Splinter Universe

Agent of Change, Summing Up

So, I finished reading Agent of Change some while back. A couple of things struck me, that I’ll talk about here in no particular order.

First is that the reviewer who said that there was more action in this one book than in many trilogies, was not indulging in (too much) hyperbole.

I, as many, continue to adore the Clutch in general, and Edger, specifically.

The panic attack that locks Val Con into the Loop on Edger’s ship — that was Steve, who, unfortunately, was prone to panic attacks for all the years I knew him.

I recall the conversation, when I was waving my hands in the air and trying to explain the shape of what I thought needed to go right here, and Steve said, suddenly and firmly, “Right. He has a panic attack.” And he got up from the kitchen table, carried his wine to the typewriter, and wrote that scene, right there, right then.

We’ve told this next story many times, but for those who may have tuned in late — the original “outline” had Val Con steal Edger’s ship. I was lead on the book, and was typing merrily along on my day off (I was working three days a week at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the Modern Languages department at that point), got everybody up to the space station and it was time for Val Con to steal the ship and!

My fingers stopped.

The story stopped.

Val Con stopped.

I got up, got myself a diet Pepsi, came back to the typewriter — nothing happened. I looked at the sheet of paper where Steve had written our “outline.” I showed the sheet of paper to Val Con.

“It says here,” I told him, “that you have to steal Edger’s spaceship now.”

He refused, and the story stayed stalled until Steve came home, and asked how the writing had gone.

“Val Con won’t steal the spaceship,” I told him. “I tried talking to him, but he just won’t.”

“But he’s got to steal that ship,” Steve said. “They can’t stay on the station; they’re on the run. If they stop, the Juntavas’ll catch up.”

“I told him that,” I said.

“Well,” Steve said. “I’ll go talk to him.” And he headed for the typewriter.

I finished getting dinner into the oven, and, noticing a lack of keys clicking from the other room, went to find out how the man-to-man was going.

Steve looked up from the unmarked sheet of paper in the typewriter, and said, “You’re right. He won’t steal the spaceship.”

So, that was when we learned the priceless lesson, “If the story stops, you took a wrong turn.”

We sat down at the kitchen table with our typescript, and went through it.

“How about this,” Steve said. “At the party at the Grotto, what if Edger gives him the ship?”

“That might work,” I said. “The reason he won’t steal it is because Edger’s his friend — his brother. And he won’t steal from a friend. It’s an honor thing.”

“Then, let’s change this here –” he pointed at the paragraph. “And have Edger maybe remind him that the resources of the Clan — which include the ship — are his to use, if he needs to?”

It was my turn to go to the typewriter. I made the change, and the next day when I sat down to see how things were going at the space station, the story flowed like water.

It struck me when, on Edger’s ship, Val Con presents himself to Miri as a man with a couple cantra in his pocket and a minor skill on the omnichora. It seems from this that he doesn’t intend to go home. Of course, we didn’t at that point know what was going to happen, going forward, Clan Korval being not much more than a name to us. But now — resonance being what it is — it seems like the Loop was still acting on him.

The exchange with the Yxtrang commander was a little — um. The hysteresis effect was all Steve, as were the workings of the electron substitution drive, and what it would look like in operation.

Another story we’ve told before: Agent of Change was written on Uncle Harry, a second hand “electrified” typewriter we’d bought on time at the local stationery store. (“Electrified” meant that the machine had started life as a manual typewriter and later on, someone had “converted” it to an electric typewriter. You still had to hit the return by hand, and when you turned the machine on, it RUMBLED, and you could hear it not only in all rooms of our (very small) townhouse, but out into the parking lot.)

So, I was typing the clean, submission, copy of Agent, and I smelled — smoke. I figured maybe the next door neighbors were having a cookout, and ignored it.

As I was taking a page out and rolling another in, I noticed that the smoke was coming from Uncle Harry.

I considered unplugging him — no, really, I did. But I only had two pages to go, and we were so close to having the book finished, and I did type really fast.

So, I gambled. And, not to brag — I won. I was in fact typing the last page with little flames coming out of the back of Harry, and Steve had just walked in to ask if I smelled smoke, when I was rolling the last page out.

He pulled the plug, and notably didn’t ask me if I was nuts.

We put Harry in the trunk of the car and took him down to the stationery story, but — there was nothing to be done. Uncle Harry was dead.

And we had a manuscript to submit.

So, what happened here?

Some people have noticed that the Liaden Read-Along has, to put it gently, foundered.

Some people, not necessarily the same people, have wondered what the heck is going on with that.

I will explain.

For those who are short of time and impatient with explanations, or excuses, the short form is: I was over-ambitious.

That’s it. You may move on, as the rest of what I’m going to say past this point is an elaboration on that single fact.

Still with me?

OK.

So — over-ambitious. I had a book to finish — not due until mid-April, but I had already missed two self-imposed deadlines for producing a draft that was complete enough that I could ask beta readers for help. Ordinarily — ah. Old speech forms. What I mean to say is — Previously, I would have talked out scenes, concepts and characters with Steve and he would, in essence, since I’m Lead on this book, help me catch unfruitful discursions on the fly. I no longer have that luxury, and so find that I don’t know how long it actually takes to write a book, single-brained — thus the missed deadlines.

The alert reader will have noticed that mid-April isn’t getting any further away, so I — pushed to make it to An Ending, basically ignoring everything else in the process.

I wasn’t helped in my last minute push by the manifestation of Murphy, who decreed that I would catch a “viral something” just after the new year, so I couldn’t write for a few days.

However! I have just achieved the Good Enough for Rock ‘n Roll Draft and will be putting out a call for Beta Readers.

Which means I’ll have a couple weeks to catch up on all that stuff I let slide.

Including commentary on the Liaden Books.

I will not be continuing in a chapter-by-chapter sort of way — for one thing, I’ve been reading in the evenings, and I’m half-way through Carpe Diem, while the commentary stalled at Chapter Six in Agent of Change — and for another, that really wasn’t working for me.

What I will be doing is commenting on the books, on things that struck me, surprises, dismays, and reflections of Real Life into fiction.

And that? Is where we are. Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm for the concept of a read-along, and I hope you’ll continue to read on until the end of Diviner’s Bow.

I certainly intend to do so.

As we pause for freeform commentary

So, some people have asked some good questions/made comments, and I’m stopping the action here to answer a few of them.

First, we have the on-going hilarity regarding Liadens being thought “short” at what is more or less average height for USians.

I am a USian, as was Steve. In my youth, Science showed us that people were getting taller as time moved on. The average height for a man in 1900 was 5 feet 7 inches. In 1984, when Agent of Change was written, the average man was +/-5 feet 10 inches. Steve was of average height.

In 1900, 5 foot 2 inches was the average height for a woman. In 1984, that had increased to 5 foot 4 inches. I was a giantess at 6 foot even.

So, it seemed to us — extrapolating (i.e. If This Goes On) — that, if the trend among USians to get taller continued, by the time we got around to Agent of Change, 6 foot for an average Terran female wouldn’t be totally out of line. Liadens would then be short at what were average heights in the 1900s.

I note this totally ignores the fact that even here on our own planet, there are racial groups who tend to be taller and others who tend to be shorter.

Steve had thrown out the idea at one point that Liadens were smaller and “more efficient” because they had been space-going for a long time. Which gave rise to the notion that Loopers might be shorter than other sorts of Terrans. We may have mentioned Loopers as recognizable as a “type” once or twice, and if so, that’s where that came from.
* * * * * *
Second!

Yeah, the quickness of that bond forming between our heroes is really — wow. I think there are a couple of things at work there. Let me see if I can break them out:

1. In the stories I had been telling myself for years, in which Val Con and Miri were the main characters, they were always together — a team. So, starting out with them leading separate lives was a vary, which I now believe the characters were fighting to fix as fast as they could.

2. Today’s General Social Wisdom is that, not only does Love At First Sight not exist, but it’s a pernicious, dangerous, and potentially deadly fable created by men to keep women subservient. To which I say that anything can be weaponized, given a sufficiently ruthless person or system, but to say Love at First Sight does not exist is a fable just as dangerous to the happiness of human beings.

2a. Steve and I had an immediate connection. I kid you not, they probably heard us click in Towson, when we met. And the Fiction Writer’s Wisdom, misleading of course, as all good wisdoms are, is: Write what you know.

2b. On a surprising number of levels, Agent of Change is a story of Steve and Sharon, from Miri’s Baltimore street smarts and inferiority complex to Steve’s twisty creativity and panic attacks.

So, yeah, I think all that’s working together in these first chapters. Later, of course, we find that these people are, in fact, two halves of a whole, but I don’t think that the concept of “lifemates” as a “wizard’s match” came into its own until Carpe Diem, when Val Con looks inside his own head and realizes what he’s seeing (It was fitting; the Universe owed much — or something of that nature) — and that only happened because we wrote Conflict of Honors, more or less by accident, in-between.

Going just a little further — Agent of Change was the first novel either of us had written. We had written short stories, but characters are . . . different in short stories. This is not to say that they’re easier to push around. In fact, if there is one piece of Wisdom I would offer to my fellow writers it would be to never go into a fictional situation believing you can make your characters do what you want them to do. Do this and you will lose — either the characters will go on strike, or you’ll produce a broken story. The best thing you can hope for is that the characters will wrest the story from under your undeserving fingers and go on as they meant to do.

Anyway — error of inexperience. We were certainly aware enough to twig to the fact that something was wrong when Val Con flat out refused to do any more work. But we were definitely not up to the nuances of two people who were destined to work together, trying to fix An Error visited upon them by their writers.

Here endeth your auctorial handwaving for the day.

Agent of Change Chapters Three, Four, Five, Six

Chapter Three: The bargrill was near the shuttleport, a smoky, noisy place crowded with grease-apes, shuttle-toughs, fuelies, and any number of local street-livers.

And now the tables turn. We learn the red-haired lady’s name — Robertson. Miri Robertson. — an echo of 007 there — and also her professions: mercenary soldier and bodyguard. Val Con was right: this lady is formidable by trade.

The reader is given a lot of information in this scene — Liadens, we’re told, count coup, but Terrans don’t, Miri using this as her reason for refusing his idea of her owing him, because she, after all, is Terran.

He seems startled, but makes another argument — “It is dishonorable for a soldier not to know the enemy!” — and that one makes sense to her. We learn who’s after her and why. And it’s decided — or, rather, Val Con decides — that she will continue to accompanying him. He offers her a change of identity. Which in retrospect is a very odd thing for him to offer. But we don’t know that, yet. Still coming to terms with the fact that she’s alive, and having no place else to go, Miri follows him.

Arriving at Cargo Master Phillips’ apartment on the wealthy side of town, we get more characterization. Miri’s not used to fine things; Val Con is. She tries a bit of banter; he answers in kind. They’re both literally too tired to fight. Miri retires, but Val Con — Val Con recites his own name — all of it, and has a teatime of the soul, giving us a quick look of the life of a spy with specialty in impersonating other people. He wonders how many people he has killed in the last three Standards — and now we know how long he’s been doing this. And suddenly, he gets up — to play music, and to find — or at least look for — himself.

There may still be three people in the world who don’t know this, so for them I will say: Agent of Change was written in three months, and to the music from the Talking Heads’ album “Stop Making Sense,” particularly “Life During Wartime” and “Once in a Lifetime.” There is a particularly poignant line in “Lifetime”: And you may ask yourself: Am I right or am I wrong?/And you may say to yourself, “My god, what have I done?

Chapter Four: Miri woke and stretched slowly, eyes focusing on the clock across the room.

Next morning’s newspaper and a breakfast confrontation. I wrote the scene. Steve wrote Selene‘s ad for a new cargo master. Steve had a way with a classified ad. I am amused by Val Con ordering milk out of the chef. When I met him, Steve preferred milk to coffee, and I wrote it like I saw it.

I am little unhappy with Miri’s decision to send a deadly, crazy guy to her fostermother. On the other hand, the concept of “partners” seems to be working powerfully on Val Con and on Miri, and Liz herself, though she gives him a hard time and makes obligatory protective parent noises, doesn’t find him completely unlikely. And Miri is therefore reunited with the few items she considers to be the most valuable things she owns.

Miri’s adventures with the collection agency and the making of the tape seem unnecessarily complex on this reading and I am actually unhappy with, “I think you look like a whore.” I do like, “Are you going to wash your face?”

I am likewise unhappy with the little interaction with Pete; and the supposed ending zinger, though I suppose that could be in character for Cargo Master Philips. I remain deeply in love with triggering the smoke detectors by setting brandy on fire to achieve a diversion.

Chapter Five: He was male, though that rarely mattered to him.

While our heroes are being evacuated along with the other residents, the authors direct our attention to the lobby, where a new character has just entered the story.

Edger as he finally came to be written is formed from two characters.

From Steve came the insurance salesbeing, Honest John. John sold life insurance. Which was to say, if you bought insurance from John, he would make sure nobody killed you. This occasionally became . . . complicated, if not outright bloody.

From me came The Green People, who had existed, when I was telling Miri and Val Con stories inside my head, to mix up the plot when it got too hard for me to fix by doing something Alien and inscrutable. The Green People’s actions didn’t have to make sense, because they were aliens.

Steve wrote the introduction to Edger and his brothers. I’m a little sad, now, that Edger didn’t get to listen to the concert they were originally walking out to observe. On the other hand, he did still get music. While Steve was busy with the Clutch, I got Val Con and Miri into the lobby and behind the shrubbery. Steve wrote the meeting between the brothers; I wrote the cop (And take this zoo with you!) and Miri’s commentary.

One more thing about the scene in the lobby. In the copy edits, there was an editorial note by Val Con’s speech that begins, “I am honored that you recognize the workmanship,” that said, more-or-less Nobody who talks like this would have forgotten the word AUNT (referencing Val Con’s confusion at breakfast). And I remember refuting that with: But, somebody’s messed with his head. It’s characterization. Astonishingly, it was let to stand.

At Edger’s hotel, a meal is shared and introductions are made. Miri has some native wit, aside being a smart aleck. We learn that Edger and his brothers are on a sales trip, investigating markets for the knives their clan — Middle River (both Steve’s stepfather and my grandfather had camps on Middle River, back in the day). We learn that Clutch and humans think of time very differently, and that Val Con had promised to return to Edger’s clan . . . someday.

Then, it’s time for entertainment, and Miri is musical too!.

Chapter Six: The staff at the hyatt in Econsey were even more impressed with the members of Edger’s group than the staff at the City House, where they’d spent the previous night had been.

Edger likes his luxury, too, and Miri’s way over her head. Also, the guy who owes isn’t being easy to track down, and money is becoming a serious issue for her. As she’s considering her present situation, it occurs to her she has a resource to hand, and that perhaps it might be wise to ask a question about one of her treasures.

Edger, in the meantime, is out paying sales calls and makes what seems to be a fortuitous connection. And, yes, the lovely box that Mr. Justin Hostro has procured for his daughter’s birthday! How could such a piece of art fail to delight? I wrote that. I regret nothing.

In another part of Edger’s suite, Val Con’s Chance of Personal Survival is lower than Chance of Mission Success. He ignores this in favor of finding more music in the chora, until he’s startled by Miri tossing her enamel disk down in front of him. The authors immediately — and wisely — make the choice to “prove” that this is not a stolen item — Val Con knows the device and the Clan to which it’s attached. From the geneology on the opposite side, we learn that Miri was named for her grandmother, and that the name Val Con gives as Tiazan is known by her to be Tayzin — what we may take for a Terranized version.

Val Con tells us about his father, his mother and his mother’s death.

This is one of those things that makes it look like we had planned everything that has ever occurred in the Liaden Univese before (or at least while we were writing) the first book. In fact, we didn’t plan everything out, and Agent of Change itself is practically stream of consciousness. What Steve and I excelled at was going back through what we’d already written and pulling out useful threads to riff on, later.

The Loop takes advantage of the unguarded moment to goad Val Con into an attack — which he aborts. He sits down and delivers one of the most brilliant and poignant speeches in this book — Steve wrote it –“tools are programmed to protect themselves.” He warns her, right there. Tells her as plain as he’s able that he’s not trustworthy; that even he doesn’t know what he might do. It’s an act of selfless bravery, though neither realizes it.

Handler arrives with the news that there’s to be a party downstairs. Val Con gives Miri a weapon, and addresses her in the wrong dialect.

And I believe I’ll stop here for a bit.

General Notes: Say what you will, this book zips along, and we’re not even 100 pages in. It was said in the Locus review that there was more action in this single novel than in some trilogies, and — I say this humbly — Locus was not wrong.

I’d like to thank everyone who is taking part for their patience, enthusiasm and insights.

Agent of Change Chapters One and Two

The Man Who was not Terrance O’Grady

. . .comes to the point, I’m not entirely certain how to proceed. Well. Let’s try it this way, and we’ll adjust things as needed, as we go along.

CHAPTER ONE: In which the man who was not Terrance O’Grady had come quietly.

And that right there is the first line that started It All. Originally, I thought it was enough to support a novel; Steve insisted that it would support seven. Turns out we were both wrong.

It’s kind of interesting that I can remember bits that were written by Steve, and bits that were written by me — the first line being a case in that point — and lines that were fixed somewhere along the line, though I’m not always clear if one of us did the fixing or Del Rey took it in hand.

Now, giving the lie to my contention that I remember Everything — I don’t remember what the original 60 pages were. I remember that we were challenged to rewrite those pages into something “less cartoonish,” and I remember that we did not change the first line.

There’s a lot of setup going on in this chapter: the reader is assured that they’re in a science fiction novel — we have asteroid mining! we have trade imbalances and the names of other races: Yxtrang, Liaden, Terrans, rude turtles! We have desks imported from Earth, and cheesy-talking villains likewise. And,there appears to be a . . . device inside the head of the prisoner. What’s that about, anyway?

Regarding the prisoner, we’ve been told straight off who he’s not, and now the reader’s mission is to find out who he is. We’re soon to know that he’s not a pushover hand-to-hand, despite being a short, thin guy. We also find out that he fights dirty.

And as the chapter ends, though we’ve established that the little man is a ‘geek spy’ in addition to not being Terrance O’Grady, and we’re offered three choices of what kind of ‘geek’: Yxtrang, Liaden, turtle.

But we still don’t know who he is.

The walk down the alley, up the lift, and into Mr. Jager’s office was largely written Steve, with me hanging over his shoulder (sometimes literally, because I had never had to revise to editorial demand before and had no idea what to do). You may, by the way, take it as given that any expression by the Loop in this novel was written by Steve.

I remember Steve telling me to describe the desk, which memory insists had already been characterized as ‘beautiful.’ I remember, in fact, writing in the rare woods that had been imported from Earth. And I remember going down to the next paragraph and typing, “The man behind the desk was also imported from Earth, and he was not beautiful.” And I remember Steve laughing, and saying, “Good!”

Reading the whole scene in Mr. Jager’s office as it was published, which is not High Literature — Mr. Jager apparently read too many five cent spy novels — I’m really glad we were challenged to fix whatever the original words had been.
#

CHAPTER TWO: Dripping, he kept to back streets, passing silently through the deepest shadows.

Once again with the cheap spy novels, but a guy’s gotta have an undocumented place to rest after blowing up a building, after all.

Steve wrote Mr. Not-O’Grady’s divesting himself of his disguise; I wrote the description of the man who arises from the disguise: no limp, no glasses, knives disposed, new set of papers in order, apparently sufficient money, since he doesn’t tell us he’ll be robbing a bank.

Mission accomplished, and he’s headed out, paying off the apartment in cash, burning the bogus papers and the leftover chemicals, spreading the used clothing in various alleyways, and we learn the name of the planet we’re on, and that there’s a spaceport.

I remember when we got the page proofs (we having not known enough to demand that we see the galleys) and somewhere in the walk away from the apartment, a complete random “flaming greaseape” appeared on the street. We were able to get that struck.

Right about here, we have an interesting development. The sound of gunfire. Does our ‘geek spy’ ignore it, like a sensible man?

He does not. He runs toward it.

Now what? says the reader.

That’s a pretty good firefight, if I say it myself. Steve wrote it.

And I felt a — spark, actually, when the red-haired woman comes back from trying to take down the guy who got away, checks on the man who saved her life, and says, “Awwww, damn.”

We immediately learn of the red-haired lady that she pays her debts. She does not leave the stranger lying unconscious in the alley. She takes him with her to her safe house, and such is her self-assurance, that I didn’t even ask why.

Arrived at the safe place, and her rescuer still unconscious, she opens his pouch, reads his papers, cusses some more, and returns the papers, and though we know there’s money in that pouch — she doesn’t take it.

I’ve always liked this scene, which, yes, I wrote. The reader gets more information, but what does it mean? A Middle River blade? What’s that? We also get a description of the red-haired woman, and the judgment of the man we know to be a professional that she’s formidable. So formidable, in fact, that he would have to kill her in order to assure his clean escape from her toils, and, to his own surprise, he’s ‘disinclined’ to do so.

The interaction shows that the red-haired woman is also a wiseguy — “Hi, there, Thrillseeker.” — and more than just formidable with a gun. She insists on the truth, and apparently, she gets it, winning for herself and also the patient reader — his name! What a relief.

And now what?

Having determined that he can take care of himself, she throws him out in order to pursue her own plans.

He leaves, and as he’s walking toward the infobooth, counting heads, and doing sums, he realizes that the woman’s enemies have found her.

There’s a phrase missing in this bit, BTW. There had been this: “Would she have sent him out to be her Trojan?” It was the wrong phrase, and whoever took it out was right to do so, but I missed it, and had to read the scene twice to make sure it wasn’t there.

Val Con is still debating with himself when one of the people after the red-haired woman accosts him, bringing him back into the dispute on her side.

Bad guys dispatched, Val Con and the lady (who, for all her insistence on the truth, hasn’t exactly been free with her name) pause to make peace between themselves, only to realize that there’s more trouble on the way, and leave.

Together.