A Thousand Deaths

George Alec Effinger

 

In memory of

George Alec Effinger
 

1947-2002

 

 

 

Editor's Notes and Acknowledgments

 

 

The idea for a collection of Sandor Courane stories was originally conceived more than a handful of years ago by Mike Resnick, along with indie publisher Gordie Meyer. Gordie then floated the idea past George Alec Effinger, and he wholeheartedly approved.

Unfortunately, the exigencies of everyday life tend to interfere with the best laid plans, and, four years later, A
Thousand Deaths
had yet to be published. (Gordie later informed me that both he and George came up with the book title independently of one another—"cue
Twilight Zone
theme..." Gordie had written in his email.) In mid-December 2002, while doing some web searching, I came upon Gordie Meyer's Wunzenzierohs Publishing Company web site. The home page contained a statement that the planned George Alec Effinger collection, A
Thousand Deaths,
was currently in limbo due to George's passing. I immediately contacted Gordie regarding the collection. At the time, I had just delivered
Budayeen Nights
, my first George Alec Effinger short fiction collection, to Golden Gryphon Press publisher Gary Turner, and I was working on plans for a second Effinger collection, which became
George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth.
I felt that a collection of Sandor Courane stories would fit perfectly with my future editing plans, and continue to fulfill my earlier promise to George to help bring his fiction back into print. That is, if Gordie was willing to relinquish responsibility for the book, which he did, most graciously.So that's a very condensed version of how A
Thousand Deaths
came to be. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Gordie Meyer—and Barbara Hambly, executrix for the Effinger estate—for allowing me, and Golden Gryphon Press, to publish a collection of Sandor Courane stories.

 

In exercising my editorial prerogative, this "collection" has turned out a bit different from how it was originally conceived. Though George's first novel of the Budayeen,
When Gravity Fails
, may be his most popular and well-known work, the Sandor Courane novel
The Wolves of Memory
was always his personal favorite and, he felt, quite possibly his best work. So from the very beginning I intended to include
Wolves
as the major focus of this third volume, with the short stories as an added bonus.

Sandor Courane is, of course, one of George Alec Effinger's many alter egos—a somewhat autobiographical character. Yet, contrary to the title A
Thousand Deaths,
there are only a dozen or so Sandor Courane short stories, and of these, Courane only dies, or faces death, in probably half of them. It is these stories that are included herein. Of those stories not included in this volume, three in particular deserve special recognition: "The Pinch Hitters," the story of five writers who, while attending a science fiction convention, find themselves transported into the bodies of major league baseball players (George was a diehard fan of the Cleveland Indians; and in addition to himself, as Sandor Courane, of course, the other four "characters" are based on the real-life SF writers Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, Jay Haldeman, and Joe Haldeman); and "Strange Ragged Saintliness," a story narrated by Courane, in which he tells of the trials and tribulations of his childhood friend and roommate, Robert W. Hanson (another recurring Effinger character), who tried to help "plugging"-addicted street people kick their habit before it killed them (given George's own history of drug addiction brought on by chronic pain, this story is indeed very personal). A third story, "The City on the Sand," greatly expanded from its original appearance in the
Magazine of Fantasy
d
¹
Science Fiction,
is included in the earlier
Budayeen Nights
collection. Here Courane, though a minor character, is a successful poet and cafe owner who joins the desert city's new regime as a colonel, essentially responsible for propaganda—and serves as a thorn in the craw of the story's protagonist, an alcoholic and failed poet, envious of Courane's popularity and success.

 

Lastly, I would like to acknowledge those who helped me track down copies of all of the uncollected Sandor Courane stories: Richard Bleiler, Paul Di Filippo, Curt Phillips, and George Zebrowski. Thank you all once again.

—Marty Halpern

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

There is a wonderful exchange in one of my
favorite films,
They Might Be Giants,
between George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and a Mr. Bagg, whom Scott has just met:

 

MR. BAGG: I thought you were dead.

"HOLMES": The Falls at Reichenbach. I know. I came back in the sequel.

 

We used to talk about character actors coming back in the sequels—they'd die in one B movie and there they'd be, back again, two months later—but the above scene was the first time anyone ever actually gave voice to the notion for public consumption.

And then came Sandor Courane.

Actually, the title of this book—A
Thousand Deaths—
is a wild exaggeration. I doubt that Courane has died much more than eight or nine times. Surely less than a dozen.

But they weren't phony deaths. When I was a kid and we had the first television set on our block, back in the late 1940s, my friends and I used to gather around the tube after school and watch the endless Tom Mix serials. At the end of one episode we'd see him and Tony (his horse, for the uninitiated) fall over the side of a mountain and plunge to their deaths, or get run over by a train. Then we'd wait breathlessly for a few days until the next episode, which always started a minute before the last one ended, and we would see that our eyes had betrayed us, that we only
thought
we'd seen Tom and Tony fall to their doom, that Tom had somehow dived to safety in the last nanosecond.

There's none of that sleight of hand for Sandor Courane, no sir. When he dies, he
dies,
and there's no two ways about it. He stops functioning. He stops breathing. He enters what you might call a long-term open-ended state of non-life.

But he still comes back in the sequel.

Most people don't have any trouble coping with reality. Every now and then you get someone like Philip K. Dick, who questions it just about every time out of the box. But no one ever played as many tongue-in-cheek games with it as George Alec Effinger, the sly wit who took such pleasure in constantly killing Courane and bringing him back.

Take, for example,
The Wolves of Memory
and "Fatal Disk Error." In the former, TECT runs the universe and eventually kills Courane. But in the sequel, "Fatal Disk Error," Courane kills TECT, and then we find out that it was really George Alec Effinger who created (and destroyed) them both. And since George was never content merely to put in one or two unique twists when he could come up with more, we also learn that the story was rejected by an editor who was a little too based in reality, so George resurrects TECT just to kill it again.

Or consider "In the Wings." Doubtless at one time or another you've seen or read Luigi Pirandello's classic play,
Six Characters in Search of an Author.
This story might just as easily be titled: "Effinger's Stock Characters in Search of a Plot." The entire story takes place in the wings (or perhaps the locker room) of Effinger's mind, where Courane and other regular Effinger characters are waiting impatiently for George's oversexed muse to get him to write Chapter 1 so they can go to work. And, of course, Courane is killed again. At least once. (Not to worry. It is impossible to let the cat out of the bag when discussing an Effinger story. If you like the image of cats, it's a hell of a lot more like herding them. Trust me on this.)

Okay (I hear you say), now I know what a Sandor Courane story is: things happen and he dies.

Okay, I answer. Go read "The Wicked Old Witch" and then tell me what a Sandor Courane story is about. This one may be one of the least likely love stories you'll ever read. (Or it may not be a love story at all. George was like that.)There's one here that I commissioned some years ago, when Disney's
Aladdin
movie was coming out and I edited an anthology of stories about genies and magic teapots and the like, and I invited George to write a story for it. What I got was "Mango Red Goes to War." It's a Courane story, of course, or it wouldn't be here—but it's a lot more than that. For one thing, it's George explaining to me exactly how he's constructing the story, not by phone or e-mail but as part of the story itself. And with all the three-wish stories that filled the book, George's was the most original. (George was like that, too.)

Poor Courane has reality yanked from under him yet again in "From the Desk of," in which he's a science fiction writer. (George loved to write about science fiction writers. Nothing ever went smoothly for them.) He's a science fiction editor in "The Thing from the Slush," a story I am convinced George wrote after reading one too many Adam-and-Eve endings in some magazine's slush pile.

I won't tell you a thing about "Posterity," except that it ends with a question no one else had ever thought of asking, but a legitimate, even an important, question nonetheless, one that most writers I know would have a difficult time answering. (George could be so amusing that sometimes people didn't recognize the fact that he asked important questions. Lots of'em.)

In the course of his career, which ended all too soon with his death in 2002, George created three ongoing characters.

Marîd Audran was the star of the Budayeen books and stories—
When Gravity Fails,
A
Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss,
and
Budayeen Nights—
and that is clearly the most important work he ever did.

Maureen Birnbaum was the ongoing star in a new genre of humor that George created, which I call Preppie Science Fiction. She was the funniest of all his creations.

His third character, of course, was Sandor Courane. Not as important as Marîd, not as funny as Maureen Birnbaum. But I'll tell you something: the Courane stories are far and away the most creative, the most off-the-wall stories that George or just about anyone else ever put to paper.

Enough introduction. Sit down and read them, and I'll bet Courane's life you agree with me. (After all, what have I—or he—got to lose?)

 

Mike Resnick
 

Cincinnati, Ohio
 

May 2006

 

 

 

The Wolves of Memory

 

 

The vilest deeds like poison weeds

Bloom well in prison-air:

It is only what is good in Man

That wastes and withers there...

— Oscar Wilde,
 

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

 

"I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road.

"Then what am I to die for?" the old man asked.

Jesus took a small notebook from his pocket and copied the question. "If I may have your name and address," he said, "an answer will be sent to you."

— A. J. Langguth,
Jesus Christs

 

 

 

 

One

 

 

When his arms began to get weary, Courane
put the corpse down on the sandy soil, sat with his back against a rough warm boulder, and tried to remember. He closed his eyes for a long time, listening to the faint whisper of the wind blowing the topmost layer of sand toward the western horizon. Courane's breathing was slow and easy, and he was as comfortable as a napping baby. He breathed deeply, enjoying the hot freshness of the afternoon. A buzzing insect disturbed him, lighting on his ear, and he made a rather indolent swipe to chase it away. He opened his eyes again and saw the young woman's body.