous improvement, and editor Susan Allison, who read that improved text and prompted further beneficial changes. I’m very grateful that the version Timescape had was never published!
It’s entertaining to read the book again, these thirty years later. I can see echoes of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Frank Utpatel’s illustrations of that story, in my description of Venice: “Its seaward side, where the most altered of the city’s denizens limped, hopped and swam about on unimaginable errands in the canals of poisonous Inglewood”—and I remember that my account of the crowd of Jaybirds doing Sanctified Dancing in the rain was inspired by the 1982 video for the Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy”—and I came up with the alien name Sevatividam by reading the words made and no preservatives on the can of Coors beer I was holding at the time, and more or less reversing them.
Ace Books published the book in 1985, and it won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. My next book was a historical fantasy about eighteenth-century pirates, and the one after that was a historical fantasy about Shelley and Byron and Keats, and I’ve never gone back to setting a book in the future as I did in Dinner At Deviant’s Palace. I may never go back to it, but I’m glad to have staked a claim in that territory with this book.