Stepan Chapman (1951–2014) was a US writer who won the Philip K. Dick Award (1997) for his first and only novel, The Troika (1996). He grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, and attended the University of Michigan. Throughout his life, Chapman either wrote full-time or held odd jobs; with his wife, Kia Chapman, he once performed PSA-type puppet shows for Arizona schoolchildren, a gig that ended when the puppets caught fire. Chapman also wrote an eccentric math book for kids and wrote plays performed at various fringe festivals. He died prematurely of a heart attack in 2014, at his desk, working on new fiction.
As a storyteller, Chapman mixed myth, science fiction, fantasy, and the surreal into a rich tapestry of unusual, ironic, and darkly humorous fictions that were often antiestablishment. Useful comparisons can be made to such distinctly American freethinkers as Mark Twain, R. A. Lafferty, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Chapman’s first story, bought by the legendary John Campbell, was published in the December 1969 Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, followed by four appearances in Damon Knight’s influential Orbit anthology series. His work also later appeared in the World Fantasy Award–winning Leviathan series (1994–2002). However, Chapman is also one of the few writers associated with science fiction to regularly appear in such prestigious publications as Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Wisconsin Review, and Zyzzyva. In all, he published more than three hundred short stories during his lifetime, only a handful of them collected in Danger Music (1996) and Dossier (2001). A “complete stories” is long overdue.
Chapman’s most famous creation is the novel The Troika (published by the editors of this anthology through Ministry of Whimsy Press, 1997), which received widespread critical acclaim and was perhaps the most reviewed science fiction book of that year. The Troika came into print only after Chapman submitted selections from it to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Leviathan anthology series. By that point, the novel had been rejected by more than 120 publishers—so many editors had passed on the novel, in fact, that at the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony Chapman sat by chance next to two of the editors who had rejected the novel. The story of The Troika’s publication provides a good example of how difficult it could be to publish sui generis long-form material in the American marketplace at that time.
The Troika is a tour de force of sustained surreal science fiction—influenced to some degree by manga—and contains some of the most audaciously imaginative passages ever published in the context of science fiction. Although the mordant humor of the novel invites comparisons to Joseph Heller and Terry Southern, it is uniquely “Chapmanesque” in its fusion of mythology, psychology, and the afterlife. In the novel, three main characters who have lost their memories trudge across an endless desert lit by three purple suns: a robotic jeep (Alex), a brontosaurus (Naomi), and an old woman (Eva). Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities. To further complicate matters, sandstorms jolt them out of one body and into another.
The novel alternates between dream tales about the troika’s former lives and their present-day attempts to discover where they are and how they can get out. From this quest form, Chapman creates a poignant and powerful story of redemption, in which pathos is leavened by humor and pain is softened by comfort.
The excerpt included in this volume, “How Alex Became a Machine,” fuses chapters 7 and 10 of The Troika to tell the complete story of Alex, a character who is pushed by excesses of industrial capitalism into losing his humanity.