Beginning Year Number Nine in Chronic 1A (1987)
I used to want to ask Johnson how to control things, how to control even my arms and legs, but he would have only laughed. Johnson is convinced I’ve gone the same place as Hewlitt, that we have both surpassed the need for our bodies, that if he is dedicated enough he might someday be like us. Besides, he would have said, had I been able to ask, how was he to know I wasn’t a spy, sitting immobile in my wheelchair for eight years in order to trick him into revealing his methods?
Read MoreThe Eyes of Manukan (1981)
The Eyes of Manukan is a fantasy novel. I pounded it out on my venerable IBM Model B typewriter. Several years later I would be writing on my new VIC-20 computer.
Read MoreThe Nice Lady (1990)
Ilana told herself that when she grew up, she would be just like the nice lady.
Read MoreFour Unfinished Short Stories (2013)
Here are four uncompleted works of short fiction. I like each in some way or another, and so decided to publish them here.
Read MoreTwo (Really) Early Stories (1966)
I have no excuse for these stories, except to say I was in my teens when I wrote them. Proceed with caution.
Read MoreDear Raggfllad (1972)
I wrote this not-very-good story when I was about 22 years old. I’ve present it here so it can be compared to my later writing to prove I do have the capacity to learn.
Read MoreFree Bleeder (1968)
To the best of my knowledge I wrote this story while still in high school. I might have written it my junior year, but I have dated it to my senior year. Certainly by the time I was in college I would have known better than to create a fictitious type of alcohol in a future that would have undoubtedly preferred single-malt scotch.
Read MoreRules (1973)
I wrote this story when I was 22 or 23 years old. Needless to say, the Cold War was on my mind.
Read MoreA Tale from Whitey’s Tavern (1967)
I wrote this story, as best I can remember, my senior year in high school. I had heard of but not read Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales From the White Hart, and the concept of fanciful stories told by regulars at a neighborhood bar intrigued me.
Read MoreDeep Freeze (1966)
I wrote this story when I was a junior in high school. At the time I was under the influence of Victorian-era writers like Poe and Verne and H.G. Wells.
Read MoreA Trade is in Order (1990)
I expected them yesterday, but they didn’t come. I imagine they were looking for Honda in Tokyo, or Weinstein in London. But they came today. I was sitting in the oval office, reading documents which had once been vital to the security of the United States, when I heard them land. I put the documents back on the President’s desk and went out onto the White House lawn.
Read MoreCurious Boxes (A Paranoia) (1984)
Machines don’t need doors / Machines don’t have any money
Read MoreImposter (1990)
Zara was a clouded leopard, anatomically, physically, chemically, behaviorally. Her whiskers were clouded leopard whiskers, her fleas clouded leopard fleas. But Zara had not been a clouded leopard forty-eight hours earlier.
Read MoreThe Bad Kid (1990)
Miss Grant was in somewhat of a dither, because she had just run through the list of reasons why a parent might want to temporarily give up his or her child. But Mr. Johnson wasn’t asking the Department of Family Services to care for the child on a temporary basis. He wasn’t asking the Department to take care of Benjamin until he could get his act together, or until a specific problem was taken care of. He didn’t want to see the child again, ever, or so he said.
Read MoreO’Darby and the Ducks (1988)
The bluffs fell away on both sides, and on a spit of land, I could see the aliens. They were lizard-men—Vegans, from the look of them. Our allies. Soldiers, like us, on furlough, looking like crocodiles on two legs. One of them was holding an old Earth-style double-barreled shotgun. He wore an orange hunting vest filled with .12 gauge shells. The other bent down and picked up something small and white and fuzzy. After a second, he tossed it into the air.
Read MoreDamned Worm, Part II: Exobiology Lesson (1995)
It is clear symbiosis in the customary use of the term is not occurring here. What is not clear is whether the host species could have managed as well without the peculiar interdependency with the symbionts. Certainly, the civilization on Trill is well advanced, but it is repressive in many ways, much like Earth was until recent centuries. I have asked myself why, if the advantage of the symbiosis is for the host species, the political, social, and economic climate on Trill is so, to use a word that is perhaps not scientific, bad. I am unable to determine the reason.
Read MoreDamned Worm, Part I (1994)
At that point, Josanna, overcome by survivor guilt and remorse (she had been somewhat in love with the Allex-Krat Thing), agreed to be the host. And so the Worm Krat had been surgically implanted in her chest. But when she awoke, there was not the blissful pairing she had imagined.
Read MoreNext Exit (1990)
Ignoring the speed limit, he accelerated to a pleasant, if illegal, seventy-five miles per hour. He turned to Judy, sitting white-faced beside him, and said, “Sorry about all that.” She didn’t reply, just pulled her seat belt more snugly around her. “Be that way, then,” he growled.
Read MoreMantid (1990)
It wasn’t that Earth was such a backwater. Earth had, after all, some of the best recreational drugs in the known universe, and the highly stylized antics of what passed for intelligent inhabitants were a source of perpetual amusement for the idle rich of the Hundred Hypercivilized Planets. It was just that she was stuck here, and she was hungry.
Read MoreGWillie (1984)
GWillie is always telling me what to do. I usually do what he says, because he’s awfully smart. He tells me he “makes suggestions.” “I merely point out socially acceptable alternatives to decisions which may not be in your best interest, Willie. I’m like a big brother.” GWillie is like a brother in a way—a nice brother who is always there when I need him
Read MoreA Raid on Donahue’s Bread (1990)
MacManus could have targeted any of the others: Saunders, Kinnon, Ayers, Britton, or Halvington. But Saunders was fleet of foot, with a vindictive nature; Kinnon was bread-wise and kept a close guard on his slices; Ayers was on a diet and got no bread at all, and so was on the prowl himself; and Britton and Halvington operated on the buddy system and were mutual body and bread guards. That left only Donahue. It had to be Donahue.
Read MoreI Think of Cindi (1987)
A millipede, seeking relief from the green spray paint insanity, comes inside, where the real insanity is. It bustles over the window ledge, its multitudinous legs working in tandem. All those legs! I wonder if it could spare a pair, What kind of god would give a bug thirty pairs and deny me the use of just one?
Read MoreJust Another Year in Chronic 1A (1988)
We’re on the big goddamned yellow and black school bus, on our way to a “picnic,” which means we’ll stop at a roadside park with three trees and two concrete picnic tables and eat extra krispy recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, bones and all, and maybe even the plastic sporks, the hungrier of us. Then we will be put back on the bus and driven back to the hospital, where we will disembark and be rolled back to the musty, dusty, and always gloomy buildings, back to the chronic wards.
Read MoreDead Issue Department (1983)
In the March 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an advertisement appeared on the back page. The ad stated: We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Viet Nam.
Read MoreDebtor’s Prison (1982)
They almost got him that time. The black Mercedes had swerved onto the sidewalk thirty yards in front of Hadley, mowing a swath through pedestrians and parking meters with its cowcatcher.
Read MoreMasquerading as Public Works (A Paranoia) (1984)
They land / Don’t you know / Shhhh! I can see one lurking on the horizon
Read MoreNight Ride (1993)
Bicycles have changed, and yet they are the same. They are still silent running and breezes in your hair and sweaty palms from holding onto handlebars too long. They are leaning into curves and riding without hands, pumping hard when you go uphill, and coasting when you can find a downhill. Modern bikes only remotely resemble those I rode when I was a kid the first time, but the old-time feeling is still there, fresh as ever it was and ever will be.
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