Introduction to Dark Carbuncle
Now for something a little lighter. I didn’t know that legendary folk musician and Grammy Award-winning singer Janis Ian was a science fiction fan until I got to know her. And boy is she a fan! When she walked around wide-eyed at science fiction conventions, I and several science fiction authors took her under our wing and introduced her to other luminaries of the genre. Janis would always insist, “Oh, nobody knows who I am!” until we mentioned some of her songs, and then eyes would pop, and jaws would drop. For nerds and outcasts everywhere, the amazing song “At Seventeen” summed up our lonely and hopeless childhood years. I sang along to it myself in numerous dateless nights in high school.
When I was editing my second Blood Lite anthology, Overbite, I had an idea for a story about desperate fans so in love with a dead one-hit-wonder singer that they wanted to raise him from the dead to perform an encore of his one famous song. With Janis’s background as a famous musician who had performed before huge crowds, I knew she could help as a coauthor. It took some convincing to assure her that I really did want to write a story with her …
I’m also close friends with Neil Peart, legendary drummer from Rush. I have seen them in concert dozens of times, and while I—as part of the audience—revel in hearing my favorite songs, I wonder how a band can tolerate playing their biggest hits at every show for decades. No matter how wonderful “Tom Sawyer” or “Red Barchetta” might be, what does a person think when performing it for the 5,000th time?
Remember this when you keep playing your Greatest Hits.