Forty Million Summers

The Cover Reveal

I’m pausing between installments of my series about Library of America’s science fiction collections to post the newly-revealed cover for my novel Forty Million Summers, due in May of 2027 from Tachyon Publications. I like this very much—it’s moody, evocative, and entirely appropriate to the text.

It’s been ten years between my last novel and this one. A long gap, but not the first hiatus in my career. I pause from time to time, let’s put it that way. It’s not writer’s block, at least not as I understand it. It’s just that there’s an occasional sense of sufficiency, of that’s enough for now.

For now, but not forever. Sooner or later the impulse returns. And when I turn back to the blank page and the blinking cursor, the question I inevitably ask myself is: Why science fiction? I could have been writing mysteries or historical novels, after all. But no. I’m a science fiction guy, first and always. So what is it that made SF such a large part of my personal and professional life? I learned to read at an unusually early age, and from the beginning much of what I chose to read was some variety of science fiction…but why?

It’s a personal question, almost a psychological question, certainly a question other writers might answer differently. The best I can say is that from my earliest encounters with it, science fiction seemed to reflect everything that was strange and expansive in the world. There was much in these stories I was too young to understand, but here were wonders hidden in plain sight, as mysterious as the fossil ammonites embedded in the marbled walls of the local bank. As a child I associated science fiction with certain places, usually places where technology hovered indifferently over nature—the hydroelectric towers in the weedy autumn field I passed through on the way to school, or the civic waterworks, windowless and round as a Roman amphitheater, in the hills behind my childhood home in Whittier, California. These places provoked feelings for which I had no words, a lonesome but exhilarating sense of the world beyond me and without me, the present moment folded into an infinity of pasts and futures. And how fascinating to find that feeling captured on the printed page or on a TV screen, in Ray Bradbury’s rocket summers, say, or the vast Krell furnaces of the movie Forbidden Planet.

And there was the tantalizing possibility of being able to recreate those feelings by writing stories of my own. And I wrote a lot of them: reams of juvenilia, printed by hand or, later, pounded out on my father’s old Underwood Noiseless typewriter. Terrible stories, of course, but every once in a while there was a flicker of authentic strangeness, enough to keep me going until, eventually, some of those stories sold to the science fiction magazines.

Juvenilia. My first-grade teacher was suitably impressed.

And thus, a career. And now, forty years since the publication of my first novel, a new book in the works. I’m proud of Forty Million Summers, not least because so much of that lifelong fascination with science fiction is woven into it. And how gratifying that Tachyon Publications has given it this moody, evocative cover.