Black Gate

I began work on The Fall of the First World in 1979, when I was twenty-six years old, at the suggestion of my agent at the time, who told me that, because of the tremendous popular success of the Thomas Covenant trilogy and of Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, publishers were eager to buy epic fantasy novels, particularly fantasy trilogies. I began to outline my own trilogy and compose the opening section. I started by incorporating story ideas already in my files. These included notes for a novel about the sinking of an ancient island-continent, perhaps Atlantis itself, to be called The Passing of the Gods. At the same time, I had long entertained the idea of writing a novel about the Third Crusade, so I included characters that borrowed from the historic figures of Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin, who more or less wound up becoming King Elad of Athadia and Agors ko-Ghen of Salukadia.

Part of the original idea of my writing the Atlantis novel was to include characters that would suggest actual historical or legendary figures of Western culture — Helen of Troy, for instance; and the Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman; the noble and arrogant Miltonian Lucifer; and the divinely inspired seer of truth, a Christ figure, a Siddhartha, a Black Elk. I found no way to include another culturally iconic figure, a dragon slayer from the mists of early time, be he St. George or Siegfried, but I had no desire, anyway, to populate such a novel with a mélange of stale operatic cardboard figures.

These were to be real people from a lost age, the echoes of whose lives persist into our own time, and who became personified in our myths and stories or who were to be incarnated endlessly in our culture as figures of universal fascination, notoriety, or wisdom. Their singular qualities immortalize them as remarkable representatives of humanity — their heroism and beauty, for example, or their spiritual insight or existential aloneness.

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There’s a reason that crime or mystery is the genre most often mixed in with others. When you’re writing novel or short story, you generally go about it by finding a character and asking yourself what kind of problems a person like that would face. Then, of course, you give that person those problems; it’s the solving of the problems that forms the narrative of the story. Involving your character in a crime certainly makes for a nice problem, and of the crime problems available, murder is the one readers find most interesting – at least for novel-length narratives.

But mixing crime into your SF does present its own peculiar difficulties. As John W. Campbell suggested, it would be too easy for the writer to suddenly come up with a gadget or whizmo that would solve the crime. And Campbell was right to worry that writers might take that easy way out. Just as in fantasy mysteries, however, all you have to do to create great SF mysteries is respect the conventions of both genres.

Well, in a world where anything about writing can be summed up in the phrase “all you have to do is.”

Not all mysteries are of the classic “puzzle” type, the whodunit usually associated with Agatha Christie, but most do follow a few basic conventions. The criminal is revealed (at least to the reader); the solution makes reasonable sense within the parameters of the story (no deus ex machina); the readers had a reasonable chance of solving the problem for themselves (no withholding evidence). SF is the genre of change, exploring the impact of (usually) technological innovations or changes on humans and human society. So in the same way that fantasy mysteries have to take into account the supernatural elements of their imagined worlds, SF mysteries have to work with whatever technological changes make the world of the story different from ours. It’s how these changes lead to crimes, or help to solve them, that makes an SF mystery.

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