Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  In 1994 (I believe), Gardner Dozois invited me to contribute to an anthology of original ghostly love stories. I figured that his brief would elicit stories more tragic, frightening, or elegiac in tone than otherwise and resolved to go against the grain by submitting a comedy. And so I wrote “Chihuahua Flats,” which generally gets a positive reaction when I read it aloud, even from auditors who later confide that they own a Chihuahua or two and that my story nails their prickly possessiveness. As a result, I like Chihuahuas a bit better than I used to and have even considered acquiring one for a pet—if a mutant parvovirus wipes out every other breed, not excluding chows, pit bulls, and neurotic cocker spaniels. (Dare I admit that our neighbors on King Avenue, the Phillips family, own a Dachshund-Chihuahua mix that I sometimes feed table scraps and stoop in the darkness to pet?)

  “The Procedure” developed quite differently. Somewhere I read a review of a short story (whose author and title I forget) about a medical intervention, or a genetic manipulation, that “frees” our species from the tyranny of the religious impulse. I have always suspected that this impulse constitutes a portion of whatever gives substance to our humanity (a debatable point, I know), and so I wondered what might happen if an organic cure for the organic religious impulse proved reversible. This idea gave birth to “The Procedure,” just as my desire to write a colorful off-world science-fiction story midwived it. Scott Edelman, editor of Science Fiction Age, a profitable magazine whose publisher yanked the plug because it did not make as much money as its sibling wrestling periodicals, bought “The Procedure” and ran it in his July 1996 issue.

  Earlier that year, Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications in San Francisco had asked me to read Mary Shelley’s five known fantasy and/or sf stories and to write an introduction to a small collection showcasing these works, The Mortal Immortal. I agreed—if I could write my introduction in story form rather than as an orthodox critical essay, and Jacob okayed this approach. Everything else that one needs to know about “The Unexpected Visit of a Reanimated Englishwoman” occurs in the story itself, except that I read it at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March and that David Hartwell printed it in a special number of The New York Review of Science Fiction (August 1996) before the small, handsome volume from Tachyon appeared.

  (Oh, yes, one more thing: When James Patrick Kelly and his wife Pam, avid gardeners both, came to Georgia in late February 2002 for Slipstream 3, a literary conference at LaGrange College, I took them to nearby Callaway Gardens for a look around. On this trip, I learned that the tree I called a “Japanese tulip tree” early in my story is actually a saucer magnolia. Until the Kellys’ visit, I had indulged this taxonomic error for twenty-eight years. Anyway, no Japanese tulip tree appears in this collection, and I wonder how many other misconceptions plague my private stores of “knowledge.”)

  The year 1996 was also my first as writer-in-residence at LaGrange College, a Methodist-affiliated liberal-arts institution twenty miles north of Pine Mountain. On the recommendation of friend and colleague John Kessel, author of Good News from Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice, among other titles, I used Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway as my creative-writing text. Late in the course, I asked my students to do an assignment from Burroway requiring them to write a story in which one of their most cherished beliefs proves untrue. As I had done on every other assignment, I wrote my own such story, “Sequel on Skorpiós.” I like this brief story a lot, but honesty requires me to confess that it both accepts and sidesteps Burroway’s challenge. It appeared in the British magazine Interzone in August 1998 and then a year later in the United States in Dark Regions & Horror Magazine.

  “Tithes of Mint and Rue” evolved from another editorial challenge. This time Edward E. Kramer invited me to write a story based on a character in the sculpture of a mysterious Ferris wheel by artist Lisa Snellings. I watched a video of Lisa’s remarkable kinetic sculpture, chose the fat lady as my character, and, once I began writing, sent her by bus from Abnegation, Alabama, to Festivity, Iowa, to meet a redemptive strangeness. The anthology in which “Tithes of Mint and Rue” appeared (along with stories by Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Edward Bryant, John Shirley, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and a host of other idiosyncratic talents) Ed and Lisa called Strange Attraction.

  The book garnered healthy reviews, and Lisa sent each contributor a distinctive harlequin statuette for making the project work. For reasons that I don’t fully understand and have no plans to inquire into, I received two such sculptures, which now adorn the mantels of my facing upstairs offices. One harlequin balances on a blue globe and exults over a hand of cards; the other demurely holds aloft a ball-shaped candle.

  Over a decade ago, in a letter or at an ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas, Howard Waldrop told me that if I ever wrote a story about Rondo Hatton, the disease-deformed horror actor of the 1930s and ’40s, I could use his title “Help Me, Rondo.” “I might never get around to writing my own Hatton story,” Howard said. Researching Hatton demanded ingenuity, but The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) provided photographs, brief biographies, and film lists, and I ordered and pored over a video of Hatton in a potboiler called The Creeper. Bob Ross, a movie reviewer for the Tampa Tribune, my friend Andy Duncan, and others offered usable tidbits about Hatton, but when I ordered a back issue of the horror-film fanzine Midnight Marquee with a detailed article by director Fred Olen Ray (another contributor to Strange Attraction), I struck the mother lode.

  Ray’s essay, along with a photo-crammed history of Universal Studios, provided the grist for my take on Hatton. An invitation from William Schafer and Bill Sheehan to contribute to an original Subterranean Press anthology proffering the photomontage illustrations of J. K. Potter as inspiration gave me the impetus to start writing. With the topic of my story already in mind, I cheated and looked through a sheaf of Potter’s photo illustrations until I hit upon one that suited my preconceived agenda. The form of this novelette, let me stress, is a deliberate hybrid—part short story and part screenplay, a movie for the mind. I submitted it in the spring of 2000, and it appeared in J. K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation in 2002.

  Of this story, South African reviewer and critic Nick Gevers wrote, “Michael Bishop has a well-practiced knack for rendering quintessential American voices, an admirable sort of Southern ventriloquism; in ‘Help Me, Rondo,’ he looks somewhat obliquely at the Hollywood career of the acromegalic Rondo Hatton, employing the hectoring, incisive tones of Hatton’s wife as his biographical scalpel. In so doing, he also quietly, wrenchingly, tells a horror story of monstrous orphanhood.”

  I wrote “Last Night Out,” the newest story in Brighten to Incandescence, a week after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A former resident of Pine Mountain, Marjorie Salamone, the daughter of Hubert and Lillian Champion, died in the airplane-bombing of the Pentagon, only a week or so after moving into an office in a remodeled, presumably hardened section of the building. Since that date, our town has dedicated a plaque to Mrs. Salamone at the site of a memorial to five or six generations of community veterans. Reading or watching news stories about how two of the hijackers visited a strip club only days before turning an airliner into a flying bomb created in me, as it did in most people of goodwill, a horror-tinged disgust. Also, the seeming contradiction between the alleged religious impulse behind the atrocities and the terrorists’ premature secular celebration of this mayhem made me obsess about their mindsets.

  After reading the last paragraph, a friend pointed out that al Qaeda’s own terror handbook recommends that its agents shave their beards, shun Islamic garb in favor of Western clothes, and mingle with the heathen locals—all to deflect suspicion. This purpose, he added, seems sufficient to explain the hijackers’ visit to a Florida nudie bar. Perhaps. But why, given the alleged God-driven nobility of their purpose, a strip club? Why not a baseball game, a Bach concert, a fund-raising chicken-Q, or a rodeo? Most of us can su
rmise their motives—a sense of entitlement, the repressed cry of male libido, a contempt for female “weakness” (as embodied by the compassion of women, as well as by their threatening sexuality), and a feeling of superiority to their dissolute Western counterparts. Despair didn’t seem to enter into the motives of the four hijacking crews—at least not so much as a pathological sense of mission. In any case, “Last Night Out” tries to make fictive sense of what struck me as total madness in quest of absolute evil. I confess, though, that it remains the document of an outraged partisan. When religion and patriotism couple, their mutant offspring prod us to spiritual wastelands that some may seek to reproduce in the world itself.

  Here, let me note that my son Jamie created the striking wraparound cover for this Golden Gryphon Press volume. Nepotism may have helped him get the assignment—I asked Gary Turner and Marty Halpern to give him a chance—but talent enabled him to fulfill it. And Jamie’s quirky take on my title and on the individual stories allowed him to weave—digitally—the lovely web of images gracing this book. Behold the forked lightning incandescing above Mary Shelley and Atticus Norveg on the back cover and limning the doleful profile of horror star Rondo Hatton on the front. Behold the saucy Chihuahua head on the spine—Jamie’s revenge for untold paternal indignities inflicted on him over three decades. Still, I hope that other examples of Jamie’s computer artwork will illustrate my fiction tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  And so you have read the stories behind the stories, and also the cover. Although I don’t much credit the sorts of afterlife that most religions promise, I do wish to believe that before we FADE TO BLACK, we BRIGHTEN TO INCANDESCENCE, either here or later, and that the heat and light of our passage persist in forms beyond our ken. It’s not only “pretty to think so,” it’s healthy, and even the bleakest of these stories defy the ice of nihilism by taking spark from an inward fire. May they both disturb and warm you.

  Michael Bishop

  Pine Mountain, Georgia

  May 2002

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  Also by Michael Bishop

  Novels

  1. And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (1976) (aka Beneath the Shattered Moons)

  2. Stolen Faces (1977)

  3. A Little Knowledge (1977)

  4. Catacomb Years (1978)

  5. Eyes of Fire (1975, 1979)

  6. Transfigurations (1979)

  7. Under Heaven’s Bridge (with Ian Watson) (1980)

  8. No Enemy But Time (1982)

  9. Who Made Stevie Crye? (1984)

  10. Ancient of Days (1985)

  11. Philip K Dick Is Dead, Alas (1987) (aka The Secret Ascension)

  12. Unicorn Mountain (1988)*

  13. Count Geiger’s Blues (1992)

  14. Brittle Innings (1994)

  Collections

  12. Blooded on Arachne (1982)

  13. One Winter in Eden (1984)

  14. Close Encounters With the Deity (1986)

  15. At the City Limits of Fate (1996)

  16. Blue Kansas Sky (2000)

  17. Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories (2003)

  * Not available as an SF Gateway eBook

  Acknowledgments

  Writers often derive a particular sort of inspiration writing for a particular editor or set of editors, and here I would like to note my debt to the editors who first ushered sixteen of these stories into print. My hat is off to Gardner Dozois, Scott Edelman, Edward L. Ferman, Charles L. Grant, David Hartwell, Edward E. Kramer, Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg, David Pringle, William Schafer and Bill Sheehan, Roy Torgeson, Eric Vinicoff, Jacob Weisman, and the editorial team of Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein. And let me not forget Marty Halpern, here at Golden Gryphon Press, for recurrent heroic feats during the compilation and revision of these seventeen pieces and also the production of the volume showcasing them. Blessings upon you all, mis amigos.

  Further Acknowledgements

  “Chihuahua Flats,” copyright © 1995 by Michael Bishop. First published in Killing Me Softly: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love, edited by Gardner Dozois, HarperPrism, 1995.

  “Help Me, Rondo,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop. First published in J. K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation, edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan, Subterranean Press, 2002.

  “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” copyright © 1992 by Michael Bishop. First published in The Ultimate Dinosaur, edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg, Bantam Spectra, 1992.

  “Last Night Out,” copyright © 2001 by Michael Bishop. Previously unpublished.

  “Murder on Lupozny Station,” by Michael Bishop and Gerald W. Page, copyright © 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1981.

  “O Happy Day,” copyright © 1981 by Michael Bishop. First published in Rigel Science Fiction, no. 2, Fall 1981.

  “Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop. Significantly revised from its original publication in Chrysalis 7, edited by Roy Torgeson, Zebra, 1980.

  “The Procedure,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop. Slightly revised from its original publication in Science Fiction Age, July 1996.

  “Sequel on Skorpiós,” copyright © 1998 by Interzone on behalf of Michael Bishop. First published in Interzone, no. 134, August 1998.

  “Simply Indispensable,” copyright © 1995 by Michael Bishop. First published in Full Spectrum 5, edited by Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein, Bantam Spectra, 1995.

  “A Tapestry of Little Murders,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop.

  Revised from its original publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1971.

  “Thirteen Lies About Hummingbirds,” copyright © 1991 by Michael Bishop. First published in Final Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant, Doubleday Foundation, 1991.

  “The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop. Revised from its original publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1974.

  “Tithes of Mint and Rue,” copyright © 1999 by Michael Bishop. First published in the World Horror Convention Program, edited by Edward E. Kramer, World Horror Convention, 1999; and originally written for Strange Attraction, edited by Edward E. Kramer, Shadowlands Press, 2000.

  “The Unexpected Visit of a Reanimated Englishwoman,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop. Revised from its original publication as “Mary Shelley’s Stories and the Unexpected Visit of a Reanimated Englishwoman” in The New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 96, August 1996; and originally written as the Introduction to The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Stories of Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley, Tachyon Publications, 1996.

  “‘We’re All in This Alone,’” copyright © 2002 by Interzone on behalf of Michael Bishop and Paul Di Filippo (as by Philip Lawson). First published in Interzone, No. 184, November/December 2002.

  “With a Little Help from Her Friends,” copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1984.

  “A Lingering Incandescence: Notes About the Stories,” copyright © 2002 by Michael Bishop.

  Dedication

  For Michael Hutchins,

  conscientious bibliographer, web-site magician, friend.

  As Mr. Porter wrote,

  “You’re the top, you’re the Colosseum.”

  Michael Bishop (1945– )

  Michael Bishop was born in 1945 in Lincoln, Nebraska. After receiving an MA in English from the University of Georgia, Bishop taught at the USAF Academy Preparatory School in Co
lorado, but soon began placing his short stories with the likes of Galaxy Science Fiction, If and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, A Funeral For The Eyes Of Fire, brought comparisons with Ursula Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr and received a Nebula nomination. It was followed by a number of critically acclaimed works including BSFA Award-nominated Transfigurations, Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated Ancient Of Days, and No Enemy But Time, for which he won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Michael Bishop lives in Georgia, where he is writer-in-residence at LaGrange College.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Michael Bishop 2003

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Michael Bishop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane