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"Answer 'Affirmative'
or 'Negative'"
This
is the first piece of fiction I ever wrote, and it was bought by the
great science fiction editor John Campbell only a few months before
he died. It's a computer story, written on a typewriter (the PC hadn't
hit the market yet). While the technology is dated now, I think
the story itself is still kind of fun.
Publication:
"The Untameable Part"
A novella-length story about human contact with a mimetic race
that has a streak of innocent cruelty the humans are helpless to contend
with. This story is almost impossible to find; the magazine that published
it is now defunct.
Publication:
I took the title of this story from a clue in one of the wordplay-anagram
type crossword puzzles the Brits do so well (the answer is "gradual
changes"). It's a time-travel story, and I later expanded it into
Pillars of Salt, the only one of my short
stories ever to become a novel. The story has to do with the discovery
that recorded history can be wrong in a way that no one ever envisaged,
that certain prominent figures of the past died before the chronicles
say they did.
Publication: This is an early
Virtual Reality story, in which I have fun with that
old bugaboo of all right-thinking Christians everywhere, the Seven
Deadly Sins. A young woman is projected into various scenarios designed
to rid her of all those nasty impulses such as pride and gluttony and
lust...but not one of the sessions goes exactly as planned.
Publication: A war in space
in which the first rule is that nobody gets hurt. Two
races, feinting and faking, ducking and dodging, unwilling to engage --
until one commander can't stand it any longer and blasts an enemy
ship out of the sky. The game obviously has to change, but how it
changes will determine the fate of both races.
Publication: A woman is walking
in a European town she has never seen before, wondering where
she is and how she got there. No amnesia; she knows who she is, where she
lives, what she does for a living. She just doesn't know what she's doing
there. She talks
briefly to a stranger, learning nothing of value. And then it dawns on her
that the conversation was in German -- which she doesn't speak.
Publication: This
is my "academic" story. It's set at a university in the near future,
when scholarship has been regimented to the point that it's little more
than a joke. But it's a sad joke, in a drab world, where the pure joy
of learning has all but disappeared. An impatient Jonson scholar forces
the issue and ends up with an intolerable situation on his hands.
Publication:
When the phone rang and a familiar voice
asked me to write a vampire story, my first impulse was to
say no. The world was already overflowing with vampire stories; why
should I add to the flood? Not really my kind of thing anyway. But as
often happens when it's Ed Gorman on the other end of the line, I ended up
saying yes.
Right away there's a problem. How do you build suspense in a vampire
story that's going to be only one of fifteen or so vampire stories all
published in the same book? The readers already know every story they
start will have a vampire in it. No surprise element at all.
So I decided to skip the thrills-and-chills aspect altogether. I wrote
a story about a small American desert town that unexpectedly finds itself
playing host to a vampire. No henbane, no stake through the heart, no Dr.
Van Helsing stuff. Just a small group of practical people dealing with
the problem of a displaced vampire.
Publication:
A Frankenstein story.
I've no patience with the argument that Mary
Shelley's novel preaches "There are things man was not
meant to know!" Her book is not anti-science; it's anti-irresponsibility.
The young student (not "Dr." Frankenstein; that's a Hollywood invention)
runs away from the mess he created, leaving it for others to deal with.
Only toward the end of the book does he develop the maturity to face what
he has done.
I found a place in the novel where the creature's activities are simply
summarized for a period of a few months; I set my story during that time
so as not to contradict the flow of the original. And I told the story
from the creature's point of view...which is that of a hideously deformed
child who has been abandoned by his father.
Publication:
Well, I'd written a vampire story and a Frankenstein story
-- so why not a werewolf story? Might as well round things out.
But not just one werewolf, oh no. The story is about an entire community
of werewolves, fellow lycanthropes with their own problems, their own
rituals, and their own way of dealing with belligerent mundanes who've
never known the sheer exhilaration of running free in the night.
The anthology that "Never Moon a Werewolf" appears in has acquired its own
fan-maintained web
page, with brief comments about all twenty-three stories in the book.
Publication:
Marty Greenberg, king of the anthologists, is constantly looking
for new anthology themes, putting old ideas together in a new way that
will pique readers' curiosity. I don't have a clue as to how he arrived
at the notion of a collection of stories about celebrities from the
past...who also just happened to be vampires. But why not?
Makes perfect sense to me.
The Tallulah of the title is, of course, the formidable Tallulah Bankhead,
at the time of the story appearing on Broadway with co-star/playwright Noël Coward in Private
Lives. The story recounts what happens when a handsome young vampire
nuzzles her neck a bit sharply.
Publication:  
"Swimming the Moat"
Castle Fantastic is an anthology edited by John DeChancie in which each
story is set in a castle, and each one contains some element of fantasy or the
supernatural. "Swimming the Moat" is about a group of characters who are
trying to get out of a castle.
The lord of the castle has been stabbed in the back with a Swiss Army knife.
His ghost appears and commands his five reluctant guests to find out which one of them
is the knife-wielding culprit. To prevent their leaving, he burns the
drawbridge, cuts the telephone wires, etc. So they're stuck. The only way
out is to do as their ghostly host wishes and find his killer. 
"Fatal Error 1000"
Future
Net is an anthology of science fiction stories set in the
imaginary cyberspace of the future. "Fatal Error 1000" posits a Virtual
Reality environment that reproduces an idealized world (food tastes better,
nobody ever gets sick, etc.).
Human memories and experiences are recorded daily, so that when someone dies
in Real Time, that person can be brought back as a revenant on the Net --
but only on the Net. But consciousness need not cease because the body
fails. These ghosts interact with both the quick and the dead on the Net,
living their lives posthumously in cyberspace.
And then someone murders a dead man.
Publication: 
"Earth Surrenders"
A difficult story to write, because the subject matter is such a
cliché
-- first contact between human and alien. Every possible variation on this
theme has already been written, so I took the oldest plot of them all: Big
Baddies from outer space with superior technology descend upon the defenseless
human race. Since the humans can't outfight the invaders, they can only try
to outsmart them.
A word about the title. A house in Massachusetts my son and daughter-in-law
once owned had an
upstairs bathroom that was wallpapered with reproductions of old-timey
newspaper headlines proclaiming history-making events. One such headline
announced the end of World War I: Peace on EarthBut one panel of the wallpaper had to be cut right down the middle to fit around a window, with this result: EarthI just knew that had to be a story title. I had to wait a few years before I could use it, but it finally did come in handy. Publication:
"Payback"
It was bound to happen: an
anthology of short stories based on urban legends -- alligators in the sewer,
the poodle in the microwave, spiders in a beehive hairdo, etc. I chose the
Neiman Marcus cookie story.
The anthology aims at illustrating one dark side of our natures that prompts
us to cherish and repeat these stories. But I found it impossible to write
a "dark" story about a cookie. The editors very generously allowed
me to supply some midbook comic relief.
And one of them put up a web
page for the book.
Publication:
Future entertainment: holographic productions of plays from
which one or more parts can be dialed out so amateur thespians can perform
the roles themselves. A Midsummer Night's Dream in your living room,
and you can play any part you like.
The story concerns a young man who invites five people to his house to
participate in a holographic production of
Hamlet. His purpose: to learn more about his father's death.
Publication:
Last updated October 22, 2000. |
Trainee Bell-Ringers, The"
