And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it.
I was a fan, a real convention-going fan, for only maybe three years. Went to a couple of them in the early ’60s. Went to a WorldCon. Got a job. Started courting girls. And suddenly I was whirled away into what may loosely be called “Real Life.” While I have to say, when you work on a newspaper, life doesn’t appear to be all that real.
In 1973 there was a convention in my area, and I thought, I ought to go back. You know, it’s been, what, eight years since I last went to a con. And I walked in, and there was no one I recognized, and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gone in and gone back into fandom right there and then. Mind you, I do recall that Salman Rushdie actually came second in a science fiction writing competition organized by Gollancz in the late 1970s. Just imagine if he’d won—Ayatollahs from Mars!—he would have had none of that trouble over the Satanic Verses, ’cos it would have been SF and therefore unimportant. He’d have been coming along to cons. He’d be standing here now! Ah, but the little turns and twists of history …
Where do the ideas come from? I do not know. But one of the things I did learn from my science fiction reading was that there were other things you could read besides science fiction. I developed a love of history, which school had singularly failed to inculcate into me. I am now in correspondence with my old history master and we get on very well. But his lessons hadn’t told me the things that were really interesting: that, for example, during a large part of the eighteenth century, you could actually get pubs to pay you to take urine away and the tanners would actually pay you to have urine delivered to them. That’s an interesting fact. It must be even more fun to know it when you are fourteen years old.
I have to admit that I am currently in a position of having more bookshelf space than I have books. [Cries of “Oh!’] However, this is, of course, not counting all those books in the attic, the books under the bed in the spare room, the books wrapped up in protective paper in the garage. Those are the books you kind of, well, just have, they’re like Stonehenge. No one is ever going to do anything with them now, but obviously you keep them. Yep, I actually have empty shelves. I have got at least eight feet of blank shelves in my new library. I am sorry. But we went off to an antiquarian bookseller’s the other week, and I spent several hundred quid and now I’ve got probably only about four feet of shelving to fill.
I’ve made a lot of money out of the writing. A considerable amount. But I am horizontally wealthy, which is the way to go. I advise you all to consider horizontal wealth. If you are vertically wealthy, you think “I am rich. So I had better do what rich people do.” What do rich people do? Well, they find out where the hell Gstaad is, and then they go skiing there. They buy a yacht. They may go to beaches a long way away. Well, first of all, never buy a yacht. Yachts are like tearing up hundred-pound notes while standing under a cold shower. A nail, a perfectly ordinary nail, costs five times as much if it is a nautical nail. My PA is on at me to buy a light aircraft because he could fly it, but he was training to be a fighter pilot and maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea.
But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it.
Let me tell you, for example, the story of tarlatane, uncovered in newspaper accounts from the mid 1850s. Tarlatane was a kind of false silk, made in, I think, lower Saxony. A mineral was ground up, and mixed with paste, and rubbed into cloth, and polished in such a way that you got something that looks a bit like silk. It was a lovely brilliant green, and this young lady attended a ball for troops going to the Crimea, in London, one sultry summer’s night, and she had a dress made of tarlatane and shoes made with tarlatane and a bag made of tarlatane. Thus dressed, she danced the night away in this closed, rather humid ballroom, and no doubt little flecks of green spiralled off her dress as she whirled and danced from partner to partner, and then she went home and she felt a bit ill. And then she felt very ill—and after a couple of days of horrible torment, she died of acute arsenic poisoning. How do you make tarlatane? You make it out of copper arsenate. And this is terrible. And this is tragic. But as an author, you look up and you see the glow, the whirling dancers, the beautiful girl, the deadly green glitter in the air. And this is so cool! Sorry … but you know what I mean.
I was reading an old book on alchemy and it talked about an alchemist in Austria, who got—I can’t remember which emperor it was—to pardon him. He was brought before the emperor on charges of falsely claiming to be able to make gold. He could see the man was unwell, recognized the symptoms of arsenical poisoning, and made a bargain that if he could cure the emperor of Austria he would be allowed to go free.
He tested everything. He tested bread, he tested meat, he tested the water. The emperor got worse and worse. Then he got hold of one of the big candles used in the royal bedroom and weighed it. He went down to the market and bought another candle the same size and weighed that, and found that the royal candle was a pound heaver than the other, because the wick was almost solid arsenic. Lovely stuff, arsenic. I have several different ores of it, it’s quite my favourite poison. And every night, when the candles were lit, the emperor was slowly poisoned—and that became part of the plot of Feet of Clay. Where do you get your fantastic ideas from? You steal them. You steal them from reality. It outstrips fantasy most the time.