CLONE SON NOTES
The following notes are in no way necessary for an appreciation or understanding of Clone Son, they merely explain some of the thoughts of the author regarding this work, his theories about science fiction, and his creative life in general.
General
Clone Son is based upon two previous novels by the same author. In one of these novels, a version of Freedom City was introduced; in the other, it was combined with the character of the "clone son." Both novels made no headway in the publishing world. This version is the story’s last cry to be heard. Years of dormancy have increased its speed of delivery and fleshed out the inner dilemma of the clone.
Those men and women of editorial power who rejected this story in its original versions have made the novel better and the author more invisible. Lost time improves the fruit but diminishes the harvest. Operas of every thought and feeling are replaced by a handful of redemption songs, a kind of creative last will and testament.
As in most stories of this type, the futuristic setting is too closely linked to our own time in terms of technology, concepts, customs, and speech to be consistent with the probable reality of tomorrow. Consider the future option portrayed in this story to be a translation back in time into our own mindset, a "poetic equivalent", something Ezra Pound would have suggested if he was a sociologist of that future attempting to make the past understand his world.
The incredible knowledge of technological directions and cultural evolution needed to imagine a truly accurate potential future is not only beyond the means of most authors, but possibly beyond the emotional range of most readers. Strangeness would upstage the human worth of the tale; it would become merely alien and interesting, in place of moving. Likely anachronisms [see below] are, therefore, used abundantly to bind the future to our times. In science fiction of this variety, the future is, in fact, not really itself, but rather a creative platform raised by us into space that is free, in order to work on the dramas of our own times. Sometimes, these dramas are better served by fairy tales than by politics. And what better medium for crafting a modern fairy tale than science fiction?
The purpose of this story is obviously to impact contemporary readers with a mixture of philosophy, adventure, psychology, humor, romance, and eroticism. Truly prophetic techno-sociology is not on the menu.
This having been said, I give thanks to this wonderful moment of the Internet, and outflank the world of the entrenched publishers who have been my lifelong sirens and harpies, to present you with a piece of my private, creative world. Like the Simon & Schuster sower-of-seeds, I walk across my own pages without a master: poor, but free. What I write is my legacy. Whoever understands it is my heir.
On The Use Of Conscious Anachronisms
To flesh out the point just made about anachronisms, consider the following example: A character makes a reference to a dog urinating on a fire-hydrant. It is a good 21st-century metaphor for conveying the idea of "marking one’s territory", which we human beings do all the time in our interactions through gestures and signals that are nearly as "primitive" as the dog’s. Can we rightly use such a metaphor in a science fiction novel laid far in the future? Technically speaking, a great deal of thought would have to go into providing an answer to this question. Will the future residents of the earth keep dogs as pets, and if so, will they permit them to urinate in the streets? Will there be fire-hydrants? We can sense that the metaphor will probably not be valid in the year 2700 AD, and yet, if we were to attempt to update it, we would be forced to sidetrack our writing efforts to engage in very detailed speculations regarding the conduct of water supplies into urban environments, the techniques used by the future to fight fires, and the nature of human-animal relationships. By the time we were through with our speculations, the metaphor would probably be either completely lost, or else turned into something so foreign or convoluted that it would cease to have the intended impact, and distract from the progress of the story. In a similar vein, supposing we have created a fictional civilization capable of breaking the light barrier and exploring other solar systems. Would such a civilization still be armed with hand-held ray-guns as so many of our science fiction stories and movies presume, allowing us to resort to the familiar motifs of wild-west shootouts or urban crime scenes with merely ritual updates of the Colt-45 and 9 mm.? Wouldn’t it be likely that more advanced weapons would be available to such a society; that is to say, if there were any weapons at all? What about the perpetuation of injections and IVs in the medical world, the continued use of keyboards and hand-manipulated control systems, the survival of familiar fashions, cultural mores and moral values? In most science fiction, it seems to me, "uneven futurism" is employed, in which some truly exotic and distant technologies and values mingle with very recognizable and barely changed features of our present world. Once again, this only points to the fact that the primary focus of science fiction is not to accurately depict an internally consistent and plausible future, but to create an imaginative setting for a narrative which will remain close enough to home to impact readers of today. Write a drama of ancient Rome in which Calpurnia calls Caesar on a cell phone, and most anybody who knows history will object. But write a drama of the future in which an intergalactic space explorer wields a hand-fired weapon like Billy the Kid, and no one will bat an eyelash. We choose not to react to the incongruity, but to suspend our disbelief, and to accept bits of the future grafted onto our own times in the name of a good story. Looking forward in time grants us many liberties that looking backward in time does not. The Neanderthal writer may give Caesar a stone chisel from his own times, but the modern writer may not give Caesar a cell phone from his! Anachronisms that are obvious, but still have not manifested in reality, are somehow so much more palatable to our sense of aesthetics!
Style
This version of Clone Son has not been written in my usual style. To begin with, I have never written a novel primarily in the present tense before. I first saw this technique utilized in W.S. Merwin’s translation of The Song of Roland, and was favorably impressed by the sense of immediacy which it delivered. It was well-suited for a tale built on action. Besides this, I have drawn in the reins of my sentences, which naturally have a tendency to carry huge armfuls of information with every breath, in the manner of Dickens or Cervantes. This style, a fitting partner of complexity, is not appreciated by modern readers, or so I have been told by modern editors; nor are the fertile meanderings and (for me) irresistible tangents so natural to my narratives. The current version of Clone Son has taken these criticisms into account. Its sentence structure has been correspondingly contained, its vocabulary streamlined, and it has been "paced into practicality", adapted to a less patient world. Whether the changes represent an improvement, or merely a concession, I cannot be sure.
Strange Morality
Strange morality of our civilization: sex is inherently dirty and everything sexual that is off-center is perversion. Crime and contempt threaten every erotic step. Meanwhile, wars that maim and kill are blessed, systematic processes that violate our health and endanger our world are tolerated, and exploitation is exalted, at least if we are not on the receiving end of it. Moralists with blood on their hands kick open the bedroom door. One "f**k you" in a story is worse than a deluge of racism in the real world, one joint is worse than an M-16 loaded and ready to fire. Sinners sit at the controls of hellfire. Strange morality….
Psychologically repressed as we are by archaic codes of ethics, our self-expression is twisted into unnatural paths. Trying to live behind society’s back, we develop the vices of nocturnal creatures, whose every nervous step is haunted by the possibility of a predator; or else careen rebelliously to extremes, like a pendulum carried by the same motion that swept it to denial, into new realms of indulgence.
When someone is drowning, the would-be rescuer must dive in and immerse himself in the very same water that the victim is thrashing in. He must know how to swim there, whether the water is water of lostness or water of self-destruction. Brotherhood is one level deeper than Judgment.
Moralists who would squeeze our books and movies dry of corruption, violence, lust, betrayal, profanity, and a thousand other realities would cause our self-knowledge to die of thirst. They would hand the world over to ignorance, and turn ignorance into a giant.
To love humanity is to go everywhere people have lived, with one’s pen; to go everywhere in the hearts of men, first to what is, in whatever costume you wish to give it, and only then, to what can be, which can only come from what is. Only by writing a bridge to the fallen will they be able to return. Only by respecting their fall, will the whole world be able to rise.
Clone Son is lovingly written from within a ring of fire; standing on disoriented moral ground, it searches for the eternal human compass needed to renew our bearings. Science fiction, with more than a measure of humor flowing through its veins, may not be considered a weighty enough medium to carry out this task, but for some who seek to sweeten the blunt edge of the life they are living with imagination, it will be the best.
When the original carrier draft of Freedom City was first rejected, it was on the basis of morality. "The science fiction audience consists mainly of studious teenage boys; give them robots and spaceships, not slums and prostitutes." Observing the Romanesque direction our culture seems to be taking, it seems that that assessment may now be obsolete, if it was not so then. To catch up with the downfall, morality must not fear to turn what is violent and erotic into its new bases of power, and to reach those who are beyond the reach of old forms of ethical teaching with morality tales comfortable on this terrain. Show that you know what is going on if you want to be listened to. Go to where people are lost, if you want to find them. Infiltrate the dark excitement with a golden light.
The Church of Writing is as boisterous as the world. It dips its pen into the ink of every sin and every form of corruption to write a path to Heaven.
Bitter Shelves
For many years, I went through the ritual of going to the science fiction department of major bookstores, to browse through all the books that had been published instead of mine. It was both a form of masochism and vindication. Of course, there were good books, as well as classics, although the most serious literary critics from the mainstream tend to regard science fiction, and especially adventure-fantasy, as feeble tangents of genuine literature: as frivolous, undignified and escapist: not fit to shine the shoes of Dostoevsky or Hemingway. Be that as it may, the lover of science fiction persists, loyal to the immense terrain that is open to his modern fairy tales and fables, rewoven in futuristic terms. He clings to the classics of HG Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K Dick, to name a few, and sweeps up armfuls of mediocre but enjoyable reads which satisfy his minds’ desire to roam in environments not closed off by the associations – both the heartbreaks, and the triggers of rage – of existing political realities. In these less emotionally cluttered environments, populated by archetypes and parallel societies, fantasy educates the reader from the sidelines
. In cases, he may learn more here than if he was in the thick of things, via the "realistic novel", with all his defense mechanisms activated by the obvious agendas of partisans, or by the mere level of the pain.What I mean to say is that I wanted my rejected books to be on these bitter shelves! Science fiction and adventure fantasy – Jules Verne to JRR Tolkien – did not offend me, they satisfied me. I did not have to be a "literary heavyweight" if I could roam where I wanted, create my own version of the 1001 Nights with technology instead of magic, or my own version of 1984, gang-tackling the eternal nightmare with everyone from St. John the Divine to Orwell. I just wanted to be a part of this world, in my own way, I wanted to see my books in stores and in other people’s hands. As I said, my trips to local bookstores such as Daltons, Barnes and Noble, and Borders, were sources of both suffering and pride. I saw myself abandoned, orphaned, alone with unrecognized talent that was being allowed to rot. I was outraged by the mediocrity of vast numbers of these books on the shelves, infuriated that they had made it into print while mine had not. I did not need a Maxwell Perkins to get here, just a decent break! At the same time, the poor quality of many of the books reminded me that I was not simply a deluded wannabe. I could do this, and do this better than most of the people who had done it! Perhaps it was the difficulty I had in compressing myself to fit the standard model. One publisher once remarked to a third party that I lacked discipline, which for me meant only that I did not follow the formulas he sought to channel writers’ souls into. I did not follow the streamlined path, the straight narrative line, the flashy bang-bang story that refused to carry any weight. For me, I was loyal to a higher vision, not undisciplined. I see now, in retrospect, that I was stubborn and proud, and avoided the compromises that could have allowed me to get a foot in the door. I rebelled before I had power, resisted before I had credibility, acted like a star before I had sales. My unpolished potential was easily dismissed.
Now, many years after I first began my ritual of browsing the bitter shelves, I have finally ceased to do so. The world I failed to become a part of goes on without me, continuing to release fine and stimulating novels, as well as droves of superficial, poorly-written hack jobs fit for kindling. I have lost my faith in the publishing world, grown discouraged by the height of the walls of the slush pile, and grown gun-shy of the might of formulas. I have given up dreams of being a "rock star" of writing, a giant of science fiction and satire. I just want to write, to put my message in a bottle, and throw it into the sea. The sea that reaches farthest in our times is the Internet, so it is into this sea that I throw Clone Son, hoping that it may find one or two readers in the world who will be enriched by it.
Recovery Of Youth
Getting older and facing mortality is challenging, to say the very least. Nostalgia, regrets, the ghosts of lost opportunities, and beautiful moments locked in the casket of yesterday, torment one, make one’s last days intense, simultaneously sweet and unbearable. One looks at the ticking clock and asks a thousand whys. Old books, old papers surround one like friends who have gathered around one’s bedside to say farewell. How could I, too, fade from the earth, like the rest of mankind? As Omar Khayyam once wrote: "And we, that now make merry in the Room They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom, Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth Descend, ourselves to make a Couch – for whom?" As age tightens its grip, one’s vanished youth, which one misused, becomes more precious; it becomes the gold of one’s life, and one seeks to return to it, first by means of memory, and then by means of rescuing the essence of its intent - at least one precious particle of what it could have been - from the flood of one’s last hours
. To make this reversal of time possible, one must finally lower the guard of one’s cynicism which has grown over the years, and stoop to make peace with the naiveté which contains the glory; one must welcome the immaturity home, and cherish it in one’s wise arms. I find that things I wrote thirty years ago, raw and uncrafted as they may have been, move me more than the ways I outgrew them. I want to use my last ounce of strength to guide them into the world; and through rescuing a semblance of their vitality, to beg for forgiveness from the Universe for the transgression of not being brave with my imperfection.