Notes
on Anagama
This story originated an embarrassingly long time ago,
while I was still in high school. It began as an image: neon,
reflected on concrete on a cold, dark street, and the rhythmic bootsteps of a dark, anguished figure— who was this person?
I had read and empathized strongly with Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf, and I thought to myself:
yes, this is someone like that, a steppenwolf.
Someone who wants to belong to society, but can’t. Like many other teenagers,
my sensibilities were decidedly gothic; at the same time, I had been exposed to
and enthralled by cyberpunk, which in the 80s (that era of glittering
mechanical dazzlement) was a new and revolutionary
thing. I wrote a story set squarely into a cyberpunk world, ugly, violent and
gritty, and I gave it that most gothic of stars: a vampire.
My protagonist remained nameless and faceless through
several editions of this short story. He went into a bar, he waited for a drug,
he killed when it was not forthcoming, and struggled
with that knowledge later. The ending always eluded me. I kept changing it, and
it would never work. There was the climax, and then… my character was left
staring into space, bereft of hope, in a world that did not and could not
change. I could not think of a happy ending for him that did not seem trite,
some sort of deus ex machina
bandaid for all that he had suffered for so long.
Deep suffering doesn’t end that quickly, as I knew, and sometimes it doesn’t
end at all. How to convey this? I
struggled with this story through my university degrees, and while the story
became more complex and the writing improved, the ending was still wrong. I
submitted the story hopefully to Tomorrow magazine, and received a
scathing page-and-a-half critique back. I suppose I owe Algis
Budrys a debt, since he was the first person of the
dozen I had asked who could articulate what the problem was: my character was
too strong and too smart to let himself be taken
advantage of. The story— the ending in particular— was not believable. Yet I
could think of no ending that was.
What to do? I put it aside for the next few years,
working on my first novel, Perigee, with what shreds of creative energy
I had left over as I finished my Ph.D. degree. One day, I had to drive through
a downpour on an
My name is Seth,
I thought, and I finally realized what was wrong. My faceless, nameless
character did have a face, and a name. He had a complicated personality and
life. He wanted to have his story told, but it was not a short story. It was
much longer, and would need an entire novel.
The framework of the novel took some more time to
piece together— it is so much larger than a short story, and there are so many
more details to figure out; it does not help that my work as a scientist is
physically and intellectually draining most of the time, leaving me with little
energy to devote to writing on a regular basis. Still, the pieces slowly came
together. Shards of the original story survived and were enlarged upon: the
virus, the subway train, the evil drug lord, and the corporation. The character
of Sara arrived, and I wasn’t sure who she was or what she did at first— until
I took an interest in ceramic art, and started to learn more about how ceramics
are constructed. My brother Fred passed away in 2003, and he makes an
appearance in this book as the character of Loki, also a computer genius. The
world of Ception and the characters indigenous to
that planet are familiar to me from my previous novel, Perigee, and
perhaps it is cheating, but I thought it would be fun to visit them again,
briefly.
And so, after all these many years, Seth’s story is
finally being written down on paper. I hope he is pleased, and that you enjoy
your brief visit into his world.
Copyright
Elizabeth Bent 2005