Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  I never knew any, though. All of the kids I knew who got chemistry sets for Christmas were more interested in trying to make stuff explode. Or turn weird colors. Or bubble and smoke. “Let’s see what will happen if we mix this with that,” we would say, as we dreamed of finding the secret formula that would turn us into a superhero, or at least Mr. Hyde. Maybe our parents thought the chemistry sets would set us on the path to becoming Jonas Salk or Wernher von Braun, but we were more interested in becoming one of the great Victors … von Frankenstein or von Doom.

  Most of the time when we mixed this with that, all we made was a mess. That was probably a good thing. If we had ever actually found a formula that turned weird colors and bubbled and smoked, we might have tried to drink it … or at the very least, see if our little sister could be convinced to drink it.

  My chemistry set soon ended up at the back of my closet, gathering dust behind my collection of TV Guides, but my passion for mixing this with that remained as I grew older, and found expression in my fiction. Modern publishing loves to sort the tales we tell into categories, producing racks of books that resemble the racks of little bottles in the chemistry set, with neat little labels that read: MYSTERY. ROMANCE. WESTERN. HISTORICAL. SF. JUVENILE.

  Pfui, I say. Let’s mix this with that and see what happens. Let’s cross some genre lines and blur some boundaries, make some stories that are both and neither. Some of the time we’ll make a mess, sure … but once in a while, if we do it right, we may stumble on a combination that explodes!

  With that as my philosophy, it’s no wonder that I’ve produced a number of odd hybrids over the years. Fevre Dream is one such. Although most often categorized as horror, it is as much a steamboat novel as a vampire novel. The Armageddon Rag is even more difficult to classify; fantasy, horror, murder mystery, rock ’n’ roll novel, political novel, ’60s novel. It’s got Froggy the Gremlin too. Even my fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is a hybrid of sorts, inspired as much by the historical fiction of Thomas B. Costain and Nigel Tranter as the fantasy of Tolkien, Howard, and Fritz Leiber.

  The two genres that I’ve mixed most often, though, are horror and science fiction.

  I was doing it as early as my second sale. Despite its SF setting, “The Exit to San Breta” is a ghost story at heart … though admittedly not a very frightening one. My first two corpse handler tales, “Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg” and “Override,” were further fumbling attempts at the same sort of cross-pollination, offering as they did a science fictional take on an old friend from the world of horror, the zombie. I was going for a horrific feel in “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels” as well, and (much more successfully) in a later, stronger work, my novella “In the House of the Worm.”

  Some critics have argued that horror and science fiction are actually antithetical to each other. They can make a plausible case, certainly, especially in the case of Lovecraftian horror. SF assumes that the universe, however mysterious or frightening it may seem to us, is ultimately knowable, while Lovecraft suggests that even a glimpse of the true nature of reality would be enough to drive men mad. You cannot get much further from the Campbellian view of the cosmos as that. In Billion Year Spree, his insightful study of the history of science fiction, Brian W. Aldiss puts John W. Campbell at the genre’s “thinking pole” and H. P. Lovecraft all the way over at the “dreaming pole,” on the opposite end of the literary universe.

  And yet both men wrote stories that can fairly be described as SF/ horror hybrids. There are, in fact, some startling similarities between HPL’s “At the Mountains of Madness” and JWC’s “Who Goes There?” Both are effective horror stories, but both work as science fiction too. And “Who Goes There?” is probably the best thing Campbell ever wrote, while “At the Mountains of Madness” must surely rank in Lovecraft’s top five. That’s hybrid vigor.

  A few of my own hybrids and horrors follow.

  The oldest story here, “Meathouse Man,” was the third of my corpse handler stories, and turned out to be the last of the series. The horror is sexual and psychological, rather than visceral, but this is an SF/horror hybrid all the same. Easily the darkest thing that I have ever written (and I’ve produced some pretty dark stuff), “Meathouse Man” was supposed to be my story for The Last Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions had a tremendous impact on me, as they did on most readers of my generation. When I met Harlan for the first time in the corridors of the 1972 Lunacon in New York City, virtually the first thing I asked him was whether I might send him a story for TLDV. He told me no; the anthology was closed.

  A year later, however, it opened up again … at least for me. By that time, I had gotten to know Harlan better, through our mutual friend Lisa Tuttle, and I’d published more stories as well, which may have helped convince him that I was worthy of inclusion in what was, after all, going to be a monumental book, the anthology to end anthologies. Whatever made him change his mind, change it he did; in 1973, he invited me to send him a story. I was thrilled … and nervous as hell. TLDV would have a lot of heavy hitters in it. Could I measure up? Could I possibly be dangerous enough?

  I struggled with the story for several months, finally mailed it off to Harlan in early 1974. “Meathouse Man” was the title, but otherwise it shared only some background and character names with the “Meathouse Man” that follows. It was much shorter, about a third the length of the present story, and much more superficial. I was trying my damnedest to be dangerous, but in that first version, “Meathouse Man” remained no more than an intellectual exercise.

  Harlan returned my manuscript on March 30, 1974, with a letter of rejection that began, “Aside from shirking all responsibility to the material that forms the core, it’s a nice story.” After which he eviscerated me, while challenging me to tear the guts out of the story and rewrite the whole thing from page one. I cursed and fumed and kicked the wall, but I could not quarrel with a single thing he said. So I sat down and ripped the guts out of the story and rewrote the whole thing from page one, and this time I opened a vein as well, and let the blood drip down right onto the paper. While 1973 and 1974 were great years for me professionally, they were by no means happy years. My career was going wonderfully; my life, not so much so. I was wounded, and in a lot of pain. I put it all into “Meathouse Man,” and sent the story back to Harlan.

  He still didn’t like it. This time he was much gentler with me, but a gentle pass is still a pass.

  Afterward I considered simply abandoning “Meathouse Man.” Even now, almost thirty years later, I find it painful to reread. But in the end, I had put too much work into the story to foresake it, so I sent it out to other markets, and ended up selling it to Damon Knight for Orbit, the only time I ever managed to crack that prestigious anthology series. It appeared in 1976, in Orbit 18.

  “Remembering Melody,” some three years later, was my first contemporary horror story. Lisa Tuttle gets the blame for this one. When we were starting work on “The Fall” in 1979, I flew down to Austin for a few weeks to consult with her in person, and get the novella started. We took turns at her typewriter. While she was pounding on the keys I would sit around reading carbons of her latest stories. Lisa was turning out a lot of contemporary horror by then, some wonderfully creepy tales that gave me the urge to try something along those lines myself.

  “Remembering Melody” was the story that resulted. My agent tried (and failed) to place it with some of the big, high-paying men’s slicks, but Twilight Zone magazine was glad to snap it up, and it appeared in the April 1981 issue.

  Hollywood has had a love affair with horror fiction that goes back as far as Murnau’s Nosferatu in the days of silent film, so it should come as no surprise that three of the six stories in this section have had film or television versions. “Remembering Melody” was not only the first of my works to go before a camera, it remains the only one to be filmed twice—first as a short student film (full of short student a
ctors), then later as an episode of the HBO anthology series The Hitchhiker.

  If you know my work at all, I suspect you’ve heard of “Sandkings.” Until A Song of Ice and Fire, it was the story that I was best known for, far and away the most popular thing I ever did.

  “Sandkings” was the third of the three stories I wrote during that Christmas break in the winter of 1978-79. The inspiration for it came from a guy I knew in college, who hosted Creature Features parties every Saturday. He kept a tank of piranha, and in between the first and the second creature feature, he would sometimes throw a goldfish into the tank, for the amusement of his guests.

  “Sandkings” was also intended to be the first of a series. The strange little shop on the back alley where queer, dangerous items can be bought had long been a familiar trope of fantasy. I thought it might be fun to do a science fiction version. My “strange little shop” was actually going to be a franchise, with branches scattered over light-years, on many different planets. Its mysterious proprietors, Wo & Shade, would figure in each story, but the protagonists would be the customers, like Simon Kress. (Yes, I did begin a second Wo & Shade story, set on ai-Emerel, a world much mentioned in my old future history, but never seen. It was called “Protection” and I wrote 18 pages of it before putting it aside, for reasons that I no longer recall.) If you had asked me back in January 1979 about the three stories I’d just finished, I would have told you that “The Ice Dragon” was going to knock people’s socks off. I ranked it right up there with the best work I’d ever done. I felt “The Way of Cross and Dragon” was damned good too, might even win some awards. And “Sandkings”? Not bad at all. Not near as strong as the other two, mind you, but hey … no one hits a home run every time.

  I have never been so wrong about a story. “Sandkings” sold to Omni, the best-paying market in the field, and became the most popular story they ever published. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula in its year, the only one of my stories ever to accomplish that double. It has been reprinted and anthologized so many times that I’ve lost count, and has earned me more money than two of my novels and most of my TV scripts and screenplays. It was adapted as a graphic novel by DC Comics, and someday soon may be a computer game as well. Hollywood producers flocked to it, and I sold half a dozen options and saw half a dozen different screenplays and treatments before the story was finally filmed for television as the two-hour premiere episode of the new Outer Limits, adapted by my friend Melinda M. Snodgrass.

  Is it the best thing I ever wrote? You be the judge.

  The success of “Sandkings” inspired me to try more SF/horror hybrids, most notably with “Nightflyers,” my haunted starship story.

  I’d put ghosts in a futuristic setting way back as early as “The Exit to San Breta,” but those were actual spirits of the dead. In “Nightflyers” I wanted to see if I could provide a legitimate sfnal explanation for the hauntings.

  The original version of “Nightflyers,” published in Analog with a nice Paul Lehr cover, weighed in at 23,000 words … but even at that length, I felt it was severely compressed, especially in the handling of its secondary characters. (They did not even have names, only job titles.) When Jim Frenkel of Dell Books offered to buy an expanded version of the novella for his new Binary Star series, an attempt to revive the old Ace Doubles concept, I leapt at the opportunity. It is the Binary Star version you’ll find here.

  “Nightflyers” won the Locus Poll as the Best Novella of 1980, but lost the Hugo to Gordon R. Dickson’s “Lost Dorsai” at Denvention. It was soon optioned by Hollywood, and became the first of my works to be made into a feature film. Nightflyers starred Catherine Mary Stewart and Michael Praed, and was so terrific that the director took his name off the film. Large hunks of my story are still recognizable in the movie, although for some inexplicable reason the single scariest sequence in the novella was dropped.

  “The Monkey Treatment” and “The Pear-Shaped Man” both date to my Gerold Kersh period. Kersh was a major writer of the ’40s and ’50s, the author of some excellent mainstream novels like Night and the City as well as a plethora of bizarre, disturbing, delightful short stories, collected in On an Odd Note, Nightshades and Damnations, and Men Without Bones. Because he tended to publish his short fiction in places like Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post rather than Weird Tales or Fantastic Stories, he was little known to fantasy readers even in his own time, and today he seems utterly forgotten. That’s a great shame, as Kersh was a unique voice, a brilliant writer with a gift for taking his readers to some odd corners of the world, where strange, disturbing things are wont to happen. Some small press really needs to gather all of Kersh’s weird fiction together in a book as large as this one, and put him back in print for a new generation of readers.

  “The Monkey Treatment,” the older of the two stories, was easy to write but hard as hell to sell. It seemed to me to be the sort of story that would appeal to a more general readership, so I set out to try and place it with one of the large slicks, Playboy or Penthouse or Omni. Frustration followed. The story elicited admiring comments everywhere it went, but no one seemed to feel it “right for us.” Too strange, they said. Too disturbing. “Boy, is it repulsive,” Ellen Datlow of Omni wrote me, in the same letter where she said how much she wished that she could buy the story.

  I would have tried Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post next, but they were both long defunct by 1981, so in the end I fell back on my usual genre markets, and sold the story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction. Strange and repulsive or not, it was nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo, losing both.

  “The Pear-Shaped Man” had an easier time of it, perhaps because “The Monkey Treatment” had primed the pump. Ellen Datlow had only been an assistant editor at Omni when Robert Sheckley returned “The Monkey Treatment,” but she had moved up to fiction editor by the time I wrote “The Pear-Shaped Man,” and she took it straightaway. It appeared in Omni in 1987, and won one of the first Bram Stoker Awards, given by the newly-formed Horror Writers of America (HWA) for the best horror of the year.

  The founding of the HWA (originally it was going to be called HOWL, for Horror and Occult Writers League, a much cooler name that got howled down by members desperate for respectability) coincided with the great horror boom of the ’80s. Subsequently horror has suffered an even greater bust, a victim of its own excess. Today there are those in publishing who will tell you that horror is dead (“and deservedly so,” others will add).

  As a commercial publishing genre? Yes, horror is dead.

  But monster stories will never die, so long as we remember what it’s like to be afraid.

  In 1986, I edited the horror anthology Night Visions 3 for Dark Harvest. In my introduction, I wrote, “Those who claim that we read horror stories for the same reasons we ride rollercoasters are missing the point. At the best of times we come away from a rollercoaster with a simple adrenalin high, and that’s not what fiction is about. Like a rollercoaster, a really bad horror story can perhaps make us sick, but that’s as far as the comparison extends. We go to fiction for things beyond those to be found in amusement parks.

  “A good horror story will frighten us, yes. It will keep us awake at night, it will make our flesh crawl, it will creep into our dreams and give new meaning to the darkness. Fear, terror, horror; call it what you will, it drinks from all those cups. But please, don’t confuse the feelings with simple vertigo. The great stories, the ones that linger in our memories and change our lives, are never really about the things that they’re about.

  “Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy’s genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with its
elf. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.

  “But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”

  That was almost twenty years ago, but I stand by every word.

  MEATHOUSE MAN

  I

  IN THE MEATHOUSE

  They came straight from the ore-fields that first time, Trager with the others, the older boys, the almost-men who worked their corpses next to his. Cox was the oldest of the group, and he’d been around the most, and he said that Trager had to come even if he didn’t want to. Then one of the others laughed and said that Trager wouldn’t even know what to do, but Cox the kind-of leader shoved him until he was quiet. And when payday came, Trager trailed the rest to the meathouse, scared but somehow eager, and he paid his money to a man downstairs and got a room key.

  He came into the dim room trembling, nervous. The others had gone to other rooms, had left him alone with her (no, it, not her but it, he reminded himself, and promptly forgot again). In a shabby gray cubicle with a single smoky light.