Crosstime Traffic, page 2
That first story, though, has been reprinted a couple of times, earning several times the original ten bucks, and I rather like it. For historical reasons, I chose it to start off the present collection, so there it is: “Paranoid Fantasy #1.”
(It was originally entitled, “Paranoid Fantasy #1, or, A Day in Whose Life?”, but that was mercifully shortened the first time it was reprinted. The full-length version of the title hasn’t been used since its original appearance in August, 1975.)
(And yes, there were other “paranoid fantasies”; I got up to #4, at least. The others never sold, and deservedly so.)
It’s worth noting that there is a standard piece of advice to beginning writers, one that I hand out myself, that says you should never start off a story with, “The alarm clock rang...” It’s a boring opening, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s the wrong place to begin the story.
I got away with it, though.
So I went back to college, and having actually sold a story, even so trivial a one as that, I was thought of as a Writer, by my classmates and myself. I’d learned a lot from all those rejections—about seventy of them, mostly form letters, but some more personal and detailed—and from reading Writer’s Market, and from other books and magazines, and simply from the practice of writing that much.
One thing I’d learned—I’m not sure just where—was what the supposed odds were of selling a story through the slushpile. SF magazines, at that point, reportedly bought about one story out of every four hundred unsolicited submissions.
SF book publishers reportedly bought about one novel out of every forty unsolicited submissions.
One in forty is lousy odds, but it’s a lot better than one in four hundred.
I therefore decided that my basic mistake had been writing short stories, instead of a novel. When the summer of 1976 rolled around, and I was faced with the prospect of getting a summer job, I came up with a dodge—I’d write a novel, instead.
I did, too. I made the mistake of finishing it in a mere ten weeks, though, so that I wound up with a job cleaning laboratory glassware for the last few weeks of summer.
The novel was called Slant, and it was terrible. It didn’t sell.
In May of 1977 I gave up on college, dropped out, and moved to Kentucky, where my fiancée (we were married three months later, and we’re still married) had just gotten a good steady job. I continued to try to write, rather than getting a real job—it was a habit by this time. I took one of those unsold novelets, one that had gotten favorable comments from an editor (though it had still been rejected), and expanded it, rewrote it into a novel. This time I took fourteen months.
And this time, after a delay so long I’d given up and started looking for another line of work, it sold.
So I was a real writer, finally.
From then on, selling novels wasn’t much of a problem. I wrote three sequels to that first one, rewrote Slant into the drastically-improved The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, and forged steadily onward, with book after book.
Short stuff, though—I still didn’t have the hang of that. I tried a few more stories, got a few more rejections.
A magazine called The Space Gamer contacted me early in 1980—the editor had read The Lure of the Basilisk and wanted to do an article on using overmen, creatures I’d described in the book, in role-playing games. I agreed, and asked if they might be interested in buying fiction.
They were. I sold them two stories, an old one from my files, and a new one that had come to me in a dream.
Honest. It did. I woke up one morning and there it was in my head. There’s one description in it that I wrote only because it was important in the dream, and I still haven’t figured out why it was important. The Space Gamer published it under the unintelligible-to-non-gamers title “Minus Two Reaction”; I’ve included it here under its correct title, “One Night At A Local Bar.”
Since the story came from a dream, I can’t tell you much about it beyond the simple fact of its existence. It does have a point, but a good many readers seem to miss it.
I’ve spared you the other story that ran in The Space Gamer—the older one.
After those two The Space Gamer seems to have become disenchanted with me; they rejected a couple of stories, and I quit submitting to them. I was doing well enough with novels that I didn’t care all that much.
Short fiction still happened occasionally, though—something would demand to be written, and I would write it, and it would go out gathering rejections. And every so often one would sell.
For example: I was living in Lexington, Kentucky. There was a shop in town called The Rusty Scabbard that sold games and gaming supplies, and some friends of mine were regular patrons there.
One day my wife said something about the place, and got the name wrong—she couldn’t remember the real name, so she made one up that sounded right, and called it The Rune and the Dragon.
I liked that. It was obviously the title of a story. What’s more, it was obviously the title of a story I had to write. And it should be done in a high-fantasy style.
I made a couple of false starts, but then the whole thing fell together, and I wrote “The Rune and the Dragon,” and it got rejected a couple of places, both of which said, “This is a fine story, but we’re not doing this sort of straight fantasy adventure right now.” The first one suggested sending it to the second one; the second one suggested sending it to Dragon Magazine. Dragon bought it, and published it in their November, 1984 issue.
And that was the last place it appeared until now. Here it is again.
Now, for the next part of this account, we need some background.
In March 1982, Ace Books re-issued Spider Robinson’s short story collection, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, and I saw it displayed in the bookstores. I didn’t read it, didn’t even open it, just saw it. I liked the title. I’d always been fond of parallel world stories, never thought they’d really been done right, and I assumed from the title that the book was about parallel worlds. I also like barroom tales, and the combination sounded like a good idea. That title stuck with me, somewhere in the back of my head.
In 1983, my wife and I drove from Kentucky to Washington, D.C. and to Baltimore for the World Science Fiction Convention. We stopped for lunch in a place called Sutton, West Virginia, and ate at a diner there that we liked—it’s hard to say just why; there was just something about the atmosphere that appealed to us.
These two items percolated in my subconscious, tangled themselves up with parallel world theory and certain attitudes, and came out as a story called “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.”
It sold the first place I sent it, which was Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (henceforth Asimov’s, for short). It was my first sale to a real science fiction magazine. It was the first time a short story of mine had sold on the first try.
It went on to be the first story of mine to win a Hugo, and the first to be nominated for a Nebula, and the first to win the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll Award. It’s been anthologized, translated into Japanese and Polish, and adapted to radio.
After all that, I decided I’d finally gotten the hang of writing short stories.
And since then, while I still get rejections, I’ve been able to sell most of my short fiction.
Naturally, when one has a hit, one tries to follow it up, and the concept of “Harry’s” obviously still had plenty of potential. Several other related stories have been planned; so far, I’ve only finished one. It’s called “A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates,” and it’s here, right after the original story. It isn’t exactly a sequel; it’s just another story about the same place. It, too, appeared in Asimov’s originally.
I’d had another idea about parallel worlds that was intended to be a whole series of short stories—the basic concept was that some sort of accident has created a permanent, stable opening connecting an effectively-infinite number of alternate Earths. The series title was to be “The Hole Above the Parking Lot.”
So far, though, I’ve only written one of the stories. My title for it was “Eurydice,” and anyone who has a classical background will recognize the name and understand where the story came from. My agent protested, probably accurately, that 90% of the readers wouldn’t have the necessary background, so it was retitled “An Infinity of Karen.” It was first published in Amazing in 1988; this is only its second appearance in English.
Another variant on the parallel world theme occurred to me about ten years ago while I was walking to the supermarket one afternoon, thinking about vectors. No, I don’t generally think about things like vectors when I’m out strolling; I have no idea why I did that day, I just did, and when I got home I wrote a story called “The Drifter”—but it’s not the one that’s included here. It was only about half as long, and although it had the same central concept I’d approached it entirely differently, and it was a pretty lousy story. I sent it out several places, and eventually it wound up in my agent’s files, gathering dust.
Then, just recently, he cleaned out his files. He sent me a whole package of old stories he had no particular use for.
Most of them I didn’t have any use for, either, but when I re-read “The Drifter” I said to myself, “I can fix this!” With the additional experience I’d acquired in the intervening years I could see immediately what I’d done wrong.
I didn’t just fix it, though, I just about wrote an entire new story with the same title and premise, and I did it more or less in a single sitting. I don’t think there’s a single line from the original in the rewritten version, but it all poured right onto the page, as if it had been working itself out in the back of my head all that time.
And yet another angle on the parallel-world idea—I’ve come up with dozens, many still unused—was the possibility that experimenting with travel between different realities would have unforeseen side-effects, effects that might be felt in worlds other than where the actual experimentation was being done. These might be very serious. Frederik Pohl came up with the same idea independently and used it as a sub-plot in The Coming of the Quantum Cats, under the name “ballistic recoil.” I thought that he threw away some excellent story possibilities there—what if some of the affected parties had no idea what was causing it? Reality might seem to be coming apart, they would have no idea why, and they would have to just learn to live with it.
The result, so far, is the story “Storm Trooper,” contained herein.
Related to the whole field of parallel worlds is the idea of alternate histories—what if some event had happened differently? How would the world be changed?
I’m not really all that fond of the subgenre, because there are just too many variables involved and there’s a tendency for the stories to degenerate into fictional history lectures, but I’ve tried it a couple of times. One of them was a very short consideration of one of the classic time-traveler-changes-history scenarios, written at the suggestion of Laurence M. Janifer; it’s called “One-Shot,” and it’s included here.
And then there was Mike Resnick’s invitation to do a story for his Alternate Presidents anthology—the premise was to write alternate-history stories based on presidential elections turning out differently.
I picked 1932, studied up on it, and discovered that Al Smith came very, very close to declaring himself a third-party candidate, which might have split the Democratic Party and gotten Hoover re-elected in a squeaker—Herbert Hoover, “the most hated man in America,” with a second term, a heavily Democratic Congress, failing health, and the interventionist Henry Stimson as his Secretary of State and effective second in command.
What would have happened with Henry Stimson running U.S. foreign policy in the 1930s, rather than Franklin Roosevelt?
My guess is called “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”
And while we’re changing history, the idea of time police who prevent people from changing history isn’t a new one at all; probably Poul Anderson’s “Time Patrol” stories are the best-known examples. It’s a fascinating idea. It’s also sort of creepy—how mutable is the past? Fritz Leiber’s “Change War” stories, about the Snakes and the Spiders, consider that. And one day, I sat down and wrote a little story about just how would a time patrolman know what’s real and what isn’t?
At least, I think that’s what it’s about. It’s called “Real Time.” It’s about my favorite of all my short stories.
And one more final twist on the parallel world theme—why do science fiction stories seem to focus on crosstime travel, or on space travel, but never on both? After all, if there are an infinite number of parallel Earths, then there must be just as many Marses and Alphas Centauri. I had that question kicking around my head for years, and then one day I came up with the clever idea of writing a story live on-line on the GEnie computer network, as a publicity stunt—rather like Harlan Ellison’s stunt of writing a story while sitting in a bookstore window. The idea I chose was the question of why either/or, and not both, and the result was “New Worlds.”
I like stunts. I like doing things that aren’t supposed to work, like the first line of “Paranoid Fantasy #1,” and some other things in this collection that I don’t want to give away here. I like challenges, if they’re the right sort.
I was in a discussion of all those old juveniles from the ’40s and ’50s—that’s what they were called then, anyway, now we’d say “young adult novels”—where two kids build a spaceship in their back yard. It’s an idea that even made it into the movies, in “Explorers.”
It was the consensus of the discussion, though, that SF readers are all too sophisticated for that sort of thing nowadays—you couldn’t make it work. “Explorers” wasn’t exactly a hit, so maybe it’s not just readers, either.
It seemed to me there should be some way to make it work, to make people believe two kids could built a spaceship in their back yard.
So I did. I even sold it to Analog, that bastion of hard-core technological fiction—my very first sale there. And I had the audacity to call it simply, “Science Fiction.”
I know exactly where that story came from. Others just happen, for no reason that I know of. One that just happened was “Watching New York Melt,” which was written with my wife’s help—she suggested the characters’ luncheon preferences and added a few other details. I think I’d been thinking about conceptual art—always a dangerous thing to do.
In much the same way that “Science Fiction” was a result of one of the ancient clichés of the SF field, another one brought forth “Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist’s Command!” The title alone should make it plain that I wanted to write a story that would actually belong behind one of those old pulp covers that depicted a tentacular monster carrying off a busty young woman. I also wanted to explain why a monster would want a woman.
I tried to put a new twist on the whole thing, of course.
This story was turned down for being too sexy, too long, too strange, and for various other reasons that struck me as silly, before finally selling to Pulphouse Weekly. It’s one of my own favorites, it’s been a hit at public readings, and I really don’t understand why it took so long to sell.
One way to come up with a new twist is to put together two things that haven’t gone together before. When Locus reviewed On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers, the reviewer remarked on how Powers had done something that should have been obvious, by putting together two things the Caribbean is famous for—pirates and voodoo—that hadn’t been put together before.
That got me thinking.
Mostly, it got me thinking, “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?
But then it got me thinking about what I could put together that obviously went together, but hadn’t been done before.
I didn’t come up with anything obvious, like pirates and voodoo, but I did eventually come up with an American folk tale—one that happens to be based on an actual historical incident; Thomas “Windwagon” Smith was real—and some elements of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles that looked like a nice fit.
Bradbury and American legends seemed like a pretty good match, and I’d always wanted to write a real old-fashioned tall tale; I did a little research, sent the rough draft to Mr. Bradbury to make sure he didn’t object to my story, and the result was “Windwagon Smith and the Martians,” which won me my second Asimov’s award and went on to various reprintings and adaptations.
Let me emphasize that I know what I derived from The Martian Chronicles; it was quite deliberate, and I would never have allowed the story to be published if Mr. Bradbury had not given his permission.
Thomas Smith, of course, is available for any author who cares to use him, like any other public figure of his day.
There is, by the way, a third source—it really only provided a passing reference. I’ll leave it as a puzzle for the knowledgeable reader to identify what other (public domain) story I drew on.
So far, except for the first, these stories have been mostly science fiction, or at least borderline. After “Windwagon Smith and the Martians,” though, we get into pure fantasy. Fantasy is the field I’ve been most successful in; I’m not quite sure why. I like it fine, you understand, but I like science fiction just as much.
Ah, well, no accounting for the vagaries of fate.
I have already, however, accounted for the origin of “The Rune and the Dragon.” Let me now explain “The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan.”
Remember those two dozen stories I wrote in 1974 and 1975 that didn’t sell?
Well, one of them was called “The Palace of Llarimuir,” and from the minute I started writing it, it felt special, better than anything else I’d done up to that point. I was very, very pleased with it; I had a feeling that here, at last, was the story that was going to break me into print. I mailed it off to an editor who shall remain nameless.
And he lost it.
I got a letter from the slush reader who had read it and passed it on to the editor with a strong recommendation; he really liked it. After that, nothing.
