by Pratt, Tim
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Bottom Feeding
I always liked those salmon of wisdom stories, but I grew up in the South, where the local fish of legend and story is the catfish (mudcats, channel cats, etc.). I thought how neat it would be to write a salmon of wisdom story wrapped in Southern trappings, sort of the way Howard Waldrop recast the story of Hercules as a Southern epic in A Dozen Tough Jobs. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to feel that catfish were fundamentally different from salmon—being bottom-feeders with bellies full of garbage, eating indiscriminately. So the story became something far stranger—and, I hope, far better—than a simple retelling of an Irish legend in a Georgia setting.
Like many of my stories, this one is about grief, and love, and how one can be the antidote for the other.
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The Tyrant in Love
I think “The Tyrant in Love” is the oldest story in this collection. I wrote it in college, probably in 1997 or 1998, though it’s been revised since then, to clean up the clunky language. I won’t comment on the story, except to say that, shortly after it was written, I read it aloud to a woman who admired my writing, and whom I hoped to seduce. In retrospect, that was probably one of my stupider ideas.
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Impossible Dreams
“Impossible Dreams” is my long-talked-about alternate-universe-video-store story. I’ve been gathering material for this for years. It’s light, and certainly a little silly, but it’s also sweet, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be. Sweet love stories are underrated. Romance makes me happy, and so do movies, and so does movie trivia, and all those things are present here. My thanks go to my friend Brian Auton for first telling me about much of the movie trivia I used here, and to the generous readers of my online journal, who contributed other tidbits. Most of the alternate-universe movies described are at least remotely plausible; at the very least they’re firmly rooted in specious Hollywood apocrypha.
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Lachrymose and the Golden Egg
“Lachrymose and the Golden Egg” is another romance, almost a romantic comedy, except for the whole dying-of-a-terminal-illness thing. It is, despite the obvious fantasy trappings, arguably a pure science fiction story, which makes it a rarity for me. I wrote it because I wanted to do a Virtual Reality story without the goggles-and-gloves, sensory-deprivation-tank trappings of most VR stories, and because opium dreams are at least as interesting as immersive video games, and definitely have better graphics.
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Dream Engine
I never, ever, ever start a story with nothing in mind but a title. Except this one time. I’d wanted to write something called “Dream Engine” for years (and I still expect to someday write a story called “Meme Engine”), but never found the story that belonged to the title. I finally put that title, and the weird steampunk imagery it conjured, together with an old idea about a man who becomes a murderer in his dreams. I’d also been thinking a lot about the structure of the Sherlock Holmes stories and similar tales, where the narrator is not the obvious protagonist of the story (Watson tells the stories, but Holmes is the hero)—it’s an odd structure, with both advantages and disadvantages, but at its best, it can serve to illuminate the character of both the narrator and his subject. Then, somehow, in one of those occasional gifts from the gods of story, I started scribbling, and out came Wisp’s voice, and his opening complaint about the city where he lives, at the center of all universes, and about his unreasonable partner/prisoner/whatever, Howlaa Moor. This story is dear to me, and it was a pleasure to write from start to finish, from setting to character to plot. The hardest thing about the story was keeping the pronouns straight when Howlaa constantly switched genders, so I finally decided to go with gender-neutral pronouns, which adds a nice touch of up-front weirdness to the tale. I think I’ll return to the city of royal orphans and their voracious snatch-engines another time. Wisp has other stories to tell about Howlaa. And there’s even a short novel about them, called The Nex, that I hope to publish one of these days in some form or another.
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Publication details:
Hart & Boot & Other Stories © 2007 by Tim Pratt
Cover art by Richard Marchand
Cover and design by Claudia Noble
“Hart and Boot” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Polyphony 4.
“Life in Stone” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Lenox Avenue.
“Cup and Table” © 2006 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Twenty Epics.
“In a Glass Casket” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Realms of Fantasy, October 2004.
“Terrible Ones” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in The Third Alternative, Spring 2004.
“Romanticore” © 2003 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 2003.
“Living with the Harpy” © 2003 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Strange Horizons, October 2003.
“Komodo” © 2007 by Tim Pratt; original to collection.
“Bottom Feeding” © 2005 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Asimov’s, August 2005.
“The Tyrant in Love” © 2005 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Fantasy Magazine, November 2005.
“Impossible Dreams” © 2006 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Asimov’s, July 2006.
“Lachrymose and the Golden Egg” © 2005 by Tim Pratt; originally published in The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives 2, Spring 2005.
“Dream Engine” © 2006 by Tim Pratt; originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, October 2006.
Collection originally published by Night Shade Books.
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