Chimerascope

Author’s Introduction

Author’s Introduction“One of those natures that the ancient fables tell of, as that of the Chimera or Skylla or Kerberos, and the numerous other examples that are told of many forms grown together in one.”

—Plato, Republic 588c (trans. Shorey)

Chi·mer·a (ki-meer-uh, kahy-meer-uh) noun

A fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, commonly represented with a lion’s head, a she-goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The Chimera ravaged Lycia before being killed by Bellerophon with the aid of Pegasus.

Any imaginary creature made up of grotesquely disparate parts.

An impossible or foolish fantasy.

-scope (skohp) suffix

An instrument used for viewing or examination.

Chi·mer·a·scope (ki-meer-uh-skohp) noun

An instrument, in book form, used for viewing a disparate (but hopefully, not grotesquely so) collection of impossible (but hopefully not foolish) fantasies.

Or not...

The book you are holding doesn’t breathe fire, nor does it harbour (to the best of my knowledge) any plans to ravage Lycia. Yet assembling this book, my first “full” collection of short fiction, made me feel like I was building a chimera.

Now, writers are used to building fantastic creatures. We call them stories. We construct them from the pieces of ourselves that make us who we are—all the accumulated detritus of a lifetime of experiences, good and bad, happy and sad, remembered and imagined.

These story creatures remain caged inside our heads and our souls, until we write them into freedom, releasing them into the world, unleashing them on an unsuspecting humanity. And then we do it again. Another story. Another metaphorical monster ready to ravage some symbolic Lycia.

The problem comes when we try to recapture these beasts and squoosh them into a larger creature of the imagination called a story collection. The resulting creation often consists of, as per definition #2, “grotesquely disparate parts.”

But maybe they do fit. Maybe you can’t see the stitches where I’ve sewn these tales together, one after another, back to back, in some supposed order, to build the bigger beast. Or worse (from the writer’s perspective), the larger creature may be only too coherent.

I’m sure that I have themes that I deal with repeatedly in my writing. Perhaps the creations that are my stories, assembled together here in this chimera that you hold, will reveal that larger creature, a thing built from loves and hates, dreams and fears, prejudices and paranoias. I just can’t say that this larger creature appears clearly to me.

I know that I write about characters that I care about and like to spend time with. I know I write about love—lost, found, and lost again. I know that my preferred ending is bittersweet, because that’s how I see life. I write about myths, because they have endured for a reason. I write about people with things inside them, because we all have things inside us.

In short, I write about a lot of things, which makes this book the chimera that it is.

When I was assembling this collection, I found, to my surprise, that I couldn’t include all the stories that I wanted to. So some stories will have to wait for the next collection, if there is one. What I’ve included here are my own favourites and favourites of fans who have been kind enough over the years to tell me so. All of the stories, save one new one that appears here for the first time, have appeared in professional magazines and anthologies. This collection includes early stories through to more recent ones, and spans just over a decade of my writing. It includes a mix of SF, fantasy, horror, and surreal, sometimes in the same story. And, in case you believe that awards are any indication of merit, it includes one Aurora Award winner (a Canadian thingy), nine Aurora finalists, a Best New Horror selection, and three Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror honourable mentions.

I struggled with how to arrange the stories. By genre? Mood? Style? Date written? Date published? In the end, does it matter? I mean, you’re going to read them all, right? Right?

Well, in the end, I had to put them in some order. So, since this collection is an assemblage of disparate parts, I went with a disparate ordering as well. I’ve arranged them more or less chronologically, with most of the older stories in the first half, but I’ve tried to alternate stories in terms of genre, mood, and length. So as much as possible, the stories will move from fantasy to SF to horror and back again, from sad to upbeat, from dystopic futures to hopeful ones, from love lost to happily ever after.

And hopefully, assembled as they are, these many forms will grow together into one.

Enjoy.

~Douglas Smith