I've been looking back at 30 something years of literary work, more than half of it nonfiction, which troubles me. I don't like it, that I had the burden of exploring the obvious. Among my too few novels, five of them were set in the future, projecting ideas into fictional lives and loves and clashes with jealous, hamhanded evil.
Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.
Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.
That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.
It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.
News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.
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