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 short 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.