Live! From Planet Earth by George Alec Effinger

Author:George Alec Effinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Introduction to "Housebound"

Among the pleasures of knowing George were conversations about our shared interests in baseball, southern culture, and New Orleans. We got to know each other casually, in the early 1980s at conventions, and then later, quite a bit better. The several times I saw George in New Orleans we would often go on a rambling, free-form walking tour of the French Quarter and surrounding areas, with George pointing out some local business or landmark that had made its way, often in disguised form, into one of his stories.

During one of my favorite visits we spent several hours in the Jackson Square area with George pointing out various elements that had gone into his story "Beast" about the Union occupation during the Civil War. Most of the time though, our story discussions were over the telephone, particularly for the other three stories George wrote for anthologies on which I was working. Two of those were Maureen Bimbaum stories. The first was a Grail quest parody and the other a Tennessee Williams satire; both stories were as much fun to talk about as they were to read.

Among George's laments was that his mainstream work rarely received serious attention, and that as his career progressed what he was asked most often for were new Maureen stories and more Budayeen sequels. At least this was the state of things circa 1991 to 1994 when George and I were in most frequent contact. George would have liked to have written true crime books about New Orleans, but didn't want to risk retribution from local godfather Carlos Marcello. Instead he included Marcello in When Gravity Fails as the renamed Friedlander Bey, and was very thankful that mafia dons rarely read science fiction novels.

As an editor for the Phobias anthology project, one of the concerns was that the stories not duplicate each other. No less than three authors volunteered to contribute the "agraphobia" story, but changed plans when I asked them to confirm that they really wanted to write a story about the fear of farming. When I discussed the project with George, I thought he'd be pleased that this would be an opportunity to write a mainstream story, free of supernatural and SF content. He was, of course, but what surprised me was his subdued manner when he said "I hope no one has asked to write the agoraphobia story yet. There are some things I'm trying to work out right now...."

On first read I thought "Housebound" to be as good as any short story George had ever written. Later, after the story was purchased and set for publication, George said to me that he also thought it was at the top with his best work. "I don't want this one to get published and forgotten," he said. "There are a lot of personal things in it, and I'd like to think someone might find it and it could help." Rereading "Housebound" now some ten years later, it still holds for me the same quiet power it did when I first read it.

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