Just Over the Horizon (The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear Book 1) by Bear Greg

Author:Bear, Greg [Bear, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2016-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

The White Horse Child

Here’s one of my most popular stories, reprinted dozens of times and even made into a multimedia CD-ROM. When Terry Carr bought it for his original hardcover anthology Universe 9 (1979) I was thrilled—Terry was one of the most respected editors in the field, and he said this story reminded him of Ray Bradbury.

Ray’s work has always been one of my biggest influences, but “The White Horse Child” is the only one of my stories that even comes close to being Bradburyesque.

I had strong inspiration. In my late teens and early twenties I experienced a series of dreams that exposed something about my inner, creative self. While I’ve seldom gotten story ideas from dreams, on occasion—and particularly in those years—dreams acted like a mindquake to reveal hidden layers and allow deep magma to reach the surface.

One of the upwellings came in 1972. I was living by myself in an apartment on College Avenue in San Diego, California. Half-awake, lying in bed in the dark at some hour past midnight, I witnessed an equine beast push slowly through my bedroom wall. It was made of woven ice crystals, but otherwise bore a distinct resemblance to the horse in Fuselli’s “Nightmare,” and it relayed a message that seemed at first ominous—but in retrospect, after I was fully awake, turned out to be friendly and approving. That message was, and I quote it exactly, “You’re doing just fine, but don’t forget about me.”

I had met this creature before.

When I was nine years old, I had had a bad nightmare about a white cloud hovering over my bed. It had told me that it was going to eat me.

The ice-crystal horse and the hungry cloud were one and the same. In the intervening years, my subconscious selves—my creative “demons”—had formed an alliance with my consciousness, and were no longer threatening, but intensely collaborative. A whole series of similar dreams sealed the alliance, and my demons and I have been working well together ever since.

In 1977, Tina and I moved to Long Beach. I was writing on an old IBM typewriter, using long sheets of yellow paper wound off of a roll—five feet was a pretty good day’s work. In the afternoon, I would often drive into downtown Long Beach and wander through Acres of Books, a venerable old store that is now closed. Around the corner was Richard Kyle’s Wonderworld books, where I met not only Richard, a lean, witty man with a lifetime’s experience of popular culture, but Alan Brennert, the superb novelist and screenwriter. Alan was young and ambitious, just like me, and we would soon partner up to impress an agent and take story ideas into Hollywood. I had connections that led Alan to his first Hollywood agent, and Alan had connections that led me to my literary agent, Richard Curtis.

The ideas perked, and in 1977, in that apartment in Long Beach, poured forth as a story of dreams and creativity, of a young lad’s awakening to the

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