INTRODUCTION
Mark Rich
As did others of my generation — I was born in 1958, which tells you all you need to know — I grew up on science fiction stories I found in magazines, collections and anthologies. My Dad must have bought most of the lot. Some of the paperbacks on our bookshelves dated from the ’50s, after all — not that publication dates mattered to those of us in the family fascinated by their cover paintings, and eventually by their contents, in the 1960s and early ’70s. I and my siblings read them eagerly, oblivious to the fact that some stories were quite old and others relatively new. It was all the same, to us.
As I was thinking back on this, while preparing this, the first full-length collection of my own stories, it struck me that I did grow up on those short stories, yes — and that I grew up on the introductions to those stories, too.
I began to wonder: would I have become what I am — a science fiction writer — without those introductions? Sure, I read and re-read those stories, and still think about some of them — maybe even all of them, on some unconscious level.
What is quite certain is that I delved into the story introductions in a different way . . . in a way that surely had repercussions later.
In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, editors and writers felt fairly free to express their thoughts and record their memories, within the seemingly minor paragraphs of introductory matter they placed before the stories being published.
Some introductions were quite short — Roger Zelazny, for instance, never grew too effusive in the trotting-down-memory-lane department: maybe the shadowy iterations of Zelaznian life were too hazardous, even for that flashing-pen stalwart . . . but others certainly made up for it. From the amiable and always readable writer-as-hero recollections of Isaac Asimov, to the virtuosic essays by the George Bernard Shaw of science fiction introductory matter, Harlan Ellison . . . from the wide-ranging, thoughtful literary explorations of Judith Merril to the more restrained comments of Damon Knight or Groff Conklin . . . it all made for fascinating, tantalizing reading.
Introductions helped make these collections and anthologies what they were —
And what were they? They were quiet, paperbound powerhouses of minuscule social change . . .
Changing me, for instance, into a science fiction writer.
How could anyone read these SF-historical moments described by these writers without being affected — without feeling some desire to have been there? Stories abounded, in these short snippets of informal prose — stories about Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delaney, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch . . . about Michael Moorcock, Pamela Zoline, J.G. Ballard . . . stories, ideals, notions . . . rising up as dancing picture-motes in the wind, showing distant, enticing vistas.
Whatever world it was these writers were talking about, I wanted to be there.
Through the years it seemed I would never reach my goal, and never be hobnobbing with interesting people of a wide variety of interests and occupations — such as writers or editors or researchers or graphic illustrators or museum directors or any of a dozen other occupations . . . never be engaging in the very activity that seemed near the essence of being adult, to me. Having read about such doings, I thought this was what the adult world must be like.
Life, though, is made up of miscellaneous moments and incidents, choices and avoidances, right moves and errors . . . and at some point along the line it occurred to me that in simply pursuing what I wanted to be doing, which was to be writing (with a little drawing and musicking thrown in alongside), I had, in fact, become adult in the really nonsensical terms I had conceived “adult” to have, as a young science fiction reader. For I had hobnobbed, hung out, lollygagged, conspired, dithered, joked, reminisced, drank, dined, chattered and even gone grocery shopping with many dozens of people who, by my own childhood standards, were the vaunted famous and the imponderably important souls of this world: the ones with their names in print — in print! — there beneath the titles of their stories or poems, or beneath the banner of their magazines. How strange; how improbable . . . but there I was, believing myself still a child (which is the fear that still keeps me asleep at nights), and acting like an adult ... and having the adults around me swallowing the charade.
At a recent World Fantasy Convention I had the chance to hang out with a few of my peers — such as with Peter, the young son of editors David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and with Peter’s diminutive and even younger sister, Liz. Walking along a hallway, my long-suffering partner-in-life Martha and I overheard Peter talking with another boy about a “really weird” show they had listened to, probably in the car traveling north through New York state toward the convention in Saratoga Springs. They had been listening to an old radio program from the 1940s or ’50s, is my guess.
“Yeah, it was really weird!” piped Liz in her squeakish voice.
“It was something about space and time,” said Peter.
“Yeeaaah!” squealed Liz, scampering down the hallway. “Space — and time!”
I cannot get Liz’s little high-piping vocal cords squeaking those words out of my head. Yeeaaah! Space and time!
Not that I want to.
I just wish you could hear her, too . . . to give you a properly elevated and dignified — I mean, properly delightful —introduction to what lies ahead.
–Cashton, Wisconsin, November 2007