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Today, my latest story, "The Star-Bear," goes online at Tor.com. It was edited by Jonathan Strahan and illustrated by Bill Mayer. The illustration is directly above.
To mark the occasion, I've written an essay explaining what went into this particular story, why I wrote it, and some of its hidden allusions. I recommend that you go to Tor.com and read the story first and then come back and read what I had to say. Then again, there are people in this world who eat dessert first. You know which type you are better than I do.
You can find the story here. Or you can go to Tor.com and poke around. It's well worth doing.
Writing "The Star-Bear"
I used to be president of the world.
Okay, technically I was president of the International Union
of Writers1 and it was only an honorary position. But the honor
meant a lot to me because it had been arranged by my friends in Russia. I’ve
been to Russia several times over the past two decades and attended Roscon, the
national SF convention, twice and Aelita, the country’s oldest SF convention
three times (one of them virtual). I had the opportunity to become good friends
with many writers, and fans there. I think the world of them.
There is something about Russia, or perhaps I mean the
Russian people, that grabs you by the heart. It’s elusive and hard to explain,
but I’ve heard it called “the strangeness of the Russian soul.” Puzzling over
that strangeness led me to write two stories set in Siberia, “Libertarian
Russia” and “Pushkin the American.”2 As the titles will tell you,
they were genre, not mainstream.
Then the Russian army invaded Ukraine. I had no choice but
to resign my position with the IUW.
My Russian friends were outraged. They had bought into
Putin’s potent mix of truths, half-truths, slanders, conspiracy theories, and
lies. I happened to know something of the subject, so I posted an essay online explaining
why the claim that the U.S. had 32 “bioweapon labs” in Ukraine, ready to
unleash plagues upon their helpless motherland was a dark fantasy and ridiculous
to boot. If anybody there read it, nobody was convinced. Someday the war in
Ukraine will end. But I doubt I’ll ever be welcomed back by the Russian science
fiction community that had so warmly embraced me.
It is a sad thing to lose a friend. Sadder still to lose
many friends all at once, along with a country I’d come to care about. Not a
fraction as sad as what every citizen of Ukraine is now going through, of
course. But sad enough that I wanted to write a story about that loss.
* * *
The hero of that story was based on an émigré writer named
Alexei Remizov—a modernist, satirist, calligrapher, and student of folklore.
When he fled Russia in 1921, he was held to be an important writer. In Paris,
he gained the admiration of such luminaries as James Joyce and Vladimir
Nabokov, but the passing decades saw his prominence dwindle. He alienated the émigré community and
outraged Nabokov by applying for and receiving a Soviet passport. But though he
was obviously tempted, he did not return to his native country. Which was
probably a good thing, for many writers who fled and then returned did not live
long after. When he found himself unpublishable, he created unique stories
combining illustrations and a calligraphic text, which could be enjoyed only by
a single reader at a time. He died in 1957, well on his way to being forgotten.
I anagrammatized Remizov’s name to Zerimov because what
little I knew of Remizov’s life didn’t fit with the story I wanted to tell. His
wife Serafima, for one, did not die in Moscow but went into exile with him.
While Remizov was teaching Russian in Paris, he became friends
with the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and her companion Hope Mirrlees, author
of the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist. His work had a strong influence on
Mirrlees, so she and Jane made the most fleeting possible appearance in the
story—you’d miss it if I didn’t point it out—as “English bluestockings” Zerimov
teaches at the Ecole des Langues Orientales. There is also a reference to Jean
Cocteau’s Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, and the claim that a genius
could build upon its innovations to create something astounding. Which Mirrlees
did in Paris, a Poem, printed and published in chapbook form by none
other than Virginia Woolf. The late scholar Julia Briggs called the poem “modernism’s
lost masterpiece,” and those few of us who have made a study of it are all convinced
it must surely have been an influence on T. S. Eliot, who was a close friend of
Mirrlees.
So there is a great deal hidden in this story which no sane
person would expect you to be able to winkle out. Here’s an example: When
Zerimov describes his first encounter with the Star-Bear, making claws of his
fingers and saying, “It reared up and went: Raowrr!” This line I took
from my late friend, Andrew Matveev. As a young writer, it was his ambition to
be the Russian Hunter S. Thompson. The editor he submitted his first novel to
jabbed the typescript with his forefinger and said, “This novel will never be
published.” Then he had Matveev sent into internal exile. In Ekaterinburg, he
was given a job as night watchman at the zoo, to keep him out of the way. In
the small hours, the big cats there made it clear what they wanted to do with
him. After Perestoika, Andrew (never Andrei) Matveev was free to write and
publish. But, he said, “A part of what I could have been was taken away from
me.”
I could go on and on. But I am not trying to impress you
with my cleverness. I simply hold up these sources so you can appreciate how
much more than you can see goes into even the simplest and most straightforward
of stories. That bit of fluff you enjoy so much? That too. All of a writer’s
life goes into every story, and a great deal of effort goes into hiding that
fact. Because, as William Butler Yeats wrote in one of his poems, “A line will
take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/ Our stitching
and unstitching has been naught.”
I hope you read my story, which the good folk at Tor have
made available online for free. But if it doesn’t work for you on the surface
level, as a simple tale of a man and a bear and possibly a woman, all this
background will be for naught. Still, if you do read it, I hope it gives you
pleasure.
The story’s title was borrowed from Remizov’s bear-story “The
Star-Bear,” one of four by him that appeared in The Book of the Bear,
translated and edited by Harrison and Mirrlees.
1 The IUW was founded in Paris in 1954, hit hard
times with Perestroika, and now its membership is almost entirely Russian,
though there have been efforts in recent years to make it truly international
again. If you know the history of the last seventy years, this should tell you
a lot.
2In one, a young post-Collapse Russian, enamored
of American cowboy movies, travels across Siberia and discovers why “Russian”
and “Libertarian” are incompatible terms. The other is about a 19th
century American stranded in Ekaterinburg, who becomes his new nation’s most revered
writer. Which I admit was pretty cheeky of me.
Above: The Illustration for "The Star-Bear" was, as I said, made by Bill Mayer. I think he did a terrific job of it.
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