Introduction
When my first novel, Sidney’s Comet, was published in 1983, my mother told me it was unusual for me to be selling novels without first having sold short stories. She was right, as I would confirm later, years after her tragic death in 1984, which I wrote about in Dreamer of Dune. The more I learned about writing, and the more novels I published over the years, I realized how rare my experience was. Now, after having published millions of words in novels and non-fiction books, I am pleased to present my first collection of short stories. (Not included here are a number of Dune-series short stories that I co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson. Readers can find many of those stories at WordFire Press.)
Back in December 1980, I mailed two satirical science fiction short stories to my father for his opinion—“Earth Games” and “The Stakeout.” At the time, Frank and Beverly Herbert were living in the Hawaiian Islands, near the town of Hana on the eastern shore of Maui. It was a beautiful area with no high-rise developments, a paradise where ancient Hawaiian kings vacationed long ago.
“Earth Games” described an alien world where Earth people were kept prisoner and forced to perform competitions with hotrod automobiles. Those games strongly resembled rush-hour commute experiences in major US cities, where drivers competed for lane space and made rude hand gestures to one another. A slight difference: the cars in my story had machine guns on the fenders, and cannons on the rooftops!
Early in 1981, Dad mailed the stories back to me, with his notations, and this brief letter:
Dear Brian –
You have some problems with point of view (POV) and detailing a story. We’ll discuss when we see you in the spring. Keep on writing. Your technique shows improvement.
Love–
Dad
By the summer of 1981, I had completed a second draft of “Earth Games,” and had also done a major rewrite of my first science fiction novel, Sidney’s Comet. I mailed both of them to my new literary agent, Clyde Taylor at Curtis Brown in New York City. A short time later Clyde had good news for me about Sidney’s Comet—Berkley Books wanted to publish it in paperback, and it came out in 1983, in time for my mother to see it and read the terrific review it received from Publishers Weekly. (This was actually my third published book, following two earlier humor collections that I sold directly to Price/Stern/Sloan in Los Angeles: Classic Comebacks and Incredible Insurance Claims).
Heeding Frank Herbert’s expert advice, I further revised my short story “Earth Games,” though it was not published or even submitted for publication. Instead, a portion of it became a scene in my second science fiction novel, The Garbage Chronicles, which Berkley Books published in 1985. There are a number of differences between this short story and the dramatic scene in the novel. For one, the character Enrique in the short story became the heroic Tom Javik in the novel. I hope my readers find the two versions interesting, for their similarities and differences.
Based on Dad’s comments, I also rewrote “The Stakeout.” He did not like my original ending for the story, and put a large bracket around the last four paragraphs of the first draft, with this note in the margin: “Bad ending—Rewrite.” I rewrote the story, adding two plot surprises—one in the middle of the story, and another near the end.
I wrote “The Egg and the Dragon” in 2005 as part of a round-robin novel that included contributions from several authors under the title The Omega Egg, edited by Mike Resnick.
I am also including my first story that was ever committed to paper, when I was seven years old, and living in a little beach shack north of Tacoma, Washington. My mother liked the story so much when I told it to her that she typed it up, and put my name at the bottom, along with the date. I called it “Two Heads and One Fat Pig” (1955). It’s probably a typical tale told by an imaginative seven-year-old, but I thought it should be included in this collection of my short stories. It is the only one that remains from my childhood.
Two stories in this collection are collaborations with the noted fantasy author Bruce Taylor, who is widely known as “Mr. Magic Realism.” One, “The Great Steam Time Machine,” is a steampunk story about an incredible time machine that is operated by steam power. It was included in the anthology Resurrection Engines, edited by Scott Harrison. The other collaboration with Bruce, “Death of the Internet: Under Burning Skies” has never been published before, and shows the folly of hundreds of millions of people losing their humanity to the technology of the internet and smart phones. It reveals how utterly helpless they would be if the internet crashed forever. Yes, forever.
This new collection also includes eight short stories that I wrote with my late cousin, Marie Landis. (She and I also published two horror novels—Memorymakers and Blood on the Sun). Four of these new stories are published here for the first time—“The McElvoy File,” “Santaphobia,” “Caveat Emptor,” and “The Norre Fen Murders.” The other five, “The Bone Woman,” “The Contract,” “Dropoff,” “Blood Month,” and “Raiders from the Ghost World,” were included in anthologies published by White Wolf Publishing or Avon Books.
“Raiders from the Ghost World” was included in the anthology Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion, a collection of stories based upon Michael Moorcock’s writings. “Raiders” revisits a favorite theme of mine—the way people in Western nations consume too much, far more than they really need. In this story, the citizens of the Kingdom of Greehyll are like that, but are forced to live without their material goods, because creatures from the Ghost World are slipping into their dimension and stealing everything, leaving homes and castles barren. This theme is also touched upon in “Death of the Internet,” and is a major aspect of my novel Sidney’s Comet. In that novel, consumer goods are cluttering Earth so much that there is no place for garbage, or even for the burial of bodies. As a consequence, governments catapult all trash and bodies into outer space. Unfortunately, there are life forms out there who take offense at this littering, and send it all hurtling back in a huge garbage comet that threatens to wipe out the planet.
I hope you enjoy this new collection of short stories. In a number of them, as I often to do in my novels, I use humor to highlight important social issues.
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
May 16, 2015