This story was a real problem child. Harry Harrison asked me to do a story for an anthology of science fiction set one million years in the future. I ran home and wrote the first three pages of “Anniversary Project,” and then stopped dead. Started again, stopped again.
After a half-dozen tries I was all the way up to four pages, and I really liked those four pages, but I had to stop wasting time on it. I wrote Harry and told him to go on without me.
Several years later I came across the fragment and it was immediately obvious what was wrong with it. Painfully obvious, and so was the solution.
I had taken as a basic premise that “people” a million years in the future would have evolved into something totally alien, and I’d done too good a job; they were the most convincing aliens I’d ever invented. But they did lack certain interesting attributes: love, hate, fear, birth, death, sex, appetites, politics. About all they had was slight differences of opinion regarding ontology. Pretty dry stuff.
Yet I thought I was onto something. Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature. My purpose was not nearly so elevated; my aliens were there as unwitting vehicles for absurdist humor. All the story needed was a couple of bewildered humans, to serve as foils for alien nature. Once I saw that, the story practically wrote itself.
In the process of writing itself, the story generated two dreadful puns. I’m not responsible.