The shootings seem like ancient history now; but for the sake of our souls, we have to remember that history is about real people with real lives and real deaths. There's something disturbing about the air of unreality with which we often view the past—as if anything that happened more than a few days ago took place in some alien dimension that doesn't have much to do with who we are now. I'm certainly guilty of feeling that way, too…which is one reason I wrote a story about fading memories and trivializing other people's tragedies.
"Withered Gold, the Night, the Day": I'm normally a pretty cheerful guy…but when I saw the movie Se7en in 1995, this story just came blurting out over the next three days. A story in which the world is withered, thinned out, shriveled. Where Everyman is a despairingly unbalanced vampire who seeks moral guidance from the Devil in a bus shelter.
I should know better than to see certain types of movies. If I'd seen a movie about the Care Bears, heaven knows what I might have written.
"The Last Day of the War, with Parrots": A story from a woman's point of view. People ask why I use female narrators so much. My answer is (a) I don't use them any more often than I use male narrators, and (b) why shouldn't I use female narrators, provided I'm not a jerk about it? To be sure, men often do lousy jobs of portraying women—but I have to believe that's just sloppiness and inattention, not an inevitable fact of gender. I don't accept that the only type of character I can legitimately write about is someone very much like myself…because frankly, I'm bored with middle-aged middle-class white men, and there are far too many of those guys in science fiction already.
Therefore, I resolved long ago that whenever I wrote about the future, I would show it containing just as many women as men, not to mention people of diverse cultural backgrounds, old, young, straight, gay, rich, poor, and every other variation I could make fit within the story's logic. That's the sort of future world I wouldn't mind living to see.
One more thing about this story. It takes place in the League of Peoples universe, and readers who know about the League might be wondering how two groups of aliens could descend upon a planet and start waging war against each other. Isn't that against the fundamental law of the League? Yes, it is; and someday, at the proper time, I may tell the story of what really happened on Caproche.
"A Changeable Market in Slaves": Sometimes it takes a number of rewrites before I find a good tone of voice for a story. And sometimes the rewrites get out of hand…
"Reaper": In 1989, I attended the Clarion West Science Fiction workshop. Each student was required to write a story a week. This was my first story of the workshop, written longhand in the depths of Seattle.
I'd had the idea of Reapers for some time before, but had never made a serious attempt to write a story about them. At first I thought the central character was going to be a brash teenager like the Hooch character; but after a page or two, I realized it wasn't working. That's when I switched to the current despicable narrator…and the story practically wrote itself.
"Lesser Figures of the Greater Trumps": This is what one calls a prose poem…or at least what I call a prose poem, for lack of a better name. At the time I wrote it, I could be pretty confident most readers would be familiar with the Rider-Waite tarot deck. I don't know if that's true anymore. The world seems to have acquired a disdain for such things; and not for healthy reasons like sincere rationalism, but simply because disdain comes so easily. Pity.
"Shadow Album": In the 1980s, I did a lot of theater: writing, acting, directing, and improvising (which is writing, acting, and directing combined). Somehow in the middle of that, I got involved in a mask workshop—possibly because said workshop was taught by my wife, Linda Carson.
Masks are powerful things, which is why they feature prominently in shamanistic religious traditions. Donning a mask is often the first step to donning an alternate personality. Masks are therefore used in some types of theater training to help students learn to set aside their mundane selves and become something Other.
If this sounds hokey when you read it on the page, let me assure you it's very effective in practice. Masks can have a powerful psychological effect…if you let them. In some sense, you can "become" the mask: someone you'd never let yourself be otherwise. There are obvious risks in this process, which is why mask workshops should always be led by people who know what they're doing; but taking risks is one of the great exhilarations of acting, and when it works, you can be transformed.
In this particular workshop, we constructed our own masks. The mask I built, and the personality I discovered within that mask, are exactly like the character ToPu (pronounced "toa-poo") as described in "Shadow Album." The mask of poor sad ToPu still sits in my study as I type these words—the closest thing to a magical object I've ever made.
"Hardware Scenario G-49": Another Clarion West story. ("Shadow Album" was, too.) All I can say is that my grandfather ran a hardware store and I worked there for several summers. The rest followed naturally.
"The Reckoning of Gifts": Back when I was doing theater, I wrote a one-act play called "Gifts" that was performed by my old high school. Years later, when Lorna Toolis and Michael Skeet asked me to submit a story for Tesseracts 4, I resurrected the idea from the play and this is what I got.
I should point out the story is substantially different from the play. For example, the play had none of the Vasudheva/Bhismu subplot. There are subjects that high schools prefer to avoid…
One last thing about "The Reckoning of Gifts"—the story is science fiction. Science fiction. Just because the tale is dressed in fantasy clothing, just because the characters talk about gods and demons and dreams, don't automatically believe them. Science-fiction readers should know better.
"The Young Person's Guide to the Organism": The title comes from Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra or Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell. This is a musical work written in 1945, designed to introduce children to the various instruments in a symphony orchestra.
Structurally, the piece starts with the entire orchestra playing a simple tune composed by Henry Purcell in the 1600s. Then each different instrument plays a variation on the tune, demonstrating the sound of the instrument, the range, something about playing technique, and so on. When Britten has finished taking apart the entire orchestra, he puts it back together again in a fugue that has all the instruments taking the melody line in the order they were first presented. Finally, while the fugue continues in the background, the brass section soars in with the original Purcell tune playing over top of the rest of the orchestra (which is still belting out the fugue).
If that sounds complicated when described in words, it's quite straightforward when you hear the music. You can probably find a recording of the piece at your local library—check it out and listen for yourself. Most recordings have narrators who explain what's going on throughout the music, so you won't have any trouble following the structure.
I followed the same structure in writing "The Young Person's Guide to the Organism." In my case, the initial "theme" was one of science fiction's classics: First Contact. The story consists of a number of individual "voices" describing their moment of contact with an enigmatic alien organism that drifts slowly through the solar system. Each of these individuals imposes his or her own interpretation on what the organism is—the organism serves as a blank slate on which personal concerns are projected. At the end of the story, in the fugue section, the individuals are brought together again for a climax, and then the original theme of First Contact comes back for the grand finale.