Variable Star

Afterword

This is an optional bonus: a sort of DVD Special Feature, “The Making of Variable Star,” in which I explain how I ended up being the one to tell you the story.

Feel free to save it for later, or skip it altogether. Its principal purpose is to save me from having to spend the next few years answering the same questions over and over, and I already suspect it’s probably not going to work.

I type this in November of 2005, in my office on an island west of British Columbia… but for me, the whole thing began way over at the other end of the continent, in a New York suburb rightly called Plainview, fifty-one years ago in November of 1954, when I turned six years old.

My mother wanted to raise a literate son. But Mom also had a lot of resting she wanted to get done, so she came up with a diabolically efficient scheme for teaching me to read. She would start reading me a Lone Ranger comic book, and just as it got to the really exciting part, where the masked man was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff… Mom would suddenly remember she had to go wind the cat or fry the dishes. By age six I had taught myself to read out of sheer frustration.

On my birthday, she graduated me to the hard stuff. She drove me to a building called a “lie bury,” and told me to go inside and ask the nice lady behind the desk for a book. I followed instructions. “Mom says gimme a book, lady.” And the nice lady behind the desk sized me up thoughtfully, and handed me the very first book with no pictures in it that I ever read in my life: Rocket Ship Galileo, by Robert A. Heinlein.

Her name was Ruth Siegel. She changed my life completely.

It was the first of Robert’s famous juvenile novels—and it was at least a hundred times better than the Lone Ranger! It was about teenage boys who were so smart they went to the Moon, and fought Nazis there, and there was nothing dopey about it, it all could have been true, practically! I finished it that night, and the next day I walked two miles to that lie bury and demanded to swap it for another one by the same guy. The same nice lady accommodated me, and the first ten books I ever read in my life were by Robert Heinlein, and they were all great.

When I tried other books, by other writers, it immediately became clear that some were good, and some were rotten. But it was just as clear that the ones in the same stack with the Heinleins—the ones that all had a sticker on their spine depicting a hydrogen atom inexplicably impaled by a V2—were always excellent, nearly as good as Heinlein himself. In 1954, science fiction was such a scorned genre that any sf actually published in hardcover—and then ordered by a public library—had to be terrific. I became a hard-core sf reader simply because that was where all the best stuff was… and so the whole course of my life was twisted.

Now the story jumps ahead nearly a year—and yanks us halfway back across the country again.

On November 14, 1955, ten days before my seventh birthday, Robert Anson Heinlein sat down at his desk in Colorado Springs and wrote an outline for a novel he first called The Stars Are a Clock.

He later wrote in half a dozen possible alternate titles by hand, including Doctor Einstein’s Clock, but never settled on one he liked. This was not unusual for him. A Martian Named Smith, for instance, was also The Heretic for a while before it was finally published as Stranger in a Strange Land.

His outline filled at least eight extremely dense pages: single-spaced ten-pica type with absolutely minimal margins on all four sides and very few strikeovers. He also filled fourteen 3X5 index cards with extensive handwritten notes relating to the book. And then, for reasons only he could tell us, he closed the file and put it in a drawer, and never got around to writing that particular book.

Now the biggest jump of all: less mileage this time, but nearly forty-eight years—to Toronto on September 1, 2003, where the World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon 3, was held that year.

I was Toastmaster for that Worldcon, the second time I have endured that honor, and it went infinitely better than the first time had, the Saturday night Hugo Awards ceremony this time fiasco-free. So I was pleasantly relaxed on Sunday morning when I showed up for my last obligation of the weekend, an appearance on a panel discussion about rare and obscure works by Robert A. Heinlein. Some remarkable discoveries of previously unknown Heinleiniana had been made in recent years, including an entire first book few had known existed called For Us, the Living, which Scribner’s had just published for the first time. I was on the panel because I had contributed an Introduction to it—but what I wanted to hear about was the exciting new stuff I’d heard rumors about. Teleplays—screenplays, even! I was quite unprepared for what I got.

The star panelist was Dr. Robert James, one of the researchers busily combing through the country’s libraries for RAH references, standing in for official biographer Bill Patterson who had been unable to attend. Robert is the man personally responsible for rescuing For Us, the Living from oblivion, and Bill had given him some terrific ammunition from the Heinlein Collection at the University of California at Santa Cruz to wow us all with. Those teleplays, for instance: most were based on known short stories… but not all of them. There were Robert Heinlein stories we didn’t know. That room was packed to bursting with some of the world’s most hard-core Heinlein fans, and we were electrified by the news that the Canon was not yet quite complete, after all.

And that wasn’t all….

There was, Robert said, an outline for an entire novel that no one knew about, that Heinlein had never gotten around to writing. What it read like, he said, was a classic Heinlein Juvenile, and indeed it had been dreamed up around the time he was writing them, and—

—and from the back of the room, a woman I could not see called, in a loud, clear, melodious voice:

“You should get Spider Robinson to finish that novel.”

And there was applause.

One of the other people on that panel was Eleanor Wood, literary agent for the estate of Robert A. Heinlein—and also, as it happens, for me. Another was Art Dula, trustee for the estate and its half-million-dollar Heinlein Prize Trust (see www.heinleinprize.com for details)… and Robert’s literary executor. Glances were exchanged. Immediately after the panel ended, words were exchanged.

I was, please understand, profoundly terrified that this cup might actually come to me. It was quite literally the most difficult and intimidating challenge that could possibly be handed a science fiction writer, a red flag to critics. It was like a musician being asked to write, score, produce, perform, and record an entire album based on a couple of John Lennon demo cassettes. In boxing it’s called leading with your chin. But I was fifty-five years old, just in the mood for the challenge of my life. Most of all, I wanted to read a new Heinlein novel so badly, I didn’t care if I had to finish it myself, didn’t care what kind of grief it cost me to do so.

Once again, a woman I didn’t know had changed my life.

I’m delighted to report that she did not remain anonymous. I sent this Afterword around to some of those mentioned in it for corrections, and one of them was David M. Silver, President of the Heinlein Society (www.heinleinsociety.org), who was also on that panel. He was able to identify my benefactress as a member of his esteemed society. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Kate Gladstone!

Shortly after I returned home from Torcon 3, I received Robert’s outline, and permission to write two sample chapters and a proposal for Art Dula; if he liked them, the gig was mine. Wild with exultation, I fell upon that outline and read it three times with extreme care.

And then I began banging my head on my desk. Gently, at first.

You may recall I stated earlier that Robert’s outline ran at least eight pages. It may have run fifty, for all anybody knows. What we do know is, seven of them survive.

They establish the ficton—Robert’s term for the time-and-place in which a story is set. They create vivid characters and their back stories, especially Joel, Jinny, and her grandfather. They describe the basic antinomy that impels Joel to emigrate, discuss the economics of interstellar colonization, and sketch in some of his early adventures after he leaves.

And then they chop off in midsentence, and midstory.

My God, I said to myself, the first time I finished reading the outline, there’s no furshlugginer ending! It could go anywhere from here….

God, this is great! I said to myself the second time I finished it, I not only get to write a book with Robert, I get to pick the ending.

Dear God, I moaned to myself after the third reading, what the hell am I going to do for an ending?

I holed up in my office for a week, and stared at those seven pages and fourteen quasilegible index cards and asked myself that question until beads of blood began to form on my forehead. Barring another miracle of forensic scholarship, this was going to be the very last Robert Heinlein novel ever. No ending I thought of seemed adequate. Twice a day my wife poked food in with a stick and retired to safety. I played my entire iTunes music library in search of inspiration, staring at its hypnotic visual display on my Powerbook screen, thinking like mad.

And one afternoon, iTunes finished playing the last Ray Charles album on my hard drive, and defaulted to the next artist in alphabetical order.

Robert Anson Heinlein.

Half a dozen short mp3 audio clips, of him being interviewed on radio in his hometown, Butler, Missouri, on its first-ever Robert A. Heinlein Day back in 1987, a year before his death. I’d listened to all those clips often. But the first one in line made me sit bolt upright in my chair now.

There—in my GrandMaster’s Own Voice—was the rest of our novel, and the inspiration for its new title, in a single unscripted sentence. Two clips later, he said it again, indifferent words. Suddenly I recalled Robert griping to me once in a phone conversation about a story he’d always wanted to tell, that John W. Campbell had argued him out of writing….

You have read both those soundbites. They were the chapter-opening quotes for Chapters 17 and 18.

That quickly, the novel finished itself in my mind. All that remained was the comparatively trivial business of writing those first two sample chapters and a proposal, winning Art’s approval, marketing the novel, selling it to Tor Books—oh, yes, and then typing 115,051 words, configuring them in sentences, arranging those into paragraphs, and separating them into chapters. Every waking moment of two years of my life, tops.

Two Novembers later, the task is completed, to the best of my ability.

And well beyond. Fortunately I had help. Even more so than any of my previous thirty-two books, I could not conceivably have completed this one without the generous and patient assistance of many people far more knowledgeable and intelligent than myself. We have come now, in other words, to the closing credits.

My principal consultants and unindicted co-conspirators were the gentlemen who have assisted me with all of my recent novels, the Vancouver Lunar Circle, particularly engineers Guy Immega and Ray Maxwell, physicist Douglas Beder, and astronomer Jaymie Matthews. Once my colleague and friend Allen M. Steele (www.allensteele.com) and noted rocket scientist Jordin Kare had helped me decide what kind of starship I wanted, Guy, one of my oldest friends, designed the Sheffield with Doug and Ray for me, treating the Ikimono Drive I handed them as a black box. Guy and his daughter Claire created Brasil Novo together in the course of a bedtime story they spent several years telling themselves, calling it “Jungle World,” and latterly Jaymie added a few refinements to help it retain its atmosphere. Jaymie also figured out how to make its star satisfy the odd requirements I needed, and educated me about the destruction of my own star, its precursors and its consequences, as well as consulting on cosmology in general. Doug saved my bacon over and over, not only working and reworking complex relativistic computations in what appeared to be zero time, but continually suggesting ingenious ways to make the answers serve the needs of the story. And each of these Lunarians made invaluable comments on the work of the others.

Allen was also enormously helpful in helping me visualize what interstellar flight would actually be like, over a period of years, having devoted considerable thought to the matter for his own terrific Coyote novels. To help me imagine what a starship’s farm that feeds five hundred might look like, however, I went straight to the man himself: Dr. Raymond M. Wheeler of NASA’s Biological Sciences Office, who’s designing the farm that will feed astronauts on their way to Mars; he gave generously of his time and special knowledge. The goat lore I acquired myself, painfully, a long time ago in Nova Scotia.

One more technical adviser must be thanked who, like Dr. Wheeler, had never previously helped me with a book, yet proved invaluable this time. Everything I know about the sax I learned by either listening to, watching, or questioning my friend Colin MacDonald (www.crypticmusic.ca), a composer, saxophonist, Soto Zen monk, and in his spare time (!) the keeper of my Web site www.spiderrobinson.com.

Nor will I ever forget the love and support of David Crosby, who gave me the chords and melody for “On the Way to the Stars”—not to mention the 1.67gHz G4 Powerbook on which Variable Star was researched and written. The music I listened to most often while I wrote was that of CPR, the band David and his older son James Raymond formed with Jeff Pevar (www.crosbycpr.com), and also the landmark 2004 Crosby•Nash double-album.

Numerous others also furnished invaluable ideas and insights, including Bob Atkinson, John Barnstead, Bill Patterson, Eleanor Wood, David Gerrold, Jef Raskin, Michael Lennick, James Gifford, Paul Hattori, Yoji Kondo, Herb Varley (who suggested the Mercury be powered by hyperphotonic swans), my editor Pat LoBrutto, and doubtless others I’m blanking on now. I hope they’ll forgive me.

And nobody’s input was more valuable or more profoundly appreciated than that of my beloved wife and partner, Jeanne, who read each day’s copy when she woke up, and left extensive notes on my keyboard for me to find every night when I went to work; no one will ever suspect how many stupid mistakes she caught before anyone else got to see them, or how many neat ideas were really hers.

Once the story was complete, everybody named went over it looking for mistakes, misunderstandings, and problems, and then helped me repair them. So—crucially for my peace of mind—did my friends John Varley and David R. Palmer, both noted Heinlein experts, who went over the manuscript with great care and each made characteristically astute suggestions.

To all these people I give my deepest thanks. As always, any mistakes are my fault.

But it takes more than just technical advice to finish a novel. Especially this one.

First of all, and last of all, I want to say that without Jeanne’s boundless love and rock-solid support, I would never have even dreamed of starting such a nerve-wracking project, and would probably have finished it, if I did, with a massive dependency on Ativan, or worse. She is my invariable star, and our orbit is stable. Equally invaluable were the unquestioning love and sensible advice of our remarkable daughter Terri Luanna, both an advertising exec and a social worker in the toughest town on Terra.

Art Dula took a major weight off my shoulders right from the start, by telling me, “I do not want you to try and do the literary equivalent of a Rich Little impression of Robert Heinlein. I want you to take his outline and write the best damn Spider Robinson novel you’re capable of.” He also gifted me with Robert’s own, many-times-hand-repaired desk dictionary. I had Robert Heinlein’s personal box of words to dip into, any time I ran short of them—and still do. Thank you, Art.

A mainstay of my morale throughout was Robert and Ginny’s granddaughter, Dr. Amy Baxter, M.D. Jeanne and I met her and her husband, Louis Calderon, M.D., at Torcon 3, two nights before I sat on that panel and learned of the existence of an unwritten Heinlein novel, and we hit it off immediately. When she learned I had landed the commission, Amy promptly sent me a pair of her grandfather’s Polynesian cuff links to wear as I typed, and sent Jeanne some of Ginny’s jewelry to wear for me. (I was startled and amused to discover that it was necessary to send one of my shirts out to a tailor and have it retrofitted to accept cuff links—apparently they stopped having them while I wasn’t looking.) By the time I was steaming into the home stretch of Variable Star in summer 2005, I was wearing Robert’s treasured, threadbare favorite gardening shirt as I wrote out in my office, and Jeanne was in the house, in her own office, wearing Ginny’s kimono. Bless you, Amy.

Other moral support and/or morale support (sometimes inadvertent or unsuspected) was provided by Daniel P. Gautreau, Alex Morton, Anya Coveney-Hughes, Andrea MacDonald, Greg McKinnon, Bob Atkinson, George R. R. Martin, Parris McBride, Alex Grey, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Lawrence Block, Tom Robbins, Robert Crais, Donald E. Westlake, Amos Garrett, Gregg Carroll, Holger Petersen, Paul Pena, Seth Augustus, Moses Znaimer, Keith Hensen, Paul Krassner, David, Jan and Django Crosby, James Raymond, Graham Nash, Jens Stark, Gabrielle Morrissette, Rob Bailey, Kerry Yackoboski, Damien Broderick, James R. Cunningham, Brad Linaweaver, Robin W. Bailey, Steve and Lynn Fahnestalk, Will Soto, Evita Karlic, the Heinlein Society, Charles, Mary, and Jim Robinson, innumerable kind members of the Usenet group alt.callahans, and whoever I’ve forgotten to mention.

Finally, all the Portuguese names for Brasil Novo and its moons were furnished by my son-in-law, Heron Gonçalves da Silva, of Niteroi, Brazil—a classic young Heinlein Hero if there ever was one, who came to New York a few years ago without a dime, a reference, or a word of English, and is now studying electrical engineering at the same university I got my own degree from. Obrigado, meu genro.

Writing Variable Star has involved more work, more pressure, more fear, and above all, more sheer fun than all my other books put together. I hope it will be given to me to write another thirty-three, but I doubt any of them will come close to this.

Every time I’ve ever sat down to write anything, I’ve had Robert looking over my shoulder, of course, because he is my first template for How This Thing Should Be Done. But this time around, I felt his presence far more powerfully than ever before. In general it had a calming effect.

Only twice did it actually get spooky.

The first time, I frightened my wife badly when she discovered me heading out to my office with the vacuum cleaner. She was vastly relieved to learn I was not going insane, but merely being haunted: in fact, she roared with laughter when I finally admitted that Robert had stubbornly insisted he was not going to work in that goddamn pigsty until I mucked the place out.

The second time, it was me who got the willies. A friend had sent me the URL for a particularly thrilling NASA Quicktime movie: a full 360-degree true-color view of the surface of Mars. (Google it for yourself.) I was mousing my way around in a circle in wild exhilaration, like a drunken dervish, intoxicated by what I was doing, thinking to myself how thrilled Robert would have been to see this. Check it out, Robert! I cried in my mind. A robot on the Red Planet, named after Miss Sojourner Truth! I’m sitting at my desk, using my mouse to pan around Mars, can you believe this?

Just then, I moused past a series of surface irregularities just odd enough to catch my eye: a string of roughly spherical depressions in the coppery sand, separated by intervals of about the same distance. I wondered idly what they were.

At that moment, I heard a voice—an actual, physically audible voice—the well-remembered, unmistakable Missouri voice of Robert Heinlein—say, I swear to you, these two words: “Willis tracks.”

Well, those bumps in the sand did indeed look just like the tracks that might be left by a Martian bouncer such as Willis, the star of Robert’s classic juvenile novel Red Planet, now that I thought about it. But I hadn’t been thinking about it. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I nearly crushed my mouse. If you’ll pardon the expression.

That is my only actual ghost story, I’m happy to say. And I admit I was not cold sober that night. Nonetheless, I report that from start to finish, writing Variable Star has left me feeling Robert’s presence and spirit far more strongly than I had since he caught a starship for parts unknown back in 1988.

I sincerely hope it has done the same for you.