Worlds Enough Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction by Simmons Dan

Author:Simmons, Dan [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Anthologies
ISBN: 9780061809439
Goodreads: 10322127
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2002-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CUT to the summer of 2000 A.D. Just after returning from a convention in Hawaii—and missing the Fourth of July waterfight!—I was off to New Hampshire for a week as visiting instructor in Jeanne Cavelos’s Odyssey Writers’ Workshop. Odyssey is an interesting workshop and the adults who attend—at least in that summer of 2000—were interesting people: an astrophysicist, a computer programmer, two lawyers seeking to go straight, people fluent in Russian and German and music, a couple of recent college graduates—mostly serious adult human beings, successful in their respective fields, brought together by a common desire to write publishable SF and fantasy. For a week I would teach in the mornings and join in the critique of the sixteen participants’ fiction through the long, hot afternoons.

I don’t sit in critique circles without offering work of my own for criticism, so I brought along “The Ninth of Av.” It was critiqued late in the week and the effect was not so dissimilar from tossing a grenade into a sewing circle.

The Odysseans were nothing if not earnest in their analysis. They did Web searches on the background of the Voynich Manuscript (a topic probably more interesting than my story); they deeply researched Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition in search of hidden meaning; they sought out the meaning of the name “Moira” and one Odyssean did a comprehensive analysis of the significance of the number 9,114 from the Bible through prime numbers (he found no real significance); others criticized the story’s “vagueness” and “murkiness” and questionable technologies. Most disliked the story. Some were actively irritated. A few defended it.

No one, I think, understood the thing. No one, for instance, really paid attention to the title—“The Ninth of Av”—or to the Jewish observance of it as Tisha B’Av.

Titles are important. Sometimes, as in “The Ninth of Av” they carry almost as much freight as the text of the tale. I think of stories like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” and wonder that titles are so easily tossed off and then ignored these days. In this case, when the French edition of Destination 3001 containing this story was about to come out in the autumn of 2000, I learned that my good friend (and editor) Jacques Chambon and good friend (and translator) Jean-Daniel Breque had changed the title of my story to “Le Dernier Fax” (“The Final Fax”) and I hit the roof, threatening—not idly—to pull the story completely rather than to lose the original title. I understood that the title “meant nothing” in French and, worse, that it would sound like “The Ninth of April” since the French word for April is “Avril,” usually shortened to “Av.” I understood when both my editor friend and my translator friend explained that the average French reader did not know Jewish holidays and would not understand the importance of the Ninth of Av.

It didn’t matter. To change the title to “The Final Fax” emasculated the story. I would rather burn down my city,

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