Dan Simmons - The River Styx Runs Upstream

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The River Styx Runs Upstream

by Dan Simmons

Introduction

It's a cliche that writing fiction is a bit like having chil-dren. As with most cliches,

there's a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novel—that moment of

pure inspiration and conception—is as close to ecstasy as writ-ing offers. The actual

writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and

is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of

difficult labor before the thing is born. Fi-nally, the stories or books take on a

definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer's con-trol

completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to

express themselves flu-ently in languages the author will never begin to master,

gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and ed-ucation far beyond those of

their progenitor, and—perhaps the most galling of all—living on long after the author

is dust and a forgotten footnote.

And the ungrateful whelps don't even write home.

"The River Styx Runs Upstream" was conceived on a beautiful August morning in

1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife's parents' home in Kenmore, New York. I

remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinking—This will be my first

story to be published.

It was, but not before two and a half years and a myr-iad of misadventures had

passed.

A week after I'd finished writing the first draft of "The River Styx..." I drove from

western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at

the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New

Hampshire, meeting and talk-ing to a respected writer whom I'd previously only

corre-sponded with. His advice: submit to the "little magazines," spend

years—perhaps decades—building a reputation in these limited-circulation,

contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel,

and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known

publishers, reaching only a thou-sand or so readers but trying to acquire some

critical un-derpinning.

I picked up Karen in Rockport and we began the long drive back to our home in

Colorado. I was silent much of the time, pondering the writer's advice. It was sage

advice—only one would-be writer in hundreds, perhaps thousands, achieves

publication. Of those who publish, a scant few manage to make a living at it ... even

a "liv-ing" below the poverty line. The statistical chances of be-coming a "bestselling

author" are approximately the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously

being attacked by a great white shark.

So between Rockport, Maine, and the front range of Colorado, I pondered, decided

that the advice was un-doubtedly sound, realized that the "little magazine route" was

almost certainly the wise way to go, and began to un-derstand that it was a sign of

maturity to realize that the quest for being a widely read author, a "mass market"

writer of quality tales, was a chimera ... something to be given up.

And then, about the time I saw the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains ahead of

us, I said, "Nahhh." Per-versely, I decided to go for the widest audience possible.

Cut to the summer of 1981, two years later. Dispir-ited, discouraged, all but broken

on the wheel of rejec-tions, chastened by reality, I "gave up" writing for publication

and did something I'd sworn I would never do: I went off to a writers' conference.

Paid to go to a writ-ers' conference. A "how-to", "this is the way to prepare your

manuscript", "sit-in-the-circle and we'll critique it" kind of writers' conference. It was

my swan song. I went to hear and see the writers present and to begin to view

writing as a hobby rather than obsession.

Then I met Harlan Ellison.

I won't bore you with the details of that meeting. I won't describe the carnage that

acted as prelude as the legendary enfant terrible beheaded, disemboweled, and

generally dismembered the unfortunate would-be writers who had submitted stories

for his critical approval.

Between story critiques, while Harlan Ellison rested and sipped Perrier, officials of

the workshop rushed into the seminar room, carried out the scattered body parts,

hosed down the walls, spread sawdust on the carpet, and generally made ready for

the next sacrifice.

As it turned out, I was the next sacrifice.

"Who is this Simmons?" bellowed Ellison. "Stand up, wave your hand, show

yourself, goddammit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the

unmiti-gated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this

workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!"

In one of the braver (read 'insane') moments of my life, I waggled my fingers.

Stood.

Ellison stared at me over the top of his glasses. "At this length, it had better be good,

Simmons ... no, it had bet-ter be fucking brilliant, or you will not leave this room

alive. Comprende? Capish?"

I left the room alive. In fact, I left it more alive than I had been in some years. It was

not merely that Ellison had liked it. He ... he and Ed Bryant and several of the other

writers there ... had found every flaw in the story, had re-vealed every false note and

fake wall, had honed in on the places where I'd tapdanced fast rather than do the

neces-sary work, had pulled the curtain off every crippled sen-tence and humbug

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