Introduction
Brandon Sanderson
Eric James Stone is a genius. I feel ashamed that, when I first heard about him, I was actually skeptical.
A roommate said to me, “Oh, hey! You’re a writer. One of the guys at my work is a writer too.” My response was raised eyebrows and a question: “Yeah, has he actually published anything?”
“I don’t know,” my roommate said. “He won some kind of science fiction writing contest or something.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, unless it was Writers of the Future—”
“Yeah, that’s it. He won that.”
That was it, and more. Nebula winner, published over and over in top short story markets (which, I might note, had repeatedly rejected me at that time), Eric turned out to be the real deal. My skepticism seems silly now; I was expressing the same kind of bias and cynicism that (as an aspiring novelist) I myself had suffered on many occasions.
I decided that I needed to give this Eric guy a shot. At the next local convention I attended, I went to his reading. Not only was the place packed, with standing room only, Eric was a charming and witty reader. The story he read then (“Tabloid Reporter to the Stars”) is not in this collection, but the stories here are equally stunning.
By now—some fifteen years after first meeting Eric—I thought myself something of an EJS aficionado. We’ve been in writing groups together numerous times, including the current incarnation of the one at my house. I assumed I’d read basically everything he put out. I was therefore amazed to see just how many stories I had to catch up on that, for one reason or another, hadn’t made it through my writing group.
You, dear reader, are in for a treat. Reading through all of these stories, I’ve found myself impressed again at Eric’s breadth. He’s a master of the end-of-story twist, in which he takes an entire story and recontextualizes it in an often humorous way.
That, however, is only one arrow in his quiver of heart-piercers. Eric does empathy, pain, and romance equally well. One story will hit you with a fascinating science fiction conundrum, and the next will make you sit thinking about the nature of love.
The thing I most envy about Eric’s writing is his ability to do all this in a page or two—arcs and resonances I spend entire epics trying to paint, he masterfully accomplishes with a single dot or streak on the proverbial canvas. He’s a writing impressionist, somehow able to convey entire novels in a paragraph. Beyond that, he’s just a great guy and a valuable source of criticism for my own works.
It’s been an absolute honor to know Eric over the years, and is my privilege to present this to you: his second collection of masterpieces. Each one a present, wrapped up with no clue to the contents, other than it will be wonderful.
—Brandon Sanderson