In 1988 I pretty much backed into my first novel deal, to write an Isaac Asimov’s Robot City™ novel that went through a handful of different titles before finally being released in 1990 under the name of Maverick. In 1989 Jim Baen, having heard that I was working on a novel and having read “Elimination Round,” accepted Maverick as proof that I knew how to write a book and signed me to a contract for a novel, to be named, Cyberpunk.
Actually, I signed two contracts with Jim Baen. One was for Cyberpunk, and the other was to work for him as a contract fiction editor, developing a three-book shared-world anthology series that I’d proposed, to be based on the well-known works of a certain elderly and much-loved hard science fiction writer.
CRUCIAL NOTICE
I want to stress, all the following is based on my interactions with Jim Baen personally, both as an author and as an editor reporting directly to him. It is in no way a reflection on the modern entity known as Baen Books. Toni Weisskopf has done a brilliant job of maintaining the good parts of Jim’s legacy while getting rid of the less-than-good parts, and I have nothing but respect for Ms Weisskopf and her company’s products, authors, and personnel.
CRUCIAL NOTICE
Of the shared-world clusterfsck there is much that could be said, but perhaps it is best to leave it with these simple words from Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, chapter 11, page 74:
“Once a chieftain has delegated responsibilities, he should never interfere, lest his subordinates come to believe that the duties are not truly theirs. Such superficial delegation yields fury in the hearts of subordinates.”
With the three-book shared-world deal thus reduced to a smoking hole in the ground, Jim then turned his full attention on Cyberpunk. In hindsight, I should have appreciated all the thought he clearly poured into this book. He didn’t have to keep calling me up at any time, day or night, at home or at work, to tell me what was wrong with what I was writing and what I needed to do to fix it. No reasonable editor ever needs to do that. Clearly, he must have thought he saw something really promising in me, and in this book.
But all the same, what I wound up having to do was to write this book. And then rewrite this book. And then re-rewrite this book. I wound up having to tear out and completely rewrite almost everything that was in the original short story, in order to set up for and make it fit in with the continuity of everything that was changed or inserted later at Jim Baen’s direction.
I’d come into this project with a fairly clear idea of what I thought I was going to try to do. The way I saw the world Mikey lived in, it had developed like this:
1st Wave - the cyberpunk phase, primarily kids, anarchists, hackers, and wild cards. It’s the days of the wide-open cyber frontier.
2nd Wave - early-adopter capitalists, moving in to figure out how to make money off what the kids in the 1st Wave pioneered.
3rd Wave - organized crime and malignant political actors, moving in to exploit the trust the 2nd wave built and make real money.
4th Wave - government, first in the form of military and intelligence agencies trying to figure out what the Hell is going on here, followed by regulatory and taxing authorities, trying to get control of it and get the government a piece of the 2nd Wave action.
Thereafter things would settle down into the usual corporate/fascist unholy alliance between the 4th Wave and the successful survivors of the 2nd Wave. The 2nd/4th Wave alliance would do a great job of getting rid of all that pesky free speech, driving out or putting in prison whoever was left from the 1st Wave, and strangling their nascent competitors in the crib.
At which point things would settle into a state of wobbly equilibrium with the 3rd Wave. The 3rd Wave would have the edge in imagination, and thus in finding new and creative ways to be evil, but the 2nd/4th Wave would have the edge in money and raw power, and thus always be one close step behind the 3rd Wave. 1st Wave people, if there were any left or any new ones coming along, would be irrelevant, except insofar as they could be co-opted to join the 3rd or 4th waves.
This is the world I wanted to drop Mikey into, when he finally came home from The Academy.
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As the project continued to develop, the ideas I was most interested in pursuing—all having to do with what was going on out in the big wide world and how Mikey fit into it after he came home from the Academy—kept getting pushed further and further into the background, until eventually they were pushed completely out of this book and into a hypothetical sequel. The only parts of any of my original stories and scene sketches that Baen did not have me rewrite from scratch were those chapters derived from “Elimination Round.”
In hindsight, I should have realized that while Jim Baen wanted to publish a book with the title of “Cyberpunk,” given the way he kept drawing comparisons to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (which had recently won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel), the story he wanted behind that title was the extended version of “Elimination Round,” only with more and bloodier violence.
I also should have realized things were going terribly wrong when Jim became obsessed with the ending of this book—and specifically, with setting it up so that Mikey would need to kill someone in a final showdown.
He first proposed that I end the book with Mikey returning to his hometown, to hunt down and kill his father. I said no.
He then suggested that I end the book with Mikey tracking down and killing Rayno. I said no. I saw Rayno as the villain of the original story, yes, but also saw Mikey as someone who solves problems with intelligence and cleverness, not violence. I wanted him to humiliate Rayno and leave him stripped of all power.
Okay, Jim said, (paraphrasing from memory now). How about if Mikey gets recruited to join a secret government agency that tracks down and kills cyberpunks? (Which, I must admit, would have neatly anticipated Tom Clancy’s Net Force by about a decade.)
I said no again.
Jim called me at work one day, to tell me he’d not only figured out how I needed to end it, he could even visualize the cover art. I needed to end the novel with Mikey going on a rampage and killing everyone at the Academy who had ever pissed him off. It would make a great cover: the hero, center-stage, with a mighty weapon in his hands, a cowering half-naked babe at his feet (There is a half-naked babe somewhere in this story, right? No? Well, put one in, okay?), and the blood-smeared corpses of his many enemies piled high all around. It’s the kind of cover Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo made famous.
I said I’d think about it. Then I went and wrote the ending I wanted Mikey to have: one that let Mikey solve his plot-climax problem using his intelligence, not a knife or a gun.
§
When Jim Baen read the last line of my manuscript, “Mission complete, Colonel,” he went apoplectic. Cancelled the book on the spot. Threatened to sue me to recover the contract on-signing advance. Refused either to release the book, to send it back to me for yet another rewrite, to definitively reject it in writing as being hopelessly unpublishable (which action on his part would have had specific contract-breaking ramifications that would have benefited me), or to grant me a temporary waiver, so I could at least try to sell the book to someone else. Then my then-agent advised me to do something that even I could tell was actionable, so I fired him and tried to clean up the mess myself.
And that is when I discovered my contract contained a clause that prevented my selling any novel-length fiction to anyone, until either this book was released or Jim released me from my contract. Which is where things sat for five long years, while I went through a layoff, a bitter divorce, and a forced career change, until finally, one blessed day, I was able to come up with the cash to buy the publication rights to this book back from Jim Baen, and thus to be released from my contract.
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COMING NEXT SATURDAY: We’ve reached the middle of the saga! Join us next week as we explore how the catastrophe that was Cyberpunk: The Novel inexplicably led directly to the award-winning comedy, Headcrash! Until then, if you have a question you’d like to ask Bruce about anything cyberpunk-related, send it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com.
And consider buying some books, okay? At least, take a look at SS#23, and maybe read “Eddie’s Upgrade,” by Kevin Stadt.
3 comments:
let's be honest. It's really Mister Cyberpunk, isn't it? I mean, you're not a real doctor, are you?
In truth, it should be Dr. Cyberpunkenstein, but my great-grandfather lost a few syllables on the way over from the old country.
That... was a nightmare.
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