Dealing in Futures by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [Haldeman, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-04-16T21:00:00+00:00

I thought that was real clever, killing off One-Thumb like that. The best places to be in an anthology supposedly are the first story or the last story. If other people were going to be using One-Thumb, I reasoned, then by disposing of him I would force the editor to put my story last. Another consideration was that I knew there was going to be a sequel to the book, and I thought one sword-and-sorcery story was my limit. With my main character dead, I was safe from being asked to do another.

Wrong, wrong. A person kilted by sorcery, they told me, can also be revived by sorcery. Not only did I not win the final position in the book, but when I refused to do a story for the sequel, they handed my character to another writer! A dirty trick, by Crom.

(Actually, I have no right to complain—the story was fun to write and it's made more money than most of the stories in this volume. Asprin turned Thieves' World into a board game and I get a percent or two of the profits, which are unseemly.)

From the commercial and fun to the serious and rather painful. The novella that follows was originally the middle section of my novel The Forever War. I like it better than the version that got into print.

The Forever War wound up being my most successful novel, sweeping the science fiction awards for 1976, and still going strong in its umpteenth printing. But it wasn't an immediate success; it was turned down by eighteen publishers before St. Martin's Press took a chance on it. Most of the publishers felt it was an okay story, but nobody wanted to buy a book that was so transparently a metaphor about Vietnam.

While the outline-plus-sample-chapters package was being rejected by all those publishers, I of course continued writing the book. It's an episodic story, so I was able to sell the individual sections as more or less independent novellas. Analog magazine picked them up, and the editor, Ben Bova, was of immeasurable help, for moral support as well as canny storytelling advice. (In fact, it was Ben who convinced St. Martin's, who did not at that time publish adult science fiction, to take a look at it.)

He sent this novella back, though, with grave misgivings. Most of The Forever War is set in outer space—where the war is—but most of this story takes place back on Earth. He felt that including it in the novel would slow it to a halt. Besides, the dystopian view of future America was too depressing.

Maybe he was right. After some thought I did set it aside, and wrote the shorter novelette "We Are Very Happy Here," of which less than five pages takes place in the United States, and that's what wound up in the book. It does move faster than it would have with this story, which is certainly a virtue in a novel of adventure. But I still like this one better as a story.

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