The Golden City: Part III

My account of the history of this story and why I took so long to complete it.

Mar 26, 2023

Issue #23: Sunday 26 March 2023

About The Story

I guess I came up the the basic idea of the story in late 1976: a Golden Tower, a place reserved for the rich while the poor had to huddle at its base.

It wasn’t all that long before I realised that I was trying unconsciously to recast the fairytale of Jack and the Beanstalk and put it in a science-fictional setting. Once I realised that, I decided to go deliberately in that direction, and so Jack came about. After quite some time, I started wondering about how the rich folk in the tower kept the peasants away, and I came up with the idea of the gravity fence. And with that came the character of Sam, a curious old man who had long been trying to find a way through (though without a handful of magic beans).

I wrote the story up to the point where I got Jack into the tower (leaving Sam behind on the other side of the Fence). But then I started floundering. What would Jack find there? What would he do? Would there be a giant in the top of the tower, bellowing “Fee Fi Fo Fum”? Well, no, that would be a far too literal interpretation of the fairytale. I tried a number of alternatives but eventually flubbed it and just had Jack find a mysteriously empty tower, an ironic take on the jealousy of the people who lived at its base.

It was in this shape that I sent it off in mid 1977 to Ursula Le Guin as a submission to an anthology she was putting together with Virginia Kidd.

Now a bit of background: I had the most incredible good fortune to have attended a Writers Workshop led by Ursula in 1975, while she was in Australia as the Guest of Honour at Aussiecon, the World Science Fiction Convention held in Melbourne. The week of that workshop remains one of the real highlights of my life. Ursula was a wonderful teacher. I was also responsible for corresponding a fair bit with Ursula about The Altered Eye, a book about that workshop and featuring a number of stories written there, as well as accounts of the experience from participants.

I give you all this background so that you’ll understand that I already had something of a personal connection with Ursula when I sent off my story. This is the letter she sent back:

Dear David, Thank you for sending "The Golden City" - - I read it with pleasure and its images keep sticking in my head. I'm not sending it onto Virginia as co-editor, because I know what she'll say, & I wd have to agree: "It's beautiful, but —- And that's the trouble - - finding the but -- I can't quite figure it. Is it too flat/pat an ending for such a lovely long build-up? Does too much remain unexplained (notably the existence of the "City" and the absence of its builders/inhabitants)? Does the fairy-tale vein (Jack's name, trade, and behavior - - all very like English folktale --) need to be more consistently carried through or less? One nit. pp 1-5, reading quickly, the layout & distinction of City Market & Town is unclear -- is the City just the tower? One wd assume the market was in the city -- etc. I know what it is about Jack. If he's a real Jack the cobbler's son like in all the stories, then by God he finds his way out with the loot .. if not with the King's Daughter!... You can't keep Jack down with a lot of fancy gravity barriers. I love the whole scene where they explore & outwit the "fence," by the way. Sam starts out like a Typical Old Geezer of SF, but I got very fond of him by p 10 or 11. By the way why is Jack unable to cry? Only lack of tearducts will explain this to me. Unwilling perhaps; unable, no. If this were a story for kids, not bitty ones,I mean 8-12 or 11-up, it would be a lovely beginning: Jack would find some way "on" from the tower -- up? rockets?? -- to Another Place, you know, & adventures. Could it by chance be a beginning instead of a story? I should like to think so. You sure can write, Grigg luv. All the very best, Ursula

This, obviously, is the best rejection letter anyone could ask for (that “You sure can write” still makes me glow), and this is how I replied:

Dear Ursula, thank you for your letter. It's the most delightful rejection I've ever had. You are extremely perceptive in your analysis of my problems with "The Golden City". I just couldn't end the thing properly. The ending that you read was the third version so far. So your suggestion that it is, perhaps, the beginning of something rather than a finished story struck home quite strongly. I suppose the basic lesson is that if you are going to allow concious or unconcious mythological themes to creep into your stories then you have to remain true to those themes. When I first concieved the story, Jack (as Jack) did not enter into it; that theme was something I discovered was there when I began writing it. And so now I guess I have to salt the story away until my subconcious comes up with a way to have Jack return, carrying the singing harp and the Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs. Oh well. Thank you for your comments, anyway, they are extremely valuable, particularly the thought that my story might be the beginning of a juvenile. I hadn't thought of it from that angle before. Cheers, David

So I salted the story away. For years. I got married, acquired a mortgage, had a child, pursued a career which wasn’t writing fiction. I wasn’t until 2011 that I started to pick up the threads of writing. And one of the things I did was look back at the stack of unpublished stories in manuscript which I’d kept through the years. This was one of them.

With fresh eyes, I realised that the key to getting the story to go somewhere was to have old Sam come along with Jack into the tower, to be a foil for Jack’s thoughts and explorations, and ultimately to be the reason Jack understands what had happened to the inhabitants of the tower.

In this form, the story was eventually published in Novapulp Magazine in 2015. Some 38 or 39 years after the first draft! It’s certainly still not a perfect story, and I’m still pondering Ursula’s suggestion that maybe it’s the start of something, rather than a stand-alone. There’s a lot of merit in that.

So there you go.

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See you next issue!

A Flash in the Pan

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