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How to Write a Bestseller
At the time it was published, in August 1984, West of Eden was Harry Harrison's most ambitious work to date, both in scope and actual size. It was the first part of a trilogy - Winter in Eden and Return to Eden were to follow - Harrison's first in which a single story was told across more than one book; and it was set in an alternate world where the dinosaurs never became extinct, and an intelligent race, the Yilanè, descended from the dinosaurs live alongside mankind. There has been some confusion among readers and reviewers about when the books are actually set, with some readers and reviewers saying that it is set in prehistoric times. But at the beginning of the first book, where the premise is stated, Harrison says: "Sixty-five million years ago ... a meteor six miles in diameter struck the Earth and caused disastrous atmospheric upheavals ... The age of the dinosaurs was over; the evolution of the mammals that had been suppressed for 100 million years began. But what if that meteor had not fallen? What would our world be like today?" Another problem which reviewers seemed to have with the book was that it wasn't funny: at this stage in his career Harrison had, unfortunately, become typecast as a writer of humorous fiction, mainly due to the amazing popularity of the Stainless Steel Rat series which had overshadowed his other, more serious work. Reviewing West of Eden in the first, and only, issue of the British Omni, Joanna Birkinshaw said that the novel was "coldly written, with excitement being provided by blood and guts." This 'colder' style perfectly suited the nature of the story Harrison was telling, reflecting the cold-blooded nature of his Yilanè and giving the story a gritty edge and a sense of grim fascination. It is certainly not an easy read, but nor is the series without humour - a fact Harry and I talked about in the interview which you can read here. |
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West of Eden was also the first time Harrison had written a bestseller, or rather the first time he'd written a book which was published in the 'bestseller' category: "Big displays, big budgets (they're spending more on the advertising than they paid me for the book!)," Harrison told Neil Gaiman in an interview for Knave when the book was published. "It has bestseller printed on the cover, so it goes on the bestseller racks of the bookshops. I'm not sure that works all the time, but it's better than just throwing the book out sideways and hoping." In the UK the book was promoted with stand-up cut-outs of Yilanè, and a glossy 11.5 x 8" brochure filled with pre-publication quotations from various SF luminaries. The book was also promoted outside the SF genre, in the same way Clan of the Cave Bear was, in order to attract readers who would not normally have picked up a genre title. As to whether this approach was a successful, the sales figures speak for themselves: according to Harrison each book in the trilogy sold in the region of 500,000 copies, and the books have recently been republished in a new edition.
The Saurolithic Age
For decades Hollywood has given us movies where we see man and dinosaur in conflict in prehistoric times, despite the fact that the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the planet 65 million years ago, and the first cavemen didn't appear much more than 100,000 years ago. But it is an enduring image, and if a science fiction writer wants to have men versus dinosaurs, he has to either revive them from ancient DNA and put them in a theme park, or he has to create a whole alternate history in which the dinosaurs never died out, and the cavemen evolved in a far off corner of the world away from reptilian predators. In Harrison's story, the humans evolve in North America, while the dinosaurs dominate Africa and much of Europe. Over the millennia a race of intelligent dinosaurs, the Yilanè, have evolved, but they have never set eyes on men. A new ice age is beginning, and the cold is gradually driving the Yilanè further and further south and west in search of a home in a warmer climate. This brings them into contact with men for the first time, and the two races hate each other on sight. The stage is set for an epic battle.The Yilanè are a strictly matriarchal society, where the males raise and nurse the children, and where each individual remains absolutely loyal to her city. The technology of the Yilanè is based entirely on biogenetically engineered organisms, they have no knowledge of the use of fire or of the use of tools to create implements from wood or stone or metal. Their cities are grown from a genetically modified seed, and they travel across the oceans in submarines which are living leviathans modified to carry passengers in their bodies. They have modified other creatures to provide other items such as scientific instruments, and weapons which spit out poison darts at high velocity. The humans, or Tanu, meanwhile exist as primitive hunter-gatherers living in small nomadic tribal groups, whose only weapons are spears and knives. The bridge between the two cultures is a young man called Kerrick, who is captured by the Yilanè when he is eight or nine years old, and who - in an attempt to stay alive - tries to prove himself useful, and to integrate himself into their society, learning their intricate language of vocal signs and body movements. When Kerrick is rescued by the Tanu years later, he is a strange human-Yilanè mix, an alien among his own people, but ideally suited to advise them in the battle against the reptiles which must soon be fought if the Tanu are to survive. Various parallels have been drawn between Kerrick and the story of Natty Bumppo, who was captured and raised by Native Americans, or Tarzan who was captured and raised by apes. And the battle between the humans and Yilanè has been compared to the battle between the European colonists of the nineteenth-century and the 'primitive' native population of North America. But these links weren't consciously made when Harrison wrote the book, as he told Brian Ireland in a 1997 interview: "I don't think the Indian thing... it could apply. We have an advanced culture against a primitive culture, but unlike the two human cultures they have nothing in common. Basically it was an in-born hatred they had against each other all the time. And the fact that they lived in different climates - they had to cross over and clash along one edge there. But if there are echoes of other things, like Indians - as I'm sure there are - then it wasn't conscious. The conscious bit was evolving the Yilanè culture and using a typical human culture, and then, when they meet each other, what would happen? And half-a-million words later it was done!"
How to Build an Alien Race
A big part of the scope of the book was the research which went into creating the world to the West of Eden, and the creatures which inhabit it. The human characters belong to tribes of hunter-gatherers and are based on what science already knows about peoples of this kind. Harrison had to tinker a little with the evolution of the human beings, with a little help from noted anthropologist Leon Stover: in Harrison's story there would be no Old World apes for humans to evolve from, because the Old World is dominated by the Yilanè and the dinosaurs, and so a parallel evolution had to be posited based on New World apes. But the Yilanè themselves were an entirely new creation, dreamed up by Harrison with input from Jack Cohen, Professor of Biology at Warwick University. Harrison worked with a linguist to create languages for the Yilanè and the human peoples; a biologist to create the Yilanè themselves and their technology, which is entirely based on the genetic manipulation of living things; and with a philosopher to create the beliefs of the 'Daughters of Life'. Before a word of the novel was written, Harrison spent two years on research, amassing 30,000 words of material. "I tried to make a totally alien race," Harrison told Brian Ireland in 1997, "which comes out of other animals, not mammals. All possible facets of the Yilanè, the Saurians, exist right now or in the past ... Their science is completely biological. They never heard of fire! Our science is based on fire and elements, on heating things and cooking things and burning things. Theirs is all biological. They don't have fire, they don't cook their food. So at one point they were all eating their flesh raw, dripping gobs of blood! Then I remembered that in Mexico they use Papaya. Papaya contains an enzyme called papayin which is nothing but a meat tenderiser, it's a natural enzyme which you shake on your meat and it softens the connective tissue so you can eat it. So I had my Yilanè put it on to pre-digest their meat, to get rid of the image of blood and teeth. But everything came, with good reason, out of the physiology."Creating an 'alien' race based on existing reptile and amphibian biology probably didn't require huge leaps of imagination, as Harrison explained in the interview with Neil Gaiman: "Working with [Jack Cohen] I found out more about those rotten lizards than I care to know! He'd say things like 'Eighty-five percent of all lizards have two penises.' I said 'Jack, what do they want with two penises?' 'Well, if one gets tired they use the other one!' And so much of the lifestyle is equally exotic. With the help of a really good biologist and a really good linguist I built the most alien aliens ever seen." Another example of existing 'alien' biology was quoted to Brian Ireland: "I know that in frogs sometimes the males carry the fertilised eggs on their back. Jack Cohen told me one species carries their fertilised eggs in their mouth for a couple of weeks. I mean, that's pretty hairy stuff! So in the Yilanè, the males carry the eggs; they go through a dormant period. Therefore the women have to be the dominant sex physiologically. Fem Libbers have hated me since then! But I didn't do this to be anti-female, I just tried to make the Yilanè totally alien in every way. They have a hierarchical culture, talent rises to the top. This is a structure that came out very naturally, I didn't compose it that way, it just became."
Nazi Lizards from SpaceFeminists did attack West of Eden, most notably in a three-page review by Mary Gentle in the Winter 1985/86 issue of Foundation. She criticised Harrison for accepting the popular anthropological theory regarding hunter-gatherers, and for not taking into account feminist and academic theories which had challenged this theory: "here it is - macho Stone Age hunter-gatherers, male-bonding and all." She also criticised Harrison for creating a male-dominated mythological culture for his humans: "sky-father spirits with no hint of previous Mother-cults; male shaman, with no hint that women may have been the keepers of culture." And she criticised the fact that the 'female aliens' were the 'villains': "Good Guys = individualist warrior Males, Bad Guys = communal intriguing Females. Oh gawd..." She also spent a considerable amount of space comparing Harrison's female Yilanè character Vaintè with the rodent-eating Diana from the TV mini-series V, or 'Nazi Lizards from Space' as she refers to it... Gentle also, however, points out something that other readers picked up on: the human characters are fairly one-dimensional, whereas the Yilanè - in direct contrast - have a "machiavellianism, for which one feels the morally dubious admiration that unstoppable dictators often excite. The Yilanè connive, gain allies, fight adversaries, suffer defeat and victory - do all the things that make a good novel. Beside that, the human's narrative of being massacred, massacring in return, and coming forth with a super-weapon to attack ... the Yilanè pales into insignificance." Gentle's argument seems to be that if you make the villain of your novel a woman, then you must hate women, or at the very least support the subjugation of women. Similar criticism is levelled at any movie which has a female villain, or indeed a gay villain, or a non-WASP villain. And Harrison has more recently been criticised for making the villains of his Stars and Stripes trilogy British. My own view is that villains are usually the best characters in a story, and often the ones readers and writers like best - Alan Rickman or Kevin Costner in Prince of Thieves, vote now. And returning to West of Eden, I don't believe that the Yilanè as a whole are the villains, though admittedly Vaintè is the one rotten apple: read the trilogy through to the end, and you get the impression that the saurians are actually the victims, they stand every chance of being wiped out by the approaching ice age, and they've lost their battle against the humans which they were fighting in order to make a new home in a warmer climate. I discussed this in my interview with Harry Harrison, and he agreed that neither side are heroes or villains in this story.
Just Hold this Lizard for Me, Would You...?
The hatred between the humans and the Yilanè in West of Eden is not intended to mirror some kind of xenophobic human reaction to 'aliens,' but rather an extension of the reaction of some people already have to snakes, spiders and reptiles. "I had the Yilanè and they had to come from Europe, which is all lizards, to the New World [where the humans are]. Now for the reactions. That reaction I got from working with these guys," Harrison said in a 1997 interview with Brian Ireland. "Jack Cohen, the biologist, has some Geckos which are nice little things which don't move and then [Growl!] they'll take your finger off in a second! Tom Shippey was absolutely paralysed by them. Jack said I'm one of the thousands of people who are completely immune to fright by lizards or spiders. Nothing bothers me, I think they're very interesting. But Tom was actually terribly frightened. And I said, well, that's a good part of the plot. If he feels that way, maybe when these two meet each other they'll automatically hate each other. And these are normal reactions to each species. All the plot came out of these normal physiological reactions, once I had that idea."
If Steven Spielberg is Reading this...West of Eden is a story which would make an excellent movie. The CGI technology is now there to create the dinosaurs, and the logical next step after Jurassic Park must be to create a film where the dinosaurs are characters in the story with full speaking roles. The screenwriter is going to have his work cut out adapting this huge trilogy for the screen. My own view is that the whole trilogy should be done as one big two-and-a-half hour epic movie. I have an idea of how it might be done, beginning with just a hint of the cataclysmic disaster which wiped out the dinosaurs in our own version of reality...
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