Fractal Mode

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I had this novel scheduled for writing during the first three months of 1991. But I have hired a research assistant for a year, Alan Riggs, and naturally I want to do my heavy research while I have him, not when I don’t. So I set up to do my World War II novel, Volk, the fall of 1990. I started Volk in 1980, ten years before, but found no market for it. Publishers wanted only science fiction and fantasy from me. They insisted on typecasting me. It didn’t matter whether I could be competent in a new genre (I can be) or how good a novel it was (contrary to critics, I do know how to write), or whether I had something original and evocative to say (I did); they were tuned out. I have chafed under this idiocy for long enough, and now I am doing something about it. More on that in a moment.

But I knew that other commitments could fall due in this period, causing Volk to run a month or two into 1991. That would squeeze Fractal Mode, and the contract deadline dictated that this must not happen. So I moved the novel up to AwGhost, SapTimber, OctOgre of 1990. Better early than late. Then interruptions came, such as a couple of conventions I had to attend to promote my works, and half a spate of interviews, and it ran into NoRemember. I hate to travel, and I’m not all that keen on conventions, and I’m tired of interviews, but such things seem to be the price for what I want to do, so I do them. So this novel ran a bit overtime, but since I did it early, I’m okay.

So how did it go, otherwise? That question reminds me of the sick joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” A novel doesn’t just go, any more than a marriage does; it’s a life experience. It is struggle and frustration and wonder and pain and joy. (Note to Ye Copy Editor: Leave my “ands” alone!) And yes, sometimes I find my fiction becoming reality, in devious ways. At the time I was writing the scene in Chapter 3 in which Darius condemns Colene for her deceit, and she blasts back at him with her statement of desperation, something similar happened to me. It had to be coincidence, because I saw that scene coming before I finished Virtual Mode. There are ways in which Darius is like me. Not in appearance—he is young and handsome—or in ability—he can do magic—but in his judgment of people. He has a relatively inflexible standard of honor, as I do, and many folk do not understand this. Those who cross me in a matter of honor might as well travel to some other world, as far as I’m concerned, for they will not be in mine. This applies to individuals and to corporations, to friends and to publishers both amateur and professional, and I have left a fair trail of ex-associates behind me. This does not mean that there is animosity, though there can be, or that I will not do business with them; sometimes I have to. Just that they will never again have my respect. Many do not understand my objection to their ways—and that is the point. Honor is not a thing swine can grasp. But there are different codes of honor, some of which can be respected by those who do not share them, and here is where the interactions can get tricky. Colene is not a bad girl; her code differs from Darius’ code, but is consistent to itself. He judged her by his code, and he did not have the right. When he saw that, he apologized, and thereafter did not mention it again. It is to Colene’s credit that she did not hold a grudge. Similarly I judged a woman by my code, and hurt her thereby, and then saw that I had erred. Such error is no light matter to me. I apologized, and the matter is at rest. We are in intermittent touch, not close; that’s not the point. It is a question not of closeness but of mutual respect. It was eerie, seeing it happen in the novel and my life at the same time.

There was also solid research in this novel. Fractals are simple in theory but can be mind-bendingly complex in practice. The Mandelbrot set exists, not precisely as described in this novel, but it is indeed called the most complicated object in mathematics. I encountered it inadvertently. I saw an article on it years ago and was intrigued, but did not follow up. Then later a correspondent, Dave Alway, introduced me to Ed Pegg, who founded Centaurs Gatherum, a magazine for centaurs. Ed introduced me to the artist Kurt Cagle, who founded Sea Tails, a magazine for merfolk. You’d be amazed at the varieties of centaurs and merfolk there are! Kurt sent me a copy of Chaos, by James Gleick, a fascinating book—and there within it were the pictures of the Mandelbrot set. I had bought a copy of this book on my own, several months before, and hadn’t yet gotten to it; it was Kurt’s copy that got my attention. So it seemed fated that I would get into fractals; when I didn’t follow up, other sources brought them to me again.

It turned out that Ed Pegg, too, was a fractals fan. He offered to get me more information. I accepted. Before I was done, I had amassed a small collection of books on fractals, gotten a computer program to generate them, gotten in touch with Benoit Mandelbrot himself, and subscribed to Amygdala, a newsletter of fractals. It was from the last that I got the system of nomenclature Colene encountered. I had also spent many hours entranced by the devious and marvelous underlying order of the Mandelbrot set. I just had to do something with this, and so I made it the setting for this novel. I did my best to simplify its ramifications, because even professional mathematicians can have trouble fathoming aspects of the set, and it can be bewildering for average folk. If you found part of Chapter 15 confusing, that’s why. I took significant license adapting it; this is a novel of fantasy with respect to some of the concepts as well as the garden-variety magic. But for those who want to see how convoluted and beautiful the Mandelbrot set is in full color and detail, watch the video tape Nothing But Zooms or its longer sequel, Mandelbrot Sets and Julia Sets, both put out by Art Matrix. This is where mathematics merges with art.

Now back to what I am doing to achieve my independence from typecasting by publishers. Publishers, like women, are not all alike, but in certain respects they seem so. In fact, sometimes they seem like flocks of chickens, all spooking together at something inconsequential. Sometimes they seem like sheep of Orwell’s Animal Farm persuasion, defining things irrelevantly: FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAA-AA-AAD! Sometimes they merely seem like idiots. One publisher, advised that I want my box number used for regular mail so that stray fans won’t be able to find my house and drop in on me unannounced, now sends all my regular mail to the house address except for an occasional one to the box with the name Piers Anthony deleted and the words “Don’t Use Number” substituted. So much for that. (So how come this comment is seeing print? Well, the present publisher, like my wife when I remark on women drivers, knows that I wouldn’t dare say anything bad about it. ) Good books do get denied, and bad ones do get published, and foul-ups are chronic. So I am going to see what I can do for myself. I can foul up readily enough on my own, and I might as well publish my own bad books.

So I am setting up my own marketing facility, HI PIERS, and if your local bookstore won’t sell you an Anthony book, calendar, or whatever, call my “troll free” number 1-800 HI PIERS and we’ll sell it to you. If no publisher takes what I write, I will publish it myself, and HI PIERS will sell it. That’s how this got started: I couldn’t get a publisher for the 1991 Xanth Calendar, despite the fact that it may be the most beautiful calendar extant, so I published it myself. It’s easy enough to do; all it takes is time and suicidal nerve about risking money. So maybe I’m a little like Colene too. At this writing we are running TV ads and building up our mailing list, hoping to make this work. (e-book note: this phone number is no longer valid. For similar information try the official web site at http://www.hipiers.com instead.)

So it was in this period that I had to take time off from writing to go to the TV Channel 6 studio in Orlando, Florida, and speak my amateurish lines under the lights. You would think I would be able to do a professional job of being Piers Anthony, but I found I was capable of fluffing even that. Something about reading from the monitor that makes me lose any naturalness to which I might aspire. Something about speaking for a microphone that turns my voice into duck talk. So I struggled through, constantly being assured that this disaster was great.

But I did get one fun commercial in, in which I pretended (pretended?) to foul up, and concluded, “Oh, just buy the bleeping book!” And would you believe it: the cable TV outfits wouldn’t run it, for reasons which changed each time we inquired: because of the dirty word “bleeping,” because it was facetious, because they were afraid they’d get blamed for running a reject. Publishers’ syndrome, again. So we added that to the videotaped Interview With an Ogre. That’s what I mean: I now have the means to get my stuff to my readers despite whimsical editorial censoring. What a feeling of power!

At any rate, at this writing it remains to be seen whether HI PIERS will turn out to be genius or idiocy. That is, whether it succeeds or fails. But its object is to make my titles readily available to my readers, help promote my works, and make me better known as a writer. The addresses of those mentioned in this Note may have changed by the time you read this, so I haven’t run them, but if you call HI PIERS they’ll give you current information. If you are curious whether HI PIERS is succeeding or failing, call the number, and if you get a no-such-number intercept you’ll know it failed. If you get a response of “Hi Piers” you’re stuck; you will be locked onto our mailing list forever.

In this period another venture saw fruition: the ElfQuest folk, Father Tree Press, published Return to Centaur, the first part of the graphic adaptation of my thirteenth Xanth novel, Isle of View, which was also published at this time. This is the one featuring Jenny Elf, the character made from the girl who was paralyzed by a drunken driver. I told her story and gave her address in the book, and letters poured in to her at the rate of ten a day. They were all nice letters too. At this writing about 350 have reached her, and I think they are like a lifeboat, buoying her, showing how people care.

Jenny herself managed to get in trouble in school. There was a stiff note from the principal. How does a girl who can’t get out of her wheelchair and can’t speak get in trouble at a special school for just such students? Well, it seems she wore a button in her cap. She had found the button when shopping. Now, why would the school officials get so upset about that? Well, possibly it was because of the nature of the message on it: I’M BAD WITH NAMES. MAY I CALL YOU S—HEAD? (I have edited out part of the original, in the interest of not getting a note from the principal.) Jenny may be paralyzed, but she’s full of mischief. She was the same age as Colene at this time, fourteen, which may explain it. But as I was editing this novel in NoRemember she won the school’s “Citizen of the Month” award. Right: they didn’t remember that button. She is now making a determined effort to walk again. She uses a walker, and has succeeded in making it across a room. There’s still a long way to go, but this is significant progress.

I also got into another experiment. Another correspondent—I have half a slew of them!—urged me to try a special line of health foods. These are Oriental herbs refined and concentrated to powders which can be used as supplements and foods. Theoretically great improvement can result. I am a skeptic, but I try not to condemn anything on the basis of ignorance. So I pondered a few weeks, and finally agreed to try it, cautiously. My expectation is nothing; I already have a healthful life, having no “vices. ” That is, I don’t smoke, drink coffee, or use drugs, and while I’m not a teetotaler, I touch alcohol only when social protocol requires, and then quite sparingly. I exercise and sleep regularly, have a consciously healthy diet, and always use a seat belt when riding in a car. I am a workaholic, though; nobody’s perfect. In short, I see little to be gained from Oriental powders. But sometimes I am surprised. For example, just before starting on this novel I read a book about the search for the so-called Dark Matter in the universe: The Fifth Essence, by Lawrence M. Krauss. The theory is that we are unable to perceive 99% of our universe. Ridiculous, of course; they probably just hadn’t thought to check for the amount of matter hidden inside the black holes in the center of the galaxies. But I checked, just to be sure. And that book converted me. I now believe in Dark Matter, and this novel offers a hint about its whereabouts. So I’m giving this diet the same fair trial, and will in due course form an informed opinion. Tune in, next Author’s Note, maybe.

I spoke of health. I do work at it, and am probably in the upper percentiles of healthiness for men my age, which at this writing is fifty-six. But there are annoying deficiencies. I remain diabetic—fortunately Type II, the mild type—and can not stand on my feet for more than a few minutes without getting tired. Thus it is true that I can run longer than I can stand; it is as if my engine lacks an idling jet. Every so often a change in weather can bring me a bad fit of allergy, so that I have to stuff tissue in my nose to stop it from dripping into the keyboard. My knees have improved slightly in the past decade, but I still can’t quite squat without pain. And remember my tongue? In the Note in Virtual I told how it was sore, and the dentist smoothed out a worn onlay. Well, that didn’t do it. In the end I had two onlays replaced with smooth new crowns, and still my tongue was sore. After fourteen visits to dentists, during which my mouth was seen by five different ones, I still have only a stop-gap solution: a plastic appliance, or stint, that I put in my mouth to cover the region that makes my tongue sore. It seems that I have an “ectopic” taste bud on the side of my tongue that has become sensitive to something in that part of my mouth. Stop that sniggering, you women; this is nothing like an ectopic pregnancy.

Last time I gave credits to several readers for contributions to the novel. This time there are fewer. In 1989 Hannah Blakeman sent me a package of articles on alcoholism and child abuse. I had intended to use it for Virtual but Colene’s family didn’t turn out that way. You may have heard it said that the characters of a novel sometimes dictate their own story lines. It’s true. Colene’s mother was alcoholic, but the girl was not directly abused by her family, though the problems of that family surely contributed to the insecurity that manifested as a flirtation with suicide. But this material on alcoholics was eye-opening, and I wanted to use it. It enabled me to recognize in retrospect a situation that had perplexed me in prior years: I had run afoul of an adult child of an alcoholic. That is, a person who had been a child of an alcoholic, and had grown up and left that family. In the ignorance I suspect I share with most folk, I thought that once a person gets out of such a situation, things are all right. That is not necessarily the case. The emotional scars can remain for life. To make a poor analogy: you can not amputate a child’s leg, and expect him to win foot races as an adult. You can’t abuse him in his formative years, and expect him to be without pain thereafter. You can’t force a little girl to have sex several times a day for years and expect her to grow up with a healthy sexual attitude. You can’t dedicate years to making children believe that they are worthless and expect them to have good self-esteem thereafter. So just as folk run afoul of me, because of the standards I set to correct the problems of my youth, so also I run afoul of others, who carry their problems out of sight. I am not the child of an alcoholic, and was never abused in that manner, but there are ways I can relate, as you can see by the tone of this Note. One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all, survivors—we are not that way from perversity, and we can not just relax and let it go. We have learned to cope in ways you never had to.

So I pondered the material for this novel, and crafted a bad case: Esta, a girl who had suffered all three types of abuse known in alcoholic families. Physical, sexual, and emotional. Not the skewed definitions sometimes seen, as if physical abuse means one spanking, sexual abuse means someone used a dirty word, and emotional abuse means setting an eleven P. M. curfew. The real things, so bad that we prefer not to believe they happen. Esta, thinking herself weak, was strong; she was surviving with minimal apparent damage. Exactly as an unconscionable number of others do. She, at least, will have a chance to recover completely, healed physically by magic and emotionally by the reversal of her life-memories. Those in real life do not have that option.

Rather than try to give a help number which might change by the time this sees print, for those who see themselves or friends in aspects of this discussion, I will try to see that HI PIERS has such information. If you call and say, “Please, I don’t want to be put on your mailing list, I just need the number of Sexual Abuse Anonymous,” or whatever, we will give you that number. This much I hope I can do to help. There is doubt, however: we are not at this point certain about liability. That is, if someone calls in, and we give a helpline number, and the folk there fail to help, are we liable for a lawsuit? Don’t laugh; such things happen. So we’ll help if we can safely do so. Actually other folk have problems too; as I wrote this Note I received a letter from a young man who had had intestinal surgery; several doctors had failed to diagnose his malady, and when one did he was dying; they saved him, but now he has $80,000 in medical bills not covered by insurance. Canada has a good system of medical coverage; the United States has deadly chaos. Will it ever change?

Another credit with a story behind it: in the Phaze Doubt Note I mentioned discovering the cover of the record album Heartdance, with the beautiful picture of the giant musical instruments by the sea, and the girl in red standing at the brink. Well, I set that picture up between my keyboard and the monitor screen as I typed this novel. That’s the starting point, with Nona there. In the Note for Virtual I mentioned a sketch sent by Oria Tripp, of a young woman in red walking toward mountains: “Someday. ” I put that beside the computer. Nona again, perhaps. So I named the planet Oria. Thus do little things catch my fancy and become other things. Please don’t write begging me to name a magic planet after you; I generally do such things only when the whim strikes.

And one even farther-fetched: as I completed my first draft I received a wonderful letter from Julia. No last name, no return address, just a note of appreciation for my Note in And Eternity. She had suffered the loss of three children, and said my comment to the Ligeia girls prompted her to seek counseling, which helped her. I appreciate the letter and the thought, though it often seems to be the nicest letters I am unable to answer, while I am swamped with demanding letters from others. But the thing is, the Mandelbrot set—the setting for this novel—is related to the Julia sets, so it seemed somehow appropriate to receive a Julia letter.

And I heard from Arthur Babick, a man I had known about thirty-five years ago, in college. He had heard a radio announcer praising my books, so he called the station, then wrote me. I wound up doing a half-hour telephone interview for them. It’s nice to know that those I knew in a bygone day do still exist. I mentioned to Art that I am doing spot research on consciousness, as I orient on future projects, and he sent several articles on the subject. I see similarities between the problems of consciousness and those of chaos. Which leads nicely into the next novel in this series, Chaos Mode, which will also relate to the creatures of the Burgess Shale. That might sound dull to you. Well, let me tell you—no, that had better wait for the next Note.

Meanwhile, my life continued in its petty pace. I use a VGA color monitor, which I have set with yellow print on a brown background. That’s fine; I like it, except that I am nervous about reports that radiation from computer monitors may be frying folks’ brains. Would anyone notice the difference if my brains were fried? Suddenly my bottom command line disappeared. You know, the line that gives the name of my file, tells where my cursor is, the time of day and whatnot. I depend on that line, because when there’s a special instruction, that’s where it is. For example, my Control V evokes the message “Don’t touch this key again!” and Control Z says, “Help! I’m being held captive in this computer. ” Would you want to live without messages like these? My colors also were shuffled. What had happened? Had I miskeyed in some fatal fashion? Alan looked into it, and concluded that there was no way a miskey could have done it. Apparently I had lost the 23-line display, and it was now projecting 25 lines, with the bottom one showing just below the screen. Thus my command line was literally out of sight. Great! What could I do about it? Apparently the 23-line display was gone; maybe it had existed once, but would not in the future. Finally Alan found a solution: there’s a control on the monitor which squeezes the display together. We could cram those 25 lines in! I had my command line back. Once again the fell plot of the evil computer had been foiled.

Well, not quite. We still had not gotten the colors back; it had set itself on half my colors, and the other half on Blink, with the colors I wanted preempted by the Blinking section. Alan got into the works and recovered my slate of colors. But when I printed out the day’s work on the laser printer, my 60-line pages had been reduced to 57 lines, with slipsheets inserted to carry the extra 3 lines. Thus my printout was 57 lines, 3 lines, 57 lines, 3 lines, and so on. But we hadn’t touched the printer. How did an adjustment to the programming for the monitor do that to the printer? It wasn’t my word processing program, Sprint; that was formatting for 60 lines. No doubt a computer expert will tell you it couldn’t happen. Just as a dentist will assure you that you don’t feel what you feel as he drills into your nerve. Alan finally ran that down too: the system was refusing to read the appropriate formatting file. Alan removed that file, then put it back in the same place. That tricked the system into reading it again, and all is well. There is a certain art to outsmarting a stupid machine.

Letters continued to pile in at a record annual rate; I answered over 500 during this novel, though I can not promise to answer them all. Some of them ask for money, some for free books. I don’t want to seem unkind, but I’m not in the business of giving things away. I also continued my internecine war with copy editors; those for my novels have improved, which means they mess less with my pristine text, but one systematically changed all my dashes in a story to ellipses. That is, three dots …, thus. The dash is properly used to signal a break in the text—like this—while the ellipsis is properly used to signal omitted words, as the… copy eds seem not to know. Growl! And the Post Orifice issued a fiat changing the way we must address letters: HENCEFORTH ALL CAPITALS NO PUNCTUATION. Surprise: I like it; it’s easier to do.

I had to sign 1,150 pages for our special limited hardcover edition of Isle of View. Have you ever tried to sign that many sheets? My signature has been degenerating over the years, as if there are only so many signatures in me, and later copies get degraded. Now it is illegible, with the last four letters of PIERS condensed into half a squiggle and the I-dot in the middle of the loop of the P. That’s to confound the grapho-analysts. I half expect the purchasers of that edition to stare at the signature and say, “Pay fifty bucks for this?” I certainly couldn’t blame them.

Virtual Mode came back to haunt me too: it had not yet been published, and the routine permission for my use of a few words from a popular song hit a snag. For thirteen words they demanded $450, take it or leave it. That’s over thirty dollars a word, for doing the proprietors the favor of publicizing their song. It’s a nice song, but not a nice attitude, so I didn’t take it, I left it, and rewrote the concluding paragraph of that Author’s Note to exclude those words. Now you know why I did not name that tune.

In this period, too, Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting off an international crisis. Sigh; if I had the power to right every wrong in the world, I wouldn’t even know where to start. But I wish you folk out there the best you are fated to have.

After I finished the novel and this Note in first draft, at the end of OctOgre, I went to the World Fantasy Convention at the beginning of NoRemember. I don’t like to travel, and can live without conventions, but this was for business. A full Convention Report is beyond the scope of this Note, but I’ll touch on a few items. I was not listed in advance promotion, at my request, so that few folk realized that I would be there, but I did attend the autographing session and participated in a panel on “The Never-ending Sequel. ” Others on it were Jo Clayton, Philip Jose Farmer, and Gordon Dickson, so it was a pretty high-powered panel. The moderator, Jack Chalker, wasn’t there, which left us headless. We got along nicely anyway, and halfway through Jack arrived, having had a time confusion. The shift from Daylight Saving to Standard Time had occurred just the week before, and for many of us the trip to Central Time complicated it further; I simply left my watch as it was and made mental adjustments, as I knew I’d have to shift back soon. You probably think I said something funny there. Okay: when others remarked on the manner writers like Dickens were panned as hacks in their lifetimes, then elevated to literary genius status after their deaths, I said, “I’d like to know how to go from hack to genius without dying. ” Because I do expect to have a better critical reception after death; it could hardly be worse than it is in life. A genre newsmagazine once did a survey of the top SF/fantasy writers extant; I came in at #37. Once a review book listed its top forty-three fantasy novels for the year; I had had four fantasies published that year, but did not make the list. I may have had more SF/fantasy genre bestsellers than any other writer, with twenty-two titles appearing on the New York Times and/or Publishers Weekly bestseller lists as of this writing; that’s why. The critical assumption is that any writer who is popular with readers can not be worthwhile. So it really wasn’t funny, and all other real writers understand, because they get similar critical treatment, but it did get a laugh. However, our panel did get serious too; it ranged all over. We discussed history, and I remarked how man is currently destroying the world by overrunning it. I feel about that as Colene does, by no particular coincidence.

My business at the Con was with editors and publishers, Including Susan Allison of Berkley, who will be surprised to see her name here, and to promote HI PIERS. We were trying to sell my publishers on the notion of cooperative cable TV ads for my books: we would make the ads and the publisher would pay the better part of the cost of running them. We had them in for meals. It is an ironclad rule that the publisher always pays for the author’s meal, but I never was much for rules, and it was my treat. Which meant they had to watch our sample commercials, including my “bleeping” one. The publishers were noncommittal; I can’t think why.

There was also a cute young woman taking pictures of middle-aged old men like me, which strikes me as a reversal of the natural order. She had us scheduled every twenty minutes throughout the convention. When my turn came, and she was setting up her photographic paraphernalia, I demonstrated the joke we played as children: smile angelically, and just as the camera clicks, make a horrible face. As I spoke, I turned to face the camera, stuck out my tongue, and wiggled my fingers at my ears. FLASH! Perfect messed-up shot. No, she did take others—these folk never leave such things to chance—but I wonder whether that will be the one she publishes?

Meanwhile Jenny was attending Sci-Con, where I had met her the year before. The convention was down to a third of its normal size, because so many of its attendees had been shipped to the Persian Gulf for the crisis. That’s one way to stamp out fandom! But I understand that Jenny had a ball. For one thing, our Jenny Elf T-shirts were just coming out, with her face on them.

So I returned from the convention, and set up for the two-hour job of plugging in a few items I had overlooked when writing the novel. That took three days. Then the formal editing, normally done in a week. I started on the 10th—and completed it Thanksgiving Day, the 22nd. Because everything in the world came in to take my time, so that I was operating at about 50% efficiency. I mean that’s when my wife bought a new car and I had to go into town to sign papers and drive it home. The second issue of the Hi Piers newsletter was getting ready for publication, requiring almost daily long technical calls. There was motion picture interest in my Xanth series, but naturally the purchaser wanted more rights than I could afford to give, leading to Florida/California phone calls going nowhere fast. Assorted relatives visited. My bicycle tire went flat; the first time I fixed it the way Colene did, with gunk, but the second time it was too far gone for that and I’m going to have to get a new tire. I ride my bike a mile and a half each morning, fetching in the newspapers, you see. So I had to use my wife’s bike, my knees just about banging the handlebars. Sigh. As you can see, my home life is distressingly typical.

And in this period of the writing and editing of this novel, I had six other novels published: Hard Sell, Firefly, Isle of View, Dead Morn, Orc’s Opal, and Balook. They should all be in paperback reprint by the time you read this. I’m trying to keep up with the demands of my readers, really I am, inadequate as my effort may seem.

NoREMEMBER 22, 1990

Copyright © 1992 by Piers Anthony

Cover art by Daniel R. Horne

ISBN: 0-441-25126-9