Reminiscence on
Starborn and Godsons
by Larry Niven
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The Heorot trilogy started with an African frog with nasty habits. Jack Cohen told several writers about it. I’ve had correspondence with the man who actually did the research; his problem was getting anyone to believe him.
The frog lives in a very simple ecology. There’s moss; there’re frogs; and there’re tadpoles. The tadpoles eat the moss. When they grow bigger, the frogs eat them. Some survive to become frogs and continue the species. We moved them to an alien planet and made some changes.
This third volume of the Heorot series will be the last.
Jerry Pournelle and I conceived The Legacy of Heorot hoping to generate a Nebula Award winner. Hence the pretentious title, naming the hall invaded by Grendel in the Beowulf saga. We intended a novella: there’s fewer sales at that length, hence reduced competition. Our menace, the grendels, would resemble a horror from EC Comics from our childhood. That decided, we set forth to build the SF field’s most realistic colony story. Bring enough people. Use an established concept for an interstellar spacecraft. Inhabit an island to confine the new world’s surprises to a minimum.
For a year or two it was just talk and notes and ideas. No text. We got impatient. We decided to invite a guy I’d written with, Steven Barnes, into the mix.
That was brilliant. Steven was perfect. He’s wonderful at writing horror. We were all a lot younger, and Steven in his twenties was the perfect student. He listened. He worked. He needed the training. He didn’t freak out when we tore his text up and rewrote it. Jerry and I got into lecturing him and each other. We talked it all over, and as we did, the story grew to novel length.
Steven admits: once he got involved, The Legacy of Heorot was always going to be a novel. He wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to learn.
When a story is finished, we don’t stop thinking about it. Most writers are like that, I believe. That’s how sequels are born.
Jerry and I used to drink as we generated stories. When he had to give that up, we hiked instead, and Steven often joined us. After publication we found ourselves frantic to explore Avalon’s mainland, barely glimpsed in Heorot.
Beowulf’s Children was written in much the same fashion as Heorot. We were all noticeably older. Somewhere in there I’d told Steven he was no longer a student, but that didn’t matter; all three of us had the habit of lecturing each other. We invited a fourth lecturer into the mix: we paid Jack Cohen travel expenses and a flat fee to help us design an ecology for the Avalon mainland.
Jack Cohen was a world-class expert on fertility in all creatures, and in a host of other disciplines. He was a lifelong science fiction fan. He sometimes did flat fee work for science fiction writers; he did that to rationalize Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. For us he designed the Avalon crab template, with an aerodynamic shell and four varied claws. We used it throughout, from seafood to bees to birdles to the Scribes, the vast creatures that leave tracks visible from orbit, which we never quite described in Heorot.
I don’t remember who invented the Avalon carnivore bees—the ones who eat grendels and use their speed to move like little bullets.
I do remember fighting to persuade my collaborators that our character Aaron could shoot a man who knew too much, if he pretended to be shooting at the grendel who was trying to rescue him. We had to put a character onstage to knock the gun out of his hands.
The book was published as Beowulf’s Children in the United States, and as The Dragons of Heorot in Britain.
On our hikes we argued about the fate of the citizens of Avalon. We were pretty much agreed that civilization there was doomed. The Grendel War had done too much damage. The younger Avalonians, the Starborn, weren’t making new tools. Their orbital ship was deteriorating, along with the ship’s computer.
Jerry wanted to write a romance. We wrote a novelette set between the first two books, “The Secret of Black Ship Island,” and sold it on the Internet. Here a new life form was born, the Cthulhus.
And eventually we found a way to rescue the Godsons, the youngest generation of Avalonians.
But by then Jerry had developed a tumor in his brain. They had to burn it out with converging lasers. Afterward it developed that Jerry couldn’t write any more. He could dream, he could plan, he could interact and criticize when we spun our dreams, but sitting down to write became impossible.
We worked in Jerry’s living room, spinning plot lines and redirecting them, generating characters and interactions, making underground maps. We kept Jack Cohen involved, using Skype to link England and California, but Jack had become ill too.
Jerry had a stroke. We kept working. He was recovering.
He died in his sleep in September 2017, a few days after attending Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia.
Starborn and Godsons was nearly finished by then, and fully plotted to the end. Steven and I wrapped it up over a few months.
It’s Jerry Pournelle’s last novel. Jack Cohen has passed on. Steven and I are at work on other projects.
Based on today’s physics, with no outrageous new discoveries, we believe the Heorot series is a fully reasonable approach to the settling of other planets. We’d love to live long enough to see it happen.
—Larry Niven
August 15, 2019