More Than the Sum of His Parts: Collected Stories by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [Haldeman, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504061889
Google: 6oXjDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2020-07-20T23:00:00+00:00

Author’s Note

After that story appeared in Omni I got some inevitable mail. Is the year a misprint? No. Can you explain what it means? I could, but won’t. Life is too short.

Maybe fifteen years of this business has eroded my patience: worn down the ability to suffer fools gladly. Though actually, the people who write letters are rarely fools—at least they like to read and write, and sometimes feel and think. The truly insufferable ones are the ones you meet under the vitreous gaze of the television camera: interviewers.

Not all are bad. The first person who interviewed me on television was the late Charles Haslam (founder of the huge Haslam’s book emporium in St. Petersburg, Florida), who did a weekly local show called Book Beat. His questions revealed that he had read the book carefully—had read many books carefully—and had invested a lot of time and effort in structuring the show.

That was not the last good interview I’ve had, but I could probably count the good ones on the fingers of one hand. Generally the best you can expect is that someone on the staff has read the promotional material and perhaps scanned the book, so as to cobble together a few questions that the “personality” will see for the first time when you both sit down in front of the prompter. Sometimes the questions come from a cursory glance at the flap copy. Often the interviewer doesn’t even know the name of the book.

The inevitable first question is, what is this book about? That’s easy to answer if the book’s about pickling geraniums or shining your cat. It’s not that easy with a novel; the honest answer—”It’s about whatever went through my head during the two and a half years I sweated over it”—isn’t exactly what they’re looking for. So you come prepared with a plot synopsis and theme statement that you hope will not sound too dumb or pretentious and won’t give away the ending. (When John Cheever was asked this question he gave the deadpan perfect answer: “Love and death.”)

It’s at this point that the worst, or least prepared, interviewers discover that they have a science fiction writer, as opposed to a real writer, on their hands. So the next question is liable to be about UFOs or life on Mars, and the interview goes downhill from there.

This next story came from one such experience. Perhaps fortunately, the interviewer didn’t quite get my name right, and for some minutes she proceeded not to improve on that auspicious beginning, while I tried not to squirm visibly. Afterward I went down to the studio’s Green Room to watch an instant replay of my electronic canonization.

It was even worse watching it from the consumer’s side of the tube. While reliving my still-fresh agonies, though, I came to a sudden realization: Hey! Here I am watching that guy on television and I know exactly what’s going through his mind! Not a profound epiphany, I suppose, but it got me to thinking, and this was the result.

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