Guest post written by author Edward Willett
Edward Willett is the author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for readers of all ages. Based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Willett won the Aurora Award (Canada’s top science-fiction award) for Best Long-Form Work in English for his 2009 novel Marseguro (DAW Books). He’s also won a Saskatchewan Book Award, and has been shortlisted for these and other awards many times. His eleventh novel for DAW Books, The Moonlit World, came out last year and his twelfth, a humorous space opera entitled The Tangled Stars, is due out in 2022. Willett hosts The Worldshapers podcast, featuring interviews with other science fiction and fantasy authors about the creative process.
Aurora Award-winning author Edward Willett is back with Star Song, a star-spanning young adult science fiction adventure inspired by the classic works of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton. Star Song is out now.
The idea of the multiverse, of new versions of reality branching off with every minute decision, has become a staple of science fiction, though it’s not really an idea limited to tales of the fantastic: after all, who hasn’t wondered, “What would have happened if . . .?” when looking back on their lives.
In fact, one of the most famous poems in the English language is based on that ever-present question: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” which begins with, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” and ends with, “I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.”
Everyone’s life is full of such divergences, and there is one in particular in my life that I have thought about a great deal over the years. Let me take you back in time . . .
It’s October 1985. I’m 26 years old, I’m the news editor of the weekly Weyburn Review in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and I’ve just sold a science-fiction short story to JAM Magazine, a (now long-defunct) Canadian magazine for teens. It’s called “The Minstrel,” and the magazine liked it enough to feature its artwork on the cover.
For me, the story’s central image, of a boy gazing at the silver spires of spaceships pointing the way to stars, longing to be aboard them, was very much a metaphor for my own love of the stories of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg and Clifford D. Simak and so many others. Their stories were the shining ships that took me to the stars in my imagination.
“The Minstrel” became the seed from which grew the first novel I submitted to publishers. It’s the story of a boy, Kriss Lemarc, orphaned at a young age, raised in secret by a guardian on a planet where he doesn’t belong. The only link he has to the parents he never knew is a musical instrument, which he calls a touchlyre. Made by his father, it can be played simply by touching it and thinking of a song.
After his guardian is murdered by unknown assailants, Kriss takes the touchlyre and heads for the planet’s sole spaceport, determined to escape the planet. When Tevera, a girl of the spacegoing, nomadic Family, hears Kriss perform, she is drawn to him against her better judgment and the rules of her people. With her help, though mistrusted and even hated by others of the Family, Kriss seeks to discover the origin of the touchlyre, the fate of his parents, and a place where he truly belongs. But the touchlyre proves to be more than just a musical oddity: its wooden body conceals a powerful and ancient alien artifact. Ruthless, wealthy men will stop at nothing to get it—and Kriss and Tevera are all that stand in their way.
Among the editors I submitted The Minstrel to was the late Josepha Sherman, then editing for Walker & Company, a major publisher of books for children and young adults. She sent it back with a thoughtful letter that said she liked what was there but felt it was missing a big chunk in the middle, where I’d put a huge time skip. She said if I wanted to take a crack at filling in that gap and making a few other changes, I could resubmit it—which, of course, I did.
By this time, it was 1991. I was living in Regina, Saskatchewan, and working as communications officer for the brand-new Saskatchewan Science Centre, but my long-term goal hadn’t changed: I wanted to write novels full-time. I had my fingers crossed, waiting to hear back from Josepha . . . and then came the blow. She wrote to say that I’d done exactly what needed to be done and she was “ready to make an offer”—but the publisher had died, his son had taken over Walker and Company, and among the son’s changes was a decision to no longer publish science fiction.
And so, the timeline split. Two roads diverged. Down one, I sold The Minstrel in 1991 and became my career as a published novelist thirty years ago. But in this timeline, that way was blocked. The Minstrel never found a home. It was several more years before I had a novel published. Still, even down this road, things eventually picked up. I’m currently working on my twelfth novel for DAW, The Tangled Stars, a humorous space opera due out in 2022, and I’ve had many other novels published by other publishers.
And something else happened along this road (and possibly along the other, but who knows?): the rise of independent publishing. In 2018, I started my own publishing company, Shadowpaw Press (named after our black Siberian cat). Shadowpaw Press (shadowpawpress.com) has already re-published several books from my personal backlist; the aforementioned short-story collection, Paths to the Stars; my grandfather-in-law’s First World War memoirs, One Lucky Devil; and Shapers of Worlds, a Kickstarted anthology of short fiction by guests from the first year of my podcast, The Worldshapers (theworldshapers.com), where I interview other science fiction and fantasy authors about the creative process. (A second Kickstarted anthology, Shapers of Worlds Volume II, featuring second-year guests, is coming out this fall.)
From the moment I launched Shadowpaw Press, I’ve known that one of the things I wanted to publish was Star Song. I wanted the story that meant so much to me when I wrote it, and which almost started my career down an entirely different path, to finally see the light of day and, I hoped, to find readers who might love it as much as I did.
But when you look back at what might have been, you may find that among the things that have changed since those two roads diverged is you. Three decades on, I’m a much more experienced writer, and looking back at The Minstrel (now re-titled Star Song), I realized that, as much as I liked it, I could write it better now.
And so, Star Song, as finally released by Shadowpaw Press in July, both is and isn’t the same story it was back when the timeline split. The plot is the same, but the telling of it has evolved. Where once, it had a single viewpoint character, the boy, Kriss Lemarc, now Tevera, the girl of the spacegoing Family, is also a viewpoint character. It seemed so obvious to me when I re-read it that it needed that second viewpoint that it’s hard to believe I didn’t see it when I first wrote it.
So, I rewrote Star Song from start to finish, and now, at last, it’s in the hands of readers.
Thirty years ago, two roads diverged. Down the one I was prevented from taking, Star Song remained The Minstrel, was published by Walker and Company, and sent my writing career down a path whose end I can never know, lost in the multiverse as it is.
Down the other, years passed before I had novels published, more years before I had my own publishing company, more years before, at last, Star Song finally saw the light of day.
But much as I wonder what happened down that other branch of my personal timeline, I’m kind of happy I’m living in this one. Star Song, as finally published in 2021, it is a better book than The Minstrel would have been had it been published in 1991. And ultimately, all that really matters is the story, and that I told it to the best of my ability.
I’m proud to have published Star Song at last. May it be the shining, silver ship that takes their imagination to the stars, as every story that inspired it was for me.
