The
Collected
Stories
of
Carol Emshwiller
vol. 1
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Emshwiller
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Contents
Foreword
Built For Pleasure
The Victim
This Thing Called Love
Love Me Again
The Piece Thing
Bingo And Bongo
Nightmare Call
Murray Is For Murder
The Coming
Hunting Machine
Hands
You’ll Feel Better…
Two-Step For Six Legs
Baby
Idol’s Eye
Pelt
Day At The Beach
Puritan Planet
But Soft What Light…
Chicken Icarus
Eohippus
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison
Krashaw
Lib
Animal
Methapyrilene Hydrochloride Sometimes Helps
White Dove
I Love You
The Queen of Sleep
Peninsula
Debut
The Institute
A Possible Episode In The Picaresque Adventures Of Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee
Woman Waiting
Yes, Virginia
Al
Strangers
The Childhood of the Human Hero*
Autobiography
Maybe Another Long March Across China 80,000 Strong
Joy in Our Cause
Biography of an Uncircumcised Man (Including Interview)
To the Association
Destinations, Premonitions and the Nature of Anxiety
Dog Is Dead
One Part Of The Self Is Always Tall And Dark
Escape Is No Accident
Thanne Longen Folk To Goen On Pilgrimages
Expecting Sunshine and Getting It
Omens
Abominable
The Start Of The End Of It All
Slowly Bumbling in the Void
Queen Kong
The Futility of Fixed Positions
Mental Health and Its Alternative
Verging on the Pertinent
There Is No God But Bog
Eclipse
The Circular Library of Stones
If Not Forever, When?
Vilcabamba
Fledged
The Promise Of Undying Love
What Every Woman Knows
Not Burning
Being Mysterious Strangers from Distant Shores
Clerestory
Living At The Center
Yukon
As If
Secrets of the Native Tongue
Moon Songs
Acceptance Speech
Looking Down
Peri
If The Word Was To The Wise
There Is No Evil Angel But Love
Draculalucard
Emissary
Mrs. Jones
Venus Rising
Modillion
After Shock
The Project
Foster Mother
Creature
Grandma
Notes On Stories
About The Author
Foreword
I’VE BEEN through several changes in my writing over the years. I suppose every writer has. What with all these years it would be odd if I hadn’t. These were all big changes, or at least they seemed so to me.
I’ve done five different ways of writing. Or learning periods.
At first I was trying to learn how to plot and form a story—trying to write like the stories I was reading. I felt as if I learned, one element at a time, little by little. It did take a long time even though I started selling right at the beginning, I wrote about a hundred stories that never sold, and these manuscripts are full of my writing teacher’s corrections.
All these early stories seem skimpy to me now, as if written by my “outer” mind. They don’t come from (as Damon Knight called it) “deep inside.” Damon Knight was a well-known science fiction author and the founder of SFWA science fiction writer’s group, and the Milford workshops. In Milford seventeen professional science fiction writers would get together for a week and critique each other. He also wrote a book on writing science fiction. He also started the Clarion workshops for students who wanted to write science fiction. These are two months of classes in the summer, each week taught by a different well known science fiction writer or editor. Damon had never gone to college but he was one of the most educated people I’ve ever met. And one of the funniest, too. I miss him.
And then my stories started to come from “deep inside.” (My second stage of writing.) I had sold ten or twelve stories before I sold “Baby” to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In criticizing that story Damon Knight told me that, in the place where Baby climbs to the top of the statue, I had finally hit my subconscious mind. The minute he told me that I realized he was right, though I hadn’t realized it until he said it. After that story, I did it often, though I never realized I had done it until after I’d done it. So almost everything written before that didn’t come from “deep inside”… according to Damon Knight, though as I look back I’m sure my story “Pelt” did, too. I was starting to get the point. I’ve seen that with my students, too. All of a sudden their stories come from a different place. Sometimes writers whose stories are stiff and awkward suddenly start flying. They’re using a different part of their brain. Once one of my students that everybody in the class thought would never be able to write well suddenly “got the point.” and surprised everybody. It’s a mysterious thing. I don’t understand it myself… a bad writer can suddenly become a good one. They’ve hit a different place in their brains.
Even so, I think that part in “Baby” is overdone. I wrote:
He thought, I have one eye in the center and it flickers red. He could feel his eyes merging slowly to just above his nose. My arms are interchangeably, (what did I mean by that?) and if I jump I will land on rubber feet and my knees will spring, one section up into the other, and I won’t be hurt…. I am changed.
And he had jumped.
I wouldn’t write that way now!
Then, my third stage, I learned how not to plot and yet still have a structure—as in my husband’s Structuring Strategies class. He made movies of dance, with rhythms and recurring patterns, without stories or plots. But, he insisted there be a unifying form of some kind. We influenced each other a lot in those days. Many times we stayed up late into the night talking about what was good “art.”
Not plotting was as hard for me to learn as plotting had been. I had to jettison plot, one plot element at a time, just as I had learned to plot one element at a time. I was substituting patterns instead of plot. I’ve never cared f
or writing that doesn’t have some sort of a strong structure. This was the late 1960’s when the “New Wave” got to be popular in science fiction.
It was during the so called “New Wave” that I began always using first person and present tense. I’m still doing that. I’m not sure why I did this though I do remember in the class I took with the poet Kenneth Koch, he said: “That’s how we write these days.” There was something in the air. I was already doing it, though, long before that class. (I guess I was breathing that air.) I was reading a lot of so called avant-garde writing. That’s what we all did. I also think I use first person because it’s harder. (Also, after drawing and painting all my life and playing the fiddle a lot of my life, I like writing best because it’s the hardest art. There are more balls to keep in the air at a time.)
My fourth stage came after my husband died. Then my writing changed completely and I wrote for an entirely different reason. I needed a family to live with so I wrote my westerns, Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill. My writing became more expansive and relaxed. And with much more characterization. It was people that I needed. The only purpose of that writing was to live with these people as I mourned my husband and lived alone. My children were all grown and had moved away. I didn’t go anywhere at all while I wrote these books. Those characters were more real to me than any of my friends.
Now, a fifth stage and I guess my last, I’m back to plotting and story, though I never plot ahead of time. When I started learning to plot, I usually had an ending in mind though often I didn’t reach the ending I was aiming for. But now I start with nothing. I find the plot as I go along, one piece at a time. I often write myself into a hole and then have to solve the story problems to get out of it. I think it makes my plots more complicated than if I’d tried to plan them out ahead of time. This isn’t conscious anymore. Plotting as I go along has become automatic to me.
I was happy to learn that even the mystery writer Tony Hillerman said he wrote that way, too. I never thought a mystery writer would be able to do that. I thought they’d have to plan ahead.
My science fiction is a bit less expansive than in my two westerns, but still more expansive than the way I wrote in the beginning. Doing those westerns helped my writing get richer and more nuanced. More “literary” I suppose you’d call it, though I think genre writing is different from literary writing. I’m stuck in it now. I’d have a hard time going back to literary writing.
One thing I like best about science fiction, though I can’t always do it, is that you can write a story that makes comments on our world here and now. I think the best science fiction does that—gives us a new view on what our world is like right now. Often from an alien point of view.
The best thing ever said about my writing was said by Jim Gunn. He said my stories “estranged the everyday.” I wish I could do that all the time.
I started writing science fiction in the first place because I met my husband’s friends who were science fiction writers. Unlike in my college literature classes, they spoke of writing as if a normal human being could do it… maybe even me. They spoke of technical problems and solutions. (By the way, I flunked Freshman English in college and had to take it over again and almost flunked it again. Partly because I can’t spell.)
I owe a lot to Damon Knight, both for my way of teaching and writing. Though I also don’t know anybody who has read as many books on writing as I have. I was so passionate about it I didn’t care if a book was good or bad, as long as it was about how to write I read it.
I left science fiction for a while. You can see with the stories published around 1980 to 1990. They were still “magic realism,” but aimed at non science fiction magazines. Stories such as “Yukon” and “Secrets of the Native Tongue”. Still many of them were selling to science fiction magazines.
I always liked writing from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. I particularly like the voice of an innocent person. Childlike. Somebody who was clearly wrong. Ignorant. So you have to try to tell the real story from the pov of somebody who doesn’t understand it. (That’s also a good way to make comments on our world here—seeing the world with innocence.)
I get into trouble all the time with this. I characterize my first person characters by their thoughts. People think my character’s ideas are mine. That happened with the beginning of “Boys” where the first ideas are the colonel’s. “He” said:
Boys are so foolhardy, impetuous, reckless, rash. They’ll lead the way into smoke and fire and battle. I’ve seen one of my own sons, aged twelve, standing at the top of the cliff shouting, daring the enemy.
I used his thoughts to characterize him, but everybody took them as mine. I’m so used to seeing the world from the point of view of my characters, (and trying to imply the truth behind what they say), I hardly know what my own pov is sometimes.
Writing while raising three kids was hard. For a while I was “famous” among science fiction people for putting my desk in a playpen and letting the kids have the whole room. They couldn’t reach my papers that way. I opened up the playpen and hooked it up in a corner of the room so that I had a lot more space than just a playpen’s worth.
You won’t find any similes or metaphors in my stories except maybe in my early work, though the whole story might be a metaphor.
I hope I don’t still write anything like my first stage. Second stage? I never think of that coming-from-deep-inside stage anymore though I hope I do hit “deep inside” now and then. I hope there’s a little bit of the avant-garde third stage left in what I do, some of that courage to go out on a limb, and to experiment, but not too much because I want to be mostly a science fiction writer. As to the last two stages, I guess they’re still there.
I’ve never known quite what to call my writing. When I’m boasting I call it Magic Realism… and some of it is…. It’s often fantasy though lots of it is actually science fiction.
— Carol Emshwiller
New York City
Built For Pleasure
SHE HAD long reddish hair. Her eyes were such a dark blue they could be taken for brown, if you preferred brown eyes. Her lips were full, firm and sensuous. Her breasts the same. There was not a trace of hair on her legs and her long red fingernails never broke. She was equipped with built-in high heels and never-fail atomic motor.
She stood on the front step of the Carter home, a large gray house in a suburban residential area. She pressed the doorbell and subdued tinkling chimes sounded inside. A moment later the door was opened by a tall, middle aged man.
“Mr. Carter?” the girl asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m Sandra from the Amberton Perfect Mate Company.”
“Ah, Sandra. I didn’t expect you so soon.”
Robert Carter’s roving eye took her in from head to toe. Then he spread his arms out to her, and without hesitation she walked confidently into their embrace. Soft lips met his. Firm, foam rubber breasts were flattened to his chest. “Fireproof” spun glass hair brushed his cheek. Minutes later they stepped back and surveyed each other.
“This is it!” Robert whispered breathlessly and led her inside.
Margo, his last wife, had become insufferable. What a bore she had been these last weeks! He’d stood it as long as he could. Yesterday he had finally turned her back to Amberton’s and ordered a new one. Here she was, and what a beauty!
Life began to look pleasant again for Robert. He stayed away from the office a good deal even though work was piling up.
They went to the opera every night for a while. Sandra loved it as much as he did, and she could sing arias, the next morning, from the opera of the night before. Her voice was as beautiful a contralto as it was a soprano.
Then they went to a play. Sandra liked this, too, and could repeat some of the lines afterwards. They went to the ballet, and Sandra could even dance some of the dances with as much, or more, grace than the human dancers themselves. This was much more than Margot had been able to do. Amberton’s was getti
ng better all the time.
But after the first month or so Sandra began to seem more and more like Margot. The way she said “I’m sorry, Robert” and stopped singing at breakfast when he wanted to hear the news. The way she said “Of course, Robert” when he asked her if she enjoyed the evening. The way she said “Yes, Robert” and “No, Robert” with the sameness his other Amberton company wives had said them. The body was different, but, despite its extra talents, the mind was the same.
By the third month he was shouting at her, and she was still calmly saying “yes, Robert” and “no, Robert.” And by the fourth month he had turned her in, but not for a new model.
“This time I’ll get a real woman,” Robert decided.
Getting one wasn’t as hard as he expected in a world where women were either busy bearing children in the insemination clinics, or had handsome plastic husbands themselves. As a matter of fact, he found one in the same situation he was…fed up with synthetics.
Arrangements were easily made by telephone and four days later Eva appeared at his door. Not as promptly as an Amberton wife, and with much more luggage.
He was a bit shocked when he saw her, although a moment later he realized that expecting perfection was a habit now that he had met a succession of Amberton wives at his door step in the same situation. She wasn’t what he’d expected, though. She was really too tall for him. In heels her eyes were level with his. She was as slim and hard bodied as he was, and her hips were altogether too narrow.
Still this was a real human being and called for different values and a different approach. The novelty of it excited him the more he considered it.
“This is it!” he whispered to himself as he led her inside.
They sat down on the square foam couch in his living room. There was an awkward, embarrassing silence.
“This is really an unorthodox thing we’re doing,” Robert said at last. “I don’t know what to say. I suppose we both feel the same about the robots.”
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