Avram was a brilliant (and underappreciated) writer, but he was not an exciting speaker. As the tape unreeled, my mind wandered. I thought: The sailors who reported sea monsters and mermaids were uneducated, and they were superstitious, but they were experienced and they weren’t stupid. So what was it that they saw and reported?
I dug out a scrap of paper and wrote, “Why do we, today, think that sea monsters never existed, when they obviously did—and maybe still do?”
I went home and wrote a short story in the form of an encyclopedia article, “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea” (by Vonda N. McIntyre, illustrated by Ursula K. Le Guin [Ygor & Buntho Make Books Press, 1997]). I wrestled to keep it short. (I had a deadline on another project.) The story kept trying to make itself longer; the article format kept trying to evolve into characters, dialogue, and plot. By the end of the article the sea monster and the natural historian—and the natural historian’s sister, who does not even appear in the encyclopedia article—had come alive. They became the basis for The Moon and the Sun.
An alternate history takes an enormous amount of research, as I discovered when I decided to set The Moon and the Sun in 1693 in the court of Louis XlV. The more research I did, the more I found I’d chosen a serendipitous place and time: the residence of the most powerful man in the world, at the historical balance point between ancient alchemy and modern science.
My research also uncovered a number of entertaining coincidences. After I had invented—I thought—the natural history of the sea people, I came across a description of Steller’s sea-cow, a relative of the manatee indigenous to the Bering Sea. The natural history of Steller’s sea-cow resembles the natural history of the people of the sea to a remarkable and disturbing degree. The sea-cow was first seen by Europeans during the Vitus Bering expedition of 1741. By 1768, the species had been hunted to extinction. Only a single sketch exists of the creature by anyone who observed it alive.
During the same expedition, George Steller also described the Danish sea ape. No contemporary taxonomist has ever identified it.
In another interesting coincidence, Lucien de Barenton, count de Chrétien, became an integral part of the story long before I had ever heard of the maréchal de Luxembourg. Lucien is rather a nicer person than the maréchal, I believe, but their histories and their physical descriptions bear sorne remarkable resemblances. The story of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s illegitimate child has only one more level of complication in my story than in the rumor of the time.
My background is in modern science, not in history, and though I now know a lot about 1693 and the court of Louis XIV, I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m very grateful for the advice and help I received from a number of people who kept me from walking into pitfalls. Thanks to translator Elborg Forster, whose A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz 1652-1722 was invaluable. Several historians were kind enough to read and comment on the book: Dr. and Mrs. Orest Ranum, and Dr. Charles A. Le Guin. Marc Francis Fevre researched the details of the family of the chevalier de Lorraine. Mona Helen Preuss found invaluable information on Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and summarized her biography for me, as the book defeated my high school French.
Ron Drummond brought Jacquet de la Guerre to my attention. In an early draft of the story, I made the inexcusable error of assuming—just because no women composers were mentioned in scores of reference works—that no women composers existed at the court of the Sun King. In fact, Versailles was practically crawling with them. But even Jacquet de la Guerre, who was among the foremost composers of her time, who was a great influence on baroque music, and who was permitted to dedicate her work to Louis XIV (a rare honor for anyone), rates only half a line in an entire modern reference work about music in Louis’ court. I am only surprised that I was surprised by this.
Two books particularly helped my understanding of the period and the people. Nancy Nichols Barker’s uniquely sympathetic Brother to the Sun King: Philippe, Duke of Orléans treats Monsieur as a comprehensible human being, rather than as the usual figure of contempt and ridicule. Peter Burke’s The Fabrication of Louis XIV allowed me to understand the amazing and overwhelming chateau of Versailles as a deliberate political statement of power and control, rather than as the product of a baroque ego backed by the resources of an entire country.
Jon Takemoto and Kim Larson at the Wallingford-Wilmot Library were endlessly patient in helping me find the most obscure references. I’m very grateful to them both.
Thanks, too, to the people of the chateau and the town of Versailles, who answered my questions patiently and never laughed at my shaky French, except the time I said, “Mon agent de voyage est un bozo.”
Of course, any mistakes that remain are my own. A few are deliberate; I hope I haven’t included too many inadvertent ones. I’ve done my best to describe historical events and to represent historical characters (including their prejudices) accurately. This is a novel—and a novel of alternate history—so I’ve chosen to include neither footnotes (which are useful in fiction only for comedy) nor a formal bibliography.
I took some liberties in the matter of titles. Writing about a society in which everyone has at least two sets of names, the novelist can leave the reader floundering to keep up with all the characters. As far as I was able, I left each person a unique title, even though, for example, Madame, Monsieur, and Mademoiselle would all more properly have been called “Your Highness” by someone of Marie-Josèphe’s much lower rank.
Thanks as always to the friends and colleagues who read and commented on various drafts of the book: Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane E. Hawkins, Kate Schaefer, Amy Wolf, Rob Jacobsen, Alyce Williams, Deb Notkin, Myriam Dupuis, my agents Frances Collin, Maggie Doyle, and Brad Gross, and my editor Dave Stern. I’m especlally grateful to Paul Preuss, who cheerfully read successive drafts. I would have fallen into several tiger pits without the benefit of his comments.
The Moon and the Sun is unusual (for me) in that it exists in two different, more or less simultaneous, forms. In 1994, I was a fellow in the Writers Film Project, a screenwriting workshop for prose writers and playwrights, supported by Amblin Entertainment and Universal Studios and administered by The Chesterfield Film Company (Kevin Kennedy and Ken Orkin, with the assistance of the director of development, Kat Williams).
Early in the program, Amblin hosted a reception for the new workshop fellows. Steven Spielberg, whose support made WFP possible, welcomed us and said something that I think should be repeated to every student of every writing workshop no matter what the genre. I have certainly quoted him at every workshop I’ve taught since my year in Los Angeles.
He said: If you choose to stay in the movie business, right now may be the only time in your career when you can write whatever you want without worrying about whether it’s commercial or not. And that’s what you should do.
We had two schools of thought in the workshop about this advice. “He’s right,” and “He’s Steven Spielberg. He has six hundred million dollars. He can afford to say that.”
I thought he was right. It wasn’t my place to decide The Moon and the Sun would be too expensive or too difficult to film, or too “uncommercial” because it stars a woman and a sea monster, and a male lead rather different from the usual tall and hunky hero. I wrote tbe screenplay version without thinking about bankable stars, special effects, or the cost of filming at a national monument among thousands of visitors.