Terry Bisson and the wild horse woman

I think it's one of the five or six science fiction novels that are immortal and it's one of the eight or 10 mid-century American novels that will stay in print forever. I think it's a great book.

It's kind of a long story, but basically Walter Miller had been working for 30 years on the sequel, and his health was failing. About a year ago I was contacted by his agent, who said he felt like he couldn't finish the book and he wanted somebody to do the last 100-120 pages for him. So the agent asked me to come in and look at it and see what I thought.

It was totally luck. The agent had brought it up when he was with a woman that's an editor of mine and she suggested me, so I got to look at the book.

I was doubtful about the whole project because here's a book that a guy's been working on for 30 years and he said, I've got 600 pages, do you want to come in and have a look at it? I figured it'd be a mess. Well, it was absolutely beautiful. It's a wonderful book. The sequel is based on the second novella in Canticle, which as you know is three novellas set about 500 years apart. It's not really a sequel to the whole thing, it's a parallel story that takes place in the time frame of the second novella.

So I looked at this 600-page book and it blew me away, I thought it was absolutely great. I ended up getting the job and finishing the book. Miller, of course, committed suicide last Christmas, so I never actually got to meet him, or even talk to him on the phone. I never had any communication with him whatsoever.

He left indications and instructions as to what he wanted the final scenes in the book to be, the direction he wanted it to go, and by the time you've got 600 pages you kind of know what it is anyway. I completed the book I think he wanted it to be. So I'm confident that the book is what he would have wanted.

I would say it wasn't difficult. The thing is, I fell in love with the book. I had the book up to 600 pages and I figured I was as good a person to do it as any and better than a lot, so I figured I was actually a pretty good choice to do it. I never felt intimidated by it. Miller's not a flashy writer. Miller's world is what his fiction's about. It's not about flashy prose and he's not a stylist in the sense even that I'm a stylist or, say, Bradbury would be a stylist. He's almost, you might say, a non-stylist. He writes with a deceptively flat surface to his prose. So as far as imitating his style, I didn't feel like it was difficult. I felt like you had to be true to his characters and his milieu, and that I was prepared to do. So it's not like I had to imitate somebody with a real flashy style, like an Ursula Le Guin or a Ray Bradbury. He kind of writes deceptively flat, almost like Asimov, although he's a much better writer than Asimov is. The prose is on a high level, but it's very, I don't want to say flat...it has the appearance of plainness.

If I might add, there are a number of writers that could have done this job in the field. I could name you Karen Fowler or John Kessel or Michael Bishop. I could give you a number that could have done it. There's also a lot that could have really screwed it up. But it was just kind of luck. I was the first guy they asked, and I said okay. The agent sent a copy of my book down to Miller to see if it would be all right with him if I did the stuff. I don't think Miller even read it. I think he looked at the book and said, I've never heard of this guy, but any son of a bitch with a sense of humor can finish this book so tell him to go to work.

The money.

That's not really true. It was the significance of the project and the fact that the book was of such high quality. It wasn't a patchwork job of some guy that's been working on this thing for 30 years and has totally f*cked it up and rewritten it 20 times and doesn't know what he's doing.

He made it easy for me. So it seemed like a really doable job, and it seemed like a great honor to be in the position to do it.

Oh yeah. It's not satire. His stuff all has a strain of humor that runs through it. But it's not a satire. It's a straight adventure about religious and sexual obsession which has a dimension beyond Canticle. It has a whole element of...it has a girl. Canticle didn't have a girl. The wild horse woman. The title is, St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman.

You know when it takes place. You know his world -- it's a post-holocaust, there's been a nuclear war, but it's a thousand years after, basically. It's sort of a dark age, a new dark age. Most of it takes place on the high plains. It concerns the struggle over the papacy and it's fought out between these different nomadic tribes that live on the high plains.

These sort of neo-Benedictine monks are trying to intervene in the struggle in certain ways and it's kind of dicey whether they'll be able to do it or not.

He had written the book up through page 592, and then he had written a couple of long letters to his agent saying, almost like a book proposal, from here the characters going to go here, he's going to go there, then he's going to go back to such and such.

And then he actually sketched out a couple of scenes, real important scenes. The death of somebody -- a death scene -- and a vision scene. Sketched out, that means there was only like a third of a page or a half page of actual dialogue kind of sketched in there that he was kind of fooling around with but didn't do anything with. And that was thrown in. So I had maybe five or six pages of stuff altogether that I worked with. It was not really an outline but sort of an indication of where the story would go.

What I did was take the scenes that he had sketched out, I did them exactly as he did it but fleshed them out so they were in the style of the rest of the book. I interpolated all his material. I followed whatever instructions he had, where he wanted to go, to the letter, because the important thing to me was that this book be his book.

I took what he left and it closed the book. I brought it some closure, that's all. I wrote 110-115 pages.

No. That wasn't the task. He didn't need a collaborator. He just wanted someone to finish his book. I would hope that there is no part of the book where it would be recognizable as my voice or my style because that would be totally improper.

I think it's right. I'm very pleased with it. And the publisher is, the estate is, so everybody's happy with it. This is Walter Miller's book.

Right now I'm working on a couple of commercial projects, nothing of my own. I'm doing a novelization of a new movie, which I have to have done by Christmas, a movie called The Fifth Element. This is a new movie [Luc Besson's] doing with Bruce Willis that's coming out next year.