by Lewis Shiner
SNOWBIRDS
This is a blatant homage to one of my favorite writers, Philip K. Dick. It was also my only sale to Analog, the venerable hard SF magazine whose glory days had been overseen by the great John W. Campbell. Managing editor Betsy Mitchell, who later bought my first novel, Frontera, had urged me to send her something. She wanted to expand the range of fiction that the magazine published, but it turned out to be a vicious circle. Analog readers didn’t much care for what I was doing, and I felt I’d squandered one of my best stories where it failed to get any attention. So I went back to Asimov’s and F&SF, and Analog went back to what it did best.
It’s worth noting that global climate change was already a source of worry when I published this in 1982. Now, more than 25 years later, we still haven’t done anything to try to slow it down.
MATCH
I mentioned earlier that I don’t have kids. This is why.
RELAY
Many of my stories come from dreams, but this is one of the few that came to me complete, beginning to end. The Philip K. Dick influence is obvious again, both in the cramming of multiple viewpoints into such a short story, and in the concern for the emotions of the characters over the logic of the plot.
CASTLES MADE OF SAND
One of the consolations of art is that when you end up at the wrong sand castle contest, you can turn it into a short story. Surfside was a favorite destination of mine when I lived in Texas, and the setting for my novel Slam.
This is one of the more hopeful of my stories, with things turning sweet rather than sour at the end.
PRODIGAL SON
The third and last of the Dan Sloane stories. See “Deep Without Pity” for the history of the series. I used Carnival by Arthur H. Lewis, a wonderful book full of slang and tricks of the trade, for background on this one. I was still not over my annoying habit of naming characters for writers; Andy Gresham’s last name comes from William Lindsay Gresham, author of the carny novel Nightmare Alley.
MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES
In the mid-1980s Bruce Sterling was making a point of collaborating with several other “movement” writers, including Bill Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and me. He approached me with the core idea of the story, using time travel to mine the past as a metaphor for exploitation of the third world. I remember his saying something about cracking towers in eighteenth century Salzburg. I never got around to asking him if he had Mozart in mind when he picked the time and place.
Bruce left me to get things rolling, including the details of viewpoint, characters, and plot. I wrote the opening few pages and showed them to him, and he just shook his head. “No, no, this is all wrong. If these people sit around feeling guilty and sorry for themselves, this will never work. This has to be full throttle all the way.”
He was clearly right. With that course correction, I wrote approximately the first half of the story, and Bruce finished it. Then I rewrote the whole thing and then he rewrote it (all on typewriters, of course), and then the real arguments began.
It’s always educational to learn that other writers really do write that way on purpose, and that merely showing them the right way is not always enough. Bruce and I each discovered this about the other. We hammered out the final draft on the phone one afternoon and night, pretty much word by word, and once we were speaking to each other again, our friendship seemed hardly damaged by the experience.
KIDDING AROUND
Joe Lansdale and I—among many others—taught at a writing workshop for high school students at Texas A&M in the late 1980s. One of our students was a young woman from Tomball, Texas (a Houston suburb), named Kimberly Rector. Kim was smart, outspoken, and hilarious, and once she started talking about her family, I started taking notes. With her permission, I turned the stuff she told me into this story, though please note that the motivations and “plot” are entirely my own invention.
MYSTERY TRAIN
I love Elvis—the real Elvis, the early Elvis, the needy, jumped-up, rebellious-but-polite young man who was just beginning to feel the power of his charisma, backed up by standup bass and rockabilly guitar. But something happened between 1958 and 1960: Elvis went into the Army, Chuck Berry got busted under the Mann Act, Buddy Holly crashed into a snow-covered cornfield, and guys like Fabian and Frankie Avalon took over the charts. Coincidence or conspiracy? Well, I answer that question with another: Quo bono?
I was still trying to break into the men’s slicks, and I sort of did with this one. I sold it to Oui, which at one time had been a European-style spinoff from Playboy. Unfortunately the name had been sold to a much sleazier outfit in the meantime. The upside was that they didn’t ask me to back off on using the names of real—and powerful—men in the entertainment industry.
As I remember, it was Bruce Sterling who suggested the Fisher King imagery at the end. For that and much more, this story is dedicated to him.
SECRETS
I started with the image of someone releasing blood from their eyes into the bathroom sink, and it seemed a very pure moment of otherness. The Russians call it ostranyenye—the moment when the familiar becomes strange. I wasn’t interested in the mechanism or what sort of creature Michael was, which is why I suppose I’m not really a science fiction writer.
GOLFING VIETNAM
I was staying at a bed and breakfast in Wilmington, North Carolina, and there were a bunch of kids in their 20s there for a wedding. I ended up talking to one of them, who told me about the Australian tour and a whole world of second-tier professional golf that I knew nothing about. A few months later I ended up at another wedding of 20-somethings, this time in Dallas.
That was enough to start me writing, but I still didn’t have an ending. Then, one afternoon, as I was jogging through a park near my house, I found a $20 bill. The moral dilemma hit me immediately. If I put up a sign that said FOUND $20 BILL there would be no way to be sure that the real owner claimed it. And almost immediately I saw that I had discovered not only free money, but the ending to my story.
STOMPIN’ AT THE SAVOY
This is a classic clean-out-the-notebook story—all the weird little notions that had accumulated over a period of months or years, dumped into a blender. In this case, I also threw in my favorite knock-knock jokes and a big dollop of Subgenius mythos(www.subgenius.com). I went to high school with the founder of the cult and had been a card-carrying member for years when I wrote the story.
I wrote it for the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, and I confess that it was mostly aimed at Bruce Sterling. Bruce tended to work me over pretty thoroughly and I wanted to see if just once I could deliberately push his buttons. It worked, and I had a good time doing it.
The title is hard to explain. It’s from a favorite swing era song, and it seemed to me to conjure the ultimate night of fun on the town. Used here ironically, of course. I might have been willing to change it, but no one seemed to notice that it didn’t make much sense.
GOLD
I’d already written a “punk western” story for one of his anthologies (see “Steam Engine Time”), but Joe Lansdale wasn’t satisfied, and he almost immediately came back wanting another. I told him I didn’t have one, but that trick doesn’t work with Joe.
My friend Tim Powers had just published a terrific pirate novel, On Stranger Tides, and that clicked with the fact that the infamous Jean Lafitte had once had his base of operations on Galveston Island, one of my favorite day-trips from Austin. I’d taken a tour of the historical homes on the island and picked up some tidbits about how people had lived in the nineteenth century. Put the two together, and what you get is not exactly gunfights and outlaws, but it is Texas and the right time period.
The blowfish business came from Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, and I got the financial history from Samuel May Williams: Early Texas Entrepreneur by Margaret Swett Henson. Gary Cartwright’s excellent Galveston: A History of the Island was another invaluable reference. I cobbled together the Lafitte lore, including the golden thimble
, from multiple sources that I found at the library.
DIRTY WORK
During the time I was writing the Dan Sloane stories (see “Deep Without Pity”), I had it in the back of my mind to write something I thought of as “The Last Dan Sloane story.” It would have shown Sloane becoming so disillusioned during the investigation of a rape case that he gave up and got another job.
When Joe Lansdale refused to take “maybe” or “later” for an answer on his Dark at Heart anthology in 1990, that last Dan Sloane story was the only suspense idea that spoke to me. I didn’t want to write about Sloane anymore, but when I rethought it in terms of another protagonist, I came up with “Dirty Work,” which turned out to be one of my favorites of my own stories.
Some of the details in this story came from a friend who was raped, then stalked by a thug working for the rapist’s lawyer. My thanks to her for her courage in speaking up about it.
LIZARD MEN OF LOS ANGELES
I had somehow grown to an advanced age without ever hearing the word chupacabra (“goat sucker”), a vampiric creature of Southwestern folk tales. In looking up chupacabra on the Internet, I stumbled upon the whole world of cryptids: creatures of myth and folklore including yeti, the Loch Ness monster, and lizard men.
Alarm bells went off in my head, and I printed a number of Web pages that talked about the giant lizard-shaped cavern under the city of LA, the associated Native American legends, and the mysterious death of Warren Shufelt. It was still fermenting there when Joe Lansdale called again, this time wanting something for an anthology of pulp stories.
I carefully explained that I didn’t write pulp stories, and Joe said “fine” and called the next week and asked again. And the week after. Then every couple of days.
The truth is, there are a number of pulp writers whose work I love, from H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard to Edgar Rice Burroughs. And the lizard men were perfect for a pulp story, as Shufelt’s search for their tunnels took place during the height of the pulp era.
I’ve loved the idea of caves since reading the Hardy Boys novels and Cave Carson comics as a kid. I’ve been fascinated by stage magic and magicians like Houdini for at least as long. Once I realized that Joe had hooked me again, I started reaching for more recent obsessions, like spontaneous human combustion (SHC to its students) and Aleister Crowley.
I tried to find a style that would suggest pulp without drifting too far into actual bad writing. And I wanted to bring a modern, compassionate sensibility to the story that would not be anachronistic. Once I came up with Johnny Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart, the story began writing itself.
A few inside jokes: Crowley is staying at the Gamble House in Pasadena, a place Jim Blaylock had taken me to visit. Gamble (of Proctor and Gamble fame) was rumored to be an occultist because of the crescent and star P&G logo. Hassan was inspired by the Chuck Jones cartoon “Ali Baba Bunny” (“Hassan chop!”). At one point a policeman comes through the door with a gun in his hand, deliberately echoing Chandler’s advice on how to pick up a dragging story line.
Ironically, after I had sent the story to Joe, he ended up cancelling the contract for the book. I took it back and sold it to F&SF, where it was the cover story (my first ever in an anthology or magazine), though the artist inexplicably ignored all the fabulous pulp tribute possibilities and instead showed Cairo (dressed as Indiana Jones) and Mrs. Lockhart merely walking down the street.
A few months later, Joe called again. The pulp anthology was back on. Yes, he understood I’d already sold “Lizard Men” elsewhere. How about writing him a new one?
I can’t tell you exactly why, but this is my favorite of all the stories I’ve ever written.
Copyrights
These stories originally appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications:
“Perfidia” is © 2004 by California Institute of the Arts. First published in Black Clock #2, Fall, 2004.
“Stuff of Dreams” is © 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1981.
“The War at Home” is © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, May, 1985.
“Straws” is © 2007 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Fiction Liberation Front, June, 2007.
“Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe” is © 1983 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1983.
“White City” is © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, June, 1990.
“Primes” is © 2000 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct/Nov, 2000.
“The Long Ride Out” is © 1976, 1993 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Fiction Liberation Front, July, 2007.
“Sitcom” is © 1995 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, January, 1995.
“The Death of Che Guevara” is © 2009 by Lewis Shiner and appears here for the first time.
“His Girlfriend’s Dog” is © 1989 by Lewis Shiner. First published in New Pathways, May, 1989.
“Deep Without Pity” is © 1980 by Renown Publications. First published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June, 1980.
“The Circle” is © 1982 by TZ Publications, Inc. First published in The Twilight Zone, November, 1982.
“Twilight Time” is © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, April, 1984.
“Jeff Beck” is © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, January 1986.
“Wild for You” is © 1990 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, December, 1990.
“Till Human Voices Wake Us” is © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May, 1984.
“Flagstaff” is © 1998 by The News and Observer. First published in The Raleigh News and Observer, December 27, 1998.
“Tommy and the Talking Dog” is © 1982 by TZ Publications, Inc. First published in The Twilight Zone, July, 1982.
“Oz” is © 1988 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Full Spectrum, 1988.
“Love in Vain” is © 1988 by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper. First published in Jack the Ripper, September, 1988.
“Steam Engine Time” is © 1989 by The Western Writers of America. First published in Best of the West 2, May, 1989.
“Kings of the Afternoon” is © 1980 by Flight Unlimited, Inc. First published in Shayol, Winter, 1980.
“Sticks” is © 1992 by Lewis Shiner. First published in In Dreams, Spring, 1992.
“The Tale of Mark the Bunny” is © 1999 by Lewis Shiner. First published on LewisShiner.com, September, 1999.
“The Killing Season” is © 1998 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Private Eye Action As You Like It, July, 1998.
“Scales” is © 1990 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Alien Sex, May, 1990.
“Snowbirds” is © 1982 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Analog, November, 1982.
“Match” is © 1990 by Stephen F. Austin State University. First published in RE:AL, Fall, 1990.
“Relay” is © 1991 by Lewis Shiner. First published in The Edges of Things, 1991.
“Castles Made of Sand” is © 1997 by Richard Myers Peabody, Jr. First published in Gargoyle, Spring, 1997.
“Prodigal Son” is © 1998 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Private Eye Action As You Like It, July, 1998.
“Mozart in Mirrorshades” is © 1985 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, September, 1985.
“Kidding Around” is © 1990 by Andy Watson & Mark V. Ziesing. First published in Journal Wired #2, Spring, 1990.
“Mystery Train” is © 1983 by Laurent Publications, Ltd. First published in Oui, May, 1983.
“Secrets” is © 1993 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magaz
ine, November, 1993.
“Golfing Vietnam” is © 2007 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Fiction Liberation Front, June, 2007.
“Stompin’ at the Savoy” is © 1985 by Flight Unlimited, Inc. First published in Shayol #7, Winter, 1985.
“Gold” is © 1989 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Razored Saddles, 1989.
“Dirty Work” is © 1992 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Dark at Heart, March, 1992.
“Lizard Men of Los Angeles” is © 1999 by Lewis Shiner. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1999.