A day or two before the Nebula Awards, there was a telephone call from someone in SFWA asking me if I was going to be in L.A. for the awards. I said no. I couldn’t afford it.
"Are you sure I can’t talk you into coming?"
"Yeah. I’m sure. I’m broke."
"Are you really, really sure I can’t talk you into coming?"
"Why?" I asked. I mean, it wasn’t like I was the science-fiction community sweetheart or anything.
"Well. I can’t really tell you. But you really ought to come."
"Did Enemy Mine win?" I asked.
"Uh, well, uh, yeah."
It’s not like a Nebula comes with a cash award, so we still couldn’t go, but we did call up Steve Perry and tell him, since he was the one who started it. He never did say much of anything, He just kept laughing and laughing.
Right after the Nebulas there was Noreascon Two, and the Hugo Awards. "Enemy Mine" and another story of mine were both up for awards, and I was up for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, as well. If I won them both, I would be the only writer to have won a Nebula, a Hugo, and the John W. Campbell new-writer award all in the same year.
I won the Hugo and the Campbell. If you go to worldcons these days, they prohibit using flash cameras during ceremonies. The reason for this has to do with insurance fears concerning blinding those on stage who are attempting to negotiate the stairs. There was no such prohibition when I received my awards. As I faced the audience both times, I had my retinas burned out by thousands of flash bulbs going off. I had never before seen anything so magnificently beautiful in my life. It was a terrific night. Hell, even my picks for best editor and best dramatic presentation won.
There were two more very special moments waiting for me. The first was late that night in George’s suite at the hotel. There were a number of fans in there, and I was sitting cross-legged on top of a table. George had won the Hugo for best editor, and Isaac was looking at us both saying, "What a night this is."
The next morning came my second moment. I was entering the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and with me was Jean and my mathematician sister Judith, whom I had always wanted to impress. As we entered, everyone in the restaurant stopped what they were doing and applauded. It just goes to show what building a little lean-to in the woods can do.
A few weeks after the convention, I signed a contract with Berkley for a book-length sequel to "Enemy" to be titled The Tomorrow Testament. The foundation for The Tomorrow Testament, and the key for the resolution of the story, is the Drac bible, The Talman. It was necessary to invent the philosophy, the alien history, and to outline The Talman, as well as write portions of it. Writing that and working out the language only got me started on this particular mountain.
At a writer’s workshop I conducted some months before, a woman with a political ax to grind demanded to know, "Why don’t you use more female protagonists in your stories?" So, when it came time to begin on The Tomorrow Testament, I asked myself if it made any difference if the lead character was male or female. In a supreme fit of either ignorance or arrogance. I said "no."
I had a character with a name: Joanne Nicole. In a spasm of enthusiasm I cranked out ten thousand words, then took them to bed and gave them a read. In a matter of minutes I began crawling beneath my covers. Naw, a female protagonist wouldn’t make any difference. Not much. What I had captured magnificently was ten thousand words of myself stumbling around on the pages in drag.
The sensible thing would have been to dump Joanne Nicole on the spot and start over again with a male character. That probably would have been the professional thing to do. Despite her ill-defined character and proportions, however, Joanne Nicole was very much alive. Story characters of mine, once animated, refuse to die except under their own terms. Raising stubbornness to the nth power, therefore, I stuck with Joanne Nicole by writing yet another book. I began with her birth on another planet, grew up with her as a child, experienced her school years, her hopes and dreams, her courtship and marriage, the birth of her daughter, the death of her husband, her entrance as an intelligence officer in the USE Force, until the Battle of Catvishnu when she enters the story. Then started The Tomorrow Testament again, from the beginning, this time with my character as Joanne Nicole, rather than as a "female protagonist."
There was an additional complication. She is the point-of-view character throughout the entire book, and soon after the beginning of the story, she is blinded. Writing from the POV of a sightless person presented some incredible challenges. I spent months stalking my house at night with my eyes shut, gouging pieces of meat out of my shins, burning myself trying to make coffee, and falling down stairs. I kept that up until I could read the interior of my house by touch, by sound, and by smell.
While I was in the process of writing that, at the Worldcon in Denver that year, the story editor from Kings Road Productions said that his bunch would like to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine." He said that one thing that appealed to him was that "Enemy" was a story of character and could be done without a great deal of budget-breaking special effects. When I told Jean that a producer wanted to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine," she didn’t believe me.
After getting and signing the contract, she began believing. It was not long afterward, however, when I stopped believing. I was not happy about how the movie turned out, although the performances by Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. were incredible. There are moments watching the film, when I would see the characters I invented saying the words that I wrote, that gave me a hint about what the movie might have been; but there is neither profit nor serenity in dwelling on might-have-beens. Nevertheless, there are an astonishing number of fans who have told me that Enemy Mine is either their favorite or near-favorite motion picture. Perhaps the problem I have with the film is mine, not the movie’s.
As an aside, at a science-fiction convention I was attending, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a Russian guest who was currently teaching at the University of Chicago who told me that Enemy Mine was his favorite movie. He then related the expensive, harrowing, and dangerous experience he had undergone obtaining a copy and smuggling it into Russia—where it was released a few weeks later.
It was at a Windycon, the annual convention put on by the Chicago science-fiction bunch, where I got the idea for what eventually became the third work in the Enemy series, The Last Enemy.
A friend of mind had written a book and I had been sent a copy for blurb purposes. I finished it while I was at Windycon. What interested me the most about the story was a sort of thesis statement at the end that was conveyed by two of the characters conversing. It is this: the tribe comes first. Before rationality, before honor, before good sense, before self-interest, before mercy, love, or justice, the tribe comes first. That’s what you have to do, to be, in order to remain a member of the tribe.
I thought then that he had put his finger on the whole Middle East/ Northern Ireland/Bosnia/Rwanda mess. It’s the whole world of us-and-them thinking that has kept this planet blood-soaked for endless thousands of years.
There was a military sf panel I was on at Windycon, and we thoroughly discussed the premise and my friend’s new book. At the panel I made a point of remembering to suggest to my friend that he take this premise, stick it at the beginning of another book, and use it as a take-off point to solve the Middle East problem and the dilemma of self-perpetuating war and terrorism.