And the star went before them.
AFTERWORD
Two years ago I had the privilege of speaking at the Jack Williamson Lectureship Weekend in Portales, New Mexico. It gave me the opportunity not only to spend time with Jack, but also to do the “onsite research” for this story, which consisted of a delightful day at the ranch with Jack’s family, highlighted by wonderful conversation and the best asparagus (and the most) I have ever eaten in my life. When I was asked to do a story for this collection, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.
Writing the story also gave me the chance to reread all of Jack’s early stories. A lot of the science fiction written in the thirties and forties dates badly (and not just because of the heat rays and vacuum tubes) and has only historical interest. But Jack’s stuff is as fresh as it was the day it was written. “Deadstar Station,” “Jamboree,” and, of course, “Nonstop to Mars,” would sell in a flash to Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction today.
Mostly though, “Nonstop to Portales” let me write about Jack, who is my flat-out favorite person in the field. He is a man of extraordinary talent and consummate humility, of penetrating intelligence and great kindness, a scholar and a gentleman. We are unbelievably lucky to have him as one of the forefathers of the field.
—Connie Willis, 1996
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Also By Connie Willis
Novels
Lincoln’s Dream (1987)
The Doomsday Book (1992)
Uncharted Territory (1994)
Remake (1994)
Bellwether (1996)
To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997)
Passage (2001)
With Cynthia Felice
Water Witch (1982)
Light Raid (1989)
Promised Land (1997)
Collections
Fire Watch (1985)
Impossible Things (1993)
Even the Queen: And Other Short Stories (1998)
The Miracle of Christmas (1999)
The Winds of Marble Arch: And Other Stories (2007)
Connie Willis (1945 – )
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1945. Having earned a BA in English and elementary education from the University of North Colorado, she spent a brief stint in the late 1960s working as a teacher, until she left to raise her first child. During this period she began writing SF, with her first publication, ‘The Secret of Santa Titicaca’, appearing in Worlds of Fantasy in 1971. Willis is a highly decorated author and has won, among other accolades, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards for work of all lengths: short stories, novellas, novelettes and novels alike. She was recently named an SFWA Grand Master. Willis currently lives in Greeley, Colorado with her family.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Connie Willis 2007
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ISBN 978 0 575 12039 6
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1 For a full account, see H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Oxford University Press, 1898.
2 The details of the discovery are recounted in Desperation and Discovery: The Unusual Number of Lost Manuscripts Located by Doctoral Candidates, by J. Marple, Reading Railway Press, 1993.
3 Actually a poem and a poem fragment consisting of a four-line stanza and a single word fragment * from the middle of the second stanza.
* Or word. See later on in this paper.
4 While I was working on my dissertation.
5 Dr. Banks’s assertion that “the paper was manufactured in 1990 and the ink was from a Flair tip pen,” is merely airy speculation.
* See “Carbon Dating Doesn’t Prove Anything,” by Jeremiah Habakkuk, in Creation Science for Fun and Profit, Golden Slippers Press, 1974.
6 The pathetic nature of her handwriting is also addressed in Impetus to Reform: Emily Dickinson’s Effect on the Palmer Method, and in “Depth, Dolts, and Teeth: An Alternate Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Death Poems,” in which it is argued that Number 712 actually begins, “Because I could not stoop for darts,” and recounts an arthritic evening at the local pub.
7 Dickinson is not known to have smoked, except during her Late or Downright Peculiar Period.
8 Of course, neither does, “How pomp surpassing ermine.” Or, “A dew sufficed itself.”
9 Or possibly “ciee.” Or “vole.”
10 Unlikely, considering her Calvinist upbringing.
11 Or the Australian city, Ulladulla. Dickinson’s poems are full of references to Australia. W. G. Mathilda has theorized from this that “the great love of Dickinson’s life was neither Higginson nor Judge Lord, but Mel Gibson.” See Emily Dickinson: The Billabong Connection, by C. Dundee, Outback Press, 1985.
12 See Rod McKuen.
13 Where Jules Verne was working on his doctorate.
14 The notes contained charming, often enigmatic sentiments such as, “Which shall it be—Geraniums or Tulips?” and “Go away—and Shut the door When—you Leave.”
15 See Halfwits and Imbeciles: Poetic Evidence of Emily Dickinson’s Opinion of Her Neighbors.
16 Virtually everyone in Amherst kept a diary, containing entries such as “Always knew she’d turn out to be a great poet,” and “Full moon last night. Caught a glimpse of her out in her garden planting peas. Completely deranged.”
17 The inability of people to tell Orson Welles and H. G. Wells apart lends credence to Dickinson’s opinion of humanity. (See footnote 15.)
18 Not the one at the beginning of the story, which everybody knows about, the one that practically landed on him in the middle of the book which everybody missed because they’d already turned off the radio and were out running up and down the streets screaming, “The end is here! The Martians are coming!”
* Thus proving Emily was right in her assessment of the populace.
19 See “Sound, Fury, and Frogs: Emily Dickinson’s Seminal Influence on William Faulkner,” by W. Snopes, Yoknapatawpha Press, 1955.
20 She was, of course, already dead, which meant the damage they could inflict was probably minimal.
21 Which she considered a considerable threat. “If the butcher boy should come now, I would jump into the flour barrel,”
* If she was in the habit of doing this, it may account for her always appearing in white.
22 Particularly nonlinear differential equations.
23 See “Lord Byron’s Don Juan: The Mastiff as Muse” by C. Harold.
24 He didn’t like people either. See “Mending Wall,
” The Complete Works, Random House. Frost preferred barbed wire fences with spikes on top to walls.
25 See “Semiotic Subterfuge in Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’: A Dialectic Approach,” by N. Compos Mentis, Postmodern Press, 1984.
26 Sort of.
27 The word is either “read” or “heard” or possibly “pacemaker.”
28 Also pleats, tucks, rucking, flounces, frills, ruffles, and passementerie.
* See “Pockets as Political Statement: The Role of Clothing in Early Victorian Feminism,” by E. and C. Pankhurst, Angry Women’s Press, 1978.
29 A good writer is never without pencil and paper.
* Or laptop.
30 See “Posthumous Poems” in Literary Theories that Don’t Hold Water, by H. Houdini.
31 Two years later, no longer quite so grief-stricken and thinking of all that lovely money, he dug her up and got them back.
* I told you poets behaved badly.
32 Try it. No, really. “Be-e-e-e-cause I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for mee-e.” See?
* Not all of Dickinson’s poems can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
** Numbers 2, 18, and 1411 can be sung to “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” Could her choice of tunes be a coded reference to the unfortunate Martian landing in Texas? See “Night of the Cooters,” by Howard Waldrop.
33 Normal to Ong, Nebraska.
34 See Freud.
35 Sort of.
36 The near-rhyme theory also explains why Dickinson responded with such fierceness when Thomas Wentworth Higginson changed “pearl” to “jewel.” She knew, as he could not, that the fate of the world might someday rest on her inability to rhyme.
37 For an intriguing possibility, see “The Literary Litterbug: Emily Dickinson’s Note-Dropping as a Response to Thoreau’s Environmentalism,” P. Walden, Transcendentalist Review, 1990.
38 Number 187’s “awful rivet” is clearly a reference to the Martian cylinder. Number 258’s “There’s a certain slant of light” echoes Wells’s “blinding glare of green light,” and its “affliction/Sent us of the air” obviously refers to the landing. Such allusions indicate that as many as fifty-five *of the poems were written at a later date than originally supposed, and that the entire chronology and numbering system of the poems needs to be considered.
* Significantly enough, the age Emily Dickinson was when she died.
39 A holiday Dickinson did not celebrate because of its social nature, although she was spotted in 1881 lighting a cherry bomb on Mabel Dodd’s porch and running away.
* Which may be why the Martian landing attracted so little attention. The Amherstodes may have assumed it was Em up to her old tricks again.
40 There is compelling evidence that the Martians, thwarted in New England, went to Long Island. This theory will be the subject of my next paper, *“The Green Light at the End of Daisy’s Dock: Evidence of Martian Invasion in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”
* I’m up for tenure.
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories Page 82
