Anyone who has read both “Tunesmith” and “Unaccompanied Sonata” recognizes the pattern. And at the end, he comes to the place where the music is being played and takes his unrecognized bow. After all, though the world in which “Unaccompanied Sonata” takes place is completely different from the milieu of “Tunesmith,” the basic structure of both stories is almost identical.Ī musical genius, forbidden to perform, performs anyway, and his music has far-reaching effects, even though he is snatched away without ever having a chance to benefit personally from what he achieved. When other writers talked about stories being gifts from a Muse, I imagined that experience was the sort of thing they were talking about.īut now, thinking of “Unaccompanied Sonata” in that double context, as a story that came whole and also as a story about music, probably influenced by “Tunesmith,” it suddenly occurred to me that maybe “Unaccompanied Sonata” didn’t come from a Muse at all (I’ve always been skeptical about such things anyway), but rather from Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

That draft was never revised, except for a little fiddling with punctuation and a word here or there.

That is, I sat down to write it (having made one abortive attempt a year or two before), and it came out in one smooth draft in three or four hours. Then I remembered that only a few minutes earlier I had mentioned that “Unaccompanied Sonata,” probably the best short story I have ever written or will ever write, was one of the few works that came to me whole. “Songmaster, of course, and ‘Unaccompanied Sonata.’ ” “Maybe that’s why I kept writing so many stories about musicians early in my career,” I said. Only a couple of months before writing this essay, I was talking to an audience about “Tunesmith,” telling them essentially the story I’ve told you so far. And some of those would go on to tell their own tales, carrying part of mine within them. If only a few were transformed, then it would have been worth it. Not every reader had to feel that way about my stories. Just a little, yet all would be different from then on because I had done it. It had transformed me, though even then I did not yet understand how completely I had taken “Tunesmith” into myself.Īnd I knew that if I could write a story that would illuminate some hitherto dark corner in someone’s soul and live on in them forever, then it hardly mattered whether writing made me rich or kept me poor, put my name before the public or left me forgotten, for I would have bent the world’s path a little.

But that had nothing to do with whether he had succeeded, whether his work had been worth doing, his tales worth telling. He didn’t have dumps of his novels near the checkout stand at every WaldenBooks in North America. He didn’t have crowds of salesmen touting his works. Lloyd Biggle, Jr., didn’t become one of the rich and famous ones when science fiction became commercial in the seventies and eighties. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought.īut it was a stupid lesson, and I refused to believe it. There’s no guarantee, because your works have some following in one decade, that you’ll still have an audience hungry for your stories in another. I felt a stab of regret I also felt a tiny thrill of dread, because of course the same could happen to me. His name was not a household word now, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or Bradbury, though all were his contemporaries. Not one of the writers of that time who had made the transition into the seventies and eighties. “That’s Tunesmith’ you’re looking for,” he said. Or was it simply the last I read, because there was no point in reading any other? I couldn’t remember even that.įinally I struggled to tell him the tale, calling up more details with each one I spoke aloud. I couldn’t remember title or author of the one story that meant most to me, but I remembered vaguely that it was the last story in the book. He showed me what he had I scanned through the books. I talked to the dealer, telling him the time period of the books I had read in the Santa Clara library.

Tunesmith biggle