Keeper of Dreams (2 page)

This means that the “stars” who might dominate the party are always being drawn out another door, and the new short-story writer has a chance to become something of a hit at the party. Short-story writers get
noticed
. And that is more important to a young writer than the money.

Truly.

If you got three thousand bucks for a short story but never heard the slightest feedback, the money would be gone and you would feel empty. But get three hundred bucks for the story and a lot of comment, with (perhaps) a Nebula recommendation or two, and you are much
encouraged. Or even if somebody absolutely
savages
your story, then—unless you’re so fragile you can’t stand the slightest jostling—you buckle down to show
them
what you can do.

At the same time, if you got only
thirty
dollars, then it would feel like a hobby instead of a profession.

That’s the situation I found when I entered the science-fiction field—a handful of magazines, paying not too much, not too little:
Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy
, and, at that precise moment,
Amazing
and
Fantastic
. Soon the last three would disappear, but a new one—
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
—arose and quickly outsold them all.

And then
Omni
came along and for a short while dosed the field with payments in the thousands of dollars.

It was a heady time, with
Asimov’s
and
Analog
selling upwards of 100,000 copies per issue and
F&SF
not far behind at a steady 80,000.

It’s a different world today. The numbers for the magazines are wincingly smaller. I think the main reason is that the newsstands are gone. Now, if you see a sci-fi magazine at all, it’s at the back of the bottom shelf at Barnes & Noble or Borders; a tall person has to kneel to even know that shelf exists.

Or it might be a decline in the science-fiction field as a whole. Or a decline in the quality of the editing. Or the rise of fantasy as the dominant form of speculative fiction. Or the movement of science fiction to television and the movies instead of print. I’m not pretending to know why the circulation numbers are now in the 8,000–20,000 range, less than a fifth of what they used to be.

But the need for short stories hasn’t abated. It’s still where new writers get discovered.

There have been quite a few excellent anthologies to take up the slack. The trouble is that most anthologies—and certainly the ones that sell best—put together known writers, each of whom brings some portion of his audience to the book. So new writers need not apply.

The only exception is the outstanding
Writers of the Future
series, which has, for decades now, devoted itself to discovering new writers and introducing them to the public. Many a fine career has begun in the pages of that anthology series.

And I’m not the only one who has tried to find a way to use the net
to reinvent the sci-fi magazine. My modestly titled
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
(at
http://www.oscigms.com
) is my effort to try to keep alive for a new generation of writers something like the situation I found when I was starting out. With occasional print anthologies drawn from the online zine to help draw people from the bookstore to the net, I hope we—and others as well—can succeed.

But what about
my
short stories? I’m not starting out anymore. I came to the short-story party, I jostled around for a while, and then I went on to write novels, which is where my career is firmly settled.

A story collection called
Maps in a Mirror
brought together most of my short fiction from that early formative stage of my career. Only a few of the early stories were excluded—the ones that belonged in story cycles, like
The Worthing Saga
and
The Folk of the Fringe
, or the stories that were always fragments of novels, like the Hatrack River stories that ended up in
Seventh Son, Red Prophet
, and
Prentice Alvin
.

I was done with short stories, wasn’t I? And yet here we are with another big fat book of short fiction by Orson Scott Card. Where did all
this
stuff come from?

What’s the inducement for an established writer to return to the short-story market? While it’s true that short stories require less typing than novels, they don’t take much less in the way of development. That is, to get a story ready to be written, to bring it to ripeness, takes about as much time and effort no matter how long the finished fiction turns out to be.

So why would I devote any time to writing short stories, for a few hundred or, sometimes, a few thousand dollars, when I can get many times more if I turn that idea into a book?

Believe me, that’s not a rhetorical question. Sometimes, when I’m late on a book which will actually pay the bills, and I stop to write a short story that I promised to an anthology editor, my wife looks at me and says (only more nicely), “What were you
thinking
?”

Good question.

How does a serious novelist end up with more than 200,000 words of short stories, novelets, and novellas?

One answer is: I’m one of the writers who gets invited to take part in some really cool anthologies. Robert Silverberg tells me about a series of
big-name-only science-fiction and fantasy anthologies he’s editing, and invites me to contribute a story to the sci-fi volume. Sure, I say—are you kidding? He’s not just a friend, he’s a legend in the field, and it’s going to be a great book.

Or a total stranger says, We’re doing an anthology of stories about the Vietnam War, and I say, I didn’t fight in that war, and I didn’t fight against it, I don’t see what I could contribute . . . but then my mind starts ticking over the problem and I realize there
is
a story for somebody like me to write and so I write it.

Or they’re putting together a book for the World Fantasy Convention just at the time that I’m developing this cool concept of the source of all the stories of the Flood, and so instead of waiting till I’m ready to write the novel, I write a very long story that gets it down on paper. It’s a trial run. I’m still going to write the novel . . . someday.

Or I go to another country and see a plaza that is so fascinating I have to set a story there, and just at that moment I’m reading a fascinating book about elephants, and those two things come together and I have to write the story.

Or Christmas is coming, and on a lark I decide to whip out a whimsical little Christmas story.

So it comes to four things driving this novelist, at least, to write short stories:

1. The irresistible anthology.
   
2. Stories for a particular occasion.
   
3. The big idea that has to get down on paper so I might as well try it out as a short story first and see if it’s good enough to grow into a book.
   
4. The jewel of an idea that is fully formed and simply
   has
   to exist as a short story, even if it doesn’t make me any money.
   

Story by story, I’ll tell you in afterwords just how each of these tales arose. Right here, though, I’ll simply tell you how surprised I was to realize just how much short fiction I had written over the years. Some of my best work is here, I think.

I appreciate your being willing to look at my shorter pieces, and I hope you find them worth the time you devote to them.

But I hope you’ll also remember that there are new writers out there, trying to be part of the conversation. Look for the magazines—online or in print—and the anthologies and collections. Give them a try. I can promise you that now and then—more often than you might suppose—you’ll find something and somebody wonderful.

Because if sci fi is to survive as a genre, it won’t be because readers stick to books with familiar names on the cover. I grew up in the era when the great triumvirate of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke ruled the field. But they aren’t producing much anymore. They moved on. So will the next generation, and the one after that. If there is no
new
generation to take their place, then the genre becomes a part of literary history, no longer able to produce great new work. And if a new generation is to take flight, it will fledge in the nest of short fiction.

In the heart of old Poznan, the capital of Great Poland since ancient times, there is a public square called Rynek Glowny. The houses around it aren’t as lovely as those of Krakow, but they have been charmingly painted and there is a faded graciousness that wins the heart. The plaza came through World War II more or less intact, but the Communist government apparently could not bear the thought of so much wasted space. What use did it have? Public squares were for public demonstrations, and once the Communists had seized control on behalf of the people, public demonstrations would never be needed again. So out in the middle of the square they built a squat, ugly building in a brutally modern style. It sucked the life out of the place. You had to stand with your back to it in order to truly enjoy the square.

But we’d all seen the ugly building for so many years that we hardly noticed it anymore, except to apologize to visitors, ruefully remember the bad old days of Communism, and appreciate the irony that the occupants of such a tasteless building should include a restaurant, a bookshop, and an art gallery. And when the plague came and the city was so cruelly and suddenly emptied, those of us who could not let go of Poznan, who could not bear to eke out the last of our lives in the countryside, drifted to the old heart of the city and took up residence in the houses surrounding the square. As time passed, even the ugly building became part of the beauty of the place, for it had been part of the old crowded city now lost forever. Just as the toilets with little altars for the perusal of one’s excrement reminded us of the many decades of German overlordship, so this
building was also a part of our past, and now, by its sheer persistence among us, a part of ourselves. If we could venerate the bones and other bodily parts of dead saints, couldn’t we also find holiness of a kind even in this vile thing? It was a relic of a time when we thought we were suffering, but to which we now would gladly return, just to hear schoolchildren again in the streets, just to see the flower shop once more selling the bright excesses of overcopious nature, spots of vivid color to show us that Poland was not, by nature, grey.

Into this square came the elephants, a group of males, making their way in what seemed a relentless silence, except that a trembling of the windows told us that they
were
speaking to each other in infrasound, low notes that the human ear could not hear, but the human hand could feel on glass. Of course we had all seen elephants for years on our forays out into the gardens of suburban Poznan—clans of females and their children following a matriarch, gangs of mature males hanging out to kill time until one of them went into musth and set off in search of the nearest estrous female. We speculated at first about where they came from, whether their forebears had escaped from a zoo or a circus during the plague. But soon we realized that their numbers were far too great to be accounted for that way. Too many different clans had been seen. On Radio Day we learned, from those few stations that still bothered, that the elephants had come down the Nile, swum the Suez, swarmed through Palestine and Syria and Armenia, crossed the Caucasus, and now fed in the lush wheat pastures of Ukraine, bathed in the streams of Belarus, and stood trumpeting on the shores of Estonia and Pomerania, calling out to some god of the sea, demanding passage to lands as yet unpossessed by the great stumpy feet, the probing noses, the piercing ivory, and the deep thrumming music of the new rulers of the world.

Why should they not rule it? We were only relics ourselves, we who had had the misfortune of surviving the plague. Out of every hundred thousand, only fifty or a hundred had survived. And as we scavenged in the ruins, as we bulldozed earth over the corpses we dragged from the areas where we meant to live, as we struggled to learn how to keep a generator or two running, a truck here and there, the radios we used only once a week, then once a month, then once a year, we gradually came to realize that there would be no more children. No one conceived. No one bore.
The disease had sterilized us, almost all. There would be no recovery from this plague. Our extinction had not required a celestial missile to shatter the earth and darken the sky for a year; no other species shared our doom with us. We had been taken out surgically, precisely, thoroughly, a tumor removed with a delicate viral hand.

So we did not begrudge the elephants their possession of the fields and the forests. The males could knock down trees to show their strength; there was no owner to demand that animal control officers come and dispose of the rampaging beasts. The females could gather their children into barns and stables against the winter blast, and no owner would evict them; only the crumbling bones and strands of hairy flesh showed where horses and cattle had starved to death when their masters died too quickly to think of setting them free from their stalls and pens.

Why, though, had these males come into the city? There was nothing for them to eat. There was nothing for
us
to eat; when our bicycles gave out and we could cobble together no more makeshift carts, we would have to leave the city ourselves and live closer to the food that we gathered from untended fields. Why would the elephants bother with such a ruin? Curiosity, perhaps. Soon they would see that there was nothing here for them, and move on.