Piers Anthony: Phaze Doubt

After the play I located Ben Mays and explained why I couldn’t say anything about the play. He said that that is a problem in some theaters, and wondered why I hadn’t moved to a better spot. Well, I should have, but I hadn’t realized how big a difference location can make; I might have made a scene by moving, only to be in a worse spot. He also said that they had it on video cassette. Oh, okay. He sent me the catalog, and I ordered that and some records and audio tapes while I was at it. As I said, I support the enterprise, and one good way to support it is to buy their productions.

At this writing I haven’t listened to any of it, because I have to assemble my new record and cassette tape players and I was determined to finish this novel before taking a break for anything else. But the material has had an effect on me, because one of the records, Heartdance, put out by a group called Song of the Wood, has a beautiful wraparound cover painting showing monstrous stone musical instruments cracking and being overgrown at a shoreline, as if some giant left them there millennia ago, and a girl dancing at the top of the fifty-foot-high hammered dulcimer. Beyond is a bucolic countryside, a village hamlet, and a distant castle on a hill. That picture fascinates me. In fact it set my fevered brain working, and I may use that as the setting for a future novel. Girl tunes in to the music of the ancient gods and dances to it, there at their ruins, and life stirs in the great old instruments that none alive can play, and—

But I don’t mean to bore you. My point is that via this devious channel I did gain something of value to me: a compelling picture and an idea. However, I did try to use the experience of attending the play in this novel. When Purple played the game of the Cretan mystery with the BEM, that was really an unstructured play. Of course it didn’t resemble the play I had seen, because I hadn’t heard it, but it was what came out after the experience slopped around in my cranium for a while. So if you liked that scene, then you can say I benefited, and if you didn’t like it, you can say I didn’t.

When I got into that scene, I had a real headache working out the devious ploys and counterploys. I set it in ancient Crete because that is one of the aspects of ancient history that fascinate me. You may have noticed that I sneak bits of history into my novels, because my love is for the far future and far past; only the present bores me. Fine; I completed the scene and moved on. Then when I came through on my editing sweep, I got into trouble again.

You see, there are two pillars at the main gate to the great Palace at Knossos. One is round in cross section, the other square. I called the round one a cylinder, but what’s a square one? It took me forty-five minutes to run that down (an ornery writer just doesn’t know when to quit), and then I couldn’t use the word. It’s a right parallelepipedon (or you can leave off the last two letters). Technically, a polyhedron with right-angled parallelograms as faces. That is, a figure with four rectangular sides and two square ends. If all six sides were squares, it would be called a cube. Why couldn’t they have had a simple four-letter word for a stretched-out cube? I decided on “block-shaped” and I do feel like a blockhead for wasting so much time on it. I mean, what idiot would spend three quarters of an hour editing a single word? Sigh; the worst of it is that I know that next time such a thing occurs, I’ll do it again.

Yet in the course of that spot research I ascertained that the fabled land of Atlantis was in fact Crete (I looked in the book that showed the square columns, you see), destroyed by the eruption of Thera about 3,500 years ago. Those of you who have spent your lives searching for Atlantis may now relax; my forty-five minutes has serendipitously solved your problem. No, don’t thank me; I do this sort of thing routinely for my readers.

Thus the troubled course of this novel, which is typical for me. Those who believe that great works of literature spring full-formed from the head of the author and that lesser ilk requires even less effort will want nothing to do with me, because I struggle and sweat over even indifferent material, as in this case. Most real writers do. But how I love that struggle!

This is the conclusion of the seven-novel Adept trilogy. To forestall the screams of outrage by fans of the series who never want it to end, and the sighs of relief by critics who never wanted it to start, let me explain that I regard some series as open, meaning they can continue as long as the market tolerates them, and some as closed, meaning that when their tales are told they are allowed to retire. This series is the latter type. This does not mean that I am abandoning fantasy, just that I am making way for a new series, Virtual Mode, whose framework is such that the whole of the Proton/Phaze frames can be considered a subset of it. That means in turn that should I some day suffer an irresistible urge to write another Adept novel, I could do so in the Mode context. That’s neither a promise, fans, nor a threat, critics; merely a clarification I hope allows each of you to relax. This series has been phased out. Of course I have been wrong before, when I thought it was complete as a three-novel set; like a tropical tree, a series can sometimes regenerate from the roots. But I think it’s done.