by Alfred D. Byrd, author of To
Serve in Heaven
How did the idea for the Volants come to you?
The idea for the Volant Flyway came to me in a strange way on my thirtieth birthday, back in 1984. Disgusted with all of
the fiction I'd written to date, I was looking over titles of books on my bookshelves for inspiration for a new departure
in my writing. My eyes kept alighting on Poul Anderson's War of the Winged Men and Edgar Rice Burrough's A
Princess of Mars. All at once, these merged in my mind into a hybrid title: The Winged Men of Mars. Spurred on by this
title, I began to visualize winged humans sporting in thermals of Valles Marineris on a terraformed Mars. Sadly for my
writing a story about the winged humans, they looked too happy to have a conflict, any story's core. We do like reading
about dystopias more than about Utopia, don't we? Just then, in the way of writers, I had an evil thought about my
characters: What if they can't get to Mars? What if they're trapped in a space station above Mars while they await
terraforming that politics and prejudice against them ensure will never happen? Thus, Volant Habitat, the scene of To
Serve in Heaven, entered the Volant Flyway.
What exactly is a Volant?
A Volant's a member of a human species genetically engineered, by excision of some human genes and insertion of animal
or artificial genes, to have wings for flight in the air of a terraformed Mars. Having just taken a course in human
genetics at the University of Kentucky when I came up with Volants, I wrestled with all kinds of ways to give them a
useable wing till Helen E. Davis suggested to me they'd do best with a pterodactyl's wings, which would leave the Volants
functional hands. To make the Volants flightworthy, even in Martian gravity, they also need a number of other modifications
to the basic human design. Wingborne Cecilia explains these to a visiting human, Gareth Powell, in the opening chapters of
To Serve in Heaven.
How did you come to write To Serve in Heaven?
Once I'd conceived of the conflict and setting for a story about Volants, I needed a viewpoint character. Into the role
stepped Nicholas Calliope Glinda, a troubled youth growing up in a habitat bursting at its seams with overpopulation.
Although impulsive and self-centered, he's not intrinsically hateful, yet his bad choices put him at risk of receiving
Volant Habitat's ultimate judicial penalty, radical personality reconstruction, a product of psychotherapy, drugs, and
dream induction. Nicholas' struggle to avoid what he calls "The Zombie Treatment" and escape from a meaningless life became
a novelette called "To Serve in Heaven." You can read a much revised version of my original Volant Story in my short story
collection Dreamcatcher's
Awakening and Other Stories.
How did you turn a novelette into a novel?
After I'd written "To Serve in Heaven," I saw I'd packed the background for a whole novel into a novelette. In
particular, I'd brought Nicholas together with two characters, his cousin Cecilia and a non-Volant bard named Gareth, both
of whom have conflicts as complicated and absorbing as his own was. Cecilia, Gareth, and Nicholas are bound together by
their encounters with an ecologicial activist, Peter Erica Carmen, who wants to fulfill the Volant dream of flying free in
the skies of a terraformed Mars. Guided by the twin poles of a hopeless world of the present and a hopeful world of the
future, I expanded Nicholas's story into a novella and intercut it with novellas from the viewpoints of Cecilia and Gareth.
The three novellas became a novel of three versions of a common struggle for freedom in a world that's ceased to allow
it.
Before you tell us of that struggle, could you explain Volant names?
The three-part Volant name reflects the Volants' origins. At the start of the Twenty-Second Century, two thousand
Volants were gestated in and delivered from simulated uterine environments on a space station in Earth's L5 point. These
Volants were the Ancestors. In response to mistreatment by the rest of humanity, which turned against the creation of
artificial species in the Great Reaction, the Ancestors set up a society that they felt would let them express their unique
nature as flying humans. In the Ancestors' society, each person belongs to a matrilineal clan, or Line. A person's name
consists of a given name chosen by their mother, the mother's name, and the name of the Ancestress who founded the mother's
Line. Thus, Nicholas Calliope Glinda is the son of Calliope, a descendant in an unbroken female line from the Ancestress
Glinda. You'll meet Calliope in To Serve in Heaven, along with Cecilia's mother, Marissa.
What's Cecilia's role in the novel?
Cecilia, an earnest young woman who wants to do good, but fears she can't change a world disintegrating around her,
takes on the challenge of escorting a visitor from Earth, the bard Gareth, through Volant society. During that task, she
faces three main conflicts. First, she must try to keep her wayward cousin, Nicholas, from receiving the Zombie Treatment.
Second, she must care for her father, who's already received the Zombie Treatment for an offense unknown to her — an
offense the Volant courts have put under a judicial seal. Third, she wants to become a nun in a Volant religious order
seeking recognition by the Roman Catholic Church — recognition the Church denies.
What's the Church's conflict with the Volants?
The Church is wrestling with a profound theological question: are Volants human in the sense that Christ's sacrificial
death and resurrection provide them with redemption and the hope of life everlasting as the Passion provides them to
genetically unmodified humans (which volants call Basics)? This question breaks down into subsidiary questions: (1) does
humanity end when one's maker admixes artificial and especially animal genes into the human genome? and (2) can God accept
the products of human presumption in creating an artificial human species? If theology matters to you, these are far from
trivial questions — questions we may in time face in real life.
Why did you hand this conflict to the Roman Catholic Church?
Every story's rooted in what its writer brings to it. I'm a Baptist, a member of a way of faith and practice that makes
all decisions at the congregational level. If the Volant conflict arose in a congregational setting, it'd likely be solved
by a church split in which those who accepted Volants as their brothers and sisters in Christ would go in one direction,
and those who didn't accept them would go in another. You can see that dynamic at play on the earth in congregational ways
of faith and practice today. For the story, I needed a way of faith and practice that makes its decisions at a common
center and makes them binding universally so that there would be no easy way out for Cecilia and her brothers and sisters
in the order. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has been such a way of faith and practice throughout its existence.
It's been so across two millennia; why not for five hundred years more? Having read widely in Church history, I felt I
could do justice to Catholicism in Cecilia's story. I've tried not to make the Church a villain in the stand it's taken in
the novel. Rather, I see the Church as a set of concerned humans wrestling with a difficult question that's arisen from
human acts that some might call presumptuous. In response to that question, Volants say: We didn't create ourselves; why
should we suffer for our creators' choice to make us what we are?
What's Gareth's role in the novel?
Gareth's an outsider of our own kind who looks at Volant society with our own eyes and sees in it things Volants
themselves might miss or think obvious. Ostensibly, he comes to Volant Habitat as a visiting professor of musicology who
wants to learn of a unique form of poetry Volants have invented for themselves. He comes to Volant Habitat with personal
baggage: a brother's recent death from abusing dream induction, a breakup with a strong love interest, and a mandate to spy
on the Volants. His decisions, colored by ignorance and impulsiveness, get him involved in a political controversy with
interplanetary implications.
Gareth isn't a great white savior, is he?
When I wrote the first draft of what'd become To Serve in Heaven, I hadn't heard of the concept of the great
white savior. That being said, I'd read books that figure appeared in — particulary Burroughs' John Carter and
Tarzan novels. I saw at once that such a figure wouldn't work in Volant Habitat. What a man of action, whatever the good or
evil of his intentions and deeds, might get away with on a far frontier would get him at once arrested in a settled
society. Rather, Gareth's a tourist who struggles with culture shock and speaks and acts in ways that win him both friends
and enemies among the people he's come to visit. Rather than being a conquering hero from fantastic literature, Gareth's a
figure we read of all of the time in the news: a foreigner who gets caught up as a political pawn in another nation's
conflict. In trying to become an agent rather than a pawn, he seeks a form of redemption — for himself and for his
new friends.
What's with all of the court cases your characters end up in?
After I'd read a lot of action-adventure literature, it became unbelievable to me that the characters in those stories
— even and perhaps especially the "good guys" — could break laws right and left and never get arrested or go
before a judge. I chose to put some real life into Volant Habitat. At the time of writing the novel's first draft, I was
thinking of a career change to legal assistant. I never made the change, but the research I put into it came in handy for
the novel.
Why's the Volant government so British?
When the Volants became confined to Volant Habitat and had to set up a government for themselves, they used Great
Britain as a model of parliamentary democracy. Thus, the Volant Republic has a queen, a royal family, an aristocracy, a
prime minister, a House of Lords, and a House of Commons. These should make the Volant government, at least, familiar to
readers. The Volants, as they do with everything else, take parliamentary democracy in their own direction.
What's the Assembly?
The Assembly is where the novel's strands of conflict converge. When multitudes contend for a host of ideas and
ideologies, what can there be but conflict? I based the assembly on things going on at the time of the novel's writing.
Back in the 1980's, political activists seemed to me poised to make direct democracy real through initiative, referendum,
recall, open primaries, nonpartisan primaries, and even a second Constitutional convention. I gave the Volants an Assembly
to use initiative to convoke a constitutional convention to settle their problems of overpopulation and exile from their
destined world. You may've noticed that direct democracy has progressed little since the 1980's. We may even be receding
from it. Could fear of what happens at the Volant Assembly be why? In history as in physics, for everyaction there's an
opposite (though not necessarily equal) reaction.
How did the United Nations grow as powerful as it is in To Serve in Heaven?
Back in the 1980's, I was already aware of predictions of climate change and global warming. Taking the worst-case
scenario as the basis for the Volant Flyway — the scenario we may be living in today, sad to say — I conceived
the idea that humanity dealt with a series of catastophes in part by strengthening the United Nations. I came up with a
whole set of reforms to its charter to make the UN a workable interplanetary government, but, for the novel, only two of
these matter. First, each nation is overseen by a "governor general" called a Procurator, who ensures that human rights and
international treaties are observed and protected. Second, so that every nation has permanent representation in the
Security Council, nations are grouped into "regional authorities" overseen by procurator generals. Sadly for the Volants,
but fortunately for the story, any theory of government founders on the human beings who practice it.
Who's in charge of the surface of Mars?
Most of the surface of Mars — all of its desirable surface — is controlled by a nation called the Federation
of Martian States, founded to block Volant immigration to Mars and to slow the pace of that world's terraforming. The
Volant Republic and the Federation of Martian States belong to the local regional authority, the Republic of Mars. Any
Volant will gladly tell you that the FMS, the ROM, and the UN do all in their power to ignore the Volant Republic's
existence. Still, you can't keep a good winged human down, can you? Did I mention that the ROM has the Red Helmets?
Why did you put off publishing To Serve in Heaven till now?
While I was working on the novels of the Volant Flyway, the field of sf was changing in two significant ways. First,
with the most direct application to To Serve in Heaven, the publication of Kim Stanley Robinson's monumental Mars
novels overshadowed everything else written about Mars. I feared that the market containing the Mars trilogy would be
unfriendly to my relatively modest works. Second, dream induction as it appears in the Volant Flyway didn't fit the
zeitgeist of a field dominated by cyberpunk. Now, Red, Green, and Blue Mars have become classics, and the wave of
cyberpunk has receded. It seems to me a market friendly to the Volant Flyway has come around again. You can be a judge of
whether it has.
Did you revise To Serve in Heaven to reflect the present political situation in America?
No. Scarily, I didn't have to change a thing in the novel's politics. The political situation in Volant Habitat was
colored by my memories of living through 1968. I was hoping not to see that year again. Still, history runs in cycles, and
the scariest things we meet in space may be ourselves…
You can find To Serve Heaven on Amazon.com.