Angel Station

I have to admit it, Angel Station was not one of the books I was looking forward to reading during the process of converting the book to e-formats.  (Wherein it is now totally available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.  Just in case you forgot.)

I’ve always had a problem with Angel Station.

But before I get into all that, a little bit of history.  I wrote the first part of Voice of the Whirlwind around 1980 or early 1981, and I know this because the original typescript is in fact a typescript— it was written on my IBM Model D typewriter, before I got my first word processor in mid-1981.  Anyway, I put the manuscript down in order to do some paying work, and there it sat for years, because I wasn’t sure where those opening chapters were leading.

I finished Hardwired in the autumn of 1984, and was casting about for the next project.  Instead I got a raging kidney infection, fever along with tooth-shattering pain, and spent several days in bed slamming down antibiotics and Schedule II narcotics (both duly prescribed by a physician, I hasten to add).  Thanks to the fruit of the poppy, I had several days’ worth of hallucinations, and one of them turned out to be Angel Station.  Having nothing else to do but lie in bed and dream, I worked out the story in obsessive detail, much as I had scripted Hardwired on the long, long drive from Austin to Albuquerque the previous year.  No Person from Porlock interrupted my musings.

I mean, how stoned do you have to be to think: Hey, King Ubu in space!  Awesome!  I’m totally gonna write that!

(Why Ubu Roi, you ask?  Because he’s the guy who gets all the money and eats all the food, that’s why!)

(By the way, Angel Station is the only novel I’ve ever conceived while in an altered state.  Writing is, pretty much, a sobering profession.)

When the kidney infection finally succumbed and the narcotics wore off,  I found myself with a lot of pent-up energy, and I went to the keyboard and wrote the first 100 pages of Angel Station in a couple effortless weeks.

And then, for some reason, I remembered Voice of the Whirlwind (maybe there was still a certain amount of narcotic-related free association going on), and— click!— I figured out how to finish it.

So then I leaped from Angel Station to VotW, sold the latter, wrote it, and sent it to my publisher.  I intended to follow this with Angel Station, but— as I have related elsewhere— Tor wasn’t ready for a new hardback from me, and I ended up writing the first two Maijstral books instead.

Maybe I’d gone cold by the time I finally got to it, or maybe I had some other problem, but writing Angel Station turned out to be much like pulling teeth.  Out of the jaw of a mule.  With tweezers.

Damn, that book was work. (And, I want to reiterate, I didn’t become an author so I’d have to work.)

Possibly there was just a little too much going on in that book.  You have space adventure, caper stories, espionage, rivalry between clans, economic theory, and a first-contact story with aliens.  All with a couple juvenile protagonists who have lots of sex (particularly once they hit port), and play lots of music, and there’s all sorts of drugs lying around.  Plus Ubu’s a four-armed synaesthesiac with weird memory problems, Maria’s a subatomic witch, and they’re both haunted by the ghost of their father, who’s insinuated himself into the ship’s computer.

Also there were a few serious ideas floating around.  I wanted to work with the idea of frontiers.  On the American frontier, first contact between nations wasn’t between Colonel Launcelot of the U.S. Cavalry and Big Chief Thundercloud, it was always between guys nobody ever heard of, between Little Big Fart and Hans Dypschytt, and both of them so terrified they were pissing their drawers and liable to make crucial mistakes.  Contact was between people on the margins of their own worlds, people who were on the frontier because they were despised or down on their luck or had nothing to lose.

And conversely, these were also the folks who had the most to gain.   Colonel Launcelot and Chief Thundercloud were already at the top of their societies: they didn’t have anything to gain from interacting with each other, and quite a lot to lose.  Whereas the marginalized characters on the frontiers, if they could manage to overcome fear and its accompanying homicidal impulse, could maybe work out some way that each of them can profit.  (Hans gets beaver pelts!  LB Fart gets pins, needles, and some really cool weapons!)

That’s why Runaway and Beloved are willing to deal with each other.  They’re both desperate, their both pretending to be something they’re not, and neither has anything to lose.

Plus, I wanted to write a space opera without guns and missiles and beam weapons an’ stuff.  Because all that makes it too easy.

I also wanted to do something new with the idea of a hive mind.  I’d seen hive minds done in SF, but they mostly took the societies of colony insects like bees or ants and made a one-on-one translation to the science fiction medium.  I wanted to show how a spacefaring hive mind didn’t have to be ants in space.

Anyway, it was all a insanely complex thing to write, and I wrote it like a Western pioneer digs his root cellar, one shovelful at a time.  Angel Station was the first novel where I blew my deadline.  (The manuscript turned out to be 30% longer than I planned, and I took 30% more time to write it.  My estimate of the amount of work necessary was wrong, but at least I understood my own pace.)

The last third of the book was absolute agony.  I wrote pieces of it over and over.  I got caught up in subplots, like a computer doggedly plodding through a subroutine, and I thought I’d never find my way out.  I was horribly aware that I’d made a botch of it, and that the plot took far too many pages to resolve.

That’s why I wasn’t looking forward to re-reading it.  My only consolation was that maybe I could maybe rewrite it and make it better this time.

And then I read the book and— guess what?— I liked it.  I didn’t see any pacing problems at all.  The story flowed smoothly from beginning to end.  The whole thing worked.

All of the toil and sweat and pain that went into the book paid off.  I had put immense amounts of effort into trying to solve the book’s problems— and I had solved them— but I’d been so close to the work that I hadn’t seen it.  I thought I’d delivered a horrible mess to my publisher, but I hadn’t.  What I gave them was a freakin’ great novel!

Imagine my surprise.  Imagine my relief.  Imagine me jumping around my office going Woo-woo-hoo! (Actually, don’t imagine that last bit.)

Angel Station.  I sweated bullets over it so that you could have a trouble-free reading experience.

Go forth, reader, and read.