As I sat down to write the introduction to this collection of short stories, I realized that most of what I wanted to say had to do with the stories themselves—the inspiration for them, the writing of them, and sometimes the reaction to them.
At the same time, I realized that most of you would come to these stories cold, having never seen them before. The last thing I wanted to do was spoil the reading experience by accidentally talking about an element of a story that should have remained secret until the story was over.
So I decided to put the little pieces about the stories at the end of the book, as an afterword, which you can chose to read or not. As a reader, I’ve always loved this kind of material. In fact, I was recently disappointed in a short story collection by one of my favorite writers because it lacked even the most basic information about the stories, from the initial copyright dates to where the stories were first published. There was no introduction, and certainly no discussion of the stories.
The purists can skip all of this. For those of you who want a tiny insight into the writer’s (warped) mind, read on:
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Recovering Apollo 8: For years, I kept asking scientists and other science fiction writers what would have happened if astronauts had died while orbiting the Moon. Initially, I was trying to write a story set in the future space program—a high adventure piece about an attempt to rescue those astronauts as their oxygen ran out, sort of an Apollo 13 meets Armageddon.
One day, one of the writers claimed he didn’t understand what I wanted. So I said, “What if NASA miscalculated and the Apollo 8 crew never made it back from the Moon? What if….?”
My voice trailed off at the point, because I suddenly realized where the germ of my high-adventure story had come from. It had come from my eight-year-old self, who worried as she watched the news reports about Apollo 8. My father took me aside, just like Richard’s father did in the story, and explained to me what might go wrong, trying to protect me from bad news by preparing me for it.
In that discussion with my fellow writer, I found the story I wanted to tell, but I wasn’t sure my skills were up for it. I brainstormed the idea with my writer friends at our weekly lunch, and after months of this, I think they grew tired of my strange questions. But that group helped immensely.
Because the story was so difficult for me to write, I wasn’t sure what the reader response would be. My husband, who is my first reader, loved the story, but he had helped brainstorm it, so I worried that he wasn’t objective. Then Sheila Williams at Asimov’s had a similar reaction, making it the cover story of the February 2007 issue. The Asimov’s readers gave me the best vote of all, by choosing “Recovering Apollo 8” as the best novella of the year. (It was also a Hugo nominee.)
One odd coda: When the story was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Story (Long Form), I was stunned. I had worked so hard on getting the science right and on actually finding the science fiction story I wanted to tell, that I had never consciously realized I was writing an alternate history story. Usually I look at alternate histories as soft science stories at best. Most of my alternate histories have no science at all (look at “G-Men” later in this volume). “Recovering Apollo 8” went on to win the Sidewise award, proving to me yet again that the writer never knows exactly what she has written.
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A Taste of Miracles: I wrote “A Taste of Miracles” nearly ten years before I wrote “Recovering Apollo 8,” even though they appeared in the same calendar year. “A Taste of Miracles” was the first short story I wrote after I quit editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I was suffering from a problem that I call “critical brain.” I finished the story, decided it was “slight” and shelved it.
Years later, I found a copy, reread it, and loved it. It wouldn’t win any awards, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do—it talked about an imagined future for outer space while harking back to the past. I immediately mailed the story to Analog, which published it the month before Asimov’s published “Recovering Apollo 8.” You can see that I was dealing with my Apollo 8 obsession even then.
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The Strangeness of the Day: Martin H. Greenberg invited me into an anthology called Battle Magic. The title says it all: the story had to have a battle and there had to be magic.
I love writing for Greenberg anthologies because they stretch me. My first reaction is often “I don’t want to write about that,” but eventually I do. I also analyze the anthology before I start. I figured most people would have giant wizard battles in made-up fantasy universes or unicorns facing off against dragons or that kind of thing.
I decided to do something different. How I ended up with Prince Charming fighting the Evil Stepmother for Sleeping Beauty’s body, I’ll never know. What I do know is that this story became the impetus for my Kristine Grayson romance novels. The fantasy world first introduced here appears in all eight (so far) Grayson novels. The first, Utterly Charming, is an expansion of the short story itself.
By the way, the short story went pretty much unnoticed in the United States, but the French gave it their prestigious Le Prix Imaginales in 2003.
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Substitutions: I have been writing about Silas, who deals in Death, since the early 1990s. In fact, I started “Substitutions” on December 20, 1996. I wrote the first three paragraphs and stopped, uncertain where the story was going to go.
Fast-forward eight years. During that time, I would open the file, read my three paragraphs, and decide not to finish the story. Then Brittiany A. Koren asked me into an anthology she was editing with Martin H. Greenberg about assassins, called Places to Be, People to Kill. I realized at that moment that Silas could be considered an assassin. I opened the story again and this time, I finished it.
Soon after it was published, I received an e-mail from Ed Gorman, a fine writer who edits an annual year’s best mystery volume. He wanted “Substitutions” for his mystery anthology.
I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of the story as a mystery. Once again, I learned that a story isn’t always what the writer thinks it is.
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G-Men: “G-Men” is what I think of when I think of alternate history stories. It has no science at all. It simply takes sf’s basic proposition “what if?” and applies it to history. What if Germany had won World War II? What if Christ had not been crucified?
In this case, the what-if is simple: What if J. Edgar Hoover was murdered three months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated? I’d love to have credit for that idea, but it came from my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, in the middle of lunch. I was whining about an alternate history story I had to write for an alternate history mystery anthology edited by Lou Anders. All of my ideas either had no alternate history or no mystery.
So Dean, probably to shut me up, suggested the Hoover idea. And it worked. I shut up, started researching, and by my deadline had this novelette—which garnered great acclaim. It is the first story (that we can find) to appear in both a mystery best of the year collection (The Best American Mysteries 2009) and a science fiction best of the year collection (The Year’s Best Science Fiction 26).
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The End of the World: “The End of the World” is another story that took years to finish. I began the story in the late 1990s, and all that existed for years was the first section marked “Now.” I knew I was dealing with aliens. I knew I had a story based half in Oregon’s past and half in the present. But I was afraid of the subject matter for two reasons—it was going to be dark, and it was going to be long.
It wasn’t until 2005, when Mike Resnick asked me to participate in an anthology of science fiction crime novellas, that I decided to finish this story.
While the story didn’t get much attention in the United States, it did win a Special Mention (essentially second place) in the UPC contest, a prestigious international novella competition run out of Spain every year.
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June Sixteenth at Anna’s: I wrote this story in the days after the 9/11 tragedy. Those events so shocked me that I worried I might never write again. After all, what was fiction when compared to the hardship of real life? Gradually I came back from that position, but it took some effort.
I had a lot of trouble in those days after the attack, as most Americans did. I found comfort in the music of World War II. My mother, who was in her twenties during WWII, once told me that the music of her generation was better than the music of mine “because of the war.”
I didn’t understand what she meant until 9/11, when the loss and heartache hidden beneath the lovely words of songs like “Sentimental Journey” and “White Christmas” became clear to me.
Her words, that music, and the attacks themselves inspired this story.
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Craters: I wrote “Craters” in three days, just after I finished a devastatingly difficult mystery novel. I was exhausted, but I had promised this story to yet another anthology, this one for my friend and mentor Joe Haldeman, about a topic I didn’t much like, Future Weapons of War.
I was burned out. I was also disillusioned with the direction our country was taking and with many of the things happening in the world.
This story came out fast partially because I knew that if I had set the story aside I never would have finished it. The story disturbs me to this day—which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
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Diving into the Wreck: “Diving into the Wreck” is another comeback story for me. I got very ill from 2001-2003. I also had some serious problems with my writing business. I lost confidence and lacked the energy to write.
But I kept imagining the hulk of the wreck from this story, and I had to put it on paper. The story went slowly, partly because of my state of mind. After I finished it, Dean had to convince me to mail it. Even then, I sat on it for some time.
Within a week of mailing, Sheila Williams at Asimov’s bought the story and told me she wanted it to be the first cover story that she had chosen as the new editor of the magazine. Reader response was tremendous, winning me a Reader’s Choice Award. “Diving” also won the UPC contest in Spain.
By the time all that good stuff had happened, I was already deep into plotting the novel—which launched an entire universe.. WMG Publishing is in the process of releasing all of the novellas in the Diving Universe as well as an ebook omnibus of the first three novels. WMG will release the fourth novel, Skirmishes, in September 2013.
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I have a very strange writing process. Short stories often spawn novels for me. Three of the stories in this volume have become novels: “Strangeness of the Day” has become Utterly Charming, “G-Men” is a (yet to be published) novel titled The Enemy Within, and “Diving into the Wreck” is the first section of a novel of the same name.
Someday the Silas stories will be a novel, and who knows what’ll happen to the characters in “The End of the World.”
Short stories are my first love and often the genesis of my most important work. Thanks for sharing the collection with me. I hope you enjoyed it.