A Journey Through Time

Recently, I received some questions on here from a woman named Claudia, who said she was writing a thesis about my work and wanted to get some answers directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Since they were not questions that could be answered briefly, I thought I would address them in a blog, as they might also have some general interest for other readers. (And I don’t get around to writing blogs too often, so why not?) She wanted to know how I came to write the Time Wars, how I felt my time travel stories were different from other time travel stories, what writers influenced me, what movies, and so forth. Well, okay, I’ll give it a shot.

I’ve always loved adventure stories and historical fiction. As a boy, my mother used to read to me from the books of Capt. Mayne Reid, stories about a Seminole Indian chief in Florida named Osceola. She read me those stories in Russian translation, so I have no idea what they were like in the original English, and have only the vaguest memory of them, but along with other stories that she read to me, such as the tales of Rudyard Kipling, and the Russian fables of Krilov, and Grimm’s fairy tales, those were probably my earliest influences. Later on, I discovered the Horatio Hornblower books of C.S. Forester and read every one of them, as well as the historical fiction of Kenneth Roberts and Raphael Sabatini, although in Sabatini’s case, I came to his work from having first seen the films that were made from them, starring Errol Flynn. (Captain Blood, Robin Hood, The Sea Hawke.)

Unlike many SF writers, I came to science fiction fairly late, when I was introduced to it by a friend. Until that time, I was not aware that science fiction existed as a genre, and I did not know about any of the magazines that published it, magazines such as Galaxy, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. But once I had discovered it, I began to read SF voraciously. Not only were they great adventure stories, but they were also full of wonderful ideas. I loved the Foundation books of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert’s Dune, the stories of Robert Heinlein, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, and many others. Years later, after I began to sell some short stories of my own, I got to know Harlan Ellison and he took me with him to my first World Fantasy Convention in L.A. I wound up in a suite, at a party with some publishing people, none of whom I knew. (My ticket to entry to this party was the fact that I had sold my first professional short story to the host, Jim Baen, who was the editor of Galaxy magazine and later became the founder of Baen Books.) At one point, the conversation turned to which writers were admired by the various guests. A number of names were mentioned, and when it came around to me, one of the names I mentioned was Fritz Leiber. At that, one of the gentlemen in attendance said to me, “Well, some of those others, I suppose I can understand, but Fritz Leiber? Really? He’s not so hot.” Well, at that, I went into a rant about how great I thought Fritz Leiber’s work was and how no one else in the room was fit to shine his shoes and so forth, words to that effect (I don’t really recall what the hell I said, because it was a rant, you know?) And at one point, I suddenly became aware that everybody in the room had stopped talking and all of them were either smiling or stifling laughter. Realizing that everybody was in on some joke that I was clearly not in on, I trailed off, in puzzlement, at which point, an elderly gentleman seated on a couch directly across from me got to his feet, came over to me, held out his hand, and said, “I’m Fritz Leiber, and I’d like to thank you for all the kind words about my work.” I just about fell through the floor as Frederick Pohl (who had set me up), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Poul Andersen, and a number of other pros whose work I had admired all sat there and laughed at me.

Ironically, I had started writing science fiction before I knew that there was such a thing as science fiction. I had read the stories of Jules Verne as a boy, but did not think of them as science fiction. I had no idea that there was such a thing. But I am a first generation American, whose parents came to this country after World War II. They both worked, and I was raised primarily by my maternal grandmother, who lived with us and spoke very little English. The language I learned first was Russian, and when I started school, I was still not very comfortable speaking English. Also, as a child of the 50's, I grew up during the time of Senator Joe McCarthy and the Cold War, when it was not too cool to be of Russian descent. On top of that, I was socially awkward (something a lot of SF fans can probably understand) and I didn’t really have any friends. More often that not, I’d get beaten up in the playground for being a “Commie.” Somehow, as an unconscious form of self-therapy, I suppose, I wound up writing stories in a composition book where all the characters were the kids in my class and me, and in these stories, we would all have adventures together on the moon. One day, my teacher caught me writing in my composition book and thinking I was up to something, she took it away from me. As she read through it, I saw a strange expression come over her face and then she gave it back to me, saying, “I want you to read this to the class at the end of the day.” When the time came, I was absolutely filled with dread. She told everyone that I had written a story and then she called me up to read it. Convinced that they would all make fun of me again, I held the book up so I couldn’t see their faces and began to read. When I was finished, there was dead silence. Slowly, I lowered the book, waiting for the laughter to begin. And then somebody said, “That’s it? There isn’t any more?” And my teacher said, “Well, maybe if we clap our hands, he’ll write something more tomorrow.” And from that day on, I knew that I would be a writer.

As for the Time Wars, what I wanted to do was to write the sort of stories I had loved to read as a boy, the sort of adventure stories that Raphael Sabatini wrote, or Rudyard Kipling. And I had this idea of taking classic works of literature and using them as a setting to write science fiction adventure stories that were also historical fiction. I had always been interested in the idea of time travel as a fictional device, but most of the stories I had read about time travel were, at least in my opinion, seriously flawed. For one thing, writing time travel stories isn’t easy. You have to really think it through. You have to keep things consistent within the framework of the story. And most of all, you have to deal with something called “the grandfather paradox,” which is something most writers who deal with time travel either neatly sidestep or ignore. Basically, what “the grandfather paradox” poses is this fascinating riddle: suppose you could travel through time and meet your grandfather, before your father was born, and then you killed him. This would mean that your father could never have been born, which means that you could never have been born, so how could you have existed in the first place to go back in time to kill your grandfather? I decided that I would take “the grandfather paradox” head on and “solve” it -- at least in terms of the framework of my stories. To do this, I had to figure out the “rules” of time travel, in much the same way as Isaac Asimov figured out the “rules” of robotics. I did a lot of reading, and I made lots and lots of notes. It took about a year of research and working out the framework for the fictional Dr. Mensinger’s “Theories of Temporal Relativity.” And the payoff was that I received a number of letters from college students who wanted to know where they could read more about the work of “Dr. Mensinger.” They thought that he was real, someone I had read for research, and I took that as a compliment. It’s also a compliment that all these years later, people still want to read my Time Wars novels and ask if there is any chance they might be done as graphic novels or maybe even movies. Well, there has been some interest, although it’s hard to say if anything will come of it. These things tend to be long shots. The Time Wars novels have been out of print for many years. There was an attempt to bring them back one time, but it did not work out too well. Now, I am in the process of re-issuing them myself, through Amazon.com, where they will be available as both trade paperbacks and Kindle editions. As I write this, the fifth novel in the series, THE NAUTILUS SANCTION, is in production and should be available shortly. And I plan to bring back the entire series over the next couple of years or so. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 20 years since I wrote the last Time Wars novel, but I am about to start work on another one. Hopefully, I can do it well enough to please the fans of the previous books. Well, I guess we’ll see....