About the Author
Dan Simmons, a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, producing novels described as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, while winning major awards in all these fields. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous awards, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction to
“The River Styx Runs Upstream”
It’s a cliché that writing fiction is a bit like having children. As with most clichés, there’s a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novel—that moment of pure inspiration and conception—is as close to ecstasy as writing offers. The actual writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of difficult labor before the thing is born. Finally, the stories or books take on a definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer’s control completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to express themselves fluently in languages the author will never begin to master, gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and education far beyond those of their progenitor, and—perhaps the most galling of all—living on long after the author is dust and a forgotten footnote.
And the ungrateful whelps don’t even write home.
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” was conceived on a beautiful August morning in 1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife’s parents’ home in Kenmore, New York. I remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinking—This will be my first story to be published.
It was, but not before two and a half years and a myriad of misadventures had passed.
A week after I’d finished writing the first draft of “The River Styx …” I drove from western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New Hampshire, meeting and talking to a respected writer whom I’d previously only corresponded with. His advice: submit to the “little magazines,” spend years—perhaps decades—building a reputation in these limited-circulation, contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel, and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known publishers, reaching only a thousand or so readers but trying to acquire some critical underpinning.
I picked up Karen in Rockport and we began the long drive back to our home in Colorado. I was silent much of the time, pondering the writer’s advice. It was sage advice—only one would-be writer in hundreds, perhaps thousands, achieves publication. Of those who publish, a scant few manage to make a living at it … even a “living” below the poverty line. The statistical chances of becoming a “bestselling author” are approximately the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being attacked by a great white shark.
So between Rockport, Maine, and the front range of Colorado, I pondered, decided that the advice was undoubtedly sound, realized that the “little magazine route” was almost certainly the wise way to go, and began to understand that it was a sign of maturity to realize that the quest for being a widely read author, a “mass market” writer of quality tales, was a chimera … something to be given up.
And then, about the time I saw the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains ahead of us, I said, “Nahhh.” Perversely, I decided to go for the widest audience possible.
Cut to the summer of 1981, two years later. Dispirited, discouraged, all but broken on the wheel of rejections, chastened by reality, I “gave up” writing for publication and did something I’d sworn I would never do: I went off to a writers’ conference. Paid to go to a writers’ conference. A “how-to”, “this is the way to prepare your manuscript”, “sit-in- the-circle and we’ll critique it” kind of writers’ conference. It was my swan song. I went to hear and see the writers present and to begin to view writing as a hobby rather than obsession.
Then I met Harlan Ellison.
I won’t bore you with the details of that meeting. I won’t describe the carnage that acted as prelude as the legendary enfant terrible beheaded, disemboweled, and generally dismembered the unfortunate would-be writers who had submitted stories for his critical approval.
Between story critiques, while Harlan Ellison rested and sipped Perrier, officials of the workshop rushed into the seminar room, carried out the scattered body parts, hosed down the walls, spread sawdust on the carpet, and generally made ready for the next sacrifice.
As it turned out, I was the next sacrifice.
“Who is this Simmons?” bellowed Ellison. “Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddammit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmitigated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!”
In one of the braver (read ‘insane’) moments of my life, I waggled my fingers. Stood.
Ellison stared at me over the top of his glasses. “At this length, it had better be good, Simmons … no, it had better be fucking brilliant, or you will not leave this room alive. Comprende? Capish?”
I left the room alive. In fact, I left it more alive than I had been in some years. It was not merely that Ellison had liked it. He … he and Ed Bryant and several of the other writers there … had found every flaw in the story, had revealed every false note and fake wall, had honed in on the places where I’d tapdanced fast rather than do the necessary work, had pulled the curtain off every crippled sentence and humbug phrase. But they had taken the story seriously.
Harlan Ellison did more than that. He told me what I had known for years but had lost the nerve to believe—he told me that I had no choice but to continue writing, whether anything was ever published or not. He told me that few heard the music but those who did had no choice but to follow the piper. He told me that if I didn’t get back to the typewriter and keep working that he would fly to Colorado and rip my fucking nose off.
I went back to the typewriter. Ed Bryant was generous enough to allow me to become the first unpublished writer to attend the Milford Writers’ Conference … where I learned to play pool with the big boys.
That autumn, I submitted the revised “The River Styx Runs Upstream” to Twilight Zone Magazine for their first annual contest for unpublished writers. According to the folks at TZ, more than nine thousand stories came in over the transom and had to be read and judged. “The River Styx …” tied for first place with a story by W.G. Norris.
Thus, my first published story reached the stands on February 15, 1982. It happened to be the same day that our daughter, Jane, was born.
It was some time before anyone, even I, really noticed that I’d been published. Analogies are fine and the similarities between being published and pregnancy are clever enough, but when it comes to being born—babies are the real thing.
And so, submitted for your approval (as a certain gentleman once said)—a story about love, and loss, and about the sad necessity sometimes to surrender what thou lov’st well …
