WRITING HEAVEN

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

We started thinking about Heaven in a pub, which is where a lot of our thinking starts—and most of it ends, to be honest. We were idly wondering what might happen to the interstellar religion of love and tolerance that was hinted at in the climax of our previous novel, Wheelers. We quickly decided that there wouldn't be any plot if it stayed a religion of love and tolerance. Jack remembered a long passage in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, about the Grand Inquisitor, which shows how the horrors of the Inquisition could happen without the inquisitors being just plain evil. On the contrary, torture and death can follow logically from some simple assumptions about what is best for others—especially if the downside involves them frying in Hell for evermore. So we decided to tell the story of a religion gone rogue, enforcing love and tolerance on people whether they wanted them or not.
        When we started thinking of scenarios and characters, we both homed in on a coral reef ecology. Ian enjoys snorkeling, and Jack likes setting up fish tanks. So we designed a super-intelligent reef, the collective mind of the reefwives. Their husbands, though, are not so smart. Jack decided that we needed a name for the central reef husband, and "Second Best Sailor" popped into his head unbidden. That crystallized much of the story. Jack put a lot of his knowledge of marine biology into designing the sailors' habitat and behavior – especially sexual behaviour. We had fun designing sailing-ships for aquatic sailors, too. And working out how they had evolved.
        We needed a human protagonist, to represent the religion of Cosmic Unity seen from the inside, and we decided that his position would be the lowly one of duplicator on a Mission Fleet. Several more pub lunches later, a second theme got tangled into the tale: what, precisely, is a mind? Could a machine have a mind? Could something more exotic have a mind? Without giving away too much plot, we thought about things like minds made of magnetism, gravitation, or quantum fluctuations of the vacuum.
        Something, though, was still missing. Our religion needed a focal idea to dramatize its assumptions about the nature of sentient creatures and their spiritual needs. One morning Jack turned up in great excitement, having eaten too much the night before, slept badly, and had a long, complicated dream which he could still remember perfectly. It involved a lot of guts and gore, and some giant, floating, bloated white creatures. The dream, largely unchanged, inspired Cosmic Unity's unusual concept of "Heaven". Not an afterlife for the souls of the dead—Cosmic Unity doesn't believe in afterlives, it believes that once you are dead you stay dead—but a reward, of sorts, for the living. This situation has its very primitive seeds in our lives today – it could easily evolve naturally as our little personal-assistant computers look after more and more of our lives. And start some medical checks. Then a few simple medical procedures...
        How do two people write one book? For fiction, Jack is the ideas man and Ian does most of the actual writing. Once we have a first draft, we both get involved in rewriting and editing. We always plot out the main story line and characters (lots of pub lunches are required to do this) and produce an outline of the sequence of chapters and what happens in each.
        We wrote chapters and bits of chapters, and we picking the brains of friends in the SF community. We designed aliens, some orthodox, some decidedly weird. That bit is always fun because imagination can run riot. Then we had to make sure that our creations were scientifically plausible, no matter how weird they were. We were writing a book about what aliens are really like – the real-as-far-as-we-can-tell biology of extra-terrestrial life – at the same time as Heaven, so it was natural to give some of our more way-out xenobiological ideas a fictional outing. Jack decided that the reefwives' sense of time ought to be quite different from the human sense, in which time is perceived as a sequence of events that have very short durations. Reefwives scan a block of time like our eyes scan a TV screen. Ian introduced a whole slew of Cosmic Unity doctrine, scattered it throughout the book, and then took it all out again when our editor Jaime Levine told us (rightly) that it didn't work.
        We know that a book is working when it starts to deviate significantly from the plan—for fiction, this means that our characters are taking on a life of their own and reacting to events in whatever way makes sense for them in those circumstances. Especially the alien characters. The concept of "Heaven" was a deviation of that kind—despite becoming the title of the book, it wasn't part of the original plan. Neither was the ending, not exactly. We knew that Cosmic Unity had to get its comeuppance, but we didn't know how until we reached that part of the writing... and found out that our characters were wiser than we were. Which, given all those pub lunches, is perhaps not a total surprise.