I first had the idea for this story in Greece, sailing between the islands, in 1980 when I was fifteen. I wrote two short bits that clearly belonged in this world and introduced characters who appear in the novel, but I didn't really have a proper thread to string them on. I first tried to write it seriously as a novel in London, in 1987, when I was twenty-two. I'd written several previous novels, between fifteen and twenty-two. Some of them were even more ambitious than this one. All of them were awful. The first attempt I made at this was no better. Unlike the other things, which I had the sense to keep to myself, I showed the fragments I had of this one to someone who assured me it was terrible and I couldn't write. I decided in that case to give up on fiction writing for once and for all, and for the next ten years I only wrote non-fiction and the things that were bursting to come out -- mostly beginnings of new novels that petered out when the first impulse left me and hard work was needed to keep at them. Hard work, I thought, was a waste of time, if I couldn't write anyway. My only natural talent was for pastiche.
In 1996, when I was thirty-one, a friend bullied me into believing that I could in fact write. I went back to this story, to the draft I had, on paper (typewritten!) and started to write it again. That is the version you have here. There are lines in it -- mostly lines of dialogue -- that were written in 1980 or 1981.
This was a ridiculously ambitious book to try to write even in 1997. I had written a number of long roleplaying projects, which had taught me how to do the hard work a long project requires, and I had, just as importantly, run a number of roleplaying games, which had taught me a lot about how the shapes of story work. What I sat down to write was this strange story about gods and Greece, this mosaic novel with its weird set of different first person POVs, alternating with chapters in full fairytale omniscient. I would never write a novel like this now. I know too much. I have more sense.
I finished it, and I printed it out and submitted it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor, who I knew from online interactions. He kept it for a mere nine months, during which time I worked on what was to become my first published novel The King's Peace. Patrick rejected The Rebirth of Pan with the best rejection in the world. He said this was the kind of thing written by people who were going to write really good things later, and I should send him my next book instead of trying to fix this. This was really good advice. I instantly sent him The King's Peace, which I had just finished, and he bought it.
None of my books is much like any of the others, except those that are sequels. The Sulien books, The King's Peace and The King's Name are really one 300,000 word Arthurian novel. Tooth and Claw is a sentimental Victorian novel in which all the characters are dragons who eat each other. Farthing is an alternate history set in 1949, my series title for that trilogy is "Still Life With Fascists".
Nevertheless, even for me, The Rebirth of Pan is odd and unlike any of the others.
I have always wanted to do something with it, because I was fond of it. I always thought one day I'd be able to make it work. It seems to me now, re-reading it after so long that what I remember are only the essential things, that it gets better as it goes on, and the things that make it good and the things that make it terrible are in fact the same things. I think Patrick was absolutely right that this story could not ever have been fixed. I think I got it as good as I could get it in 1997, and I'm reluctant to mess with what I did with it then in case I break what's there that's of value. It was hard to make all these things balance as well as they do, (especially the end) and in many ways I'm not the person now I was when I wrote this. If I try to change it, I fear for spoiling that person's intent. I read it now and ask myself what was I thinking? The author of this novel seems leaner, darker, more passionate, and harder than me, not to mention obsessed with this weird religious stuff. I know why I started writing seriously again, but what made me decide to begin with this contemporary fantasy? With the Eumenides in the shopping mall? With the first person POV of a widowed boat? How could I know what to change, if I didn't know why I'd done it that way? In the end, I didn't even change the cringeworthy chapter titles. This is not a 2007 revision, this is the 1997 novel unaltered. It's as good as I knew how to make it when I knew what I wanted to do with it, and that'll have to do.
Oh, and this text isn't edited, nor copyedited, and the spelling is British not out of affectation but because that's how Protext and I spell.
The universe of The Rebirth of Pan owes a huge amount to Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, which I'd just read when I first had the idea in 1980, and to Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry which I'd just read when I started working on it in 1987. It also seems to me the prose is clearly influenced in strange ways by Mary Renault and C.J. Cherryh -- two of my favourite writers, but not people you usually think of together.
I offer it now as a curiosity, and hope it finds some friends.
Thanks to Graydon Saunders, Emmet O'Brien, Frossie Economou and Lesley Grant for beta-reading it for me so long ago that you've probably forgotten all about it. Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for rejecting it so enthusiastically. Thanks to Guy Gavriel Kay for giving me permission to use his word "andain".
This story is for all the bright and dark gods who care for the pattern of the world -- and still for Graydon, whether he wants it or not.