THE BLACK SUN
One of the issues I come back to repeatedly in my fiction is violence. Is it inevitable? Under what circumstances does non-violence get to win, and at what cost?
If a discussion about war and violence goes on long enough, somebody’s bound to say, “What about Hitler? Would you not have gone to war to stop him?” I was a fan of the old Mission Impossible tv show, which not only had the best theme music ever (except maybe for Route 66), it made a habit of hoisting the bad guys on their own petards. With that inspiration, I set about trying to answer the Hitler Ultimatum.
As you can imagine, the Internet is full of excruciating detail when it comes to Nazi Germany. If I wanted to know what Hitler’s private plane looked like, there were photos. The courtyard of Wewelsburg Castle during the remodeling? No problem. It was a pleasure to have so many photo references to work from—I hardly had to make anything up.
In addition to the web, I relied on a couple of print books for background. I wanted a solid, non-controversial life of Hitler and got just what I was looking for with John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. For the nuttier stuff I went to Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda. His constant mockery of the Nazis startled me at first, but ultimately struck me as a valid way to puncture their pretensions and deprive them of a glamour they don’t deserve.
An old friend from Austin, Bill Wallace, lent me his most impressive knowledge of history and the occult, and made helpful suggestions on the story in manuscript. Richard Butner and Orla Swift also provided valuable early readings, and Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press published it in the final issue of his on-line magazine. My thanks also go out to the judges of the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, who named it a finalist in the short form category for 2014.
THE NEXT
I talked about this one in the introduction. I didn’t read any reference books for it, though I made extensive use of Google Maps. Jim Blaylock confirmed my LA geography and provided corrections on my flora. My favorite lawyer, David Stevens, who is anything but predatory, kept me on the straight and narrow where legal matters were concerned.
DOGLANDIA
I started this in a Hello Kitty notebook in longhand in 2002 and wrote half of it before I put it aside for reasons now lost to me. Once I started thinking in terms of a novella project, this story came to mind right away—though it proved considerably shorter than the other three.
Thanks again to Richard Butner and Orla Swift for commenting on the first draft.
DOCTOR HELIOS
This one began with Cairo. It wasn’t even an idea, it was just an image, a memory of the city from when I was 12 years old. Clumps of intensely green tropical foliage, ancient buildings side by side with the new, the fierce contrast between the absolute dryness of the desert and the immensity of the Nile. I had no characters, no plot, mafish, as they say in Arabic. But I felt a powerful emotional resonance.
I had been in Egypt and the Sudan from the fall of 1963 to the spring of 1964. My father was excavating early human sites in the area that would become Lake Nasser once the Aswan High Dam was completed. Thus a lot of the detail comes from memory. I rode in a felucca on the Nile, saw an unbelievably huge catfish head floating in the river, and regularly crossed from our home on the East Bank to work sites on the West Bank by means of wwii surplus landing craft. We rode one of those pontoon boats up to Abu Simbel for a day trip before the temple was dismantled and moved to the ridge above, and I used the pictures I took that day with my Brownie camera as reference.
The actual writing of Heroes and Villains started here, because I thought it would be the most difficult of the stories. (In fact, that honor went to “The Next,” because I underestimated the difference between screenplays and prose.) Once I hit on the idea that it would be a spy story—my favorite genre throughout the 1960s—things fell quickly into place.
I probably would not have been able to write it had I not managed to find a copy of the 1965 book High Dam at Aswan: The Subjugation of the Nile by Tom Little, which was filled with great details about the construction of the dam, the layout of the work areas, and the political background of the project.
I used Saïd K. Aburish’s superb Nasser: The Last Arab as my general reference for the history of the region and time. This is a first-class biographical work, as partisan as it is well-informed, and includes an uncompromising account of the criminal behavior of the cia in the Middle East.
Also helpful were Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck, and a kid’s picture book, The Aswan High Dam, by Peggy J. Parks.
I used the M.A.S. Abdel Haleem translation of The Qur’an (Oxford, 2005) for background, though when it came to translating the opening lines, I went with a more traditional rendition. I used “Koran” rather than “Qur’an” and “Moslem” rather than “Muslim” in keeping with the standard practice of the period.
Wilton Barnhardt, Richard Butner, John Kessel, and Orla Swift all read the manuscript and made insightful comments. Bill Schafer bought the story for his Subterranean magazine, and commissioned a gorgeous cover for it from the amazing Ken Laager. I’m proud to have that cover gracing this book.