odpoved: preklad neni zatim k dispozici |
answer: AFRICAN GENESIS
The call has gone out for some Where-Do-You-Get-Those-
Crazy-Ideas articles, and since the genesis of my forthcoming
novel, _Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future_, is still fresh and
clear in my mind, I decided to tackle it.
Back in 1983 or 1984, while I was researching something quite
different about Africa, I came across a mention of an animal known
only as the Kilimanjaro Elephant. It was an evocative name that
seemed to have a mythic quality to it, so I began finding out what
I could about this elephant -- and what I found fascinated me.
In the _Roland Ward Book of Big Game Records_, the top 200
trophy animals of every African species are listed. Usually the
difference between the Number One and Number Twenty animals is
half an inch, or a quarter of a pound. No so with the Kilimanjaro
Elephant: his tusks weighed 237 and 225 pounds, and no other tusk
in history ever went over 190 pounds. He was a monster among his
own kind.
There was more, too -- or, rather, curiously less. With
almost every other animal in the book, they know the date it was
killed, who shot it, what kind of bullet was used, where it was
shot, who the guide or white hunter was, what the animal's
measurements were. Not so the Kilimanjaro Elephant: they think,
but do not know, that he was killed on the northern slopes of
Mount Kilimanjaro; they suspect, but do not know, that he was
killed in 1898; they surmise, but do not know, that he was killed
by an escaped slave. And that constitutes everything that is known
about him.
Well, everything prior to his death, anyway. His ivory turned
up for auction at Zanzibar in 1898. One tusk, the larger one, was
bought by an American, who was to pick it up in Cairo. It was
shipped north with a slave caravan, but the caravan was raided and
the tusk disappeared for twelve years, finally turning up in
Brussels. The other tusk went to Belgium, then India, and
ultimately England. Finally the British Museum of Natural History
bought the pair of them in 1932, and after an attempt was made to
steal them in 1937, they were taken off exhibit and stored away in
a vault beneath the museum, where they still reside. I wrote to
the curator for permission to examine them, and finally got to see
them in May of 1985. They are magnificent, each measuring more
than ten feet long and two feet in circumference at the base.
I then began tracing every reference I could find in my
volumimous African library, and finally plotted out a mainstream
novel, which would follow the Kilimanjaro Elephant for the last
month of his life, and then follow the ivory on an entirely
fictitious journey until it wound up in the British Museum.
I called Eleanor Wood, my agent, bubbling with enthusiasm
about the story. She listened politely, then told me that if I did
a bang-up job on it, she might be able to get me as much as I
could get for a short story for _Omni_. Whereas, she continued, if I
would remember that I am supposed to be a science fiction writer
and that that's where my audience is, and if I would follow the
ivory not just to England but into space, and not just for a
period of 34 years but for five or six millennia, she could get me
30 or 40 times as much as a short story for Omni.
A word to the wise was sufficient, and I began expanding the
scope of the book -- and suddenly realized that I could tell a
much more powerful tale with this approach. I created two framing
devices -- a future researcher for the 64th-Century equivalent of
Roland Ward, and the spirit of the Kilimanjaro Elephant -- and
each told alternating sections of the book. The main novel, about
60,000 words, was a straight-line narrative by the researcher. But
as he keeps searching for the ivory, the story segues into about a
dozen incidents, perhaps 90,000 words total, in which the tusks
appear at various times and places -- as stakes in a poker game,
as objects of alien religious rites, as pawns in a scholarly
battle between two paleontologists, and so forth. I told these
tales of the ivory non-sequentially for reasons I hope will be
clear to the reader by the time he finishes the book.
This approach allowed me to write about the foibles and
nobilities of Man, which is the business of every writer, rather
than some silly hide-and-seek adventure about a pair of elephant
tusks, and the main continuing story allowed me to enlist the
metaphysical as well as the factual in accessing the human
condition.
Since a couple of the stories occurred during the elephant's
lifetime, all that remained was to take a safari to Kenya in 1986
and retrace his steps on his last journey from the Tana River to
the slopes of Kilimanjaro, which I did -- and which I also wrote
up and sold as an article to _Swara_, the journal of the East
African Wildlife Society.
Then it was just a matter of sitting down and writing _Ivory:
A Legend of Past and Future_, which took about five months. I think
the hardest part was creating differing technologies and
backgrounds -- none of them important to the plot, but each of
them vitally important to the versimillitude of the story -- for a
dozen different future eras. The pre-publication reviews it has
received thus far all agree that it is my best novel to date, and
I have no serious argument with that assessment. When it is
published by Tor this summer, it will not only have a jacket by
Michael Whelan, but will also feature a photograph of the
Kilimanjaro Elephant's tusks -- quite possibly the first time in
history that a work of fiction will feature a frontespiece
displaying its non-fictional source. |