A Separate War and Other Stories (35 page)

We were all kind of fascinated by her bubbly enthusiasm—I mean, half the people I know are science-fiction writers, so they're no big deal—and delighted when she subsequently sent a bunch of us a stack of her CDs, with the suggestion (Mike Resnick's idea) that we write stories based on the lyrics, for a book eventually called
Stars
. Her “Here in the City” suggested to me a dark vision of urban apocalypse, which I placed below and within my beloved second home, Boston.

 

“Civil Disobedience” is another urban apocalypse, this time set in the Washington area, where I lived from grade school through high-school graduation, and later for five years of college. Ernest Lilley was putting together an anthology of future Washington stories and, knowing I'd grown up there, asked me for one. I said sure, and more or less forgot about it. The deadline just came due as I was starting to write these story notes, so I tabled them and wrote it.

I'm not alone in being angry at and scandalized by the current administration, so a story set in Washington had to be political. The immediate impetus of it was the establishment's blithe dismissal of warnings from mainstream British scientists that catastrophic flooding from global warming could be only a few years away. I suppose they think they will be saved by the Rapture, or their fortunes.

 

Now we come to two stories that were written to “illustrate” paintings. I was waxing nostalgic for the days when a science-fiction magazine editor would send you a photocopy of a painting that would be on the cover someday, and have you write a story around it. I once won a Hugo for one of those, “Tricentennial,” in the July '76
Analog
. Gordon Van Gelder, editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, heard my plea, bought a painting he liked, and sent a copy to me. The artist Max Bertolini gave me permission to publish a link to a copy of it: http://home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/FSF_art.jpeg.

It's a good painting, and suggests any number of stories. Two scientific problems presented themselves immediately: the air has a green cast, and the shadows indicate that there are two suns. So only a certain set of orbits would work, and I had to postulate some aliens who could breathe chlorine, or at least tolerate it in a concentration where it was visible. (A human can't, nor can any living organism I know of; it was an effective weapon in World War I because it would sink down into trenches and bunkers and poison people in fairly low concentrations.)

So I juryrigged a planet and some aliens who could live there, and who might construct the huge stone artifacts in the cover illustration—for those of you who don't have a computer at your elbow, it's two space-suited people looking up at three identical large alien faces carved out of rock, with a tanklike vehicle behind them.

“Memento Mori” was an interesting challenge from Dave Gross, who had just taken over the editorship of the venerable
Amazing
magazine. Among the new things he wanted to do was a feature called “A Thousand Words,” where an author would be given a picture and asked to write a thousand-word story—not 999 words or 1001, but exactly a thousand. It seemed difficult but not impossible. I do a lot of formal poetry with more or less arbitrary restrictions, and in fact I'd done exactly-100-word stories (called drabbles) twice for a British charity.

Dave sent me four paintings, and I chose the one by David Rankin, who kindly allowed me to post a scanning of it at http://home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/Mmori.jpeg.

 

“Brochure” and “Heartwired” were both written as short diversions for a series in the science journal
Nature
. All the editor required was that they be amusing, short, and contain some actual science. The first, “Brochure,” was part of a millennium project. The series was well enough received that they did a repeat.

It's kind of humbling to have a story in a magazine most of whose contents you have no chance of understanding.

 

“Out of Phase” is the first science-fiction story I sold, back in 1969, and “Power Complex” was its 1970 sequel. They didn't appear in earlier collections of my short stories because I intended for them to be the first two chapters of a novel.

I kept them in the back of my mind for a while, but after thirty-some years the back of my mind got pretty far back. I looked at them while putting together the stories for this volume and realized with a shock that I can't use them for that novel anymore, because their main character is too similar to the Changeling in my 2004 novel
Camouflage
. I had unconsciously plagiarized myself!

There's a lesson for beginning writers in the history of “Out of Phase.” It's the first story I wrote in a fiction-writing course I took, my last semester in college. (I got an A. The other SF story I wrote for the class became an episode in the
Twilight Zone
series.)

Right after that semester I graduated and was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Like most other draftees who went there, I spent one year in combat and then came back to a month's leave—so-called “compassionate” leave, which I think means that your family, rather than the army, gets to deal with your problems.

One thing I did that month was type up those two stories and send them out to the science-fiction magazines. I was rejected by both
Analog
and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, but when Frederik Pohl at
Galaxy
saw “Out of Phase,” he sent me a little note saying that if I could boil the first four pages down to one, he'd look at it again.

In fact, I boiled those pages down to the one word, “Trapped.” I sent it back, and knew from magazines about writing that I should include a cover letter with a bare minimum of information. It went like this: “Dear Mr. Pohl: Here is the story with the changes you requested.”

It turned out, though, that Mr. Pohl had quit as editor of
Galaxy
, and his last-minute replacement was a man who hadn't seen a science-fiction magazine in twenty years. He didn't know Haldeman from Heinlein, so when my story came in with that cover letter, he probably bought it without even reading it.

The lesson to the beginning writer is clear. Just keep track of magazines' hiring and firing in journals like
Locus
and
Publishers Weekly
. When somebody leaves a magazine, shoot his or her successor a story with a cover letter addressed to the recently departed. “Here is the story with the changes you requested” could start you on a career that could result, thirty-five years later, in a confession like this.

 

I started writing just a little too late to get into Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthologies
Dangerous Visions
and
Again, Dangerous Visions.
“Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip,” written in 1972, was going to be in
The Last Dangerous Visions
, and make my name a household word. I could have been the Father of Cyberpunk, seven years before William Gibson's “Johnny Mnemonic.” Or maybe not.

At any rate, the last of the dangerous anthologies never saw print. I lost this story for ages, since it was written before computers made it easy to keep track of things. Then the University of South Florida offered to collect my papers, which sent me rummaging through dusty old boxes.

In one of the boxes I found a carbon—that's what we used when “Xerox” was the name of a villain in Buck Rogers—of the story, and I still like it, though perhaps it's more quaint now than dangerous.

Joe Haldeman
Gainesville, Florida, 2005