Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (31 page)
‘Nope, nothing.’
There was a little disappointment there, he couldn’t help noticing as he pulled the drawer out and tipped its contents onto his bed, but he decided not to worry about that. It was like giving up smoking. There was bound to be some regret at first.
He began separating the pairs of socks, checking each one and then putting the two socks together again and dropping them back into the drawer. He’d replaced four or five pairs like this when he saw the solitary blue sphere lying there in the middle of his duvet.
He had the strange sensation that something or someone, miles away, was reaching towards him, seeking him out, trying to pull him towards them. And then, right in front of his eyes, but without any visible motion taking place, what had been one sphere became two.
Marcher
began as a group of six short stories: ‘Marcher,’ ‘Watching the Sea,’ ‘The Welfare Man,’ ‘The Welfare Man Retires,’ ‘Tammy Pendant’ and ‘To Become a Warrior’. They were among my most popular stories – the short story ‘Marcher’, for instance, won
Interzone
’s annual popularity poll – and one of them, ‘Tammy Pendant’, was also my most controversial.
Marcher
was first published in 2009 in the US, by Cosmos. The present edition is not simply a re-edited version of that book, however. It has been very substantially revised, with a completely different ending, a shift from 1st to 3rd person, and cuts and additions throughout the book. I regard the present version as the definitive one, and I am very grateful to Ian Whates for giving me this opportunity to have another crack at a book which I never felt I’d quite finished.
I would also like to thank David Pringle and Sheila Williams for publishing the original short stories, and Sean Wallace for publishing the book first time round. Neil Williamson, Roy Gray, Tony Ballantyne and Clive Seale looked at drafts of this book (either the first version, the second version, or, in Tony’s case, both) and I’m extremely grateful to them for their time and their advice. I would also like to thank Niall Harrison for his review of the earlier version in Strange Horizons. I found his balanced appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses particularly helpful when reworking the book in its present form.
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– ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
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E.J. SWIFT (author of Osiris and Cataveiro)
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– SAM THOMPSON (author of Communion Town)
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– JOANNA KAVENNA (author of The Birth of Love and Inglorious)
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The critically acclaimed second collection from one of Britain’s most assured short story writers and winner of the 2009 Edge Hill Prize.
“Beckett takes the parochial and makes it universal in this fine, intelligent collection, evidence of an undeservedly underrated talent.”
– Financial Times
“He is an audacious writer, not afraid of examining big issues, but always through the humanising lens of fully rounded characters… Unmissable.”
– The Guardian
“Chris Beckett has to be one of our finest SF writers. His stories are always beautifully constructed, but at their hearts there is always something unnerving… We recognize these stories as SF, but they challenge us, they make us think about them; they explore human dilemmas and taken together, they explore different kinds of storytelling, different human conditions, and different imaginary universes.”
– Strange Horizons
“It’s a fabulous book that kept me entertained throughout, a whole collection of strong stories that did not let me down.”
– SF Crowsnest
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