A Boy’s History of the World, eh? Not this world, our world, Earth, of course—it’s science fiction. A distant planet called Rahab, colonized by humans sometime in the future.

What else to say about this work in progress if I’m not going to post excerpts—and I’m not—except that it’s the most hopeful and engaged I’ve felt about a project in well over a decade?

Quite a lot, actually.…

I’m probably in the minority here (not the first time), but not only do I not pay a lot of attention to the lyrics of most of the popular music I listen to, in most instances I’d just as soon not know what the words are. I want to hear the voice, so long as it’s a good, interesting voice, as another instrument in the mix—the words are a distraction. Michael Stipe’s mumbling in the early days of R.E.M. was excellent. I grew less interested in the band as his enunciation improved. I imagine this preference has a lot to do with why I get little joy from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits, who are all about the words and whose voices are, well, not instruments.

Wait, I do have a point here. Foreign-language pop songs = perfect for Alex. There you go.

Ivri Lider, Israeli rock god. I discovered his oeuvre by accident last summer, on the intertubes. I think I already kind of vaguely knew of his existence—I’d rented Eytan Fox’s films Yossi & Jagger and Walk on Water, both of which he scored, though apparently I wasn’t paying much attention to the soundtracks. Then I rented Fox’s The Bubble. About a third of the way through, the main characters go to some kind of trendy Tel Aviv club, where this very pretty man sits down at a piano to play and sing the Gershwins’ “The Man I Love.” Very, very affectingly. In English, yes, but never mind. And, G-d, is he pretty. So I wait for the credits, to find the singer identified as one Ivri Lider. Faint bells are going off.

Gotta have a map. Alternately, download a PDF including detail maps of the individual archipelagos. Note that many features lack names at this point—I’ll upload new versions of the PDF as it’s updated.

A summary history of Rahab through the extinction of women can be found here. A ridiculously comprehensive combined glossary/gazetteer, mostly useful only to myself, occasionally updated, is here.

Ivri Lider, “Ha’anashim Ha’chadashim,” from the CD of the same title (Helicon Records, 2002).

Ivri Lider, “The Man I Love,” from the film The Bubble (Israel, 2006).

So what does one do in these circumstances but head for YouTube? Where the first clip to come up was the music video for the big number from Yossi & Jagger, something transliterated as “Bo.” Now, as I would later learn, Ivri’s “Bo” was a cover of an anthem originally performed by Israeli diva Rita; it’s a fairly conventional power ballad with some discoey touches, but sung in Hebrew, mind, so I didn’t have a clue. And Ivri’s singing it as affectingly as he did “The Man I Love,” and he’s still mighty pretty, and at one point he starts this nerdy, jerky little dance and slaps his palms on top of a wall like he’s playing bongos—wham! Alex is toast. Burnt toast.

Ivri Lider, “Bo,” from the film Yossi & Jagger (Israel, 2002).

Naturally, I went straight to Amazon.com, where Ivri’s (then) six CDs (four studio, one remix, one live) were all available for instant-gratification mp3 download. (For the physical discs, you have to go to Israel.) That would be 72 tracks, 5.1 hours. Alex is toast in heaven.

Because, a) Ivri is a tricky, clever songwriter who seldom repeats himself, never drops the beat, and, within the bounds of accessible rock, pop, and disco, takes some interesting risks; b) I can’t understand a word he’s singing but his voice, his instrument, is nakedly expressive and emotive and powerful; c) he chooses some really fine instrumentalists to back him up—the band on the live CD/DVD is tight as Madonna’s corsets; d) he’s so damn pretty!; e) he’s gay (Wikipedia and a bunch of other sources confirmed it for me), so a lot of the things I want to read into his incomprehensible lyrics I feel justified about. I mean, there are any number of interesting, pretty rock gods with expressive voices around the world (Turkey’s Tarkan, say—incandescently hot man), but they mostly aren’t talking to me, whether or not I understand the language they sing in, and most of the middling-to-hot gay guys who sing in English aren’t saying anything I find very interesting in any manner I particularly wish to hear (hello, Rufus Wainwright and Jake Shears). (Alex waits for troll attack.)

And all this has exactly what to do with my ostensible work in progress A Boy’s History of the World?

I was laid off from my day job in the spring of 2008, say two months before I discovered Ivri. It was a writing job. Not real writing—that is, anything I’d wish to attach my name to—but it was the first job since my massive, extended block hit that required composing brand-new sentences and paragraphs, so it had put some tone back into long underused muscles. Given the luxury of time, endless stretches of time, and basic expenses’ being covered by unemployment benefits, I felt I ought at least to try writing something I would want my name on.

Naturally I looked first to the inordinate number of incomplete projects encumbering my hard drive. Two months of flailing. Oh, it was relatively enjoyable flailing, what with its being spring then summer, and the not having to get up in the morning to go to an over-air-conditioned office. But all those projects were polluted by the block: I’d flailed at them in one way or another for nearly ten years.

What I wanted to do was write a big, new story. A big science-fiction story. What I did was flail. I had settings and ideas (I make up s-f and fantasy settings all the time—cheap entertainment—it’s putting stories into them I have trouble with), but no story, no characters. The last time I cared about one of my characters … never mind.

And then I became infatuated with an Israeli rock god, whose songs I could read anything I wanted into. The title of one of them, “Ha’anashim Ha’chadashim,” a spacy, deeply weird track, translated as “The New People.” (Title track to his third, strangest, CD.) There’s a sci-fi title if I ever saw one. Put Ivri in a sci-fi story called “The New People”! Yes! Not the viewpoint character/protagonist, that would be presumptuous, but the protagonist’s love object.…

Ever read Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet (1959—out of print, but I found a bunch of copies on eBay)? A month or two ago I reread it for the first time in thirty-odd years. Earth colony ship carrying only women goes astray, crashlands on a relatively pleasant planet where (all the settlers being merely women) technological civilization collapses, the women reduced to picturesque barbarism, reproducing through some kind of mumbo-jumbo parthenogenesis. And then a virile spaceman from the civilized universe arrives! (It’s not quite as bad as all that.)

But you’ve probably heard of, if not read, Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” 1972 Nebula-winning short story that takes the Virgin Planet scenario and does it right.

Way back in my hapless youth, I started work on a novel that wanted to turn Virgin Planet on its head: the lost colony was all men! rediscovered by a spacewoman from the greater galactic civilization! Way back then, polite young men who moved in polite society, like myself, didn’t so much talk about such matters. It was a novelty. So naturally a respected s-f editor, who happened to be an acquaintance of mine, bought the book before I finished writing it.

But I was very young and didn’t know what I was doing and it ended up being a terrible, terrible, godawful novel. In so many many ways. Oh, I don’t like to think about it. My editor, correctly and with gentle tact, declined to publish it.

But it was a tremendous concept, the gay planet, don’t you think? (You do know that term is a joke, right?) Surely I’m not the only one it’s ever occurred to. And yet I haven’t seen it done. Not in the foreground, anyway, and not in a way that spoke to me as a gay man. (Doesn’t mean somebody hasn’t done it—I’m lamentably underread these days—and if you know of an excellent example I’d be pleased to hear about it.)

Gay Israeli rock god + gay planet + exploding building (friend of mine keeps agitating for explosions and car chases) + all the tangents thrown out when the first three collided = four or five characters I actually cared about (whisper this: they made me cry a couple of times) + a solid, closely reasoned world for them to live in (which is to say, not much like the one I tried to make all those eons ago) = “The New People,” a science-fiction novella—23,000 words in six weeks. (In revisions since, it’s expanded to 28K.) It was hell—I dropped ten pounds I really couldn’t spare. The kind of hell I’d been aching to get back into for nine years.

But you know, novellas are impossible to sell. (Case in point, Do You Remember Tulum?) Even in science fiction, a genre to my mind best served by that length. So it would have to be a novel.

“The New People” doesn’t admit of much direct expansion—whether by stuffing more material into the existing story or continuing it past its end point—but it does, I think, serve rather nicely as the first part of a projected book more about the planet and the issues surrounding a necessarily homosocial but not entirely homosexual society than about the novella’s protagonists. A book in the form of A Boy’s History of the World, conceived and executed by their son, containing a number of other stories—including “Jannicke’s Cat,” soon to appear in M-Brane SF #10, and “The Playmaker,” on which I work now and then when the unexpected thing lets me.