Afterword to “Another Orphan” (1982)
Herman Melville is my hero. I first read Moby-Dick when I was a sophomore in an American literature class at the University of Rochester. I did not know what to make of it. Parts of it bored me to death, but other parts—the obsession of Captain Ahab, the comedy of Ishmael and Queequeg, the adventure story, the speculations about the nature of reality—struck some chord in me. But I would never have called it a favorite. Then, several years later in graduate school at the University of Kansas, when I took in a seminar on Hawthorne and Melville from the marvelous teacher Elizabeth Schultz and read Moby-Dick again, and I was astonished to see how much it had improved in the interim.
In the late seventies while sampling some oregano I had the idea of stranding a contemporary man in Moby-Dick, but I didn’t begin writing it until December of 1979, at which time I was living alone and working at a commodities wire service. I worked on the story off and on throughout 1980, finishing the first draft almost exactly a year after I had started. Though it was still demonstrably a genre story, in writing it I let go of most of the expectations that it would find a genre audience. I was working on my dissertation in creative writing, and Elizabeth Schultz was my director. When I showed it to her after I had a draft, she gave me much advice and many suggestions, and I did a rewrite over the next four or five months.
Then I tried to sell it to science fiction and fantasy markets. Not surprisingly, it was rejected everywhere I sent it. Finally, I tried Fantasy and Science Fiction, which to that time had bought more of my stories than any other magazine. I sent it with a cover letter in which I was so bold as to tell Ed Ferman that if he didn’t buy it, it was going to go into my drawer, not likely to come out for a long time.
He took it immediately. It was came out in September 1982, and received enough recommendations to make the final Nebula ballot. In April 1983 I flew up to New York for the awards banquet and stayed with my friend James Patrick Kelly at his parents’ home in New Canaan, Connecticut. Connie Willis, who was nominated in two categories that year, for “Fire Watch” and “A Letter from the Clearys,” also stayed there with us, and we rode the train into Manhattan for the ceremony. At the banquet I was flabbergasted to receive the award for best novella, and Connie won nebulas for both of her stories. We rode back on the train and put the three trophies on the kitchen counter in Jim’s parents’ house. In the morning when we got up, Jim’s mother made breakfast for us.
“I knew you were going to win,” she said. “Now how do you like your eggs?”
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