toy circus balloons, and of the monkey gentleman who kept the store he asked:
‘Have you any flying machines?’
‘What do you mean—flying machines?’ asked the monkey gentleman. ‘Do you mean birds?’
‘Well, birds are flying machines, of course,’ the rabbit gentleman said. ‘But I mean a sort of airship that I could go up in as if I were in a balloon, and fly around in the clouds….’”
When I was growing up my family occasionally played the Uncle Wiggily board game, in which one was pursued through the swamp by the bad Pipsisewah and the terrible Skeezicks. I loved the game, even though it gave me nightmares. Later on I discovered the Uncle Wiggily books, written by Howard R. Garis, and I’m still particularly fond of Uncle Wiggily’s Airship, in which Uncle Wiggily builds his airship by tying balloons to a laundry basket. He fastens an electric fan to it for propulsion and contrives a sort of hockey-stick tiller and “a baby carriage wheel to steer by,” and then embarks on a series of high altitude adventures, often suffering crash landings when the balloons burst. In one adventure he’s saved by the ingenuity of Arabella the chicken girl, who blows flotational soap bubbles through a pipe: “Then she blew forty-’leven bubbles, or maybe more, for all I know. Uncle Wiggily caught them, and fastened them with silk threads and cobwebs, which a kind spider lady spun for him, to the basket of his airship….”
Back in the early 1980s a man in Long Beach fastened helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated high over the city, eating a sack lunch and rising to heights above 10,000 feet, where he was viewed with astonishment by pilots and passengers of commercial airplanes. When he landed, hours later, sunburned and amazed, he was cited by the FAA for having failed to file a flight plan. There were no other relevant laws on the books, apparently, although there are now. We’re living in an era when Uncle Wiggily would be an outlaw, and the monkey gentleman and Arabella the chicken girl accessories to a crime. (Uncle Wiggily, by the way, took a Japanese umbrella up with him to solve the sunburn problem.) We hear often enough that truth is stranger than fiction, which is obviously true if you keep your eyes open. It’s wonderful, however, when reality mimics fiction, and an unemployed car mechanic out in Long Beach goes down to a store where they sell toy circus balloons and becomes Uncle Wiggily for a day.
I remember reading the account of the balloon airship in the newspaper—reading it more than once—and then driving down to the Lucky supermarket on Chapman Avenue in a highly distracted state of mind. I bounced up over the curb on my way into the parking lot (my mind elsewhere) the jolt coincidental with the inspiration for the first chapter of what would become The Digging Leviathan . Later that afternoon I actually started writing the novel (which Lester del Rey would later reject unread, on the grounds that the idea of the book was “cultistic.” “You went to the same damned university that Powers went to, didn’t you?” Lester asked me over the telephone.) The episode of the balloon airship disappeared out of the book in the writing of it; it had simply been a sort of incidental muse.
The Muse in a Steamer Trunk
When those first two UNEARTH stories were published, neither generated wild interest, but more than one reader commented on the odd differences in style and method, as if the stories had been written by different authors. I mean to address that phenomenon briefly, because those perceptive readers were to some small degree correct, and these thirty years later, after writing and publishing some sixteen novels and enough short stories to have lost count, I see no reason that the truth shouldn’t prevail, such as it is.
In 1975, Viki and I traveled to Europe for a period of nearly three months, spending some time in England and Ireland. We stayed briefly in Bristol with our
‘Have you any flying machines?’
‘What do you mean—flying machines?’ asked the monkey gentleman. ‘Do you mean birds?’
‘Well, birds are flying machines, of course,’ the rabbit gentleman said. ‘But I mean a sort of airship that I could go up in as if I were in a balloon, and fly around in the clouds….’”
When I was growing up my family occasionally played the Uncle Wiggily board game, in which one was pursued through the swamp by the bad Pipsisewah and the terrible Skeezicks. I loved the game, even though it gave me nightmares. Later on I discovered the Uncle Wiggily books, written by Howard R. Garis, and I’m still particularly fond of Uncle Wiggily’s Airship, in which Uncle Wiggily builds his airship by tying balloons to a laundry basket. He fastens an electric fan to it for propulsion and contrives a sort of hockey-stick tiller and “a baby carriage wheel to steer by,” and then embarks on a series of high altitude adventures, often suffering crash landings when the balloons burst. In one adventure he’s saved by the ingenuity of Arabella the chicken girl, who blows flotational soap bubbles through a pipe: “Then she blew forty-’leven bubbles, or maybe more, for all I know. Uncle Wiggily caught them, and fastened them with silk threads and cobwebs, which a kind spider lady spun for him, to the basket of his airship….”
Back in the early 1980s a man in Long Beach fastened helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated high over the city, eating a sack lunch and rising to heights above 10,000 feet, where he was viewed with astonishment by pilots and passengers of commercial airplanes. When he landed, hours later, sunburned and amazed, he was cited by the FAA for having failed to file a flight plan. There were no other relevant laws on the books, apparently, although there are now. We’re living in an era when Uncle Wiggily would be an outlaw, and the monkey gentleman and Arabella the chicken girl accessories to a crime. (Uncle Wiggily, by the way, took a Japanese umbrella up with him to solve the sunburn problem.) We hear often enough that truth is stranger than fiction, which is obviously true if you keep your eyes open. It’s wonderful, however, when reality mimics fiction, and an unemployed car mechanic out in Long Beach goes down to a store where they sell toy circus balloons and becomes Uncle Wiggily for a day.
I remember reading the account of the balloon airship in the newspaper—reading it more than once—and then driving down to the Lucky supermarket on Chapman Avenue in a highly distracted state of mind. I bounced up over the curb on my way into the parking lot (my mind elsewhere) the jolt coincidental with the inspiration for the first chapter of what would become The Digging Leviathan . Later that afternoon I actually started writing the novel (which Lester del Rey would later reject unread, on the grounds that the idea of the book was “cultistic.” “You went to the same damned university that Powers went to, didn’t you?” Lester asked me over the telephone.) The episode of the balloon airship disappeared out of the book in the writing of it; it had simply been a sort of incidental muse.
The Muse in a Steamer Trunk
When those first two UNEARTH stories were published, neither generated wild interest, but more than one reader commented on the odd differences in style and method, as if the stories had been written by different authors. I mean to address that phenomenon briefly, because those perceptive readers were to some small degree correct, and these thirty years later, after writing and publishing some sixteen novels and enough short stories to have lost count, I see no reason that the truth shouldn’t prevail, such as it is.
In 1975, Viki and I traveled to Europe for a period of nearly three months, spending some time in England and Ireland. We stayed briefly in Bristol with our
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