by Janis Ian
Stars: The Anthology
Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian
Edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian is a nine-time Grammy nominee and two-time Grammy winner, most recently for Best Spoken Word — Society's Child: My Autobiography. A life-long science fiction fan, she gathered together thirty of her favorite authors to create this book.
For more information, visit http://www.janisian.com
"This dazzling, highly original anthology, ignited by the meeting of songwriter Ian and a host of SF writers affected by her music at the 2001 Worldcon, showcases 30 mostly superior stories, each based on one of her songs. Some contributors take Ian at her word that science fiction is 'the jazz of prose,' responding to many of society's sharpest wounds with bittersweet improvisatory descants, like Terry Bisson in 'Come Dance with Me,' David Gerrold in 'Riding Janis' and Orson Scott Card in 'Inventing Lovers on the Phone,' tales that probe the angst of adolescence… The entire anthology seems to vibrate with the death throes of one world passing away, while far stranger ones struggle to be born. Their commonality, Ian tells us in her introduction, is that 'They have heart. They have life. They have truth.' No artist — nor any reader — could ask for more." ~ Publisher's Weekly
Three "best" and seventeen honorable mentions in Year's Best SF 2004, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Also Available in Audio and Print
A Lucky Bat Book under license agreement with Rude Girl Press
Stars: The Anthology
Cover Artist: Malt
Cover Design: Theresa Rose
Copyright 2003, 2014 Janis Ian and Mike Resnick
All rights reserved
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License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors and editors.
For more information, please go to http://www.janisian.com.
Contents
You can listen to the Janis Ian songs that inspired each story by going here: http://www.janisian.com/albums/starssongs.php
Foreword
Come Dance With Me—Terry Bisson
The Scent of Trumpets, the Voice of Smoke—Tad Williams
Finding My Shadow—Joe Haldeman
Ride Me Like a Wave—Jane Yolen
In Fading Suns and Dying Moons—John Varley
On the Other Side—Mercedes Lackey
Nightmare Mountain—Kage Baker
On the Edge—Gregory Benford
Two Faces of Love—Tanith Lee
Immortality—Robert J. Sawyer
Hunger—Robert Sheckley
Society's Stepchild—Susan R. Mattthews
Murdering Stravinsky—Barry N. Malzberg
Society's Goy—Mike Resnick
Second Person Unmasked—Janis Ian
Play Like a Girl—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
All in a Blaze—Stephen Baxter
Old Photographs—Susan Casper
EJ-ES—Nancy Kress
You Don't Know my Heart—Spider Robinson
Riding Janis—David Gerrold
East of the Sun, West of Acousticville—Judith Tarr
Hopper Painting—Diane Duane
An Indeterminate State—Kay Kenyon
This House—Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Calling Your Name—Howard Waldrop
Shadow in the City—Dean Wesley Smith
Joe Steele—Harry Turtledove
Inventing Lovers on the Phone—Orson Scott Card
Special Bonus Story! For I Have Lain Me Down on The Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again—Michael Swanwick
About the Authors
To Anne McCaffrey, who sent me to Worldcon,
and Mike Resnick, who met me there.
—Janis Ian
To Janis Ian, whose enthusiasm is contagious,
and whose talent, alas, is not.
—Mike Resnick
Foreword
Janis Ian
This is all Anne McCaffrey’s fault, because it was sitting at her kitchen table with herself and her daughter Gigi that I first heard the word "Worldcon". What’s a Worldcon? I asked. Annie and Gigi were both horrified; then, with a look of deep concern on her face, Anne patted my hand and said "My dear…. You must go."
Or maybe it’s all Mike Resnick’s fault. This book would never have begun had I not written to Mike a few years ago, thanking him for writing Kirinyaga and enclosing a copy of one of my CD's. I pointed out the song his story had influenced, and let it go at that.
Much to my surprise, a month later Mike e-mailed me, asking if I wanted to collaborate on a short story with him. No, I said, I don't write stories. "You write articles, don't you? Speeches? Liner notes?" Yes, but… "I've read the stuff on your website. You need to write stories." And to be perfectly blunt, he then badgered and noodged until I said all right.
When Mike found out I’d never been to a World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon. Go figure.), he bemoaned my ignorance, then began an aggressive campaign to get me to go. He is not an easy man to turn down.
Thus it was that I found myself at the 2001 Worldcon (science fiction's largest yearly convention, where they hand out The Hugo Awards, their equivalent of The Oscars). I was terrified; I’d been reading science fiction since I was about seven years old, and here were many of my heros, along with 5,000 or so fans.
I followed Mike around like a duckling, and he had great fun introducing me to writers I’d admired for years. I stuttered on meeting Nancy Kress, burst into tears as I tried to tell Connie Willis what her work had meant to me, and gaped like the village idiot when I was introduced to Harry Turtledove.
In the course of the week, Mike introduced me to Marty Greenberg, the famous anthologist. The next night, Mike told me he and Marty had a brilliant idea—why not do an entire book of stories based on my work?
I thought they were nuts, and said so. None of these writers have time for that, none of them would be interested, and no publisher in their right mind would pursue it.
They already had a publisher interested and ready to commit. They'd spoken to a few writers they knew I loved, and the writers were ready to commit. It only awaited my approval.
What a surprise.
I am not a science fiction editor; I am no editor at all. I’m a songwriter, singer, sometime article and story-writer who happened to have some hits around the world, beginning with Society’s Child at the age of fourteen, and continuing through Jesse, At Seventeen and the like. I have nine Grammy nominations and a multitude of platinum and gold albums, which certainly doesn’t qualify me for a project of this nature!
But I do have one important qualification—perhaps the most important. I love to read. Throughout my life, books have been my window into another world. I was always terminally un-hip in school; the library saved me, hiding me from the cruelty of other children while its books showed me life as it could be.
I left school at fifteen, but I’ve derived quite a good education from my reading. I’ve never been to medieval Japan, but I can cheerfully describe the living conditions and hierarchies, thanks to books. I never took physics, or chemistry, but between Stephen Baxter and Greg Benford, I pass as knowledgeable. It is amazing how passive watching television is, and how active reading a story can be.
Many of my own fans don’t read this form; they persist in asking
me "Why science fiction?" I can give you a lot of different explanations. First of all, a lot of what you read is science fiction, even if you don’t realize it. Never mind the spaceships, the lurid covers with terrified women being strangled by seven-armed bright green Martians. Science fiction incorporates everyone and everything, from Stephen King to Madeleine L’Engle, from Peter Pan to Winnie-the-Pooh (a talking bear?!).
It doesn’t have the boundaries most literary forms have, and since, as a songwriter, my hope is to push the boundaries, it’s a perfect form.
Science fiction is a home for the homeless; for those of us who have spent our lives on the outside, staring through a plate glass window, watching all the other folks dance while we take notes and turn them into stories about "real life". It’s an outsider’s form. In my field, contemporary music, looks matter a lot. Are you thin enough? Good-looking enough? Young enough?
In science fiction, we meet young and old, thin and fat, ugly and terrible, with and without the hearts of gold. It’s Snow White (witches? people who sleep for decades, then wake at a kiss?) and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and even Jingle Bells (who rides through the air at the speed of light, re-arranging their molecular structure so they—and their gifts—can fit through a chimney, covering the entire world in a single night?)
In other words, we all grew up on it. We just didn’t know it.
For me, science fiction is the jazz of prose.
My critera for asking a writer to participate was simple: their work had to have affected my own work. In some cases, I could even trace a visible line from this story or novel to that song. I can tell you that Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic influenced my song Tattoo, that Orson Scott Card’s Tales Of Alvin Maker brought me the fire imagery in This House, that John Varley’s Press Enter brought me smack into the computer age. I told each writer how they’d affected me as I invited them, and to my astonishment, many of them said "Yes". Not only that—they said Yes with a vengeance. Howard Waldrop pulled out his old "Janis Ian records" and picked a song I hadn’t thought about in years; John Varley did the same. I was immensely flattered to discover how many of my favorite writers counted me among their favorite songwriters.
Many people in the field have been saying "How on earth did you get this stellar a cast?" Between them, "my" writers have won dozens of Hugo & Nebula Awards (the equivalent of Oscars and Grammys), and awards from pretty much every other country on earth, including Japan’s Seiun, Germany’s Kurd Lasswitz, the British Science Fiction Award… well, the list is too long.
I think one thing that helped was my complete naivete. I approached everyone truthfully, as a fan, and they responded in kind. I had no idea which writers were more successful than others, or which truly needed the pittance they'd be paid for this. I didn’t know about awards, or good reviews, or "literary and marketplace viability". I only knew that I loved their work, and hoped they'd be a part of what I was beginning to think of as my Grand Adventure.
Before we began, I heard stories about many of the authors—this one would get it in quickly, but it would be slipshod. That one would never make the deadline. This one would lose interest. Perhaps because I cheerfully confessed to one and all that I had no idea what I was doing, I found 100% of the writers (including those who could not participate) more than helpful, completely professional, and a pleasure to deal with. They got excited by the project, and as I asked each new writer to join us, that writer would pass on suggestions. Orson Scott Card raved about Tanith Lee, who was on my list anyway, so I had the luxury of using his name as a reference point. John Varley gave me Spider Robinson's address, and Spider suggested David Gerrold. Frankly, I'd never thought so many of the writers I was asking would say Yes, or that all but one already owned my records. In all humility, it's astounding to me that my work has reached so far.
Mike and I decided early on not to impose conditions; not to assign particular songs to certain writers, not to limit their word counts too harshly, not to put any barriers between them and their choices. The writers were given half a dozen or more of my CD’s, and left to pick their own songs. With a few, such as Mercedes Lackey, I couldn’t restrain myself from asking for something specific (in her case, a Valdemar story). With some, I knew my best bet was to leave them alone, and just hope they picked a song I loved.
What was fascinating to me were the song choices as they began coming in. I half-expected all the writers would go for the "famous" songs, but as you will see, there are only a few represented here. People were picking esoteric songs like This House, and Hopper Painting. After a few such surprises, I realized that the authors had taken me at my word—they were choosing songs that moved them, not songs that had been hits. Nancy Kress chose Jesse because something in the lyric moved her, not because it's been recorded by 35 different artists.
I am immensely proud of this book, and excited to be a part of it. Not the least because I got to read all the stories "first,” before anyone but the author saw them. For a fiction junkie like myself, a new story, a new book, by an author I like, is as good as Christmas and birthday rolled into one.
The first story to come in was Nancy Kress' Ej-es. She'd warned me up front, saying she was turning Jesse into a brain virus. I laughed at the time, but when I finished her treatment of the song, I realized she'd understood what I was looking for in a way that even I hadn't at the start.
When I was a very young writer, barely twenty-one, my song Jesse was recorded and made a top ten hit by Roberta Flack. When the time came to do a French translation, the great Charles Aznavour offered his services—but only if he could meet with me first. I hesitantly entered his room at the St. Moritz hotel in New York; it was a beautiful suite, with a fireplace going, and he was so terribly, terribly French that it completely intimidated me.
Aznavour congratulated me on having written a wonderful song, then proceeded to say "Of course, the lyric I write will have very little to do with yours." I was shocked, and wanted to know why? He explained that the nature of a good translation was its fluidity; that, for instance, there was not even a French equivalent to the English word "hearth". In the end, he said "A good translation is not true to the lyric; it is true to the lyric's intent."
I'd never forgotten those words, but when I read Nancy's story, their meaning hit home. Her Jesse has nothing to do with hearths, or beds, or empty stairwells, but it has everything to do with the intent. Better still, she'd done exactly what I'd asked for—she'd approached the song without timidity, without reservation.
At one point, my partner asked me what the stories were like. Carried away by my own enthusiasm, I started rambling "Oh, Jesse's a brain virus, and At Seventeen is a couple of vampire-type kids, Hunger is a mermaidish fish-lady, and David Gerrold’s named a comet after me!" She stared at me for a moment, shook her head, and said "Okay, I'll ask some other time."
That's the problem with a venture of this nature—can you make it interesting to the lay reader, the person who does not normally read science fiction? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. I do know the variety of stories and ideas in this book is huge, and I do hope everyone will find something to appeal to them—but I really don't know.
I do know that the stories are true, in only the way a work of fiction can be true. They have heart. They have life. They have truth. They move me. As an artist, I can ask for nothing more.
To be scrupulously fair, Mike is truly the editor of this volume. I am merely the slack-jawed fan, whose main contribution consisted of writing the invitations, corresponding with the writers about everything but their stories, and squealing every time a new one came in. Mike is the one who made sure deadlines were met, encouraged writers when they became nervous or disheartened, and "edited" when asked. Believe me, with writers of this stature there's not much to be done!
There are writers who could not be here, whether through illness or the constraints of time. The two writers who influenced me most when I began writing songs aren’t here: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wr
inkle In Time taught me more about the light and the darkness than any religious instruction could; she sent me a lovely letter, but pleaded age and health concerns. And Zenna Henderson, who I lived and died by during most of my childhood, and whose light has dimmed forever. This book is for them, as surely as it is for anyone else, because they did what every great artist does—they showed me myself, and made me into a better human being.
Thank you to every writer who was able to be a part of this project, and for your faith that it would be a project you’d be proud to participate in. Thanks to Mike and Marty, for the idea, and Betsy and Sheila for running with it. Thanks most of all to the readers, to those of us who keep the libraries and bookstores alive.
It is the luxury of being a semi-famous person, these days, that if you are fortunate enough to have a couple of hit records, your name is known to a multitude of people you yourself may admire. To discover that they, in turn, admire you is so much icing on the cake.
Janis Ian
Nashville, 2002
(Back to TOC)
Come Dance With Me
Terry Bisson
… who called to say "come dance with me"
and murmured vague obscenities.
It isn't all it seems
at seventeen.
~ from At Seventeen by Janis Ian
"Not so tight," Billy said. "I can't breathe."
I was like, isn't that the whole idea? But I didn't say anything, I just loosened his rope and straightened it. I never had a boy friend before, but straightening a tie is something every girl knows how to do, from watching Friends and The Creek. And this was sort of the same.
"That's better," Billy said. "I still have to do you—Amaranth."
I love it when boys call me Amaranth. Amaranth is my real name, my secret name, the name I chose for myself. I closed my eyes while Billy put my rope around my neck and pulled it tight. It was rougher than the string, that's for sure, but I didn't worry about it leaving a frankenstein mark. They could do me like they did that other girl and cover it with a high lace collar at my funeral.