Galactic Dreams

Many times many people, eyebrows raised, have asked me why I did this or that. Like driving to Mexico with an infant. Or going to Denmark for a one month visit and staying for seven years. My answer, quite often, is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. People with regular jobs, mortgaged homes, children in school and a pension hovering goldenly in the distance are often infuriated by this answer.

But it is a true one, not a glib or evasive answer. We were committed to the freelance life. And enjoyed living someplace else. For a writer it was paradise. Learning new languages, living in new cultures, responding to new realities, ideas, experiences. I am more than blessed that Joan shares my enthusiasms.

On the jacket of the German translation of one of my novels is a German expression. It refers to me as a Weltenbummler. Was I being called a world bum? Not nice. Professor T. A. Shippey, science-fiction scholar and linguist, set me right. “No, not a bum, Harrison — though others may think differently. It is an ancient and good German term, not too different from our word `apprentice.’

Or better `journeyman,’ as in journeyman printer. A novice working at a skilled trade would go from workplace to workplace, learning new skills and crafts.”

I think the Germans are right about me. Weltenbummler indeed. Everything new, different, interesting, educational becomes part of a writer’s life. It is all grist for the creative mill. Many times the connection is obvious; I wrote Captive Universe after living in Mexico, seeing the life there in the isolated villages, discovering how these people understood their world. ‘In Our Hands the Stars’ uses Denmark as a setting; the people, their attitude towards life, shape the structure of the novel.

Those are the obvious examples. But there are subtler threads in my writing, many times things that I am not aware of, that are pointed out by critics or friends. Or enemies? I do not wish to put down Peoria, home of that fine writer Philip Jose Farmer, but I do feel that there is more to the world than Peoria. I have lived for extended periods, for months and years, in a total of six countries. I have visited at least sixty more. I feel enriched by the experience. More important — I feel that my work has been enriched.

Circumstance, and residing outside my native country for some thirty-odd years, have certainly changed me. The way I think, the way I write. I am an internationalist now, feeling that no single country is better than another. Though there are certainly some that are worse. I speak Esperanto like a native, or as Damon Knight once said, “Harry speaks the worst English and the best Esperanto I have ever heard.”

I have traveled with this international language and made friends right around the globe.

Fragments from the traveler’s life: In Moscow, many years ago, a reader gave me one of my books in Russian. Not published, but in samizdat. That is, typed out by hand, circulated privately. Honor enough — and honor is about all an author can get out of Russia in the foreseeable future. Since the Soviets did not sign an important international copyright agreement, it is not illegal to steal foreign books and publish them there. I have recently discovered that I am the most pirated SF author in Russia. Which means the most popular foreign author. A boost for the ego; a sigh for the bank account.

Another fragment: Osaka, Japan. I was the first-ever foreign SF writer to be the Guest of Honor at a Japanese national convention. The twentieth annual convention. (Honored perhaps because I paid my own way there?) Much signing of books, signing the back of the jacket of one of the fans. Who, when he thought I wasn’t looking, pressed it to his heart and raised his eye heavenward in thanks. So much for the inscrutable Orient; a thoughtful look at the way SF readers prize this form of fiction.

Rio de Janeiro: Meeting a millionaire SF fan. Who never thought he would meet the author of some of his favorite books. Signing copies of my paperbacks — bound in leather.

Signing a copy of a Finnish translation of a book in Helsinki. And realizing I had never signed a contract for this book.

Doing the same in Germany, an ugly-looking translation of Deathworld, retitled for some obscure Teutonic reason Planet aus die falsch Zauberer, or Planet of the False Wizards.

Gallic fragment: Joan and I having lunch in Paris with Jacques Sadoul and important French SF people. Jacques, a camera fiend, clicking away as always. Within a month he sent a copy of his just-published French encyclopedia of science fiction, years in production. With our picture in it — looking very filled with food and wine. The book had already been printed, but not bound when we had that lunch. He saw to it that the event was immortalized in the glossy photo section that was bound in.