|
 The
stories in the book are arranged pretty much in chronological order,
from War Baby, which was my first published short story back
in 1973, up to The Mechanisms of Dawn (1999), which appears here
for the first time.
Concerto
in B-demolished originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science
Fiction Magazine. War Baby and The Woman Machine
were first published in Fantastic. The Book Beast
originally appeared in a "little" magazine, The New York
Times. (Not to be confused, and all that.) In the Conservatory,
which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 1992, was first published
in the literary magazine Thema.
Not
all of the tales in The Beginnings of Forever are science fiction
or fantasy, however. The longest piece in the book is a work of historical
fiction based on events surrounding the first successful flight of a
liquid-fuelled interstate mail rocket. This story, The Rockets of
Greenwood Lake, is set in 1936 in the small town of Greenwood Lake,
New York. It was there that the well-known writer and scientist Willy
Ley, then recently arrived from Nazi-ruled Germany, participated in
the historic flight. I spent a tremendous amount of time researching
and writing this story. I was immeasurably helped by Olga Ley, Willy's
widow who is still living in Greenwich Village. As such, this story
might not really belong in this collection but Willy was and is one
of my heroes, and Olga is as much a beacon of rationality as was her
late husband.Also contributing to the success of the story was the late
writer L. Sprague de Camp, who graciously shared some of his memories
of his friend Willy Ley.
After
the flight, the plans for the Gloria, as the Greenwood Lake rocket
was known, apparently vanished under mysterious circumstances. Years
later, the V-1 rockets with which Hitler bombarded London bore a passing
resemblance to the Gloria. It makes a great yarn. I had to fictionalize
some of it and add a few characters, but for the most part, what isn't
true certainly could have happened. I also turned the tale into
a screenplay.
As
for the other stories, several of them -- War Baby, Girl Talk
and The Mechanisms of Dawn -- are part of a future history series
I have been working on for many years. My two novels, Blood Relations,
and its sequel Blind Ambitions, both from Clocktower Fiction,
are likewise part of the series.
The common
history of all these stories keeps generating new ideas for me to follow,
as well. I have enough ideas to keep me busy well into the 21st Century.
The entire story line spans some ten thousand years, so I won't soon
run out of things to write about.
|
