Afterword

 

 

THESE WORDS ARE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE READERS who like to make up their own minds, but also for those who might like to compare notes with me about these stories. Those of you who read even afterwords first, be warned. It’s better to get your own reactions first; save forewords and afterwords for later, or even for never. 

My words here are more like what you see on wall maps, where it says “Legend,” meaning an explanation; but no one believes there are words in the middle of oceans, or lines of latitude and longitude. The world is not a map, and an author is never completely right in what he says about his work, or what is said about his efforts. There are meanings to the left, right, top, and bottom of a sentence, not to mention the same for individual words; too many to know all at once, for a writer or a reader; so we do the best we can, and if it comes out more for some people and less for others, that could be the reader’s or the writer’s fault. 

But language is not only for the knotty complexities of allusive fictions, but also for shedding some light, at least sometimes. So these notes are my take on how I understood these stories, even though I quietly believe that nothing takes the place of an attentive reader reading them, and an attentive writer knowing what he means to say, even if we can’t put explanations right into the middle of a story. At least I think so this year, as I write these words. Next year I might disagree with myself; because if you think about anything well enough, you have to expect that you might not step into the same thoughts twice. And you might, happily, write down more than you know and make a discovery.

Or then again you might not. Anyone who has kept a journal has had the surprise of asking himself, “Did I truly ever think that?” 

But you did. And you wrote it down. And it looked good to you. You might think so again; or maybe not; maybe you’ll think more. 

So have a go with me at these stories. Those of you who are reading these words, or the foreword, stop now and read the stories. Don’t even pay attention to that man behind the “Foreword.” 

 

Terrors and dark thoughts are many—personal, political, technological, historical; but the greatest horrors dwell inside us before they come out into the light to shape our lives and even change the world. The common denominator of all fiction and drama is that something goes wrong inside a human being; a conflict arises, a struggle ensues, and the outcome is in doubt. Fantasy, which predates science fiction by centuries, knows this well, as does serious contemporary fiction. Humanity’s long journey via the slow time machine of our biology is perhaps best recorded by storytellers.

Science fiction is for our proud, newly forming human mind; it looks forward and believes in progress; yet it too is divided into utopian and dystopian schools, often mixed together. Fantasy and horror fiction is for our old, violence prone souls. “The thing in the crypt is us,” Stephen King has written. The monster is not the monster in Frankenstein; the doctor is the monster, because he can’t control what he creates, and fails to restrain it after it comes to life. Dr. Morbius can’t help but send his innermost self out to kill in the movie Forbidden Planet because the technology magnifies his sleeping mind, when he can’t restrain his unconscious impulses; if the technology of the Krell had not been at hand, his sleeping other self would have been too feeble to do any harm. 

Why horrify your readers is a question best answered by: a story gives you the means to do so harmlessly, for the most part. You can conjure and confront your worst wishes and fantasies—and maybe see in the mirror clearly what you might be blind to otherwise. Our greatest works of literature tell us in make-believe, verbal dreams, what we might not say out loud, or find politically inconvenient. But when reality and our imaginations meet, we find that reality exceeds our imaginations, because we are the reality of both realms. “The true subject of the horror genre,” writes British film critic Robin Wood, “is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses.” History tells us that it has done so at great peril. 

Humor also catches us unawares, and we recognize truths that we would deny on the editorial pages of our newspapers. Satirists make even bigots laugh and go away uneasy, startled at their own involuntary recognition of truths denied. The worst of these truths is the answer to the rhetorical question, “It can’t all be that bad?” Yes, it can be. We have a whole century behind us to prove it. Doesn’t mean some things weren’t good. 

When you write imaginative fiction, especially genuine science fiction grounded in the realities of knowledge and thought, you tend to avoid the old darkness at the black heart of our survivalist evolutionary nature. 

But a writer drifts as he time travels—fantasy and horror are about our jailed innards, which we strive to keep in check. Mystery stories gaze at our guts plainly. Good Westerns and historical fictions do take sight of our terrifying pasts. Romances recycle our delusions about love and belonging. The genres focus on certain features of our human nature by exaggerating them into clearer visibility; on the page, that is; one can scarcely exaggerate what goes on in reality. The genres are in fact rivers that feed contemporary fictions, which today have always struggled to liberate themselves from limited, realistic presentations. We are wilder than our mundane fictions are permitted to admit; more thoughtful and creative than our schools wish to encourage; more alienated from previous generations; more mad than reasonable; more sleep deprived than rested; more alike than different (Stephen Hawking has a poster of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt above her hips in his office).

How to write fiction that does not flinch at realities? Maybe the dangerous thrill, what Stephen King calls the “gross out,” is nothing more than the courage we need, the fiction writer’s technique to get at the truth, to look directly at the nightmare? Quentin Tarantino said recently that in Kill Bill he was pushing at his own talent as hard as he could, to see where it would hit a limit—and didn’t find it.

Our successive world cultures have striven to purge the uglies from our nature without tossing out the vitality, brains, and creativity, to keep the love without embracing the wuss. So that’s what this collection is about, as I look back at the stories, long before I guessed what such a grouping might mean. 

“Lords of Imagination” reveals an SF writer segueing into horror, as he tries to rationalize the writing of fantastic horror. The conceit of this story, and the conceit of its presence in this collection, is that our human horror fiction is a subspecies of a galactic empire’s local fiction, concerned now with human innards, which held us back from the heroic dreams of science fiction. I can think of no more horrifying demise for science fiction, one in which we become so marginalized, our local planetary history so reduced in a larger picture, that horror and fantasy fiction becomes the only relevant form of writing. Some may say that this retreat into fantasy, as knowledge and technology shrink our self-esteem, is exactly what is happening, without need of a galactic unveiling of our true and minor place. Many claim that this unveiling of our inner nature by the sciences is evidence that we will never progress; we can perhaps see our plight, but we cannot lift ourselves out of ourselves, defeat our inner selves, and this may not be possible without a place to stand and look back. Does such a place exist? It seems that we can glimpse it, in bits and pieces. 

Dealing with our insides hits closer to the familiar in a horror story. Terror and pity make a point. Contact with an extensive extraterrestrial culture might turn us inward to personal horrors. There has been no such contact, yet we are preoccupied with our demons—and one of them is the idea of an alien from another star. I assume an unsettling reality, but it’s only a story; if it were true, it would be devastating.

“I Walked With Fidel” suggests that all political figures are zombies speaking with the voice of polls, possessed by the dybbuks of statistics and trends, riding the demon-tigers of collective wishes. Our psychology, especially the psychology of propaganda, counts for more with politicians than our reason. The horror is that sooner or later all revolutions disgrace themselves, even as they leave some good behind. We put off the issue of slavery from the start; then after the Civil War was over we “settled” the older problem of Native Americans with genocidal violence. And since the progress of the 1950s and 60s, racism’s past crimes still wait to be settled. Native Americans still await justice. “We are innocent!” cries the future to the past; but if nothing is settled, a new compact is made with the past’s crimes.

Fidel Castro denied a free press and elections because they “would only help our enemies,” he said to Barbara Walters. Recently, private computers, copying machines, and word processors have been banned in Cuba. Every kind of regime, good or bad, protects its own existence. The fault is not in the changes we make; it is in us.

When this story was published, I received a postcard from Harlan Ellison, who along with Fritz Leiber had been my teacher at the very first Clarion Workshop in 1968. “I read ‘I Walked With Fidel,’ “ Ellison wrote, “and was grievously jealous. It is superlative. No other word, that’s the one you get: superlative!”

“General Jaruzelski at the Zoo” was described by the Locus reviewer, Amy Thomson, as “a powerful allegory about Poland’s relationship with Russia. Science Fiction abounds with shallow, opinionated political polemics. It’s refreshing to see well-rendered political sf, particularly in an American magazine.”

Today, I wonder if anyone in the West much recalls General Jaruzelski, the dictator of Poland just before the collapse of the fascist state capitalism that called itself the USSR and disgraced democratic ideals. 

There was a long time during which this story could not have been published in Poland. Long after its appearance in The Twilight Zone Magazine, it was translated and published in Poland’s magazine Nowa Fantastyka. 

The real plight of zoo animals described in this story was reported in the New York Times in the late 1980s. The newspaper report struck a satiric knife into my heart and this short story came to me all at once, right up to the last line. Historians will, of course, sort out the real General’s place in history, but the underlying horror of political humiliation expressed as the human-caused suffering of animals was an actual event. The Poles, in their critical way (the country has produced some great mathematicians and logicians), have set aside if not forgiven the General. What he thinks and believes in his retirement is mostly a matter for speculation. I am, however, particularly intrigued by the facts behind the General’s apologies of the early 1990s. He claimed that his dictatorship prevented a Soviet invasion of the country; but it appears now that the Soviets assured him that they would not invade, which left him free to consolidate his power under a pretext. Still, as 

W. Warren Wagar, the American historian, said, “Jaruzelski’s apologies are more than we can expect from Comrade Castro.”

Is there anything quite like political horror? “My First World” is an episode not included in my novel, Brute Orbits (John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel in 1999). Political incarceration is strange, since so often the inmates are guilty; they accept the “crime” but not the “punishment,” about which they have no choice. Here, there is literally a wall around the sky to prevent escape, and a better wall around time. Prisons are the horrors of human history’s use of technology; top-down political approval expressed as neglect, all too often gives the jailers “new permissions” to express themselves against the human body with the available means. In this story we see a prison horror redeemed. I had meant the novel, in part, as a Swiftian “modest proposal”— following the logic of the reductio-ad-absurdum form of refutation —but was horrified to learn that the history of prisons exceeds in outrage and implausibility anything that can be imagined. I should have known better, and read Charles Dickens more extensively. 

“First Love, First Fear” is, I see now, about the horror of reproductive systems. Ask many women. They forget. Grown men faint. What would another variety be like? I have concluded that no alien way would be any stranger than some of the strangenesses that we find among the many earthly species. I had turtles in mind for this story, but perhaps I should have chosen the praying mantis. (The name is sometimes misspelled as “preying,” although both seem appropriate, with one suggesting hypocrisy, the other an honest and practical, and horrific, purpose). 

“The Alternate” betrays something of the affection I have for shabby hotel rooms and roadside motels. They have character. They provide a shelter of anonymity. Slippages in time and through alternate realities would certainly horrify a person whether he knew what was happening or not, maybe more so if he knew the metaphysical subtleties involved. We are all somewhat aware of alternatives and might-have-beens. We might speculate that this awareness is, at some rich quantum level of our minds, evidence of alternate realities, probably unreachable except through imagining, of the multiverse richness of an ever-splitting universe. Stories on this theme long ago preceded the concepts of a sum over histories view entrance into physical theory. The idea of meeting your double is one such.

I take up the theme again in “Takes You Back,” which suggested to me that time is ours in specific ways: as a biological clock which runs until it stops; as foresight, in the form of foreboding and hope; as heroic action against the great blind power of nature. And yet, it has been suggested, there may be no such thing as time beyond our motion in space. We ourselves are time, such as it is, what we mean by time, against an absolute duration that is not time as we know it. Our very feelings are time, and we must be wary of how they throw us. Step outside your home and look up at the sky during the onset of seasonal change, especially on a starry night, and wonder who you are. “Takes You Back” suggests that it is dangerous to look back; worse to fall in love with the past. You may not be hurled back, but you’ll wind up stuck there anyway. The Locus reviewer called it “an ingenious and sensitive look at how an infinitesimal change might compromise love forever...” 

“Earth Around His Bones” is based on a suspicion that cannot be confirmed with any precision. Brain death is death—or do we linger? We strike the iceberg at the moment of birth, and sink through all our days, watching the damage worsen, and maybe for a while a little beyond... 

“Fire of Spring” came to me with all its colorful imagery sharp and clear, and seemed to have the weighty horrors of a cyclical history behind it.

“Hell Just Over the Hill” crept up on me during several bus rides, which would make quite a long collection of stories in itself. Horrific and fantastic explanations suggested themselves for every ordinary moment of the ride, as we all gazed into the night ahead of us, and I imagined that we had missed a bridge. 

“Interpose” grapples with the story of the crucifixion, with the central horror at the heart of Christianity—especially with the notion that it was all part of the plan for the redemption of humanity. Probably the most successful spin in all history—given the takeover of Rome by the Christians (from the mouths of lions to the throne of the Caesars!). Yet human life resembles more than anything “the way of the cross.” We are born, we suffer, and die. I recommend an old book, The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Reade (1872), which suggests why the story of Christ’s death moves even non-believers. 

“The Coming of Christ the Joker” deals with the ideals that have been read into Christ’s message of human reform, and so rarely practiced. We don’t know who he was or what he stood for (even the Gospels contradict his message of peace); he might have been someone else entirely. Of course, I don’t believe a word of it—except for the ideals, the same ones that have been disgraced in all revolutions, in all times; secular or religious, the reforms seem to make no difference.

“Jumper” is a story about how an impossible power would be wielded by the depths of the human mind—in an unexpected, unconscious way. My agent at the time, Joseph Elder, told me how much he liked the main character, and even suggested that she might have been rescued at the end, making the story a “crowd pleaser.”

“Passing Nights” was a nightmare I had in my early teens. I never forgot it. Earlier drafts made no sense to me. I was well into adulthood when it came out this way.

“The Wish in the Fear” reminds us that phobias are real horrors to real people in the real world. Yet the substance of the phobias are real only in the virtual realm of our minds. Same difference, many people would say. 

“The Soft Terrible Music” is a hybrid story, combining my interest in the “warm” valley of Antarctica, home architecture, and the crimes on which nearly all great fortunes are founded. One might say it’s a story about the foundations of a life, a house, a crime. 

“Black Pockets,” which I wrote especially for this collection, looks at a horror directly, personally, with more than a hint of metaphysics. In my novel, Stranger Suns, my character thinks of looking out across the dark light years “without flinching.” Can we also look inward with a steady gaze, and understand? When we fail to see, when we flinch, sentimentality takes over, and from there is but a small step to lying to ourselves. Sentimentality softens truth into legend, so we can accept it more easily. Nothing reveals human flaws as the uses we make of power. The story ends, appropriately, I think, inside an enigmatic cul-de-sac. 

“Black Pockets” asks whether, if this kind of power were available to human beings, would no one use it? We have used much worse. Raw reality dwarfs imagination, but imagination gives perspective. But a story, however brave, is still a form of cultural sentimentality, where we face what we could not tolerate in reality—except that we don’t completely face it. Hopefully, we focus it. 

What we have, we use. There is no horror in human history that we have ever refrained from visiting on each other. The horrors of stories are easily outdone by realities, but these imagined horrors are inevitably rooted in our common reality. What horrors we have in reality, we use in our stories, in our horror films; yet no film has ever truly shown what was done during the genocides of World War II. No one would go to see it.

The reader will notice that in “Black Pockets” and “A Piano Full of Dead Spiders” I again visit with two characters named Bruno and Felix, who also appear in stories elsewhere. These two shadowy protagonists, whose very character shifts while their names remain the same, who sometimes know each other and sometimes not, perhaps fill some unfound need in the writer; they stand disguised, or perhaps not. Who are these guys who dance so strangely around each other? They are perhaps exactly who they need to be in each story—and perhaps I only like the names. One of them might well be a funny uncle of mine, or his brother. Or two guys who were on their way to Menshevik Hall in a story I once read by my friend William Tenn, but they never got there and wandered instead into my mind, and stayed. And this is the only way I know how to evict them. They will continue to debut; and may never get out. 

The central horror of “Nappy” flowers from Napoleon’s finding out that he is not the real one. The puppeter of history is at first horrified at not being the “original,” but a copy, and still capable of suffering, more so from knowledge than from ignorance; but one advantage of being a virtual Napoleon is that he might still achieve a happier fate. 

What horrifies writers? Often it’s violence, especially violent sex, especially if you have to write it down. But more than anything it might be Pascal’s terror of endlessness, the infinities that he saw lurking at every window. It may be, for the writer, the fear of not finding the proper end to a story, one that is not gratuitous. The plausible end is the writer’s friend; but when you can’t find it, you step into an abyss. Not a friend, the abyss, it is the heart of all horror, all terror and fear. Infinity was, for Aristotle, irrational, because it was undefined; or, even more maddening, is that you could define it but never reach its end. A well-crafted story shuts down neatly. A great story concedes an irrational infinity around its sharp edges. And strangely, because infinity is open-ended, it is the source of all creativity. 

You need it. 

A story is a well polished piece of infinity with an illusory fence around it, and you wouldn’t want to get to the end of what exists outside that fence.

George Zebrowski 

Delmar, New York 

November 2004