Speaker for the Dead

not? I brought along the manuscript of Speaker for him to read--or perhaps I gave it to him in advance--I don't remember now. I do remember, though, sitting at the foot of his bed while he lay there and explained the problems he saw in Speaker .
    He had many   good ideas. Of course, most of them dealt with small fixes for problems in the manuscript as it now stood.   One comment he made, however, illuminated everything for me.   "I couldn't tell Novinha's kids apart," he said.   "I couldn't remember which was which."
    I had enough experience by then to know exactly what this meant.   He couldn't tell Novinha's kids apart because they weren't characters. They were nothing but placeholders. At first I toyed with the idea of simply cutting them out. In my novel Saints , Ihad run into a problem with a younger sister of my protagonist--I kept forgetting she existed and completely neglecting her for hundreds of pages at a time. The solution was to eliminate the character; callously, I had her die in infancy.   But excision wasn't the right move in this case. Because I wanted Novinha to be voluntarily isolated, I had to have her be otherwise acceptable to her neighbors.   In a Catholic colony like Lusitania this meant Novinha needed to have a bunch of kids.
    Yet I had no idea who they were or what they would do in the story.   Once you've read Speaker, of course, you'll wonder what the story would be without Novinha's children, and the answer is, It wouldn't be much!   But at the time I hadn't developed their role in the story; yet there was something in the story that led Gregg to want them to amount to something more--that made him want to be able to tell them apart.
    It meant throwing out all but the first couple of chapters of what I had written so far (and, in fact, I ended up completely writing the novel from the beginning), but it soon dawned on me that it was worth doing, for this was the final idea, the one that would pull me through the whole book. I had observed before that one thing wrong with science fiction as a whole was that almost all the heroes seemed to spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus--no one had families.   If there was a mention of parents at all, it was to tell us they were dead, or such miserable specimens of humanity that the hero could hardly wait to get out of town.
    Not only did they have no parents, few science fiction heroes seemed to marry and have kids. In short, the heroes of most science fiction novels were perpetual adolescents, lone rangers who wandered the universe avoiding commitments.   This shouldn't be surprising.   The romantic hero is invariably one who is going through the adolescent phase of human life.   The child phase--the one I had dealt with most often in my fiction--is the time of complete dependence on others to create our identity and our worldview.   Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt.   They go along because they don't know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually.
    Gradually, however, this dependency breaks down--and children catch the first glimmers of a world that is different from the one they thought they lived in, they break away the last vestiges of adult control themselves, much as a baby bird breaks free of the last fragments of the egg.   The romantic hero is unconnected.   He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error.   Everything is played at twice the speed and twice the volume in the adolescent--the romantic--life.
    Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves, or try to root themselves.   It may or may not be in the community of their childhood, and it may or may not be their childhood identity and connections that they resume upon entering adulthood.   And, in fact, many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence.   But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.
    Most science fiction dealt with adolescent heroes, yes--but only because most fiction deals with adolescents.   This is not to say that fiction about adolescents is necessarily adolescent fiction,