Decimated. Jack Dann

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JACK DANN

      Da Vinci Rising

      Decimated (with George Zebrowski)

      The Diamond Pit

      The Economy of Light

      Jubilee

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

      Decimated (with Jack Dann)

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1994, 2012 by Jack Dann & George Zebrowski

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      To the 7 editors who accepted these stories; to the 5 editors who published them; to the 7 who reprinted them; and to the unknown editors who never saw the one that got away. Also to Robert Reginald, who let this book through the gate, and Pamela Sargent, who proofed it. Can’t authors ever do anything alone?

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      “Traps” was first published in Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1970. Copyright © 1970 Universal Publishing & Distributing Corp.; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Dark, Dark the Dead Star” was first published in Worlds of If Science Fiction, July-August 1970. Copyright © 1970 Universal Publishing & Distributing Corp.; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Listen, Love” was first published in New Worlds Quarterly 2, edited by Michael Moorcock, Berkley Medallion Books, December 1970. Copyright © 1971 by Michael Moorcock; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Od” was first published in Omega, edited by Roger Elwood, Walker and Co., NY, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by Roger Elwood; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “The Flower That Missed the Morning” was first published in The Killer Plants and Other Stories, edited by Roger Elwood, Lerner Publications Company, Minneapolis, MN, 1974. Copyright © 1974 Lerner Publications Co.; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Thirty-Three and One-Third” was first published in The Long Night of Waiting and Other Stories, edited by Roger Elwood, Aurora Publishers, Inc., Nashville/London, 1974. Copyright © 1974 Aurora Publications Inc.; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Faces Forward” was first published in Dystopian Visions, edited by Roger Elwood, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Roger Elwood; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Yellowhead” was first published in New Constellations: An Anthology of Tomorrow’s Mythologies, edited by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor, Harper & Row, Publishers, NY, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor; Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “Afternoon Ghost” was first published in Return to the Twilight Zone, edited by Carol Serling, DAW Books, Inc., NY, 1994. Copyright © 1994, 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      “The Standard Crisis Scenario” is published here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.

      This corrected edition of these stories along with all editorial notes is Copyright © 2012 by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski. All previous copyrights have been reverted to the authors.

      INTRODUCTION(S)

      “In the Far-off Days of Beryllium and Greycats”

      George:

      Starting out, sometimes together, mostly alone, to learn “the blood and bones of writing,” as Jack once so aptly (eptly?) put it, was full of humorous disrespect and fear. After all, who knew?

      But respect was won—for me with Jack’s great novel, The Memory Cathedral, and even earlier with Junction, along with some chaotic wrangling over short fictions; for Jack—well, let him sound my praises.

      When Jack showed me draftings of Junction, he did so with an enthusiasm that could only be genuine and a mark of merit. I also enthused. All previous work had been crap, of course, but necessary, needy crap. I pushed the novel to editors, some of whom seemed baffled―but not Philip K. Dick or Roger Zelazny, and others. I know where “Junction” is in upstate New York, where flows the river into hell, where the bar waits on the corner, and what the black hole said and to whom.

      “Traps” and “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star” were written at about the same time. The second contained what Jack declared to be his first good sentence, which he quoted out loud for some time until I put it into “Dead Star,” so it wouldn’t get lost. It was a sentence, and not the kind of fragment which beginners love to write. I finished both stories when Jack was away at law school in Brooklyn and needed the encouragement to quit. Both stories, we judged, “were good enough.”

      With “Traps” good enough was maybe better than that. This little van Vogtian exercise surprised us after its publication, with an amusing triple incongruity of diversity, in Worlds of If magazine (the companion to the more prestigious Galaxy), then in a school textbook for young readers, and then in a German men’s magazine; and after that in the French Galaxie (where Jack’s byline was inextricably lost).

      “Thirty-Three and One Third” went through a curious history of early acceptance (the earliest) by Anubis, a fan magazine, which failed to publish so we withdrew it, despite an offer of money. The story became something of a teaching tool; we tried it on beginning writers by giving them the structure and plot and having them write their own take, with the advantage of writing with much of the hard work already done. It always turned out different yet the same. Later our original appeared in a hardcover collection, and in a German anthology, by mistake, it seemed, when they put the wrong text into production. The editor apologized but said he liked this story also.

      We sometimes collaborated on an old electric typewriter that ran like a steam engine. We approached it like bullfighters, each taking shots at one sentence after another, with major revisions by one of us later, sometimes much later. We stumbled through them, had fun in one draft, or a partial, then lived to appreciate the inspired bits, and rewrote. All nine except the last. “The Standard Crisis Scenario” appears here for the first time, unrevised; it is more poetry than story.

      Early on, these stories wanted to escape certain constraints: the difference between efforts provoked by a market opportunity, when an editor says he needs a story on such and such a theme, and a story grown from the authors’ tendencies and interests. Jack and I sometimes looked to see what we “had available” and imagined how it might “seem” to a needy editor. Rationalization was a large part of it, on both sides of the cobra/mongoose editor-author relationship, as described by George Alec Effinger, who pointed out that the cobra’s efforts to swallow the author mostly fail in the long run. The author’s character prevails, since he cannot help but write “in character,” however imitative or adaptive he tries to be to alien demands. You can’t help but be yourself, since that is what you “be,” as Irving Thalberg found out about the Marx Brothers when they came to make movies for him at MGM.

      This also applies to collaborations, in which we tried to swallow each other’s inspirations.

      We became more sophisticated. “Faces Forward” “Od” and “Yellowhead” went upmarket, as they say, to hardcover collections, with paperback reprints. For more about each story, see the individual notes.

      Hard work went into these stories, because back then we knew how to work hard better than how to be good, clever, or brilliant; but we were talented. A little voice always whispered to us that whatever the result of any jam session we would learn something, aside from the sheer fun we had along the way.

      The pleasure of writing these notes recalls that fun, but more importantly it opens a door on a little history that might otherwise be lost. So when Robert Reginald gave us the go-ahead, I started scribbling notes by hand and was startled by what came