been friends with a pen

Our space opera Exordium began life as a mini-series screenplay over four decades ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, returned as a hastily corrected e-book series, and now is relaunching for the last time after Dave and I, now retired, were able to go over it more slowly. It always needed a more thorough going-over. But also, over the years, so much has changed!

From Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your forty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The world of Exordium was always a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us shove in all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction/space opera we liked.

We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“FTL battles that make strategic sense in four-space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes! Ancient civilizations! Cool clothes and machines!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the social and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and nice covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back. Thirty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The challenge with retrofitting SF is: what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

A lot of what was daring in our original (in our future, everyone is brown, with white being the largely unwanted exception; gay relationships are a part of everyday life, as well as polyamory, etc) is now commonly found, which is great. But other aspects were tougher. In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the worldbuilding: for example, the word “fuck” is a great expletive, but it also carries centuries of negative baggage. In our world, sex had completely shed the guilt, especially for women, so we jettisoned slang and idiom that still evoked that old misogynism.

Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

We kept the fun elements: A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their ass-kicking female captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

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