Beyond the Farthest Suns by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

I might be called on board the production as a sketch artist. I thought I was better suited to being a technical advisor, or even a script consultant, but what the hell. It was a job, and an interesting one.
    I left behind the issue of Galaxy Magazine that contained “The Venging.”
    I never got the job.
    Eventually, Space Probe One became The Black Hole. It was Peter Ellenshaw’s last film, a beautiful production incorporating many technical advances, but otherwise it was pretty abysmal. Oddly enough, there had been a change made in the original movie concept. After passing through the film’s glowing, geometric toilet-bowl of a black hole, the good guys end up in a kind of mystical heaven—painted onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The bad guy, played by German actor Maximilian Schell, ends up quite literally in a Dantean Hell, entombed in his evil robot and surrounded by flames.
    Shades of the end of “The Venging”? We’ll never know, very likely.
    It was ironic, however, that this multi-million dollar production thudded to a halt with an awful pun. The evil robot is named Maximilian. Maximilian Schell ends up in Hell, in Maximilian’s shell.
    I wonder if anyone at Disney got the joke.
    As an after-after-note, I called Disney Studios at one point and Ron Miller answered the phone. Wow! I’ve never had that experience since—or talked to another studio head in person, for that matter. Charming.
    After-after-after note: I could not quite understand why Anna was so down on living forever in this and subsequent stories. Clearly, I was working through some ethical issues. But most of my fiction avoided the topic of biological immortality in later years. (In the Thistledown books, people die but have their mentalities uploaded into City Memory—a prospect that seems to me less and less likely, barring transporter-beam superscience.)
    I further explored my issues and objections to biological immortality in Vitals, published in early 2002. I doubt that I’ve reached any final conclusions, however.
    Neither did Anna, as we learn in “Perihesperon.”

Perihesperon
    I n the middle and late seventies, Roger Elwood was cutting a swath through science fiction with a plethora of anthologies and a line of SF novels published by Harlequin in Canada, famed for knock-‘em-out-by-the-ream formulaic romances, much loved by a large group of devoted readers. Elwood’s line was called Laser Books, and it was advertised to the trade through catalogs minus author names—a no-no in science fiction publishing, where readers care who is writing what. The line folded, but not before publishing novels by Tim Powers, R. Faraday Nelson, and many other up-and-coming writers. I never wrote a Laser Book, but I did sell a short story to one of Elwood’s original anthologies, Tomorrow: New Worlds of Science Fiction.
    This was my first appearance in hardcover (1975, the same year as “The Venging”) and needless to say, I was extremely pleased with myself. I was living with my first wife, Tina, in an apartment in Costa Mesa, writing and painting and trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps while fitfully marketing a novel called Hegira. I was a newlywed, idealistic and energetic, and I remember those years as pretty good times, full of growth.
    I was most of the way through another novel, a time travel piece called The Kriti Cylinder that would get shelved before it was sent out to publishers. And I was plotting a story called “Mandala,” which was later bought by Robert Silverberg for his anthology New Dimensions 8 .
    Elwood would later move on to make a name for himself in Christian publishing, and to help First Lady Nancy Reagan write her autobiography.
    â€œPerihesperon” is something of a downer, all about inevitable doom and bravery. It contains some back story on Anna Sigrid Nestor, however, and isn’t that bad, after all these years.
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