Afterword to “The Pure Product” (1986)
“The Pure Product” is the oldest story in this book in terms of its original date of composition: I wrote the first draft over the Christmas holiday in 1972. That version was vastly different than what you read here, but at the time I felt quite happy with the result, and immediately sent it off. It was the first story I ever sold, after many rejections, to an original anthology titled Black Holes, edited by Scott Edelstein (not Scott Edelman, a wonderful writer and current editor of Blastr for SyFy). Black Holes was never published, and the rights reverted to me a couple of years later. By that time I felt the story had some problems; I rewrote it and submitted it again. After more rejections it was accepted by Pat Cadigan for her and Arnie Fenner’s magazine Shayol. But a year later Shayol suspended publication without printing it, and Pat sent it back to me. I rewrote again, had it rejected some more until it was taken for a new, slick fantasy magazine Imago. But their financing fell through and it never appeared.
By this time it was the 1980s and I had come to call this story my “magazine killer.” When Gardner Dozois took over the editorship of Asimov’s SF, I had been thinking about the cyberpunk movement, and I rewrote it again, gave it a new title, and sent it to Gardner, warning him that the last three editors who had bought it had gone out of business. He took it, gladly, and it appeared in the March 1986 Asimov’s to a very positive reception By the time “The Pure Product” was published, it had been rejected more than thirty times over a fourteen-year period. Since then it has been reprinted several times and was the title story of my second story collection.
Most of what I wrote in the early 1970s was deservedly abandoned, but for some reason I stuck with this story beyond the bounds of reason. I think it was because this was the one in which I found a particular amoral, active protagonist which I had never written before. Gerald of “The Pure Product” is the father of many other characters, including Richard Shrike in Good News From Outer Space and Detlev Gruber in my other time travel stories.
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