Future on Fire Read online

  The result is that the science fiction short story almost always comes in at novelette length. A tale that minimalists could tell in two thousand words or realists in four thousand will use up seven, ten, or twelve thousand words when developed as science fiction. This is not filler, not extra verbiage. It simply takes longer to help readers orient themselves in a strange place.

  Thus the science fiction short story of less than 7,500 words is a very difficult length, which requires either excellence or carelessness on the part of the writer: excellence to write with such extraordinary economy that a good science fiction story can be told so briefly; carelessness to invent such a shallow milieu or to explain a good milieu so feebly that the story, good or bad, is barely told at all.

  Novelette length—7,500–17,500 words—is the optimum length for short science fiction. Anything longer and the work usually ceases to function as short fiction at all—it becomes novelistic, and must be received in a different way by the reader. Anything shorter, and it becomes very difficult to make it good as science fiction, even if it remains good as something else.

  At novelette length, a writer can experiment. There’s enough space to do something really fine; yet it doesn’t take as much time and paper as a novel. There’s not as much lost when a novelette fails as when a novel fails. Perhaps more important, it’s hard to do something new—you’re feeling your way through, exploring, discovering, building as you go. But it’s not quite as hard at novelette length. A novelette can be grasped whole; it’s easier to see it clearly, to understand what you’re actually doing as you experiment and explore.

  Also, short science fiction is extremely important to the field because most new writers first reach print in the magazines and anthologies. There’s a circular reason for this. Because short fiction pays so badly and novels often pay much better, there is financial pressure for a short-fiction writer to attempt something longer. The result is often quite bad—the first novels of many fine short-story writers are pretentious, and rather embarrassing in retrospect. I am far from being the only writer to be glad that his first novel is no longer in print—and I know several others who should say a requiem for their first novels.

  Eventually, though, most writers make the transition to longer works, and many—myself included—discover that it’s very hard to go back again. The novel length gives the writer so much elbow room that it’s hard to get back into short-fiction mode, with its much less sprawling exposition and fewer, more tightly-packed scenes. There’s also little incentive to go back to shorter work unless you’re consciously experimenting or have one of those rare ideas whose natural expression is at novelette length.

  So magazine and anthology editors must discover new writers, bring them along, and then lose them to the book editors, so they have to go back and discover new writers all over again. The book editors, in the meantime, can do as book editors do in every other field—try to buy work that is already certifiably safe. After magazine appearances have made a new writer seem safe and familiar—or even acceptably revolutionary—it doesn’t take much courage to buy their first book, especially for a couple or three thousand bucks. But short-fiction editors live on the edge all the time, trying to discern the difference between unpublishable incompetence and quirky, unusual new voices.

  The good short-fiction editors can see the difference, at least often enough to stay in business. And it’s in those quirky new voices that science fiction finds its elixir of life. For this is a field that absolutely requires strangeness, and while rigorous science fiction writers will continue inventing new milieus, what they can’t keep inventing is new selves. Even as their stories (and novels) take place in new settings—sometimes with new characters—the readers begin to find the more subtle, inescapable patterns and familiarities in every writer’s oeuvre. Even those writers who try to keep reinventing their very selves can only succeed to a superficial degree—fundamental verities remain in the unconscious, showing up in ways that the writer can’t recognize because he can’t conceive of a story being written any other way.

  As a result, it takes infusions of new blood to keep the field growing and changing—to keep it perpetually strange. In ways they are not even aware of, new writers bring new vision. Ironically, few new writers have the experience and craft to clothe that new vision in truly fine fiction; and by the time they have the skill to do it, their vision usually doesn’t seem all that new anymore. Only a few writers master their craft early enough in their careers to both surprise and satisfy the audience; even fewer are then able to maintain the same high level of intelligence and artistry throughout their career. Even some of the great ones stumble. They were at the forefront in the forties or fifties or sixties. Yet they are not among the best writers of today.

  Who are the writers of the 1980s? Some of the grand old names in the field were still alive in this decade, still producing strong work—but most of these had settled comfortably into rigor vivis, doing nothing to refresh and invigorate the field. They may have excellent works copyrighted within the decade—but they grew out of the sensibility of another time. They were not stories of the eighties.

  Some fine writers either never wrote short fiction at all or don’t write important short fiction anymore. They may be contributing, but not at lengths that can be anthologized.

  And many new writers have come along whose work is so empty or derivative or clumsy or simply young that they have little impact on readers or other writers. They are not helping to reinvent science fiction, not yet anyway; their presence has not helped us think new thoughts because they’re still busy learning the craft or rewriting the stories they admired from the decades before. Some of them will certainly become important and transformative, but their time is not yet here.

  The writers of the 1980s are those who changed us all, often quite against our will. Some have become famous in the process—some of them even a little bit rich—but that’s not the measure I’m using. Some of the best and most important remain fairly obscure, for the time being, but their stories live on in the memories of those lucky enough to have read them. Our world is transformed because they took their place by the communal fire and spun their yarns for whatever audience would listen.

  Anyway, you can’t judge a storyteller by the size of his audience. Many writers have small audiences because they’re no good—but others have few readers because their vision is so strange and challenging that few readers have the wit or will to read their work. Some writers have large audiences because their stories please people who want to be tickled or touched, but never challenged; their audiences come away flattered but unfilled. Other writers have large audiences because their work is so powerful, so truthful, and so clearly presented that many people come to have their memories, their very selves, remade by a master. The size of a writer’s audience tells you something about the audience. It tells you nothing about the writer.

  Future on Fire is the first volume of a series that will collect, not all the “best” stories of the 1980s, but rather representative stories from all who are, in my judgment, the major short-fiction writers of the eighties. But that is not my only standard. The story also has to be one that I found moving, exciting, believable, clear. In other words, good. As any survivor of a college literature course knows quite well, there are many “major” works that are as fun to read as sociological reports on statistical surveys. These works are forced on college students the way cod liver oil used to be forced on helpless children. To my mind, fiction that tastes like medicine is no damn good. If it isn’t a wonderful story first, who cares how “important” it is?

  So in this book you will read stories by important writers, yes—but you don’t have to care diddly-squat about their importance. You can read them for the power and joy of living in the worlds these writers have created. You can inhale the memories they have prepared for you, and let all their philosophical, scientific, and stylistic innovation glide right past.

  By the time you’re
through, you’ll know you were in the hands of masters, and in many cases you’ll be a bit angry that you’ve never heard of this or that writer before. Where was this guy all my life? This is what I’ve always wished science fiction could be, without knowing that I was wishing for it. These storytellers matter, not because they fit some preconceived literary theory, but rather because when you’re through reading their stories, you have been changed. These stories matter because they matter to you.

  How do I know? I don’t. All I know, all I can possibly know, is that they matter to me. In many cases, of course, there are other critics who agree with me. In other cases, though, I’m quite aware that I’m a voice crying in the wilderness. Nevertheless, I don’t put these stories forward as a personal list—my favorite stories of the eighties. That would be one kind of anthology, but it would not be this one. Heck, I hated some of these stories. But I hated them for all the right reasons. They made me angry. They made me think. They made me feel. They made me remember. They changed me. And I dare to believe that they’ll change you, too.

  Who am I to decide? How dare I say which writers are “major” and, by implication, relegate all others to secondary status? I dare it because it must be dared—by someone, at least—if only so that wiser minds can argue with my choices and, by arguing, clarify my vision. I also dare it because few other critics in this field have read as much of the short science fiction of the eighties as I have. A few best-of-the-year editors—Gardner Dozois, Art Saha, Terry Carr before he died. I don’t pretend that I’ve read all the short fiction of the 1980s—but in many of the years of this decade I have read virtually everything published, and in the process I’ve become or remained familiar with the writers who were inventing and transforming our genre. As a critic, I’ve put my judgments on the line by publishing them, both in Richard E. Geis’s Science Fiction Review and, later, my own occasional magazine Short Form. I’ve also kept up with what others were saying about them.

  Some of these writers are friends of mine, but they became my friends only after I had come to admire and delight in their fiction. Most of these writers are barely acquaintances of mine; some are quite openly hostile to the kind of fiction I write and the kind of fiction I urge others to write. Some were even reluctant to let their stories be used in this anthology because we have locked horns before, on matters we both regard as important. In other words, this series is not an anthology of Uncle Orson’s best buddies. This series is my honest summing-up of the decade’s most important writers—whether or not I personally liked the authors or what they stand for.

  It is possible that when the series is complete I will have left out one of your favorites; it is likely that I’ll have included writers you never heard of. What is impossible is for you to read these volumes and remain unchanged, unmoved, uninterested. These writers have returned from the flames of the futures that live in their imaginations—come near the fire now and singe yourself.

  —Orson Scott Card, January 1989

  Rachel in Love

  by Pat Murphy

  Introduction

  Most writers are pretty ordinary-looking people, not worth describing. When we look unusual it’s usually on the side of gawkiness or geekishness, for ours is a profession that doesn’t require us to make a strong personal impression; rather it requires us to hole up for days and weeks on end with no one but a forgiving family and a typewriter or computer for company.

  But some writers do choose to present themselves with a degree of flamboyance. Some festoon themselves like cockatoos; others collect an audience by being loud, outrageous, or otherwise entertaining. Still others use their costume to declare allegiance—or at least association—with a group or movement that rejects ordinary, conventional dress.

  Pat Murphy presents herself with hair cropped punkishly short, with a slender rat-tail slithering down her back. An air of cocky confidence, almost a swagger as she walks. Somehow you know at once that she’ll never write a sentence like: “With heaving bosom and quavering voice she said. ‘Long have I waited for you to speak of your feelings, my beloved Malcolm, so I could utter mine.’”

  But her writing is passionate, and not with the angry posing we have learned to associate with the punk look. Her work is touched with neither nihilism nor rejection of society; far from being universally angry, she writes with a tough kind of compassion. The star of her stories is never herself, never the strutting writer demanding that we notice how clever and socially aware she is. Her focus is absolutely on a character in pain—in pain, but not ready to surrender.

  Indeed, in one sense her fiction often follows in one of the strongest traditions in science fiction—the hero who relies on his own brains and guts to get out of his predicament. But many of these traditional “competent man” heroes are so smug you want to grab them and strangle them while shouting, “Look, Bozo, I could look just as smart as you if I had a writer making the rest of the world fit in with my plans!” Murphy’s heroes arouse, not my resentment, but my sympathy, my admiration.

  “Rachel in Love,” though, is something extraordinary, even for a writer of such obvious talent. It won the Nebula for best novelette of 1987, but that doesn’t begin to suggest what this story achieves. What “Nightfall” has been to Isaac Asimov, what “The Star” has been to Arthur C. Clark—that is what “Rachel in Love” will surely be to Pat Murphy. I suspect she’ll come to curse this story in the future, as readers say to her over and over again, “Why don’t you ever write anything like ‘Rachel’ anymore?” But she will never really regret having written it, just as you will never regret reading it. Once you have lived through this experience of losing everything and everyone you love, losing even your own body, becoming an alien creature in your own land, and yet finding new love and new hope, it will remain part of you forever.

  It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee named Rachel sits on the living room floor of a remote ranch house on the edge of the Painted Desert. She is watching a Tarzan movie on television. Her hairy arms are wrapped around her knees and she rocks back and forth with suppressed excitement. She knows that her father would say that she’s too old for such childish amusements—but since Aaron is still sleeping, he can’t chastise her.

  On the television, Tarzan has been trapped in a bamboo cage by a band of wicked Pygmies. Rachel is afraid that he won’t escape in time to save Jane from the ivory smugglers who hold her captive. The movie cuts to Jane, who is tied up in the back of a jeep, and Rachel whimpers softly to herself. She knows better than to howl: she peeked into her father’s bedroom earlier, and he was still in bed. Aaron doesn’t like her to howl when he is sleeping.

  When the movie breaks for a commercial, Rachel goes to her father’s room. She is ready for breakfast and she wants him to get up. She tiptoes to the bed to see if he is awake.

  His eyes are open and he is staring at nothing. His face is pale and his lips are a purplish color. Dr. Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, is not asleep. He is dead, having died in the night of a heart attack.

  When Rachel shakes him, his head rocks back and forth in time with her shaking, but his eyes do not blink and he does not breathe. She places his hand on her head, nudging him so that he will waken and stroke her. He does not move. When she leans toward him, his hand falls limply to dangle over the edge of the bed.

  In the breeze from the open bedroom window, the fine wisps of gray hair that he had carefully combed over his bald spot each morning shift and flutter, exposing the naked scalp. In the other room, elephants trumpet as they stampede across the jungle to rescue Tarzan. Rachel whimpers softly, but her father does not move.

  Rachel backs away from her father’s body. In the living room, Tarzan is swinging across the jungle on vines, going to save Jane. Rachel ignores the television. She prowls through the house as if searching for comfort—stepping into her own small bedroom, wandering through her father’s laboratory. From the cages that line the walls, white rats stare at her with hot red
eyes. A rabbit hops across its cage, making a series of slow dull thumps, like a feather pillow tumbling down a flight of stairs.

  She thinks that perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps her father is just sleeping. She returns to the bedroom, but nothing has changed. Her father lies open-eyed on the bed. For a long time, she huddles beside his body, clinging to his hand.

  He is the only person she has ever known. He is her father, her teacher, her friend. She cannot leave him alone.

  The afternoon sun blazes through the window, and still Aaron does not move. The room grows dark, but Rachel does not turn on the lights. She is waiting for Aaron to wake up. When the moon rises, its silver light shines through the window to cast a bright rectangle on the far wall.

  Outside, somewhere in the barren rocky land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station. Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is dead.

  When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story.—Where did I come from? she would ask Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign Language.—Tell me again.

  “You’re too old for bedtime stories,” Aaron would say.

  —Please, she’d sign.—Tell me the story.

  In the end, he always relented and told her. “Once upon a time, there was a good little girl named Rachel,” he said. “She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with her father and her mother and they were all very happy.”