Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

Better stop here though. I’d hate to think of how quiet a quietness would have to be, in order to be as much quieter than this place, as this is quieter than the city!

A man ought to be able to listen to his thoughts out here—really hear things.

Just John, and me—and my monsters!

Jan . 7: Wonderful day. Crisp, but no wind, and a flood of yellow sunlight to put a warmth and dazzle into the snow banks. John showed me all around the place this morning. It’s a snug little cabin he’s got, and a good thing too!—because it’s quite as lonely as it seemed last night. No houses in sight, and I’d judge there hasn’t been anything down the road since my taxi—the marks where it turned around stand out sharply. John says a farmer drives by, though, every two days—he has an arrangement with him for getting milk and other necessities.

You can’t see Terrestrial, there are hills in the way. John tells me that power and telephone wires have never gotten closer than six miles. The radio runs on storage batteries. When the drifts get bad he has to snowshoe all the way into Terrestrial.

I confess I feel a little awestruck at my own temerity—a confirmed desk-worker like myself plunging into a truly rugged environment like this. But John seems to think nothing of it. He says I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!

And there’s a good side to the enforced isolation—it will make me concentrate on my book.

Well, that does it. I’ve popped the word, and now I’ll have to start writing the thing itself—and am I scared! It’s been so long since I’ve finished anything of my own—even attempted it. So damned long. I’d begun to be afraid (begun, hell!) that I’d never do anything but take notes and make outlines—outlines that became more and more complicated and lifeless with the years. And yet there were those early fragments of writing from my school days that ought to have encouraged me. Even much later, when I’d developed some literary judgement, I used to think those fragments showed flashes of real promise—until I burned them. They should have given me courage—at any rate, something should have—but whatever promising ideas I’d have in the morning would be shredded to tatters by that horrible hackwriting job by the time night came.

And now that I have taken the plunge, it seems hilariously strange that I should have been driven to it by an idea for a fantasy story. The very sort of writing I’ve always jeered at—childish playing around with interplanetary space and alien monsters. The farthest thing you could imagine from my wearisome outlines, which eventually got so filled up with character analysis (or even—Heaven help me—psychoanalysis) and dismal authentic backgrounds and “my own experience” and just heaps of social and political “significance” that there wasn’t room for anything else. Yes, it does seem ludicrously paradoxical that, instead of all those profound and “important” things, it should have been an idea about black-furred, long-tentacled monsters on another planet, peering unwinkingly at the earth and longing for its warmth and life, that so began to sing in my mind, night and day, that I finally got the strength to sweep aside all those miserable little fences against insecurity I’d been so painfully long in building—and take a chance!

John says it’s natural and wholesome for a beginning writer to turn to fantasy. And he’s certainly made a go of that type of writing himself. (But he’s built up his ability as courageously and doggedly through the years as he has this cabin. In comparison, I have a long, long way to go.)

In any case, my book won’t be a cheap romance of the fabulous, despite its “cosmic” background. And when you get down to that, what’s wrong with a cosmic background? I’ve lived a long time now with my monsters and devoted a lot of serious thought to them. I’ll make them real.

That night: I just had an exhilaratingly eerie experience. I’d stepped outside for a breather and a look at the snow and stars, when my attention was caught by a beam of violet light some distance away. Though not exactly bright, it had a jewelly gleam and seemed to go up into the sky as far as I could see, without losing any of its needlelike thinness—a very perplexing thing. It was moving around slowly as if it were questing for something. For a shivery moment I had the feeling it came from the stars and was looking for me.

I was about to call John when it winked out. I’m sorry he didn’t see it. He tells me it must have been an auroral manifestation, but it certainly didn’t look anywhere near that far away—I believe auroras are supposed to be high in the stratosphere, where the air is as rarified as in a fluorescent tube—and besides I always thought they were blotchy. However, I suppose he must be right—he tells me he’s seen some very queer ones in past years, and of course my own experience of them is practically nil.

I asked him if there mightn’t be some secret military research going on nearby—perhaps with atomic power or some new kind of searchlight or radar beam—but he scouted the idea.

Whatever it was, it stimulated my imagination. Not that I need it! I’m almost worried by the degree to which my mind has come alive during my few hours at Lone Top. I’m afraid my mind is becoming too keen, like a knife with such a paper-thin edge that it keeps curling over whenever you try to cut something….

Jan. 9: At last, after several false starts, I’ve made a real beginning. I’ve pictured my monsters holding conclave at the bottom of a fantastically deep crack or canyon in their midnight planet. Except for a thin, jagged-edged ribbon of stars overhead, there is no light—their hoard of radiation is so depleted that ages ago they were forced to stop wasting any of it on the mere luxury of vision. But their strange eyes have become accommodated to starlight (though even they, wise as they are, do not know how to get any real warmth out of it) and they can perceive each other vaguely—great woolly, spidery shapes crouched on the rocks or draped along the ragged walls. It is unimaginably cold there—their insulating fur is bathed in a frigidity akin to that of interstellar space. They communicate by means of though—infrequent, well-shaped thoughts, for even thinking uses up energy. They recall their glorious past—their spendthrift youth, their vigorous prime. They commemorate the agony of their eon-long battle against the cold. They reiterate their savage and unshakable determination to survive.

It’s a good piece of writing. Even honest John says so, although twitting me sardonically for writing such a wild sort of tale after many years of politely scorning his fantastic stories.

But it was pretty bad for a while there, when I was making those false starts—I began to see myself crawling back in defeat to the grinning city. I can confess now that for years I’ve been afraid that I never had any real creative ability, that my promising early fragments were just a freak of childhood. Children show flashes of all sorts of odd abilities which they lose when they grow up—eidetic imagery, maybe even clairvoyance, things of that sort. What people praised in those first little stories of mine was a rich human sympathy, an unusually acute insight into adult human motives. And what I was afraid of was that all this had been telepathy, an unconscious picking up of snatches of thought and emotion from the adult minds around me—things that sounded very genuine and impressive when written down, especially by a child, but that actually required no more creative ability than taking dictation. I even developed an acute worry that some day I’d find myself doing automatic writing! Odd, what nonsensical fears an artist’s mind will cook up when it’s going through a dry period—John says it’s true of the whole fraternity.