Slow Dancing Through Time Read online

  Suffice it to say that this is a wide-ranging, entertaining, colorful, and unpredictable collection of stories, well worth both your time and your money.

  I’m sorry—truly sorry—that there’s no story here with a byline citing Michael Bishop as a collaborator of Gardner’s. Once upon a time, I made a half-hearted attempt at a collaboration when Gardner sent me the opening of a long SF story and gently suggested that I ponder the material to see if I could add to and maybe even resolve the conflicts already set forth—but I stuck, and never got unstuck, and finally Gardner opted to pass the material along to George R.R. Martin. That was a wise decision, even if he and George haven’t yet finished the story either, but I remain jealous of all the good souls—Jack, Jay, Michael, and Susan—who have collaborated successfully with Gardner.

  I hope that one day, if only for a wisecracking short-short, I can join their company and experience myself the exhilaration of working with Gardner, of bouncing ideas off his bizarrely flexible brain, and of hitting again and again those high-paying slick markets that so often featured his and his collaborators’ cunningly hewn stories—tales of mystery, imagination, and joie de vivre.

  I’m not sure I know how to pronounce joie de vivre, but I know it when I encounter it, and Gardner’s undoubtedly got it. Over the past few years, incidentally, I have learned how to pronounce his lovely last name.

  (To reiterate: Dō-ZWAH, Dō-ZWAH, Dō-ZWAH.)

  And I keep hoping that some small relaxation of his editorial duties—he does a bang-up job at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, assembles a respected annual best-of-the-year anthology, and edits a series of entertaining theme anthologies with Jack Dann—will give him more writing time of his own. In the meantime, we have this handsome collection, and I’m damned grateful to the folks at Ursus Imprints that we do.

  February 26-27, 1990

  Pine Mountain, Georgia

  INTRODUCTION I: HOW DID THEY DO THAT?

  PAT CADIGAN

  Immediately, I understood there was Chemistry at work, definitely the capital-C variety. This is the kind you feel when it all works, everything’s in synch, in phase—so much so that even the conflicting forces make it all come out right. For a result like that, you need the right combination of people to strike a spark—or maybe it’s more like a quark. Then just stand back and watch what happens. You’re going to get either some great stories or some great parties. And if you’re enormously lucky, both.

  So how did they do it?

  Further on, you can read the individual accounts of how the stories came about, from Susan’s perspective, and Michael’s, and Jack Dann’s, and Jack Haldeman’s. You’ll be entertained and amused and you’ll learn a few things about some special people who found a way around what I think of as the writer’s Privacy Fence. Not all writers can do that and of those who can, not all of them can do it well—and of that minority, almost none can do it with more than two. But here we have some stories with three names on them. So how did they do it?

  It drove me crazy. I wanted to know. I pored over the accounts, looking for the key phrase (or phrases) that would give me the royal road into the process and enable me to divine what was at work here.

  My first thought, after all this reading and re-reading, was that I was sorry I hadn’t been there. I mean, talk about a writer’s idea of a good time—! And . . . well . . . that’s about it, really. Sounds like everyone involved was having a good time, and that wasn’t exactly a revelation to me. Even though I wasn’t around for the collaborating, I’ve been at a few of the parties.

  Only once, however, have I seen all the people in this book in one place at one time. That was in Boston, at the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention. I gather that doesn’t happen very often, probably less often than the Worldcon, which is annual.

  Most often, I see Gardner and Susan together, but they’re married, so that figures. And I suppose it also figures that two writers under the same roof would think of collaborating. The thing is, Gardner and Susan were together for a number of years before Susan’s first published work came out, a nasty story having to do with Jack the Ripper and video games called “Springfingered Jack.” Then there was “Mama,” the kind of horror story anyone who’s ever had a mother can relate to; and “The Cleaning Lady,” about the woman who breaks into people’s houses and cleans them; and “Under Her Skin,” about the fat vampire—not an obese vampire, but a vampire that makes Weight Watchers obsolete (I didn’t make this up, Susan did); and “A Child of Darkness,” about a vampire wannabe.

  Where Gardner writes mostly science fiction, Susan has gone her own way in horror, speaking in her own voice and doing just fine. I know her work well, but I cannot point to any part of the stories she has had a hand in and say, There she is—she starts here and leaves off here and comes back again over here. And yet there in “Send No Money,” I hear her. In the blend of “The Clowns,” a three-way collaboration, I pick up on her presence and I know that without her, it wouldn’t have been the same. How did they do that?

  Besides Gardner and Susan, only Michael Swanwick also lives in Philadelphia. (Philadelphia is also home to Tess Kissinger, the only person I know of who went to the prom with Jesus. Interesting town.) Author of In the Drift and Vacuum Flowers, as well as numerous acclaimed short stories like Nebula-nominee “The Feast of St. Janis” and Hugo-nominee “The Edge of the World,” Michael is also a fine writer on his own. When I first met him, I thought he would probably have been at home in Monty Python. That kind of humor, by turns goofy and sophisticated, always springing from the unexpected, delivered in a voice that I think of as the sound of merry. I am privileged to own—no, sorry, my son owns and I am privileged to borrow (once in a while) a rare cassette recording of the funniest children’s story ever, The Two Buildings Do Lunch, as performed and interpreted by the authors, Michael and his son Sean. I picture Marianne Porter (wife and mother, respectively) listening to this with a smile identical to my own.

  This is the same guy who collaborated on “Snow Job,” a story I could see belonging to either him or Gardner—and as Gardner explains elsewhere, it was more collaboration by surprise than design. Okay—but how to account for the seamlessness of “Touring”? If you don’t know which part is Michael’s, you’ll never figure it out. But you can hear him, loud and clear. How did they do that?

  Jack Dann lives in upstate New York with his wife, Jeanne Van Buren Dann, and son, Jody; and if you don’t know that he, too, is another major individual author on his own, you must have just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. My initial impression was that Jack and Gardner had known each other forever, circularly—i.e., they never actually met for the first time, they’d just always known each other. Put them together for any length of time and they start sounding like each other. Okay, I think they start sounding like each other. They also get really silly. Jack Dann, author of Junction and The Man Who Melted, “The Dybbuk Dolls” and “Camps”, giggling? Meeting my husband for the first time and ruffling his hair and pinching his cheek? (Hell, I didn’t do that the first time I met Arnie.) Jack Dann, distinguished author, extrovert, and party man.

  And not just collaborative writer, but editor, too—Future Power, MagiCats!, DogTales!, Mermaids! with Gardner; In the Field of Fire with Jeanne; and lone editing of Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars.

  If I were to put my finger over the byline of “Down Among the Dead Men,” (for one example) this could be either Gardner’s alone or Jack’s alone—but if I didn’t know for sure, I could not attribute it to only one or the other by guessing. I hear them both. Granted, I’m the one who thinks they sound alike, but I meant their speaking voices. Their writing voices are quite individual, but here they blend, and boy, does it work. Just like in “Time Bride” and “Slow Dancing with Jesus” (which also may give you some idea of how funny it can get at those parties). How did they do that?

  Jack C. Haldeman is funny, too, another fine author in his own right, with over forty shor
t stories and three novels to his credit. He shares with Jack Dann the distinction of being a genuine Jack—i.e., not a John calling himself Jack, but bearing it as his real first name. I first met him and his wife, Vol, in New Orleans a couple of years ago, long after I heard Gardner read “Executive Clemency” at a convention. Already familiar with Jack’s humor in stories like “Wet Behind the Ears” and “My Crazy Father Who Scares All Women Away”, the story made me blink. It still does. There are things about the story that are Gardner, but Jack is also unmistakably and equally present—once again, the voices merge and harmonize without undercutting each other, resulting in a very different story than either of them would have written alone. How did they do that?

  Well, yes, I did mention Chemistry, didn’t I? You could just say Chemistry and leave it at that . . . and I’m afraid that’s exactly what you’d have to do. That kind of Chemistry you can’t cultivate artificially or bring out by decree or demand. It just happens between people, between writers. Among writers, for God’s sake. So here they are, in twos and threes, all of them with Gardner in common—and now that I think of it, that’s just like all those great parties I’ve been to. Which means, I guess, that no matter how they did it, we’re all going to have a good time here, and that’s what really counts.

  INTRODUCTION II: COLLABORATING

  GARDNER DOZOIS

  We started writing these collaborative stories at a time when I had been in a creative slump for a couple of years, and, looking at them from the narrowest and most selfish perspective possible, they were invaluable to me because they helped to jump-start my creativity, shake me out of a dry spell, and launch me into a high-production period in which I completed, in addition to these collaborations, quite a few stories of my own.

  Of course, they were valuable for a lot more than that. For one thing, they made us all a fair amount of money, and got us, as authors, some worthwhile exposure in prestige markets where we had previously been little known. For another thing, we ended up with a bunch of stories that none of us would ever have written on our own, and most of them were, at the least, worth the writing. (I know that I am leaving us wide-open to some sneering hostile criticism here, but I do think that the collaborative stories were worth writing, and, for what it’s worth, the public response to them has been pretty good as well—many of them have been reprinted and anthologized, a few have shown up on award ballots, some have been picked up by Best of the Year anthologies, and so forth. My mother liked them, or no doubt would have said so anyway if she’d ever read any of them. So there.)

  For yet another thing, I think that doing them taught us all quite a bit about the craft of writing, about our own strengths and weaknesses as writers, and, ideally, how to combine those strengths to create a synergistic effect that sometimes enabled us to accomplish things beyond the ability of any one of us alone.

  For me, these collaborations are inextricably bound up with workshopping, and in a sense arose out of the workshopping process itself. Workshop bashing is a popular sport, with some curmudgeon always willing to pop up and blame the decline and moral decay of science fiction as a genre on the advent of workshopping—and it is true that the big formalized teaching workshops like Clarion have their drawbacks (they also have their good points, however, something the curmudgeons are never willing to admit) . . . Nevertheless, working SF writers have been getting together to analyze and critique each other’s work—take each other’s stories apart to see why they’re not working right—since before there was such a thing as SF as a formalized genre. Lovecraft and Bloch and Leiber did it—by mail—in the ‘30s; the Futurians—Kornbluth, Pohl, Knight, Blish, etc.—did it in the ‘50s; and writers have been doing it ever since. I suspect that they will keep on workshopping, too, despite the curmudgeons, since if you can find some people who really know how to workshop—a big “if,” admittedly—and who are temperamentally suited to survive the process with their egos reasonably intact, and if those workshoppers are willing to stick to practical nuts-and-bolts criticism rather than spouting ideological party lines or wandering away into the airy realms of obtuse aesthetic theorizing (the two biggest workshop-killers), then workshopping can be a highly valuable tool, not only for fixing flaws in specific stories, but also for learning something about writing as a craft.

  I had belonged to one such workshop—the Guilford Workshop—in the early ‘70s. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was after that workshop had dissolved, and I no longer had any outside inputs on my work, that I slowly drifted into a long dry spell. I’m sure that it was not at all coincidental that my creative juices started to flow again after I got into the habit of having frequent informal workshop sessions with Jack Dann and Michael Swanwick, and, later, after she herself had started to write, with Susan Casper.

  These sessions started sometime in 1977, and increased in frequency throughout 1978 and 1979. I was not producing much fiction myself at that point, but Jack was working on a novel he wanted advice on, and Michael was working on the early stories with which he would soon launch his writing career and wanted advice on them . . . and so, even though I had nothing of my own to place upon the sacrificial altar (which is considered bad form, usually), we began workshopping; at first, I worked with them individually, and then, after one memorable drunken evening, we all started workshopping together. And at some point in late 1979 or early 1980, we slid from these workshopping sessions to the idea of working on stories together, a transition so natural, gradual, and imperceptible that we almost didn’t notice it. Before we quite realized what was happening, we were actually writing collaborative stories, in various combinations, and then we started selling them.

  And so, we kept on doing it.

  Perhaps because the collaborations evolved organically from the workshopping experience, we instinctively stumbled upon what I consider to be one of the secrets of successful collaboration, especially of three-way collaborations, which are as rare as hen’s teeth: somebody must do a final unifying and homogenizing draft of the story, smoothing out differences in style, and that somebody must have the authority to decide what goes into the finished draft and what must come out, especially if there are alternate versions or drafts of the same section by different hands. With most of these stories, the person who did that final draft was me, perhaps because of my long experience as a story doctor, perhaps because Jack and Michael had already become inured in the workshop to having me inflict such advice upon them and the habit had been formed. At any rate, nobody ever complained about it, nor was it something that was ever discussed or questioned or formalized—it just worked out that way, an unspoken assumption. Perhaps because the collaborations grew out of workshopping sessions, where we were all used to commenting upon each other’s work, regarding a bit of prose as something to be reshaped and changed in the crucible, mutable, improve-uponable, “in progress,” we never had any major ego clashes over these stories—although many another collaborative team has foundered on the shoals of Injured Vanity—and those minor ego problems and clashes of creative vision we did have were fleeting and easily worked out.

  We just wrote the stories, without intellectualizing the collaborative process much, each writer contributing what they could, one set of hands picking up what another set had put down, all of us concentrating on ways to get the story down on paper however we could, by hook or crook, whatever worked, changing things around, discarding what didn’t work, working things out . . . and it wasn’t until much later when editors began to marvel that three such different writers could possibly work well-enough together to produce a viable three-way collaboration without murdering each other, that it even occurred to us that we might be doing something unusual.

  A word on marketing is perhaps in order, before we get to the stories themselves. These collaborations were all strange stuff, pretty offbeat, occasionally bizarre, and were all pretty much beyond the pale as far as the traditional digest SF-magazine world of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was concerned. Instead—
again, without conscious design or even thinking about it much—we ended up selling most of them outside the strict genre boundaries of the time. Kathy Green at Penthouse bought several of them, as did Ellen Datlow at Omni, and Alice K. Turner at Playboy. One of them appeared in Oui, another appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, and yet another appeared in, of all places, High Times. Later, we sold one to Amazing and then one to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine—under Shawna McCarthy at this point, when the magazine had started loosening up—and later still a few of these stories were reprinted in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, but their initial acceptance was with the so-called “slick magazine” market; only retroactively did they penetrate the genre market. The funny thing about all this is that there were only a handful of SF writers in those days who were appearing with any regularity in all of the “Big Three” slick markets (Playboy, Penthouse, and Omni): Robert Silverberg, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, and us. There were writers working in the genre market who had far bigger reputations than Jack or Michael or I, but somehow we were selling to those markets—the top-paying fiction markets in the country—and they weren’t; I suspect that’s at least partially because they weren’t bothering to submit to those markets, something that doesn’t seem to have changed much subsequently.

  Once again, we’d done something right—mostly by accident, as usual.