Introduction
Introduction
IT'S HARD TO SAY when I first began reading science fiction. My two older brothers, Jim and Dwight, both read the stuff, and thus I was exposed to it at an early age.
What I do know is that for many years I probably read more science fiction short stories than novels: short stories by Asimov and Heinlein, collections of short stories, anthologies of the year’s best, single-author collections—I loved short stories, and so it wasn’t too surprising that when I first started writing science fiction, I began with the short form.
(Besides, I thought that was the generally agreed-upon path to science-fiction writerdom: you wrote short stories, you got them published in magazines, you got noticed for your brilliance, and only then did you move on to novels.)
My very first fiction sale, in 1982, was a short story (although, not being science fiction, it’s not in this book). “The Storm,” about two kids caught in a prairie blizzard, sold to Western People, the magazine supplement of The Western Producer (an agricultural newspaper), which would later also publish my short story “Strange Harvest” (which is in this book, and is quite possibly the only science fiction story Western People ever published). I was in Zurich, Switzerland, of all places, touring with the Harding University A Cappella Chorus (I’d graduated three years earlier but did two European tours with the chorus as an alumnus), when I received an aerogram from my mother: a letter from the magazine had arrived in the mail, and, with my previously granted permission, she’d opened it, discovering the good news.
And yet…over the years, I really haven’t written that much short fiction. See, despite my love of short stories, I soon found that I personally had trouble with the “short.” Inside many of my short stories were novels trying to get out. “The Minstrel,” which starts this collection, expanded into Star Song, the first novel I tried seriously to sell. (There were three high-school novels before that, The Golden Sword, Ship from the Unknown, and Slavers of Thok, my Grade 12 magnum opus.) “Lost in Translation,” a longish short story published in TransVersions, became Lost in Translation, my first adult SF novel, first published in hardcover by FiveStar, and then brought out in mass-market paperback by DAW Books. “Sins of the Father” was never published as a short story, but became Marseguro, my second novel from DAW, and winner of the 2009 Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction novel (well, technically, Best Long-Form Work in English).
But despite my predilection for novels, every once in a while, I do write and (Lord willing) sell a short story. And I’ve also kept tucked away on my hard drive a few unpublished stories that I think deserve to see the light of day, even if I’ve never found a home for them. (At the very least, you may find it interesting to compare some of these very early efforts to my latest ones. Be kind.) As a result, I’ve often thought of publishing a collection. Trouble is, a short-story collection by an author who isn’t exactly known as a short-story writer seemed like it would be a hard sell for any traditional publisher…so I never acted on that thought.
Until now. I like my stories (obviously), and am egotistical enough (hey, I'm a writer) to think that perhaps other people might like them, too. And so, at last, I have collected my short stories—almost all the published ones, plus a few unpublished ones—into the book you now hold in your hands, whether in ink-on-paper or pixels-on-screen format.
I hope you enjoy them.
Edward Willett
Regina, Saskatchewan
February 2018
