Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois by Gardner R. Dozois

Author:Gardner R. Dozois
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781886778269
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2001-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Storm

Introduction to The Storm

“The Storm” comes from a time in Gardner Dozois’ career when I only knew him as a name, usually seen in the Orbit anthologies. I grouped him with Wolfe, Wilhelm, Lafferty and others as one of the powerful new New Wave talents Damon Knight was showcasing in his series, in an all-out effort to change and improve science fiction yet again. Each decade from the 1930’s on, science fiction had grown in leaps and bounds, as if the years with zeroes in them were cliffs that the genre was nimbly bounding up; and now, in the early 1970’s, it was happening again. Dozois was a slinky and exotic name, and the stories under the name were similar: beautifully written, strange and powerful. Sharing all these qualities, “The Storm” fits right in with the other stories of that era (indeed in many ways it is a reversal of “The Last Day of July”), but as it first appeared in a Roger Elwood anthology, I did not see it at that time. Now it is good to have it reappear before me, as if out of a time capsule. For one thing, I like recalling that paper Dozois of the early ‘70’s, unknown to me. Not that the real person is any kind of let-down; on the contrary; but now that Gardner is a friend, and functions so ably as the mayor of science fiction, performing the crucial community task of Most Important SF Editor, perhaps the single most knowledgeable and powerful person in terms of shaping the field, it is harder to remember just how dark and singular his own fiction has been. Like several other New Wave writers, his was often a poetry of entropy, and while stories like “The Storm” evoke memories of Bradbury’s tales of childhood, I think the more accurate reference would be to Edgar Allan Poe: there is the same economy of means, the same kind of simple, memorable central idea, expressed in vivid prose, and focusing on chaos, defeat, and the dark parts of the mind. These are aspects of the work that the presence of the person we know and love can obscure.

Now, I don’t think it is revealing too many plot secrets of this story to tell you that it is about a storm. And what a storm it is. People who do not live on the East Coast of the United States may think that it has been exaggerated for fictional purposes, but I have seen storms there for which the descriptions in this story would be perfectly apt—in fact there is an admirable accuracy to the details of Gardner’s physical descriptions. I have spent a good deal of time outdoors, in many places, and seen some big storms, including winter blizzards while snow-camping, when they really meant something, and yet still, in the mere four years I lived on the East Coast I saw perhaps ten storms more violent than almost any I have seen anywhere else.

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