thing to do.
Look, I don’t give you grief over where you get your ideas from.
We Can Get Them for You Wholesale
If the stories in this book were arranged in chronological order, rather than in the strange and haphazard well-it-feels-right sort of order I have put them in, this story would be the first in the book. I dozed off one night in 1983, listening to the radio. When I fell asleep, I was listening to a piece on buying in bulk; when I woke up, they were talking about hired killers. That was where this story came from.
I’d been reading a lot of John Collier short stories before I wrote this. Rereading it several years ago, I realized that it was a John Collier story. Not as good as any good John Collier story, nor written as well as Collier wrote; but it’s still a Collier story for all that, and I hadn’t noticed that when I was writing it.
One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock
When I was asked to write a story for an anthology of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, I chose to write a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction. I doubted I could say anything about Elric that wasn’t pastiche, but when I was twelve, Moorcock’s characters were as real to me as anything else in my life and a great deal more real than, well, geography lessons for a start.
“Of all the anthology stories, I liked your story and Tad Williams’s the best,” said Michael Moorcock when I ran into him in New Orleans several months after finishing the story. “And I liked his better than yours because it had Jimi Hendrix in it.”
The title is stolen from a Harlan Ellison short story.
Cold Colors
I’ve worked in a number of different media over the years. Sometimes people ask me how I know what medium an idea belongs to. Mostly they turn up as comics or films or poems or prose or novels or short stories or whatever. You know what you’re writing ahead of time.
This, on the other hand, was just an idea. I wanted to say something about those infernal machines, computers, and black magic, and something about the London I observed in the late eighties—a period of financial excess and moral bankruptcy. It didn’t seem to be a short story or a novel, so I tried it as a poem, and it did just fine.
For The Time Out Book of London Short Stories I reformatted it as prose and left a lot of readers very puzzled.
The Sweeper of Dreams
This one began with a Lisa Snellings statue of a man leaning on a broom. He was obviously some kind of janitor. I wondered what kind, and that was where this story came from.
Foreign Parts
This is another early story. I wrote it in 1984, and I did the final draft (a hasty coat of paint and some grouting in the nastiest cracks) in 1989. In 1984 I couldn’t sell it (the SF mags didn’t like the sex, the sex mags didn’t like the disease). In 1987 I was asked if I would sell it to an anthology of sexual SF stories, but I declined. In 1984 I had written a story about a venereal disease. The same story seemed to say different things in 1987. The story itself might not have changed, but the landscape around it had altered mightily: I’m talking about AIDS here, and so, whether I had intended it or not, was the story. If I was going to rewrite the story, I was going to have to take AIDS into account, and I couldn’t. It was too big, too unknown, too hard to get a grip on. But by 1989 the cultural landscape had shifted once more, shifted to the point where I felt, if not comfortable, then less uncomfortable about taking the story out of the cabinet, brushing it down, wiping the smudges off its face, and sending it out to meet the nice people. So when editor Steve Niles asked if I had anything unpublished for his anthology Words Without Pictures, I gave him this.
I could say that it wasn’t a story about AIDS. But I’d be lying, at least in part. And these days AIDS seems to have become, for good or evil, just another disease in Venus’s armory.
Really, I think it’s mostly about loneliness, and identity, and, perhaps, it’s about the joys of making your own way in the world.
Vampire Sestina
My