Introduction: All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

 

 

THIS IS THE OLDEST STORY in the book; in fact it’s the second story I ever sold. And “sold” and “sold.” It was written on April 10, 1972. It finally got into print in April of 1981, nine years almost to the day.

It first sold for an eighty-seven dollar advance (when that was a month’s rent anywhere) to a David Gerrold anthology in 1973, to be published in 1975. The publisher had a reshuffle, three anthologies were squashed into two, etc. Rights were returned in 1976; I updated it a little; it was “sold” to a magazine; the two editors had a punch-up; it was on its own again. Finally it was sold and paid for (sixty dollars this time) and appeared in Shayol #4, and was the title story of my second collection in 1987.

The genesis: I was in the Army, doing my bit as The Reluctant Draftee. (A little after Gardner Dozois and Joe Haldeman did theirs—one of the many jobs I had in the Army was sitting at the same desk the comic-book writer Bill Dubay had sat in two years before me. . . .) The night before this story was written, I was on guard duty. It was a weekend. You were on for twenty-four hours; instead of the usual two hours on, four hours off in four shifts, we asked the Officer of the Day if we could do eight-hour shifts and get it all the hell over with at once. Since what we were guarding was an empty PX (site of a former PX, but since it hadn’t been taken off the list of active buildings, it had to be guarded—such is the fine logic of the military mind . . .), he didn’t give much of a whoop either. So there I was with my clipboard, my flashlight, and my nightstick, walking endlessly around a deserted building for eight long hours. . . .

The idle mind is the devil’s playground, and boy was mine idle.

It occurred to me: What would happen if there were suddenly a Giant Bee Emergency on the East Coast? I would be one of the poor dogfaces to have to fight the nectar-hungry sumbitches! There’s a scene in every Big Bug SF movie of the 1950s when things get out of hand: All Sheriff Jonson’s deputies are eaten, Martial law’s declared, and the Army’s called out, to great cheers from the audience—tanks come out, jeeps with 75mm recoilless rifles screech around corners, caissons go rollin’ along. Goodbye, Mr. Six-or-Eight-Legs; eat napalm dropped by Clint Eastwood! (See “French Scenes” later.)

Me! It would be Me! Fighting Them!

I went home after roll-call and wrote the story.

(What everybody missed in Joe Dante’s Matinee was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the last time the U.S. Military was looked on as the Good Guys—that’s why he used “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” twice—once as a lullaby for the younger, scared brother during the Crisis; the second time—over a shot of a hovering helicopter, when the immediate threat’s over—as a warning. That lion wasn’t asleep in that jungle—it was going to eat us up and tear apart the fabric of American Society—once again, US against THEM. . . .)

And if you haven’t, I suggest you go out right now and buy both volumes of Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! (MacFarland, 1982 and 1986)—simply the most comprehensive, indispensable, thorough, and entertaining work ever on SF films of 1950–1962. I wish it had been around when I wrote this story, but as usual, I’d seen all the movies anyway, growing up and later.

Come with me for a trip down double-feature shock-o-rama Memory Lane . . .