Author Notes to

The City of Thought and Steel

 

This is the kind of story that sometimes inhabits and haunts a writer. What would a truly effective terrorism be like, and what might its success do to the mind of the terrorist? Could he face up to it, or would he retreat into a world of psychic bandages? John D. MacDonald’s deeply felt story, “The Annex,” troubled me for many years, and this was how I tried to approach the same kind of terrifying beauties. It is not really science fiction or fantasy, except that it takes place in the future and the protagonist struggles to avoid his memories through fantasy; but Shawna McCarthy, then editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, stretched a point when she accepted this story.