While I was drifting off to sleep the other night the title
of a story popped into my head: The Sky Trees of Holdar. Now this isn’t a new
title but one I made up many years ago. All I had for the story was a mental
image of floating trees – spherical growths like mistletoe – between which
people were cycling about on floating bicycles, one of the people looking very
Victorian and wearing a stovepipe hat. This was a story that, so to speak,
never got off the ground and I believe a piece of it resides in the depths of
my ‘BitsSF’ file.
This got me to thinking about some other stuff that went
through my mental processor and either got discarded or used in a different
way. I remember, when I was maybe 16 or 17, starting to write something that
was a mish-mash of hazy ideas and stuff swiped from books I’d read (as all such
early writing is). I had a title for it: The Crab, the Serpent and the
Carpenter. I liked this title but hadn’t got a great deal to fit it. The title,
I suspect, took its form from books read in my early teens (or earlier – long
time ago now) like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In this I visualized a world that consisted mostly of mud
flats, which probably arose from the mud flats of the Essex coast and my
experience of struggling through them for miles on fishing trips. It had giant
glassy centipedes that skimmed across the surface and would of course kill any
human they found. Here then was the serpent, which owed its genesis to a
strange combination of the sandworms of Dune (because I’m sure a product of
their life cycle was some kind of drug) and fishing again, well, bait digging. A
character in it was Councillor Ebulan the Crab. I enjoyed describing him but
thereafter had no idea what to do with him. The project died a death after a
number of pages and disappeared, but the ideas didn’t. Ebulan the Crab was the
start of the prador and put in an appearance in The Skinner. And over the years
the ‘glass serpents’ transformed into hooders.
14 comments:
Fascinating.
Yup, it reminds me of the first time I read Neal's first book, The Parasite, years after I started reading his other stuff. So many of the finer Polity details were recognisably there, in embryonic form.
of interest?
http://vimeo.com/58950548
Yes Jez, it reminds of the parasite wrapped round one of the victim's spine which, incidentally, I'm sure was a scene that was swiped for Babylon 5 (only kidding).
Yeah, love that stuff vaude.
I wonder if you are familiar
with some of the Cambrian
fauna found in the Burgess
Shale? Judging from artist's interpretations of the fossils,
the so-called Cambrian
Explosion produced some truly phantasmagorical creatures.
Might they have, at some point,
been fodder for your imagination?
Spent three years of my earlier - very much earlier - life analysing estuarine fish gut contents and the mouth parts of the ragworms and related polychaete worms were often the only recognisable bits. And before that I worked with shore crabs. So the post struck a chord and left me fascinated to read how you could spin such slender threads of memory into such great stories.
whoah whoah....wait. was The Technician actually a well disguised fantasy? aw jeez..
Unknown, in reality I don't need to go to the Burgess Shale for that fodder. The natural world around us is as fantastic as it is. Take this latest one for example: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bird-plane-squid.html However, I have read up on the Burgess Shale both out of interest and for research into Cowl.
Trainer John, can't get enough of that stuff. Much of The Skinner I think arises from childhood holidays mucking about in Scottish rock pools.
What makes you think that, Vaude? No, that early story was SF and I moved on to trying out fantasy later.
I can certainly see how, with a little adjustment of scale, the ragworm (Lord, how I hated digging them up for bait as a little kid!) might have transformed into the hooder!
Your spherical mistletoe-like trees remind me of the trees in Baxter's Raft.
Mike, they scared me as kid too, especially when I was showed the pincers that extruded.
That is an amzing Squid. Who knew? And thus proving day after day, you learn something new every day.
So 'squids in space' looking less unlikely, Graeme?
was joking about the fantasy bit.
you know?
http://vimeo.com/59330169
stones have feelings too.
http://www.messagetoeagle.com/livingstones.php
Ah, thought you were referring to my early fantasy writing, Vaude.
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