By the time I broke into professional fiction writing in early 1979, I was already a black belt in goju-ryu karate-do. Yet in all the years between then and the creation of this story in 1993 for Roger Zelazny’s Warriors of Blood and Dream anthology of martial arts science fiction and fantasy, the only karate story I’d produced was “New Breed.” People who knew of my martial arts credentials would ask why I hadn’t done more.
It’s simple. I create works of imaginary pasts and futures. Things beyond my experience. Often, in fact, beyond the very possibility of my experience. Money and readership aside, the act of creating a piece of fiction is the way it expands my universe just a little more, makes me more complete. Novels and stories bring to me aspects of existence that I would never otherwise sample.
Karate, however, is with me three or more times a week, fifty-two weeks a year. My parents have long since thrown out the television set on which I used to watch David Carradine walk through walls on “Kung Fu” and Bruce Lee shape himself into a legend on “Green Hornet” and “Longstreet” (the movies came later). Back then I could believe the myth that ninety-pound weaklings could master enough secret arts in a few weeks to wipe the floor with the hirsute, muscular bullies who had been persecuting them. Though I wasn’t exactly a weakling (I was, in fact, on the way to becoming not only hirsute and muscular, but a good deal more than ninety pounds), I had been a victim of bullying. In my imagination, I was the protagonist of no small number of martial-arts power fantasies.
But by the time I was writing professionally, karate was part of my real world. I had come to know the potential of a punch. I had sweated through bouts with opponents who were bigger, stronger, faster, more confident. I had passed the point where I could “make stuff up.” I had to be true to what I knew. My expertise paradoxically had made it harder for me to write a karate story.
So it was with some trepidation that I set about composing the piece for Zelazny (who, alas, died the very month the book came out). But in the end, the process was sweet. As I sifted through the maze of accumulated experience, out came the ambience of the dojo, the richness of the lessons I’d received from my instructors, Don Buck and Gosei Yamaguchi of Goju-Kai Karate-Do U.S.A. A lot of me went into this one — perhaps more than I was comfortable with at first, but looking back now, “Fearless” has become one of my favorites of all my stories.