Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2: May 2013 Read online
GALAXY ’ S EDGE MAGAZINE ISSUE 2: MAY 2013
Mike Resnick, Editor
Shahid Mahmud, Publisher
Published by Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick
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CONTENTS
THE EDITOR’S WORD by Mike Resnick
ALIENS ATE MY PICKUP by Mercedes Lackey
EFFECT AND CAUSE by Ken Liu
WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD by Robert Silverberg
FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT by Barry Malzberg
TODAY I AM NOBODY by Tina Gower
HAPPILY EVER AFTER by C. L. Moore
THE FLAMINGO GIRL by Brad R. Torgersen
REX by David Gerrold
GHOST IN THE MACHINE by Ralph Roberts
ECHEA by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
SPARKLER by Gio Clairval
CHILD OF THE GODS by Bruce McAllister
THE FEYNMAN SALTATION by Charles Sheffield
BOOK REVIEWS by Paul Cook
THE REAL FUTURE OF SPACE by Gregory Benford
PHOENIX PICK PRESENTS
SERIALIZATION: DARK UNIVERSE by Daniel F. Galouye
THE EDITOR’S WORD
by Mike Resnick
Welcome to the second issue of Galaxy’s Edge. Like the first, and all future issues, this one is a mixture of new stories and reprints, reviews and columns. The reprints are stories you may have missed by very-well-known authors, and the new stories are by authors who we expect to join the ranks of the well-known somewhere up the road.
And while I’m on the subject of well-known authors…
We have quite a coup this issue. The magnificent C. L. Moore has been one of my two or three favorite authors for the past half century, and I assure you I’m not alone in this regard. She broke into print in her early twenties, and her very first story, “Shambleau,” which appeared in a 1933 issue of Weird Tales, is an acknowledged classic.
Well, “Shambleau” was her first professional story, but it turns out that her very first published story was “Happily Ever After,” which appeared in the November 1930 issue of The Vagabond, a student magazine published by Indiana University. It’s quite short, but it shows that she had the right stuff even then. And with this issue, Galaxy’s Edge is thrilled to be able to present—for the first time in 83 years—C. L. Moore’s very first story. Thanks to Catherine for writing it, and to Andrew Liptak for unearthing it.
And why (I hear you ask) was she “C. L.” rather than “Catherine”? The general assumption is that she was hiding her gender in what was an almost all-male field. Logical, but wrong. She was hiding her name from her employer, a bank president who viewed the pulps with total loathing.
An interesting historical tidbit?
Yes, it is—and it’s just one of many.
So many people are so interested in the giants of our field—many, alas, no longer with us—that I thought I’d share some memories of them with you before they’re all forgotten by me and others.
***
The late Robert Sheckley was my good friend, and even my collaborator the year before his death.
Bob occasionally suffered from Writer’s Block, but he had an infallible way of beating it. He set himself an absolute minimum production of 5,000 words a day. If he couldn’t think of anything else, he told me, he’d write his name 2,500 times. And on those days he was blocked, he’d sit down and force himself to start typing. And to quote him: “By the time I’d typed ‘Robert Sheckley’ 800 or 900 times, a little subconscious editor would kick in and say ‘Fuck it, as long as you’re stuck here for another 3,300 words, you might as well write a story.’”
According to Bob, it never failed.
***
E. E. “Doc” Smith was the first pro I ever met at a con, back in 1963. Sweet man, very fond of fandom, very accessible to anyone. I always thought his greatest invention (other than the Lens and the Lensmen) was the seasonal Ploorians. Doc’s daughter, Verna Trestrail, became a good friend, and I used to see her every year at Midwestcon and Rivercon. She once remarked that she helped her dad from time to time. So I asked how, and she replied that, among other things, she had invented the Ploorians.
(Verna also created the planet where Clarissa had to function in the nude. She told me that Doc bought a gorgeous painting of it—and Mrs. Doc took one look at it and consigned it to the attic for the next 25 years.)
***
I met Robert A. Heinlein only a couple of times, at the 1976 and 1977 Worldcons, so I have no personal anecdotes to tell you about him—but Theodore Sturgeon had one. There was a point in the mid-1940s where Sturgeon was played out. He couldn’t come up with any saleable stories, his creditors were after him, and he was terminally depressed…and he mentioned it to Heinlein in a letter. A week later he got a letter from Heinlein with 26 story ideas and a $100 bill to tide him over until he started selling again. And, according to Sturgeon, before the decade was over he had written and sold all 26 stories.
***
I never met Fredric Brown. I know he grew up in Cincinnati, where I have lived the past 37 years, but no one here remembers meeting him. And I know he spent a lot of time working in Chicago, where I spent my first 33 years, and I never met anyone there who knew him either. But I do know he had a habit, especially when writing his mysteries (which far outnumbered his science fiction) of getting on a Greyhound bus and riding it for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles, until he had his plot worked out to the last detail. Then he’d come home, sit down, and quickly type the book he’d already written in his head while touring the countryside.
***
Phil Klass (who wrote as “William Tenn”) told this one on a panel I moderated at Noreascon IV, the 2004 Worldcon where he was the Guest of Honor.
He was dating a new girl, and he mentioned it to Ted Sturgeon when they were both living in New York. Sturgeon urged Phil to bring the girl to his apartment for dinner. He and his wife would lay out an impressive spread, and Ted would regale the girl with tales of how talented and important Phil was. Phil happily agreed.
What he didn’t know was that Ted and his then-wife were nudists. So Phil and the girl walk up to the door of Ted’s apartment, Phil knocks, the door opens, and there are Ted and his wife, totally naked. They greet them and start leading them to the dining room.
Phil’s girl turns to him and whispers: “You didn’t tell me we had to dr
ess for dinner!”
***
Speaking of dinners…
At our first Worldcon, Discon I in 1963—I was 21, my still-beautiful child-bride Carol was 20—Randall Garrett invited a bunch of new writers and their spouses out for dinner—his treat. Then, during dessert, he excused himself to say something of vital importance to his agent, who was walking past the restaurant. He left the table—and we never saw him again. The rest of us got stuck with the tab (it was an expensive restaurant, we were broke kids, and Randy himself had the most expensive dish and wine on the menu).
Move the clock ahead three years. Randy spots Carol and me at Tricon (the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland) and offers to buy us dinner. We say sure. During dessert Carol excuses herself to go powder her nose, and I remember a phone call I have to make. We meet and walk out, leaving Randy with the tab he had promised to pay (but, according to Bob Bloch, Bob Tucker, and others I’d spoken to before going out with him, had no intention of paying).
Move the clock ahead one more year, and we’re at NYcon III, the 1967 Worldcon in New York. On opening night Randy spots me across the room, turns red in the face, and yells: “Resnick, I’m never eating dinner with you again!”
I got an ovation from every pro and fan he’d ever stuck with a dinner check.
***
And let me end with one about a living giant, just to be different—my friend, Nebula Grand Master, Worldcon Guest of Honor, and contributor to this issue, Robert Silverberg.
When Bob started submitting to Astounding, John Campbell turned down his first few stories, and Bob’s sometime collaborator Randy Garrett (they wrote as “Robert Randall”) suggested that Campbell disliked Jewish names, so Bob submitted one under the name of “Calvin M. Knox,” and Campbell bought it.
Over the years he sold to Campbell as both “Knox” and Silverberg. Some years later John Campbell asked him why he’d used the Knox name. Bob gave him an honest answer. Campbell’s reply: “Did you ever hear of Isaac Asimov?”
Then, as the conversation was drawing to a close and Bob was about to leave, Campbell asked him why of all the pseudonyms in the world he chose Calvin M. Knox. Bob replied that it was the most Protestant-sounding name he could think of.
Finally, as he’s going out the door, Campbell asks him what the “M” stands for.
Bob’s answer: “Moses.”
***
How can you not love this field?
Mercedes Lackey, author of the wildly popular Valdemar universe, has written a seemingly endless series of bestsellers, and has also collaborated with Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
--------------
I don’t do humor very often. Funny scenes in books sometimes, but comedy is hard… But about the time I was asked to write a humorous story I heard a filk song called “Stray Dog Man” by Bill Sutton, and that gave me the idea. Now both of us start with the notion that an alien pet gets dumped (in my case, lost) and taken in by a very folksy type. And the “pooch” will eat about anything. But that is where our two stories part company; living as I do in rural Oklahoma I have powerful respect for the shrewdness of my neighbors. They like to fool outsiders, but—
Well, see for yourself.
ALIENS ATE MY PICKUP
by Mercedes Lackey
Yes’m, I’m serious. Aliens ate my pickup. Only it weren’t really aliens, jest one, even though it was my Chevy four-ton, and he was a little bitty feller, not like some Japanese giant thing…an’ he didn’t really eat it, he just kinda chewed it up a little, look, you can see the teeth-marks on the bumper here an’…
Oh, start at the beginnin’? Well, all right, I guess.
My name? It’s Jed, Jed Pryor. I was born an’ raised on this farm outsid’a Claremore, been here all my life. Well, ’cept for when I went t’OU.
What? Well, heck fire, sure I graduated!
What? Well, what makes you thank Okies tawk funny?
Degree? You bet I gotta degree! I gotta Batchler in Land Management right there on the wall of m’livingroom and—
Oh, the alien. Yeah, well, it was dark of the moon, middle of this June, when I was out doin’ some night-fishin’ on m’pond. Stocked it about five years ago with black an’ stripy bass, just let ’em be, started fishin’ it this year. I’m tellin’ you, I got a five pounder on m’third cast this spring an’—
Right, the alien. Well, I was out there drownin’ a coupla lures about midnight, makin’ the fish laugh, when wham! all of a sudden the sky lights up like Riverparks on Fourth of July. I mean t’tell you, I haven’t seen nothin’ like that in all my born days! I ’bout thought them scifi writers lives over on the next farm had gone an’ bought out one’a them fireworks factories in Tennessee again, like they did just before New Years. Boy howdy, that was a night! I swan, it looked like the sky over ol’ Baghdad, let me tell you! Good thing they warned us they was gonna set off some doozies, or—
Right, the night’a them aliens. Well, anyway, the sky lit up, but it was all over in less’n a minute, so I figgered it couldn’t be them writers. Now, we get us some weird stuff ev’ry now an’ again, y’know, what with MacDac—that’s MacDonald-Douglas t’you—bein’ right over the county line an’ all, well I just figgered they was testin’ somethin’ that I wasn’t supposed t’know about an’ I went back t’drownin’ worms.
What? Why didn’ I thank it was a UFO? Ma’am, what makes you thank Okies got hayseeds in their haids? I got a satylite dish on m’front lawn, I watch NASA channel an’ PBS an’ science shows all the time, an’ I got me a subscription t’Skeptical Inquirer, an’ I ain’t never seen nothin’ t’make me thank there was such a thang as UFOs. Nope, I purely don’t believe in ’em. Or I didn’t, anyway.
So, like I was sayin’ I went back t’murderin’ worms an’ makin’ the bass laugh, an’ finally got tired’a bein’ the main course fer the skeeters an’ chiggers an’ headed back home. I fell inta bed an’ didn’ thank nothin’ about it till I walked out next mornin’.
An’ dang if there ain’t a big ol’ mess in the middle’a my best hayfield! What? Oh heckfire, ma’am, it was one’a them crop circle things, like on the cover’a that Led Zeppelin record. Purely ruint m’hay. You cain’t let hay get flattened down like that, spoils it right quick ’round here if they’s been any dew, an’ it was plenty damp that mornin’.
How’d I feel? Ma’am, I was hot. I figgered it was them scifi writers, foolin’ with me; them city folk, they dunno you cain’t do that t’hay. But they didn’ have no cause t’fool with me like that, we bin pretty good neighbors so far, I even bought their books an’ liked ’em pretty much too, ’cept for the stuff ’bout the horses. Ev’body knows a white horse’s deaf as a post, like as not, less’n’ it’s one’a them Lippyzaners. Ain’t no horse gonna go read yer mind, or go ridin’ through fire an’ all like that an’—
Oh, yeah. Well, I got on th’ phone, gonna give ’em what for, an’ turns out they’re gone! One’a them scifi conventions. So it cain’t be them.
Well, shoot, now I dunno what t’thank. That’s when I heerd it, under th’ porch. Somethin’ whimperin’, like.
Now y’know what happens when you live out in the country. People dump their dang-blasted strays all th’ time, thankin’ some farmer’ll take care of ’em. Then like as not they hook up with one’a the dog packs an’ go wild an’ start runnin’ stock. Well, I guess I gotta soft heart t’match my soft haid, I take ’em in, most times. Get ’em fixed, let ’em run th’ rabbits outa my garden. Coyotes get ’em sooner or later, but I figger while they’re with me, they at least got t’eat and gotta place t’sleep. So I figgered it was ’nother dang stray, an’ I better get ’im out from under th’ porch ’fore he messes under there an’ it starts t’smell.
So I got down on m’hands an’ knees like a pure durn fool, an’ I whistled an’ coaxed, an’ carried on like some kinda dim bulb, an’ finally that stray come out. But ma’am, what come outa that porch weren’t no dog.
It was about the ugliest thing on six legs I ever seen in my life. Ma’am, that critter looked like somebody done beat out a fire on its face with a ugly stick. Looked like five miles ’a bad road. Like the reason first cousins hadn’t ought t’get married. Two liddle, squinchy eyes that wuz all pupil, nose like a burnt pancake, jaws like a bear-trap. Hide all mangy and patchy, part scales and part fur, an’ all of it putrid green. No ears that I could see. Six legs, like I said, an’ three tails, two of ’em whippy and ratty, an’ one sorta like a club. It drooled, an’ its nose ran. I’d a been afraid of it, ’cept it crawled outa there with its three tails ’tween its legs, whimperin’ an’ wheezin’ an’ lookin’ up at me like it was ’fraid I was gonna beat it. I figgered, hell, poor critter’s scarder of me than I am of it—an’ if it looks ugly t’me, reckon I must look just’s ugly right back.
So I petted it, an’ it rolled over on its back an’ stuck all six legs in th’air, an’ just acted about like any other pup. I went off t’the barn an’ got Thang—I ended up callin’ it Thang fer’s long as I had it—I got Thang a big ol’ bowl’a dog food, didn’ know what else t’give it. Well, he looked pretty pleased, an’ he ate it right up—but then he sicked it right back up too. I shoulda figgered, I guess, he bein’ from someplace else an’ all, but it was worth a try.
But ’fore I could try somethin’ else, he started off fer m’bushes. I figgered he was gonna use ’em fer the usual—
But heckfire if he didn’t munch down m’junipers, an’ then sick them up! Boy howdy, was that a mess! Look, you can see the place right there—
Yes’m, I know. I got th’ stuff tested later, after it was all over. Chemist said th’ closest thang he’d ever seen to’t was somethin’ he called Aquia Reqa or somethin’ like—kind’ve a mix a’ all kinda acids together, real nasty stuff, etches glass an’ everthang.