An Introduction
to Daryl Gregory
(featuring Jack Skillingstead)
Here’s how I tell the story:
The most important day of Jack Skillingstead’s life was the day he met me, his new best friend. It was May 5, 2006, at the Nebula Weekend in Tempe, Arizona. And yes, okay, that was also the day he met Ted Kosmatka, runner-up best friend (Ted can write his own essay if he wants to argue the rankings), and Nancy Kress, the woman he’d someday marry. But I know—know—that it was meeting me that changed the trajectory of his life, because meeting Jack changed mine—that’s just physics. We smacked into each other like two billiard balls, flew back to our respective corners of the country, and then kept bouncing into each other for the next seventeen years.
At first Jack was just an excellent hang. He’s one of those rare people I can riff with effortlessly, so my first move upon entering a science fiction convention is always to find Jack at the bar and pull up a stool. There we’d sit, topping each other’s jokes, taking tangents into gossip, puns, absurdism, mock outrage, and wordplay for wordplay’s sake. Jack’s a comedy sniper. He sits still, speaks quietly, and fires off jokes that are dry as vermouth. Civilians are thrown off by his deadpan delivery and mistake him for a sincere gentleman, which only makes the comedy more hilarious (for me).
What a relief it was when it turned out this guy could out-and-out write. There’s a particular hell known to writers when they discover that some perfectly pleasant person they’ve met writes sentences that grate like clichéd nails on a hackneyed chalkboard. Jack is not that guy. He’s a craftsman. His sentences are spare and clean, the paragraphs balanced, yet there are so many moments that rise toward poetry. He has a gift for finding new, graceful ways to describe things we’ve all experienced and seen in print a thousand times. I’ve read many descriptions of being drunk, but this line from “Einstein’s Theory,” one of my favorite stories in this collection, knocked me out: “Absinthe trickled into the convolutions of Albert’s brain.” So efficient, so apt.
There’s not a wasted word in that story, which is typical of Jack. He never overreaches. He also never tells the reader how to feel—and that restraint makes the stories come alive. He makes room for you, and trusts you to understand the emotion behind the things left unsaid, the uncompleted gestures, or something as simple as a description of a man walking down a late-night city street toward home. That’s the final image in “Einstein’s Theory.” I won’t insert the paragraph here, because I want you to see how the whole story builds toward that moment.
Jack became not only my favorite writer, but my favorite person to talk with about the craft of writing, and to bitch about the business of writing (two very different things). It turned out we were enamored with the difficulty of writing well, the taking of pains, even when no reader might notice the effort. (Yes, this suffering artist routine makes us feel superior, but please allow us to camp on this small patch of moral high ground.) We had to invest ourselves in the act of writing, because if we relied on the publishing business to provide self-esteem or satisfaction, we’d throw ourselves off a fucking cliff.
When my third novel tanked and my publisher dumped me, I was too embarrassed to talk to anyone in the field about it—except Jack. Later I had a publisher drop an entire series before I could write more than the first book, and he was there for that too, and many other setbacks and rejections and disappointments over the years. I tell people new to the field that they should become friends with other writers; that way, instead of feeling like some solitary loser, you feel like the member of a losing team.
But it can be hard for writers to manage their envy when teammates start winning without them. With Jack I’ve never felt a twinge of jealousy. This is not because I’m a saint, free of pettiness (ask my family). It’s because I admire his writing so much that I’m thrilled when others recognize it, too. I was in the car with him when he got the email that his novel The Chaos Function had sold to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and I had only two thoughts: One, why is Jack reading his phone while driving? Two, damn straight they bought the book—it’s terrific. [1]
I’m always reluctant to share my own good news. As a Midwesterner, I grew up believing that if you were ever caught bragging, God would send a tornado to destroy your house. So whenever something positive happens in my career, Jack’s one of the few people I can whisper the news to. He kindly gives the impression of being genuinely happy for me.
Jack became, in short, the guy I could talk to about everything. Not only our professions, but everything important: kids, relationships, divorce, aging, death . . . no topic too grim. He has the constitution for driving through the dark.
When my marriage broke up and I found myself planning to move across the country, Jack volunteered to ride with me from Pennsylvania to California. In a Mini Cooper. In winter. At night we drank in dive bars and ate in sketchy restaurants. We slept in ancient motels alongside Route 66, sharing a room, even though I snore like a backhoe scraping rock. We drove nine, ten, eleven hours a day, for four days, and for much of that time I was swerving all over the emotional road. Reader, I hope you have someone in your life who will cross the continent with you in a tiny British vehicle, and not only not murder you, but buy you several suspiciously cheap margaritas in a Mexican restaurant in Barstow. I arrived in Oakland hungover, but alive, and grateful.
I’m sorry. I know you were expecting an essay that was more about Jack than me. But the embarrassing and not-so-secret secret about writers is that everything we write is really about ourselves. That’s as true in fiction as non-fiction, though in stories we try to disguise ourselves. We put our words into the mouths of characters who don’t look like us, or live in locations far away from us, or belong to a different species or form of life. Science fiction, our preferred genre, is built for writers to hide themselves in.
But the truth leaks out. And when I read the stories in this book, I see Jack.
Jack’s always been a loner at heart, but in his fiction he takes those feelings of isolation and amplifies them, clarifies them, and fleshes them out. He’s a master at writing about the Eleanor Rigbys and Father Mackenzies of the world—the sole survivors, the dispossessed, the alienated. You’ll find many of those lonesome souls in his first collection, Are You There and Other Stories. Many are in this collection, too. Take Amrita, the protagonist of “The Sum of Her Expectations,” whose only companion is Tripp, an android. A catastrophe strands them on an alien planet inhabited only by runaway nano-builders creating a vast, empty city. Tripp abandons Amrita to join his robotic brethren. Late in the story, when Amrita fears she’ll never escape the planet, Jack gives us this:
Tripp visited her in a dream. He was his old self, undamaged and companionable. His blank face swiveled toward her. I’ve got your back, he said, but it was just Amrita’s deep architect of loneliness trying to manufacture the loyalty that Tripp, in the end, had been incapable of.
Deep architect of loneliness. I felt that Jack had outed himself with that one. He takes the raw materials of speculative fiction—multiple universes, AI, space travel, aliens, magic—and builds beautiful structures where his characters can live. There are men and women thrown into alternate realities, like the characters in “Dream Interpretation,” and those who recognize, like the protagonist of “Einstein’s Theory,” that they’ve lived in the wrong universe all along.
And some are outsiders in their own world. In “Mine, Yours, Ours,” a woman is trapped in a surveillance state of “neighbors” who know everything about her, and will judge her for everything she does, but don’t know her at all. The willfully oblivious main character of “Destination” is kidnapped by a self-driving car and driven out of the comfort of the privileged exclusion zone, into a world he doesn’t want to be a part of.
But when I compare the stories in this collection to the ones in Are You There, I detect a shift in approach, or at least tone. It seems to me that in these stories, Jack’s ready to let in a little light.
The lead story, “The Whole Mess,” takes a typically Skillingsteadian riff on multiple realities, but adds properly pulpish Lovecraftian monsters, plus a touching, romantic relationship. Jack, doing romance! “Straconia,” about a man pulled into a meaningless, Kafkaesque universe, should be relentlessly sad, but instead evolves into something beautiful. “Arlington,” another story about a lone pilot, is full of Jack’s love of flying (see his story notes at the end of the book) and ends with a turn toward friendship and something close to joy.
And sometimes he takes on the darkest themes and plays them for comedy. “Salvage Opportunity,” to pick one example from several in the book, is a funhouse mirror about loneliness, which could be read almost as a vaudeville sketch about three actors playing the same man, or one actor playing three characters.
I don’t mean to suggest that Jack’s gone soft. There are tough-minded stories here, and some, like “Steel Lake,” are as devastating as anything he’s ever written. But many of the stories in this book that seem headed for some bleak cliff, instead rise at the end and take flight. The lift-off is almost always made possible by a character finally reaching out to others, making a connection, or trying one last time for reconnection. Jack, a natural-born solo flyer, keeps reminding us that we need co-pilots.
One more thing about me, if you’ll indulge me. Last month I was in Tennessee, spending time at my mother’s bedside, reading through Jack’s collection again. She was at home, in hospice care, mostly sleeping, which means there were a lot of empty hours. Jack texted frequently, checking in on me. I was grateful for that, and grateful that I had his stories to keep me company. I hope you love them as much as I do.
— Daryl Gregory
June 8, 2023
[1] Jack has informed me that he received an acceptance email before we entered the car and only told me about it while driving. That may be true, but my version is funnier.