David*Macinnis*Gill.com

When gal­leys of a new book are sent out to read­ers, edi­tors often include a short let­ter from the author, telling a cou­ple of things about how the book came into being. A cou­ple of months ago, Green­wil­low sent out ARCs of Black Hole Sun, and they asked me write a such a let­ter, let­ting the reader know how I came up with a future dystopia on Mars.  The response from the let­ter was pretty good, so I thought I would share it:

Black Hole Sun is a novel set in a dystopian future. So of course, I’m going to tell you about the past.

It’s 1969.  My big brother is watch­ing Star Trek on my uncle’s TV. I’m hid­ing behind a chair. There’s a woman with green skin on the screen. Green skin scares me. Because I’m five, and no one I know has green skin.

It’s 1973. Water­gate. Viet­nam. Civil unrest. If you lis­ten to my par­ents, the world is going to hell in a hand bas­ket. We’re watch­ing the news unfold on a dinky black and white set. B&W TV is hell, in my opin­ion. Because all my friends have color sets, and they get UHF chan­nels. Which means they get to watch Gigan­tor, a Japan­ese car­toon about a kid who con­trols a giant robot. Is that cool or what? All I get to watch is John Wayne movies and spaghetti west­erns. My dad’s huge for The Duke. The Horse Sol­diers and The Res­cuers, directed by John Ford, are his favorites. West­erns aren’t Gigan­tor. But they’re bet­ter than, say, watch­ing wrestling.

It’s 1979. My dresser is chock full of tat­tered Star Wars ’77 t-shirts. There’s a well-used faux light saber hang­ing on my wall, next to a poster of Close Encoun­ters. I’m hid­ing under the cov­ers, hav­ing just had the beje­sus scared out of me by a new movie called Aliens.  Darth Vader’s famous line, “I am your father” is still a year away. But I already have that fig­ured out. Sci­ence fic­tion and pulp nov­els are piled on my night­stand–Logan’s Run, Doc Sav­age, Dhal­gren, and Star­ship Troop­ers. But my teenage self wants more. More sword fights. More stolen kisses on the Death­star. More swash­buck­ling with laser blasters. More deli­ciously wicked vil­lains and more teen heroes who shed the bonds of parental expec­ta­tions to go off to save their lit­tle piece of the uni­verse. So like any teenager who wants more sto­ries, I sit down and do what seems nat­ural. I write my own novel, typ­ing madly on an old man­ual type­writer that does more to build up my fin­ger mus­cles than to improve my nascent writ­ing skills.

It’s 2003. I’m in Greens­boro NC at Orson Scott Card’s writ­ers boot camp, doing my home­work. Which is to scan mag­a­zines for the small details that can make a sci­ence fic­tion story feel real to the reader. I find an arti­cle about bioad­ap­tive cloth and its pos­si­ble use in mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tions. Ter­mi­na­tor 3: Rise of the Machines has just been released, and one evening, instead of writ­ing, I sneak off to see it. Back at boot­camp, I write a story about sen­tient chig­gers tun­nel­ing through Mars’ core, part of a ter­raform­ing exper­i­ment. A class­mate calls it “Crabs from Space.”

It’s early  2009.  I’m strug­gling with a follow-up to my debut novel.  Ideas are lead­ing nowhere. First drafts become dead-ends. Then I’m clean­ing out the garage and find an old man­u­script, yel­lowed and crin­kled. The casu­alty of many moves from dorm to apart­ment to houses in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try. I read a few pages. The story’s lame. Com­pletely void of inspi­ra­tion. But the writ­ing has a cer­tain spark, and I remem­ber the teen who wrote this. His pas­sion. His need to see some­thing of him­self in story. His wish to make a dif­fer­ence some­how, even if it’s in the pages of a book.

So I email my edi­tor a sin­gle sen­tence. The idea for a new novel. It’s the kind of story I tried to write in 1979 but couldn’t—a heroic but flawed teen with parental issues who stares down his mon­sters instead of hid­ing behind the fur­ni­ture. She likes the idea, and it leads to the book you’re hold­ing. I hope you enjoy it—after all, it’s forty years in the making.

And that sen­tence I sent? It wasn’t “Crabs from Space.” But it could have been, dear reader. It could have been.