Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Some experiments went wrong. Even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t cut it. Eventually I decided to go back to what had turned on the lights for me . I tried The Martian Chronicles and Heinlein’s Future History . We staged stories in the classroom and cut off at the critical moment. When the hatch opens and they hear “Beautiful Dreamer.” Read the rest tonight.

Was it successful? Eventually, we had to establish a bookstore in the school.

Once they get started, kids become eclectic readers. At Mt. St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, RI, I encountered students who tried their hand at Plato simply because the subject had come up in class. Somebody would comment that Plato thought democracy was more or less mob rule. And next day there would be a general debate. It was the sort of experience, as much as anything else in my life, that left me with a sense that the human race, despite everything, is worth saving.

My first published story was “A Pound of Cure.” And yes, I was never very good at titles. It won the Freshman Short Story contest at LaSalle in 1954, and they printed it in the school’s literary magazine, Four Quarters . It was science fiction, and I thought I was on my way.

Shortly afterward, I read David Copperfield , saw how accomplished Dickens was, decided it was not a field for somebody with my limited talents, and wrote nothing else for a quarter century.

Eventually my wife Maureen persuaded me to try again, since I was always saying how someday I wanted to write SF, having failed in my other very early ambition, which was to play short for the Phillies.

To me, it was a pointless exercise. But more or less to keep Maureen happy I put together a story, “Zip Code,” about a guy who worked in a post office, and who was in love with one of the other clerks. But he could not bring himself to make a move because he thought the young lady was too daunting. Eventually, a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson, mailed over a century earlier, shows up, containing some lines from one of the essays. The letter, apparently part of an ongoing correspondence, assures therecipient that “you can do virtually anything if you believe in yourself.” But of course you have to take the plunge. You have to be willing to commit.

I don’t think that, at the time, I saw the irony in my adopting that particular theme. But it made the point I’d long before urged on my students. Believe in yourself. Don’t leave anything undone simply because you’re afraid of failure.

T.E.D. Klein shocked me when he bought it for The Twilight Zone Magazine . He changed the title to “The Emerson Effect,” and promptly sent me a check. I spent the next few months expecting to hear that the publishing house had burned down.

I discovered I loved writing. And the conviction that I could sell what I wrote made a task that had once seemed insurmountable, suddenly appear routine. Not that I didn’t bounce a few stories during those early years. There was something about an alien pizza place. And another written around a combination pool table/time machine.

Kids in any society are always being told by authority figures to keep their hands off something so they don’t break it. At school, teachers show them what they’ve gotten wrong. It took me awhile to realize that the best way to teach composition is to show a student what he’s doing well. The short compact sentence that makes its point with a minimum of verbiage. This is the way to do it, Sally. Give me more like this.

But we don’t. We tell them they’ll break something, and after a while the kids come to believe it. The result is that most of us underestimate what we can do.

Two of the stories in this collection, “Lighthouse” and “Cool Neighbor,” were written in collaboration with Michael Shara, the head of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that the concepts were his.

“Welcome to Valhalla” was written with Katheryn Lance. I’d had the basic idea for years, but I kept trying to drag a time traveler into it. And it didn’t work. Kathryn, who shares my taste for Richard Wagner, suggested Brunnhilde, and effectively wrote the story.

Two other stories each inspired a series of novels: The Academy, with Priscilla Hutchins, was born in the sands of one of Saturn’s larger moons, in “Melville on Iapetus.” And the Alex Benedict novels, of which there are now four, got their start in “Dutchman.” Curiously, neither Alex nor Hutch appears in either story, though “Melville on Iapetus”—there’s another one of those great titles—was eventually adapted and used as the prologue for the Academy debut novel, The Engines of God .

When I was in graduate school, at Wesleyan University, one of the instructors routinely held lunches for his classes at his home. One afternoon, several of us were sitting around out back, sipping Cokes and putting away donuts, when someone began describing an incident from the Renaissance. An Italian scholar, visiting Athens, had opened a trunk and found a trove of manuscripts from the classical age.

Several days later the scholar loaded the manuscripts and the trunk onto a ship headed back to Venice. But on the way home, a storm blew up. The ship went down, and the trunk went with it. The scholar, fortunately, survived. But what had been in the trunk?

It got me thinking about transience, about the things we lose as we travel through our lives. On a personal scale, friends and loved ones. On a larger scale, the Hanging Gardens and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. The Great Library. Several Homeric epics. Most of Sophocles’ plays. And, on still a third scale, countless individual acts of courage and compassion.

I’ve never been able to get the scholar and his trunk out of my mind. There are echoes of it through all the stories in Part II, “Lost Treasures.”

“Report from the Rear” is based on an actual event, as reported by H. L. Mencken, dating back to the Russo-Japanese War. “Black To Move” is a chess story, of course. (It’s my favorite game.) “The Far Shore,” set in an interstellar future, was my second professional story. The alert reader will easily conclude that the author grew up during the 1940’s radio age. “Sunrise” eventually became part of A Talent for War . And “Kaminsky At War” is set in the Academy universe. I couldn’t help suspecting that the bureaucrat that Kaminsky gets so angry with is Priscilla Hutchins.

I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities raised by artificialintelligence. That’s probably left over from “Helen O’Loy.” “Gus” was my first attempt at an AI with a mind of its own. In this case, an AI portraying St. Augustine decides it’s a Catholic and demands access to the sacraments.

There are two other AI stories in Part V. And a novella, “Time Travellers Never Die,” which was as much pure joy to write as anything I’ve ever gone near.

Now that I think of it, though, they all set off a charge of one kind or another. So I’m going to let you in on a secret: Writers are always going on about how difficult the work is, bottle of whiskey in the top drawer, writer’s block, and all that sort of thing. In fact none of it’s true. I’ve never had a job that provided such pure pleasure. We put that other stuff out there to keep the competition down.

It was at the bottom of the safe in a bulky manila envelope. I nearly tossed it into the trash with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project.