Introduction
John Dalmas
In the years before television, short stories were enormously popular. If you weren’t there, it’s hard to imagine the selection we enjoyed. There were many magazines of short fiction, some appearing weekly, and several weekly general interest magazines—notably Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, with circulations in the millions—that featured short fiction. Book publishers produced numerous collections of short fiction, including author collections like this one. Today very few magazines of fiction are published, and fewer collections.
This collection shows what a pleasure they were and can be. It is a buffet of pleasures, characters, ideas, understandings and emotions, with stories falling into several categories—while almost defying categorization. Sounds contradictory? When you’ve read them, you’ll see what I mean. What they share is their author, their humanity, their understanding. Poul Anderson, if he were still with us, would appreciate them. Superior stuff.
Meanwhile, about James Glass: I’ve known Jim for more than fifteen years. We attend cons together, have drinks together, talk science fiction together. For much of his life, Jim was engaged in perhaps the most intellectually rigorous profession on Earth: physics research. Rigor not as in rigor mortis, but rigor as in integrity. His stories, always intellectually and emotionally honest, flow from the heart, the emotional center. They peer into souls, pull threads, peel off subterfuge and rationalization, and expose with love what it means to be human.
And more: Sometime in the future, perhaps the near future, humanity will encounter other sophonts. Not humans with lumpy foreheads (well, maybe some of them too), but life forms more basically different. Life forms we might not recognize as sophonts (like cetaceans?). Life forms we might not even recognize as life forms (see “Dirty Snowballs” in this collection). Science fiction can broaden our concepts, our awareness of possibilities, preparing us for those encounters — and Jim writes marvelous aliens.
Most of the stories in this book have seen print before, in publications as diverse as Analog and Talebones, Aboriginal and Figment. Several others, including some of the best, are published here for the first time.
Finally, Jim’s broad background in science — physics, math, physical chemistry, space engineering, and astronomy (yes, he’s taught astronomy too) — gives his SF a strong sense of reality. Oh! And one thing more. Two things: his superior use of imagery and of color. You won’t be surprised that painting is his other creative activity; he really sees what he looks at.
John Dalmas
Spokane, WA
February 2004