Tales of the 21st
Century
INTRODUCTION
In the dark times, will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
There will be singing about dark times.
--Bertolt Brecht
After the turn of the
century, I started writing short stories again. It had been...well, at least
five years and probably ten since I had worked on one. In 1996 I got started on
a series of novels which kept me
going for the next ten years, and while I was working on them I didn’t really
play around much with other ideas. It’s true that around 1999 I stated trying
to write a short story based on the same universe; but after that turned into a
novel I figured it was a
sign that I should stick to what came naturally.
There were a few
things motivating my return to a form with which I had never really been
comfortable. One was practical: by that point my attempts to place the novels
had stalled out, and following the kind of advice which unpublished writers can
pick up from any number of sources, I conceived the idea of writing some short
stories and selling them in order to establish myself as a writer before making
a renewed assault with the novels. I went so far as to take out a subscription
to Fantasy and Science Fiction in
order to learn how short stories in this genre worked. The issues arrived every
month and I read them dutifully. What I had to show for it, at the end of the
year, were a number of rejections and a much larger number of direct-mail
solicitations inviting me to purchase crystal dragons, gaming supplies, and
Star Trek collectible plates.
Another was personal,
which is to say, political. Like, I would imagine, many Americans who had
reached the age of reason by the turn of the century, I had the strong
impression that at some point in November of 2000, we all went through the
looking glass. It was the most surreal presidential election in American
history; and at the time, we thought it would be the weirdest thing that would
ever happen to this country.
Then came September
11, 2001. And the morning after that, it was clear: we were living in an
alternate universe, and it wasn’t a good alternative. It was sort of like
the universe Rod Serling created in Twilight Zone, only even more
heavy-handed and a lot darker and more paranoid. For the next several years we
lurched from crisis to disaster under the “leadership” of our petulant boy king
and his retinue of evil ministers. Things I had never thought I would live to
see became unremarkable aspects of everyday life. Security became an obsession
while liberty and privacy became luxuries we could no longer afford. Torture
became business as usual. The official discourse of our government, echoed in
the mass media, was a tissue of evasions and ironies for which “Orwellian”
would be too kind a term. In the buildup to the
I see the first two
stories in this very small collection as my attempt to generate metaphors for
the special hell we were living through, in order that I might better understand
the sources of my own horror. Orwell’s totalitarian dreams were all inspired by
the
The first of these
efforts, Trees Do Not Grow to the
Sky, was partly an attempt to understand the catastrophe of September 11
from my brother’s point of view. He works in the financial industry, and lived
at the time in
Credible Threat has been
through a lot of revision and had a number of working titles. Mindful of the
fact that the depressing ending of “Trees Do Not Grow to the Sky” had closed a
lot of doors for it, I decided that the most compelling way for me to write a
happy story would be to use fantasy to come up with solutions to problems
which, in the real world, cannot be solved. This story, also, is both personal
and political, having much to do with our experience of living in the suburbs.
The earliest title for this story was “Anything We Can Do,” and it was a
statement of my own feeling of impotence in the face of some very terrible
things that happened to some of our neighbors: you always offer help, but of
course nothing can really be done. The change to “Credible Threat” was an
attempt to highlight what I saw as the relationship between the political plot
and the personal one. As always, it was too long; and like “Trees,” it’s set in
a near future that’s no longer really credible.
Heartbreaker was an attempt
to get away from political metaphors, which I had determined to be a hard sell,
and do a nice simple story about magic in the “real world.” I had originally
had this idea as a story about the WOFverse,
but decided that it would be more effective if it took place in a real nursing
home. It’s not political at all...unless you count gender politics. Which I do.
The final story in
this little collection is, on the face of it, out of place. It was my stab at a
light and frothy “chick lit” type confection; though like all my attempts at
writing for a specific niche it fails to conform to conventions. I do humor
pretty well, and am satisfied that The
Big Leap is good and funny. But like “Credible Threat,” it is an attempt to
use the paranormal to solve real problems that exist in the real
world—specifically, problems that single women typically encounter in their
search for men who understand what they want and want the same things. Like
“Heartbreaker,” it was suggested by a conversation I had, in which I noted that
people who work in the wedding industry must find it as draining as being a
private investigator, and probably all go out after work to drink and try to
forget. The Big Leap is,
among other things, my salute to Raymond Chandler, whose misogyny and
homophobia have somehow not interfered with my enjoyment of his writing and my
fascination with his particular noirscape. Franklin Green is in no way
“hardboiled;” but the fact that he tries to be, especially in his narrative
style, is from my point of view part of his charm.
I hope that someone
will enjoy these stories. By putting them up here, I myself am trying to let go
of two things: one, my dream of being published, and two, the nightmare of the
Bush years. I hope you enjoy your stay in TWILIT21. It’ll probably be a lot
more enjoyable now that we know we can leave.
