Lisa offers me a glass of tea. We talk about other subjects till it’s time for me to go.
I think about those Persian designs all the way home. I think about how you could base a whole style on it. I can see the clothes in my head. I wonder what kind of music would go with it.
When I get home, I hear my dad in his office talking to some of his colleagues. I go into my room and watch other people’s flashcasts. They’re all inane.
The Duck Monkey could rip them to shreds, but they don’t seem worth the bother.
It’s a strange thing, but the Duck Monkey’s ratings have held steady, fed by a stream of celebrity gossip from Dolores and her friends. The Duck Monkey has a completely different demographic from my own audience. They’re smarter and funnier, and they’re not trying to get me to kill myself in some horribly public way.
It’s like the Duck Monkey is some kind of viral marketing campaign for something else. A new Sanson, perhaps, one who comes swinging back into the world with a style based on Persian manuscripts.
Or maybe the Sanson who’s a real boy.
I lie on my bed and think about Lisa and the Duck Monkey and
Arab calligraphy. I wonder if I can live without the love of all those people who made up my Demographic for all those years.
I decide I’ll try to get the love of just one person, and if necessary go on from there.
I send a message to Lisa to tell her I’d like to see her again.
WALTER JON WILLIAMS was born in 1953 in Minnesota. He attended the University of New Mexico and received his bachelor of arts in 1975. He lives in rural New Mexico.
Williams first started writing in the early 1980s, publishing a series of naval adventures under the name Jon Williams. His first science fiction novel, Ambassador of Progress, appeared in 1984 and was followed by fifteen more, most notably Hardwired, Aristoi, Metropolitan and sequel City on Fire, and his Praxis trilogy. Upcoming is a new novel, Implied Spaces.
A prolific short story writer, Williams published his first story, “Side Effects,” in 1985, and it was followed by a string of stories that were nominated for major awards, including “Dinosaurs,” “Surfacing,” “Wall, Stone, Craft,” “Lethe,” and Nebula Award winner “Daddy’s World.” A number of these are collected in Facets.
His Web site is www.walterjonwilliams.net.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For me, stories hardly ever spring out of the blue. They accumulate, layer by layer, like sediment stored up by the sea, until such time as I have enough material to create a whole story.
“Pinocchio” began some years ago, when I saw a television documentary on former child stars, all of whom would seemingly have gnawed off their right arms if only it would have made them celebrities again. It was saddening, and a little bit sickening, to see forty-year-old mature men talking with such hunger and desperation about their glory days, when they were thirteen.
This set off a train of thought about celebrity in general. It seems to me that celebrity rewards you for all the wrong things—not for being a good person, but for playing a good person on television. Celebrity makes no moral distinctions, and sees no difference between saving the lives of African children or smashing someone over the head with a telephone—both are of equal use for a couple minutes worth of exposure on Entertainment Tonight.
I combined these thoughts with ideas about the instantaneous feedback that is such a part of twenty-first-century media, and rather slowly produced this story of a boy who became famous because he was unstudied and natural, and who fell from public grace when he began to understand too well the machine that was driving his fame.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Editing an anthology can either be a lonely solo effort, or it can take a community. The community that made The Starry Rift possible was large and varied, and I’d like to thank them all. First, and foremost, my three partners in crime, Charles N. Brown, Jack Dann, and Justin Ackroyd. During the nearly two-yearlong gestation of this book, they were always there, always willing to help when it was needed most. Next would come Russell B. Farr, who stepped in toward the end and helped bring the ship home, and Ellen Datlow, who was always ready and willing to help whenever it was needed. To that number I’d add each and every one of the contributors to the book, each of whom labored mightily, produced wonderful work, and often were patient beyond any reasonable measure. I’m incredibly grateful to all of them. I’d also very much like to thank Ken Macleod for his understanding; Kelly Link for persisting; and Gavin Grant, Garth Nix, Robin Pen, Gordon Van Gelder, Terry Dowling, and everyone else I discussed The Starry Rift with as I reached the finish line.
There are four other people who deserve special thanks here. My editor, the incredible Sharyn November, has been a joy and a delight to work with at every stage—supportive, understanding, and completely committed to this project; The Starry Rift wouldn’t exist without her. I’d also, as always, like to thank my partner, Marianne, and my two girls, Jessica and Sophie. They understood when I had to not be around every now and then to get things finished, and made every single other day a joy and a delight. Thank you.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
JONATHAN STRAHAN is an editor, anthologist, and critic. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1964, and moved to Perth, Western Australia, in 1968. He graduated from the University of Western Australia with a bachelor of arts in 1986. In 1990 he cofounded a small press journal, Eidolon, and worked on it as coedi-tor and copublisher until 1. He was also copublisher of Eidolon Books.
In 1997 Jonathan started work for Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field as an assistant editor. He wrote a regular reviewer column for the magazine until March 1998 and has been the magazine’s Reviews Editor since January 2002. His reviews and criticism have also appeared in Eidolon, Eidolon: SF Online, Ticonderoga Online, and Foundation. Jonathan has won the William J. Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism and Review and the Australian National Science Fiction Ditmar Award.
As a freelance editor, Jonathan has edited or coedited more than a dozen reprint anthologies and three original anthologies, which have been published in Australia and the United States. These include various “year’s best” annuals, The “Locus” Awards (with Charles N. Brown), and The New Space Opera (with Gardner Dozois). As a book editor, he has also edited The Jack Vance Treasury and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling. In 1 Jonathan founded The Coode Street Press, which published the one-shot review zine The Coode Street Review of Science Fiction and copub-lished Terry Dowling’s Antique Futures. The Coode Street Press is currently inactive.
Jonathan married former Locus Managing Editor Marianne Jablon in 1, and they live in Perth, Western Australia, with their two daughters, Jessica and Sophie.
1 Called “pulps,” they were printed on cheap paper made from wood pulp.
2 The Golden Age of science fiction was the period from the late 1930s or early 1940s through the 1950s, when the science fiction genre first gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published. Many of today’s most popular movies, from Star Wars to I, Robot, feature stories very much like those of the Golden Age.
3 The Cold War was a period of conflict, tension, and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies that started in the mid-1940s and only ended in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It reached its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Science fiction has always dealt with political and economic themes—you need only look back to satires like Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants from 1953 to see that—but these themes seemed to become more prominent, more overtly discussed, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
ASS-HAT MAGIC SPIDER
CHEATS
ORANGE
THE SURFER
REPAIR KIT
THE DISMANTLED INVENTION OF FATE
ANDA’S GAME
SUNDIVER
DAY
THE DUST ASSASSIN
THE STAR SURGEON’S APPRENTICE
AN HONEST DAY’S WORK
LOST CONTINENT
INCOMERS
POST-IRONIC STRESS SYNDROME
INFESTATION
PINOCCHIO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
The Starry Rift Page 46
