Introduction
When I was a kid, the universe opened up for me with thought-provoking and imaginative space adventures, colonies on other planets, alien intelligences, time travel, and mind-bending scientific inventions.
My real world was nowhere near as exciting. In fact, it was quite mundane, and I think I was the only dreamer for miles around. As a boy I lived in a speck-on-the-map small town in southeastern Wisconsin, not the sort of place that would inspire big thinking and lots of creativity. Sure, it was a charming laid-back environment straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with red barns and cornfields, where nobody locked their doors and where all of the neighbors were related to me somehow. Franksville, Wisconsin was a place with absolutely no imagination, and no excitement.
Anyone who longed for adventure beyond the stars had to travel vicariously.
And that’s where the library came in, with its science fiction section which comprised the top half of one tall set of metal bookshelves. At the time, reading four entire shelves of books—each book sporting a little rocket ship logo surrounded by an atom symbol—seemed a daunting task. Like the characters I watched on Star Trek (which my young imagination didn’t think was nearly as good as Lost in Space, because it had more monsters), I decided to embark on a five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Or at least where no kid in my town had gone before. I wanted to read all the science fiction, every book in the world (and surely my library had them all on that one set of shelves). Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke—yes, I started at the beginning of the alphabet.
But even that was too slow a delivery system. I needed more science fiction. And faster.
I discovered that the way to get the most science fiction ideas delivered like a triple espresso was to read big SF anthologies. My small-town library had every volume of Nebula Award winners and an entire set of the Orbit anthology series edited by Damon Knight. But a lot of those stories were too artsy and esoteric for my 12-year-old tastes. I didn’t know anything about the New Wave movement or experimental writing; I just wanted great stories. I was in the Age of Wonder.
Then I discovered the story collections of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Asimov would take an idea and run with it. Bradbury blew my mind in collection after collection: The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Illustrated Man, R Is for Rocket, S Is for Space, The Martian Chronicles. Best of all, I discovered several giant SF anthologies edited by Groff Conklin: A Treasury of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Science Fiction, Great Short Novels of Science Fiction. These were massive tomes chock-full of adventures taken from the pages of the best pulp magazines, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, the true breeding ground of the genre.
During the summer when I was reading those anthologies, I might have slept in small-town Wisconsin, but my mind really lived in the wildest frontiers of space and time. That’s when I really fell in love with short stories.
And it wouldn’t do just to read them. I decided to start writing stories of my own and send them to magazines. I began to get those published, nearly 150 of them so far.
In 2001, Golden Gryphon Press published the hardcover limited edition of Dogged Persistence, my first story collection, which included some of my favorites, and then in 2006 Five Star Press published a second collection, Landscapes, with an introduction by Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. But I kept writing stories, and the backlog of uncollected pieces grew larger and larger.
For years now, as a back-burner project, I’ve wanted to collect my short stories into one or more volumes to be released by my own WordFire Press, but the task was daunting: gathering all the stories, collecting the copyright and publication information, organizing them, getting permissions from my numerous coauthors. And since I kept writing new stories, the list grew faster than I could even organize it.
Sometimes you just have to buckle down and do it.
I’ve organized my stories by genre: fantasy, horror/dark fantasy, and science fiction. SF is by far the bulk of my short work, and those stories will fill two volumes (at least!).
This is by no means a complete collection. I published countless works in tiny small press magazines; some of them are (to put it kindly) not worth reprinting, and some are lost (I can’t even find my contributor’s copies anymore), and some of them are written in universes owned by someone else (Star Wars, X-Files, Planet of the Apes), and so I don’t have the right to reprint them.
But there are some really good stories here. Enjoy this first volume, featuring my science fiction short work.
—Kevin J. Anderson, Colorado Springs, January 2018