Worlds Enough & Time by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Collections & Anthologies, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780061809439
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T23:10:42+00:00

Introduction to “The Ninth of Av”

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In the fall of 1999, I was a guest at the Festivaletteratura in Mantua, Italy, and in the process of being interviewed by Italian SF writer Valerio Evangelisti in the courtyard of a 14th Century compound with several hundred people in attendance, when two aliens—serious aliens, with huge heads, space helmets, silver-lamé spacesuits, and only two oversized fingers on each hand—appeared and began walking—lurching, really—toward us behind the raised dais on which Evangelisti and I were carrying out the interview. The audience laughed. Valerio and I turned. The aliens had tricorder-type devices that made small, electronic beeps and the creatures lurched along to the beeps. Since the hour for the interview and discussion was about up anyway, Evangelisti and I jumped down off the platform to greet the aliens, who had an odd bump and grind, hip bounce, and two-fingered high five way of saying hello.

Good fun. But the conversation the Italian writer and I had been having before the aliens’ arrival had been interesting. Evangelisti was talking about the frustration of so many Italian and French and other European writers in seeing their SF and fantasy and horror bestseller lists dominated by American and British writers translated from English (often translated by the very European novelists who were the local competition), while those same European writers were never—never—translated into English for American readers. The New York publishing scene makes almost no allowance for bringing gifted European and Asian genre writers to the attention of the American reading public and the monolingual status of most of us Americans will keep us ignorant of the existence of these writers. It’s a real problem and a maddening frustration to many gifted writers and I admire both the restraint and generosity of the various European authors who have been so gracious to me and other visiting Americans while acting as interpreters and interviewers and guides in such circumstances as the Salon du Livre in Paris or the Mantua Festival or the Danish Book Fair or whatever.

So when my good friend and the frequent editor of French editions of my work, Jacques Chambon, got in touch with me to let me know that they were bringing out an anthology of stories by both American and European SF writers, to be released simultaneously in Europe and the United States, I thought it was a great idea and immediately agreed to write something for it. Robert Silverberg was the U.S.-based editor on the project. In addition to rounding up some of the usual American suspects—Scott Card, Greg Benford, Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Bob Silverberg himself—the anthology, christened Destination 3001, also boasted the fiction of many other writers I admire, including Philippe Curval, Sylvie Denis, Jean-Claude Dunyach, Franco Riciardiello, Serge Lehman, Andreas Eschbach, and my fellow Close Encounters survivor, Valerio Evangelisti. As it turned out, Destination 3001 appeared in France from Flammarion in the winter of 2000, but no American publisher was ever found. Too bad for us American readers.

But in the spring of 2000, my attention was focused on finding an original story idea.

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