by Geoff Ryman
It is an odd feeling to see it published now, like watching a handicapped child grow up to become suddenly independent.
There is no such sensation with The Unconquered Country. It was bedecked with awards, and wrote itself after years of obsession with the subject. Bedecked with awards it might have been, and a Nebula nomination as well, but it fell out of print in America. O Happy Day! was about prurience and its role in politics, in entertainment, in life. Well, write about what you know. It was also about what I had seen in nascent sexual politics, at least in Britain. I too had been given political kisses. It was published in the first (!) Interzone anthology. Fan was a story I shut away out of a kind of rage—against what I am not too sure. I was angry with it, and was determined, particularly after a Writer’s Block session, to let it lie. The writers in the group were concerned about this. Their expressed concern (especially Lisa Tuttle’s and Bobbie Lamming’s) was enough to be filed alongside the story in the same drawer. Someone had liked it, and wanted to see it live. Again, rereading it, I was surprised to find how much I liked it too.
How does the quotation go? The things that hurt me can scarcely be distinguished from the things that helped me. It is a shaggy, unreliable activity writing. There is no greater pleasure, as long as you have faith that someone, somewhere will see what you mean and forgive the things you don’t.
