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At the tender age of fourteen, I decided to write a book on the
history of the Agrarian Revolution.
I had conceived of this idea while at a British school, attending a history class which, in the space of an entire term, covered the changes in farming over several centuries, and especially the conflicts that arose between the aristocracy and the working class. The conflicts arose because many members of the aristocracy seized peasant farming land and made it their own. One of the means by which the ruling class ensured farming profits thereafter was through the Corn Laws ("corn" being the British word for the most important grain in any given territory – in England, that meant wheat). These laws regulated the price of grain. By the early nineteenth century, a combination of high bread prices (due to the Corn Laws) and bad harvests were resulting in starvation conditions for the working class. As a result, reformers arose, demanded expanded representation in Parliament.
"I want to write a book about the Agrarian Revolution," I told my father the following summer. "Will you bring me with you to the Library of Congress?"
He did. It was not the first time I had visited America's national library with my father, who is a literary historian; as I recall, he began taking me there when I was eleven. But the summer of 1978, when I had turned fifteen, was the first time I had visited there as a researcher. My father showed me how to look up titles in the National Union Catalog, a book catalogue that filled an entire wall with hundreds of volumes. (These were the days before computers took over the job of keeping such records.) Afterwards, he asked me which aspect of the Agrarian Revolution I wanted to research first.
I thought about this, and then replied, in my bloodthirsty manner, "The Peterloo Massacre."
The Peterloo Massacre occurred in Manchester on August 16, 1819, when a peaceful group of reformers held a rally, bringing along their wives and children. Cavalry soldiers dispersed the crowd, using sabers. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "In 10 minutes the place was cleared except for bodies. The numbers of killed and wounded were disputed; probably about 500 people were injured and 11 killed. [Henry] Hunt and the other radical leaders were arrested, tried, and convicted – Hunt being sent to prison for two years."
"You might want to look at some newspapers," my father suggested, and soon I was immersed in 1819 newspaper accounts of the massacre.
Twenty-four years later, I handed my Muse a story about prison abuse, and he handed me back a story about the Agrarian Revolution. That story was "Debt Price," which would later appear in my Master/Other story collection. But apparently, my Muse wasn't satisfied with giving me a novella with a 12,000-word passage in which nothing happened except that the characters experienced a series of bad harvests. Instead, while I was writing "Deception" the following year, I discovered that one of my main characters in the Eternal Dungeon series had taken part in a certain peaceful rally that ended with bloodshed and with his own arrest.
From a historical point of view, "Deception" is anachronistic. "Deception" takes place in 357, while Weldon's arrest occurred in 339. In the Eternal Dungeon's world, three years pass for every one year in our world, so, while "Deception" is set roughly in the year 1881, Weldon's arrest would have been roughly in 1875, three decades after the Corn Laws were repealed in Britain. But the general ferment for workers' rights continued throughout the nineteenth century until, in the 1880s, trade unions began to be formed, taking the place once held by medieval guilds. At that point, conflict between the unions and other forces in society became inevitable.
Nothing more needs to be said about the historical aspects of Transformation. If the reader detects only a faint whisper of societal change in this novel, this is because the characters themselves have experienced no more than that.
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