Arthur Sternbach also makes an appearance in my climbing story from 1983, "Green Mars."
"The Blind Geometer"
We first lived in Washington, DC, when Lisa was doing a summer internship for the EPA, in 1985. I was amazed by the thunderstorms that hit almost daily, storms far beyond any I had seen in California.
Right before moving to DC, I had decided that writing first-person from the point of view of a blind man could be my way to do an "alien story." Our Davis friend Ward Newmeyer introduced me to his friend Jim Gammon, who walked me around the UC Berkeley campus and told me a lot about the experience of being blind.
Carter Scholz taught me about the music Carlos listens to.
The story first appeared as a slim book. Gardner Dozois helped it a great deal when he edited it for its appearance in Asimov's. At that time I was experimenting with having the first and last words of stories be binary pairs that meant something to the story; thus "The Lucky Strike" starts with war and ends with peace, and The Memory of Whiteness starts with now and ends with forever. I had done the same in this story, starting with point and ending with infinity, but Gardner pointed out to me that while arranging this trick I had missed a much better last line located just a couple paragraphs earlier. We changed the ending, the story was much improved (thanks, Gardner!), and I stopped playing that first-and-last word game.
"Our Town"
I wrote this one in the autumn of 1985, as Lisa and I were taking the long way around in our move from Washington, DC, to Switzerland. The first half was written on a night train from Bangkok to Kosamui, the second half on a night train from Cairo to Luxor.
"Escape From Kathmandu"
When Lisa and I moved to Switzerland in the fall of 1985, we took the long way around, visiting Thailand, Nepal, Egypt, and Greece. The heart of the trip was our trek in Nepal. From the end of the road at Jiri to Everest Base camp and back, it was certainly one of the most beautiful months of our lives. Kathmandu was also beautiful, and it had a goofy cheerful quality I hoped to capture in a story. We had run into Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and their group in Namche Bazaar, and even while we were still in our room at the Hotel Star, I was thinking "that should be used."
"Remaking History"
Greg Benford asked me for a contribution to the series of alternative history anthologies he was editing, and I sent him this. It is one of five stories in this volume written in 1987. I guess that was my Year of the Short Story.
"The Translator"
Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber asked me for a story for their Universe anthology, and this was the result. Lisa and I were taking German classes, and we would often laugh as we consulted our yellow German-English dictionary and found it less than helpful. Some of the multiple definitions in this story were taken directly from that dictionary, and the rest were inspired by it.
Being in Zürich, I was reading Joyce's Ulysses for the first time, and during my runs visiting the statue of him at his grave on the hill above us (see my introduction to The Planet on the Table for more about that). I think that a little of the style and character of Joyce's Leopold Bloom seeped into my translator.
"Glacier"
Another one from 1987. I had recently done some hiking on glaciers, a new and powerful experience for me. This story mixed that experience with my Boston year of 1974–75, and the time in Davis we cared for the cat Stella. I was also reading the magazine Chinese Literature, which published translated contemporary Chinese short stories, often beautiful examples of socialist realism.
The song from Gilbert and Sullivan that the mom sings is "Sorry Her Lot (who loves too well)," and it is actually from H.M.S. Pinafore; but it was included in the Linda Ronstadt production of The Pirates of Penzance, so I was fooled about its origin. I've kept the mistake in this story because I want Pirates to be the music in the family's listening repertoire; so one must assume they too owned the Ronstadt recording.
While writing this one I listened to Paul Winter's album Sun Singer over and over, and I think it would serve very well as a soundtrack for the story—it sure did for me. I can still hear it, and still see the view from my desk out our apartment window, with its linden trees, stately old buildings, and the rooftops of Zürich. For me this story has all those things too.
"The Lunatics"
If I recall right, this one came after spotting the element "promethium" in a periodic table lying around a friend's kitchen. (We were hanging with chemists.) I had had no idea there was any such element, and it made me laugh.
It's also true that a South African student I had taught at UCSD named Thabo Moeti, and his stories, and the plays of Athol Fugard that he introduced me to, and my travels in Asia, and my time in DC, had all made me think about things in new ways. This story fits with "Down and Out in the Year 2000," "Our Town," and "A Transect," in a little strand of stories I thought of as my South Africa strand. All of them owed much to Thabo's appearance in my life.
As I was working on this story, Beth Meacham asked me to contribute to an anthology she was assembling as a memorial to Terry Carr, who had recently died. This one felt right for that purpose, and I dedicated it to his memory. Then I remembered that the jazz trumpeter described in the story was one Terry himself had taken Lisa and me to see, back in the early eighties—driving us all over Richmond, California, before finding the right little dive. After that it seemed even more appropriate. "Now the bucket's got a hole in it—"
"Zürich"
It happened just like this. How we loved those years.
From Washington, DC, I sent this story to our German teacher, Oskar Pfenninger, who had lived in Japan. When he wrote back he told me that in Japan and Korea, white is the color for grief.
"Vinland the Dream"
When I was a kid I loved the stories of the Vikings in North America, including the story of the Kensington Stone, which revealed that Vikings had made it all the way to Minnesota. When that find was demonstrated to be a hoax (the fact that all its rune lines were multiples of one inch was the real clincher for me), I was shocked. Then later, reading about the questionable nature of the famous Vinland map at Yale, I began to wonder: two parts of the story were hoaxes, and the remaining evidence consisted of the L'Anse aux Meadows site and three Icelandic sagas. So what if….
Around the time I wrote the story, Lisa and I stopped at the little stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, which has also been called a Viking artifact. It did look unusual.
"‘A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations'"
I drove around Scotland and the Orkneys by myself in 1987, starting the trip at the Clutes' flat in London, where I got the news that Terry Carr had died. I wrote the story in 1988, in Washington, DC, and I believe it was the last story I wrote before starting Red Mars. It would be about a decade before I got back to short fiction.
"Muir on Shasta"
This story is a companion piece to John Muir's own account of his Shasta climb, called "A Perilous Night on Mount Shasta," which is available in many collections of his work, including Steep Trails and The Wild Muir. Muir's Victorian-polite account of the crucial disagreement with his climbing partner made me laugh, and I thought it might be fun to portray what it must have really been like, while also using their adventure to make a brief homage to Muir. If you read the two pieces together you will see I have used a few phrases of his that were too good not to use; and for his visionary spirit voyage I took several images from his early journals, including the little house made of natural mountain materials. Muir's early writing, in many ways his best, can be found in To Yosemite and Beyond.
"Sexual Dimorphism"
This is from The Martians, written in Davis in 1998. Most of the stories in The Martians were written that year, joining two older stories, "Exploring Fossil Canyon" and "Green Mars." To that pair I added one more Roger and Eileen story, several about characters from the Mars trilogy, and then some like this one, about characters who weren't in the trilogy or the Roger and Eileen seq
uence. The thrust of my Mars books was mostly utopian, but even in utopia things can go wrong.
"Discovering Life"
Jane Johnson, my friend and editor at HarperCollins UK, asked me for a story for a private volume celebrating the fifth anniversary of her imprint Harper Voyager. I had visited JPL in Pasadena a few times in the previous years, and the recent claim by NASA scientists in Houston, that they had found signs of fossil bacteria in a Martian meteorite, had surprised everyone. The story was then included in the American paperback edition of The Martians, in 2000.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day this one came to pass. Seasonal appearances of methane on Mars seem to suggest life may be there.
"Prometheus Unbound At Last"
Henry Gee at Nature asked me for an 800-word story, to join his "last page of Nature" science fiction series, which ran weekly for over a year. It seemed to me that 800 words was awfully short, and I decided on the form of a publisher's reader report in order to cram in as much as possible. This one still makes me laugh, although it also contains my "prediction" for the twenty-first century that I think is most likely to come true—or hope is most likely. It's either that or big trouble.
"The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942"
Last fall I was running with my iPod, listening to the Berlin Philharmonic's March 1942 recording of Beethoven's Ninth, when it seemed to me that the timpanist was imitating the sound of bombers. The story came from that impression, and from what I learned when I researched the situation.
You can see the last five minutes of the performance described in this story on YouTube. It's a German newsreel clip, which turns Hitler's birthday concert into Nazi propaganda. Only the footage used in the newsreel survives, so I pretended the complete recording of the symphony from March 22–24 (the one I had been listening to on my run) was of April 19, for the sake of imagining the story. Surviving evidence suggests the two performances were quite similar.
That I was looking for a short story to write at this time, I owe to the encouragement of Jonathan Strahan, the inspiration of my Clarion students of 2009, and the example of my friend Karen Fowler. My thanks to them; and again, to all my readers.
—Kim Stanley Robinson
January 2010
First Publications:
"Venice Drowned," Universe 11, ed. Terry Carr, 1981.
"Ridge Running," The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1984.
"Before I Wake," Interzone #27, January 1989.
"Black Air," The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1983.
"The Lucky Strike," Universe 14, ed. Terry Carr, 1984.
"A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions," Author's Choice Monthly #20: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, 1990.
"Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars," The Martians, 1999.
"The Blind Geometer," Cheap Street Press, 1986.
"Our Town," Omni, November 1986.
"Escape from Kathmandu," Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1986.
"Remaking History," Other Edens II, ed. Christopher Evans & Robert Holdstock, 1988.
"The Translator," Universe 1, ed. Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, 1990.
"Glacier," Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1988.
"The Lunatics," Terry's Universe, ed. Beth Meacham, 1988.
"Zürich," The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1990.
"Vinland the Dream," Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, November 1991.
"‘A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations,'" Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1991.
"Muir on Shasta," Author's Choice Monthly #20: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, 1990.
"Sexual Dimorphism," The Martians, 1999.
"Discovering Life," Voyager 5: Collector's Edition, ed. 2000.
"Prometheus Unbound, At Last," Nature, August 11, 2005.
"The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942" is original to this volume.
Table of Contents
Venice Drowned
Ridge Running
Before I Wake
Black Air
The Lucky Strike
A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions
Arthur Sternbach Brings The Curveball To Mars
The Blind Geometer
Our Town
Escape From Kathmandu
Remaking History
The Translator
Glacier
The Lunatics
Zürich
Vinland the Dream
"A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations"
Muir on Shasta
Sexual Dimorphism
Discovering Life
Prometheus Unbound, At Last
The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942
Afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson
First Publications:
The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson Page 51
