One day in 1914, over forty years before my birth, my great-grandfather Herman Smeds, an elderly man suffering from incurable cancer of the mouth, got tired of the pain. He took a rope, walked down to the river that bordered my grandparents’ farm in central California, and hung himself from one of the huge oak trees on the bank.
That’s typical of how suicide has touched my life. Remotely. I have known suicidal people — some of whom succeeded in their quests for death — but it has played no large part in my life, nor have I ever considered killing myself. I wanted to get that straight, given the tendency of some readers to speculate about the auctorial motives that lead to a story with suicide as a major theme.
The inspiration for this story was not personal. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation was still a recent book and I was one of the many people fascinated by the long-term potential of nanotechnology. “Suicidal Tendencies” was the first of three works written as set-pieces examining aspects of a fictional milieu I was developing for a novel, Light Years Apart. I never completed that novel and no longer plan to, in part because the stories — which also include “Reef Apes” and “A Marathon Runner in the Human Race” — reached a standard that I did not feel the novel would. The stories, I am happy to say, are complete in their own right. Each paints a picture of how humans and human society may change in response to nanotechnology. Each has its own theme. “Suicidal Tendencies” directs itself to suicide, “Reef Apes” looks at rape, and “Marathon Runner” deals with romance. I also wrote a fourth story, “Evaporation,” which you will find elsewhere in these pages. It is also set in a future where “nanodocs” have rendered people immortal and physically youthful, but “Evaporation” was never meant to fit within the continuity of the others and I don’t regard it as part of the set. For that matter, you should keep in mind that even the three don’t quite fit into the same imaginary future. For instance, in “Suicidal Tendencies,” memories are sometimes edited to cope with trauma. In the other two, memories are what they are, and a person must cope in full with the recollections of what they’ve experienced.
“Suicidal Tendencies” allowed me to work in black humor in a way I have not done at any other point in my career. The result seemed to please fans and reviewers. I keep telling myself I have to do something like this again. I’m not sure if that can be planned, though. The mother/daughter relationship that lies at the heart of the tale required me to approach the material in just this way. I couldn’t have done it differently and have remained true to the characters and their situation.
Welcome to a portrait of a generation gap.