COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2014 by Paul Di Filippo.
“The Man Whom Things Hated” was composed from 9/3/84 to 9/14/84. “Flashers” was composed from 5/28/85 to 6/24/85. “Below the Wrack” was composed from 7/11/85 to 9/13/85. “The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party” first appeared in New Pathways, 1986. “Campion’s Tree” first appeared in New Pathways, 1986. “Winter in America” first appeared in New Pathways, 1987. “Royaume due Rêve” was composed from 9/24/87 to 12/13/87. “Triplets” first appeared in The Drabble Book, 1988. “The Jones Continuum” first appeared in Science Fiction Eye, 1988. “Waterloo Sunset” first appeared in New Pathways, 1988. “Modern Conveniences” first appeared in Edge Detector, 1988. “I Kant Cuz I’m Too Jung” first appeared in New Pathways, 1989. “Heaven Sent Me an Angel, C.O.D.” first appeared in bOING-bOING, 1992. “A Night in the Thirteenth Avenue Mifssion” first appeared in After Hours, 1993. “Strange Brew” first appeared in The Third Alternative, 1994. “Fax” first appeared in Pirate Writings, 1999.
ARTWORK CREDITS
The cover illustration of the Shimizu Mega City Pyramid (TRY 2004) has been graciously donated by the SHIMIZU CORPORATION, Coporate Communication Dept., 2-16-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan. It relates to a discontinued project of their conception.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To all those friends and inspiring writers who have left this Earth since these stories were first written.
And to Deborah, who saw them all in their infancy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All my thanks to Denny Lien, who provided scans of two stories that had escaped my own archives. A true Chum.
INTRODUCTION: UNEARTHED
This volume contains twelve stories which, for one reason or another, have lain uncollected after their initial publication, an era spanning the years 1986 to 1999. Additionally, four never-sold stories of roughly the same vintage—pulled from my files, with the oldest dating from 1984—see print here for the first time.
So: some unknown and unclamored-for stories thirty to fifteen years old, back in print? Why these, why now? Why resurrect these tales after letting them lie hidden for two decades or more? A few justifications seem relevant.
I was initially proud of all of them, unsold ones included, even if some second hesitant thoughts led me, when assembling earlier collections, to bypass them. Upon rereading them recently, my pride in the accomplishments of my younger self was reawakened, and I thought they should be honored with a new life. (You’ll learn more about each piece in the individual story introductions.)
Secondly, they represent a certain arc of my career and development, a segment of my writing which, I imagine in my vainglorious folly, might be of interest to some fans of my work—and even to some critics and historians, should I be lucky enough ever to attract such attentions.
Finally, I think they represent some good storytelling which has the potential, like all well-wrought tales, to amuse and entertain and even enlighten the reader.
Thus, for all these reasons, I’ve chosen to “unearth” these stories, the only fitting strategy for a fellow whose first piece of professional fiction appeared in UnEarth magazine!
INTRO: THE MAN WHOM THINGS HATED
When I wrote this story, I had never heard of the term “resistentialism.” And yet I instinctively knew, as all humans do, that the universe is filled with balky “inanimate” objects that desire to frustrate us and do us harm. This simple little story was my attempt to spread the warning, by imagining the plight of one poor fellow who was particularly hated by the cosmos. At the time, I had read Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” and envisioned this as a kind of counterpoint to his piece. The metaphysics may be a little wonky, but I think the effect comes through.
THE MAN WHOM THINGS HATED
Hours ago, the snow had been an icy mattress beneath his parka-clad back. Now it merely felt warm and comforting, a down-filled hollow he would never leave. Hours ago, the pain in his mangled right leg had been excruciating, causing him to cycle through a personal season consisting of periods of hellish awareness followed by merciful blackouts. Now the agony was simply an old friend, part of his very essence.
Harry Strang, dying, possessed of a curious lucidity, considered his life.
* * * *
They called him a clumsy child, and he believed them. At least for a time.
How else to explain the incredible misfortunes that dogged him, like the Furies plaguing Orestes?
Little Harry was totally maladroit among the modern appurtences of everyday life. The artifacts which everyone else dealt with so easily were intractable with him. Any significant encounter between Harry and a manmade object—and naturally such encounters were innumerable and unavoidable—ended in humiliating and painful defeat for him. His life, till age ten or so, was an unending succession of minor and major disasters.
There had been, for instance, the time he was leaning out the window at school to shout to a playmate below. Inside the old-fashioned frame at that instant, the frayed rope holding the cigar-shaped sashweight had given way, and the massive window had come crashing down on Harry’s back. He had been in the hospital nearly a month following that. And somehow, he had gotten all the blame, as if he could have known the condition of the hidden mechanism, and had deliberately taunted it, by placing his frail body beneath it.
When the emergency brake in his father’s ’59 Chevy Bel Air chose to fail, he had tried desperately to steer the rolling auto down the hill and onto a grassy median. Instead, all his best efforts brought on a collision with telephone pole at ten miles per hour. Harry took away a sickle-shaped scar on his forehead from his “clumsiness” that time.
When an aerosol can of Endust accidently fell off its closet shelf and into the bag of paper trash—the very trash which it was Harry’s job to incinerate in the backyard burner—the resulting explosion peppered Harry’s left arm with hot metal shards. His father called him a “damn clumsy kid without the sense he was born with,” and told him he was lucky not to have lost his eyes.
Dramatic and potentially fatal accidents such as these were interspersed with a hundred other lesser daily humiliations. Tripping over extension cords around the house; reaching into a toolbox and stabbing himself with an icepick; breaking the dinner glasses he was assigned to dry; stepping on rusty nails with bare summer feet; dropping a pan that held boiling water and scalding himself.
Harry’s body always bore a dozen black-and-blue marks, shifting like sunspots from week to week. Islands of permanent scar-tissue were more stable features of his topography.
Harry’s despair and sense of helplessness would have been total, had it not been for the time he spent in the woods, which he loved.
Living in a brand-new suburban tract during the ’fifties, Harry had easy access to the countryside that bordered the development. Acres of oaks and pines, birches and elms, ledges and streams, lay just beyond the last cracker-box cottage. There, Harry discovered—slowly, against all evidence—that he was not really clumsy.
He never fell from the trees he climbed, nor the rocky outcrops he scaled. He could leap from stone to slippery stone across a chilly stream without once getting wet. He never bumbled into the nests of yellowjackets. Lightning-blasted branches never fell on his head. In short, he navigated through forest and meadow with a growing confidence and surety utterly lacking in his home life.
Each time he returned from a sojourn among the trees, he would strive to convince himself that his competence would persist, that this time he would be transformed, all his awkwardness magicked into grace.
It never happened that way, though. Each re-entry into