Afterword to “Gulliver at Home” (1997)
My pal Jim Kelly wrote a story called “Glass Cloud” about an architect who is commissioned by aliens to build the tomb of a god-ruler on a distant planet. To do so the man would have to leave his home and his family, and because of the time it will take him to travel, never likely to see them again. The story ends with him deciding to go. I overheard Jim tell someone that he imagined it to be the story of “Gulliver before he went on his travels.”
That got me to thinking: what about Gulliver’s wife? She does appear in the brief passages between the four travels Gulliver tells us about in his book, but she is largely invisible. What was her story? It could not have been easy for her to be married to a man who kept leaving her in charge of the children while he sailed off, to be reported lost in shipwrecks or disasters, more than once presumed dead, only to return home three or four years later with another improbable tale.
Karen Joy Fowler, after reading my story, asked me if she could try a story on the same idea. Her version is “The Travails” and you can find it in her collection Black Glass. Is it bad form for me to say that I think hers is better? But I think I hit a few interesting notes.
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