Dickson’s helpfulness arouses a corresponding helpfulness in others. Whether he asks for a Puritan sermon text, an Italian menu, a sample of Gregorian chant, or medical data on battle wounds, someone will
promptly provide it—fandom is a living data bank. So grateful is he for help, he attracts almost too much solicitude. At times the attentiveness of friends reduces Dickson to the status of a favorite teddy bear in danger of having all its fur petted off.
Dickson’s admirers do react intensely. Women’s tears over the fate of Ian Graeme in Soldier, Ask Not prodded him to re-examine the implications of his text and see a solution to the tragedy. Other fans want to elaborate the Cycle’s background with or without the author’s sanction. There was the lawyer who speculated on interstellar legal systems and the artist who tried to predict future art tastes. The most conspicuous example of this phenomenon is a non-profit organization known as the Dorsai Irregulars which provides security services at sf conventions, sometimes in costume. The author has licensed their use of the Dorsai name and insignia.
Dickson appreciates such vivid identification because he enjoys playing roles himself. The historical persona he designed to join the Society for Creative Anachronism is “Kenneth of Otterburn,” a fourteenth-century border lord whose heraldic badge is the otter. This character is a bow to duality in general and to Dickson’s own Anglo-Scottish heritage in particular. One earlier member of his family. Simon Fraser, the eleventh Lord Lovat, was beheaded in 1747 for supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie. The official Dickson crest is: “a hart couchant gardant proper; attired, or within two branches of laurel leaves vert in orle,” which is to say, a stag with gilded horns at rest on a field bordered with green laurel leaves. The family motto is “Cubo sed euro,” “I lie down but I remain watchful.”
More importantly, this SCA project, like so many of
Dickson’s activities, is a remote preparation for the ■Childe Cycle. The climax of Childe, the concluding volume of the series, will be modeled on the Battle of Ot-terburn fought between the English and the Scots in 1388. Furthermore, investigating the life of an imaginary medieval nobleman will also give the author special insights into the mind of the real Sir John Hawkwood, hero of the Cycle’s planned opening volume.
Dickson is never content to do his research from books, even from primary sources. Whenever possible, he must visit sites and handle actual artifacts. For example, he absorbs historical mana by fingering Plantagenet coins and reading gothic manuscripts. When reality is unattainable, he turns to replicas. His most ambitious plan yet is to commission the making of a complete suit of armor such as Hawkwood might have worn. (He rejects suggestions that experiments with fleas, lice, and dysentery might be equally instructive.) So far, he has acquired only the mailshirt, helmet, and a magnificent pair of armored gloves. But attired in a friend’s full equippage, Dickson cut a marvelously gallant figure—six feet of russet-haired, blue-eyed knight with a bit of lace visible at his wrist to accent the steel and leather. “I feel as if I could walk through doors,” he proclaimed, striding off down the motel corridor. Fortunately, no other guests disputed his passage.
But his own experience did not suffice. He wanted to observe another man’s reactions as well. So he convinced a less-than-eager Kelly Freas to try on the armor next. Freas, being shorter and stockier, probably approximated a real medieval knight better than Dickson. Others might have followed suit, but by then the outfit’s undergarments were disagreeably
drenched with sweat. The author’s zeal for medieval weaponry is so compelling that on another occasion he insisted that one notably unmartial colleague take up arms and beat on the maple trees in Dickson’s back yard with a sword—all by way of sealing a business partnership.
Although mimetic research sounds amusing, it is no game to Dickson but rather a measure of his dedication to his craft. He needs to set all his senses gathering data in order to generate the authentic details his writing requires. His creativity is almost a metabolic process: information digested, art synthesized. Consider the awesome volume of material he had to process for The Far Call, the finest realistic novel about the space program yet written. This book’s flavor comes from the author’s own fervent pro-space views. Its substance is the product of many visits to Kennedy Space Center and lengthy consultations with experts on the scene. Dickson believes he must eat the bread of a place before he can truly know it.
Dickson deliberately incorporates his own interests, experiences, and values in his fiction. Take, for instance, his fascination with animal psychology. “I tend to gestalt things,” he says. “I see humans and animals as illuminating one another by what they do and also humans and animals illuminating aliens and vice versa.” Thus Dickson’s favorite beasts show up in his pages, either wearing their own hides or disguised as extraterrestrials: bears (Spacial Delivery, The Alien Way), wolves (Sleepwalker’s World), sea mammals (Home From the Shore, The Space Swimmers), cats (Time Storm, The Masters of Everon), and, of course, otters (Alien Art). On the other hand, Dickson lent his own antic enthusiasm and exasperating glee to the teddy bear-like Hokas (Earthman’s Burden, Star Prince Charlie
written with his old college classmate Poul Anderson). Dickson contemplating a gourmet meal or a fine guitar is the very image of a Hoka.
Guitar in hand, Dickson is a pillar of convention “filksings,” gatherings of people who perform odd songs which may or may not have any bearing on sf. Although his tenor has lost its original clarity, his renditions of classics like The Face on the Barroom Floor or The Three Ravens are still enjoyable. It is even more of a treat to hear him sing his own compositions like the grim Battle Hymn of the Friendlies, the wistful love song from Necromancer, or the rollicking Ballad of the Shoshonu. This has inspired some of his fans to write Childe Cycle songs themselves.
Among sf writers, Dickson is second only to Poul Anderson in the ornamental use of songs and poetry. Like Anderson, Dickson was raised on folk ballads, epics, fairy tales, and the great nineteenth-century novels, although there was more of a British than a Scandinavian slant to his literary formation. Furthermore, Dickson along with Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, Richard McKenna, John Brunner, and Cordwainer Smith, has been heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling, (Kipling’s impact on sf, now reaching into its second and third generation, has never been adequately investigated.) However, Dickson also cites major mainstream American and Russian authors and even Thomas Mann among his influences.
One expects a professional writer to maintain a large library and, indeed, the walls of Dickson’s Richfield, Minnesota home are lined with books. But Dickson is a true bibliophile. He loves books simply as physical objects, delighting in fine bindings and crisp pages. He shows a marked preference for hardbound
volumes even for works of passing interest. Accompanying him to a bookstore is like tagging behind a tornado. His ever-expanding holdings are systematically catalogued and he maintains a complete collection of his own editions.
Dickson has stronger opinions than most writers on how his work should be illustrated and collects originals of the illustrations that please him. (Wallspace in his home not devoted to books is mostly covered with art.) His feeling for visual aesthetics was deepened by years of night classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. His studies taught him the difference between written and painted visions. As he ruefully observes, too often writers try to paint with their “writing equipment” while painters try to write with their “painting equipment.”
Dickson’s life and career are also molded by a complementary set of physical pursuits. Allergies—and time—now bar him from the camping, climbing, and other outdoor recreations he formerly enjoyed. However, on a recent trip to Florida he caught the small marlin that decorates his office wall. Still, the experiences he has had with wildlife and open spaces remain with him as raw material for creative efforts. He would not be the same man or the same writer if boyhood memories of Pacific breakers did not echo in his dreams.
Dickson’s handling of nature is subtler than Anderson’s lush, almost pantheistic approach. He sees it primarily as a milieu for human action. (His preference for somber, austere landscapes is most sensitively revealed in Alien Art.) Having lived in Western Canada as a child and in Minnesota since prompts his frequent use of these regions as story settings, either directly or as models for alien worlds. His beloved Canadian
mountains, “the bones of the continent,” become the cool, rocky highlands of the Dorsai. Northcountry lakes and woodlands reappear in Pro.
Indoors, Dickson’s ardor for fitness shames his more sedentary friends. His ambition to achieve something of the high performance under stress he admires in tough old fighting men like Hawkwood led to his involvement with the martial arts—the chivalry of medieval Europe and the bushido of feudal Japan have much in common. Formal training has done more than impart special physical skills. It has also reinforced views he already held on self-mastery and functional beauty. Performing a clean knife pass takes the discipline of a dancer; a well-designed blade is a pleasing piece of metal sculpture.