AFTERWORD

I hate hate hate hate hate fantasy as it has become in American publishing.

Except for my old friend George R.R. Martin and a couple of notable others (like Tad Williams I’m told, since I can’t read most of the stuff anymore)—it’s all 6th hand rewrites of Tolkien, gl orified Dungeons and Dragons scenarios, plot coupons and way twee wee folk stories with the intellectual content of a good fart.

I mean, if anywhere on the back jacket it says “Lost Heir” or “Dark Kingdom” or “dragon-ravaged lands” or “plucky band of adventurers” you can bet it stays on the Borders or Barnes & Noble rack and is safe from me.

They’re just not writing Silverlock every time out of the chute, are they?

You can imagine my horror and intellectual fear when a fantasy story came to me.

Okay, I said, the only way I’ll write a fantasy story is as if it were happening to truck drivers.

So I did. You just read the result.

I went to the Classics Library at the University of Texas (since they’d upped the Courtesy Borrower’s Card from free to $2.00 a year to $15.00 to $25.00 in the last 4 years of course I no longer had one so had to do all my research in the library.) We’re talking the late spring of 1987 here.

I of course read P. Renatus Vegetius’ Mulomedicina in the original Latin (ahem), that being the translation of the original Greek Hippiatrika, since it had supposedly been handed down from Chiron him(it)self, and made copious notes.

Anyway, I had my plot and my protag. and the centaur. Then Nemo Prorsus walked in (like Captain Jack Cheese in “Heart of Whitenesse” or the kidnapper in “US”) and the story really took off.

(And a word about names in the story—except for the real people, they’re mostly from the glossary to Alexander Lenard’s translation of Winnie Ille Pu (1960) a well-thumbed beat-up 3rd printing of which I still have . . .)

And you need to know that Nemo Prorsus was written to be played by Bob Hoskins (whenever anyone decides to make a movie of the story.)

Also more truck-driver stuff: they go to America because that’s where horses came from (and left and died out over here and came back with the Spanish.) Once you start mixing the real in with the fantasy, you just can’t stop.

I wrote this June 11-16, 1987 and sent it off to Ellen Datlow. She called me on July 15 and wanted some rewrite, mostly taking out the six pages at the beginning where I was showing just how weird life in the Eastern Roman Empire was under Julian the Apostate. I took that out for the Omni printing in June 1988, but I’ve put it back in for every subsequent appearance of the story, including this one.

As Lew Shiner said “Nobody wins an argument with Waldrop, they only frustrate him a little while.”

I’m still very proud of this one.

High fantasy: Take this one in the chops.