Author Notes to

Starcrossed

 

I was writing one story a month in the early 1970s, and feeling delighted at being able to live on short-fiction earnings while my first novels were seeking homes. My fourth published story, “Heathen God,” was a Nebula Award finalist in 1972, and still remains my most reprinted. In that same year, Joseph Elder, who would become my agent for two decades, was editing Eros In Orbit, a collection of original fiction for Simon & Schuster, and invited me to submit a story. I tried to dig deep, to be ambitious; after all, this was a hardcover collection. As it happened, Barry Malzberg had contributed to the “writer’s workout” series in the SFWA Bulletin, in which he provided story springboards for the benefit of beginning writers. I’d had good luck with the Malzberg springboard that became “Heathen God,” so I resolved to try again. On a brisk walk to the post office one day the story came to me in its entirety. Barry was in fact holding my hand, but I didn’t think of it that way; besides, I added quite a bit to his springboard idea.

I wrote “Starcrossed” in an all-night session that week, on an old Woodstock black manual office typewriter (resembling a large Underwood that I gave to Gardner Dozois), and was startled that a mere two thousand and some words was coming so slowly. But the story “turned” by dawn, and I was very happy with the results; even more so when Joanna Russ reviewed it in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, calling it “a fine story… too genuinely science fictionally far-out to summarize easily… it realizes the sense of the subjectively erotic.”