The Best of Joe Haldeman

~ * ~

The Best Of

JOE HALDEMAN

Ed. by Jonathan Strahan

and Gary K. Wolfe

No copyright 
 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

~ * ~

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Hero

Anniversary Project

Tricentennial

Blood Sisters

Lindsay and the Red City Blues

Manifest Destiny

More Than the Sum of His Parts

Seasons

The Monster

The Hemingway Hoax

Graves

None So Blind

For White Hill

Civil Disobedience

Four Short Novels

Angel of Light

The Mars Girl

Sleeping Dogs

Complete Sentence

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION

t was an entertaining exercise in nostalgia to put together this collection, spanning as it does over forty years of writing. The importance of short stories to my daily life and my writing career has waxed and waned over those years, but writing them is always interesting. They pack surprises in a way that novels do not.

That career didn’t begin until the late 1960s, so it barely brushed the “Golden Age” of magazine science fiction, when an energetic writer could make a living pounding out stories for the pulp magazines, for pennies a word, or less. In the sixties there were still as many as a dozen science fiction magazines on the newsstands—paper was still cheap, and magazines didn’t have to compete with the barrage of media that now tries to grab the reader’s attention and wallet. (Even then, though, oldsters were bemoaning the loss of the “real” pulps, the large-format ‘zines with ragged edges that carried science fiction from the ‘twenties through my childhood ‘fifties.)

I wrote my first two short stories in a writing class, the last semester before finishing my bachelor’s degree. Then I was drafted, and for a couple of years my only literary activity, except for a little poetry, was writing home.

When I returned from Vietnam I spent thirty days as a temporary civilian. During that time I rewrote those two undergraduate stories (both science fiction) and sent them out to magazines, and they both sold before I got out of the army, a few months later.

I knew from reading writers’ magazines that this kind of success was unusual. I’d planned to go back to college when I was out of the army, to study for a Ph.D. in computer science, and so I sort of did that— I registered for half-time and took two required math courses while I wrote “on the side.” But after a couple of weeks I sold my first novel.

I dropped out of graduate school quickly enough to get half of my tuition back. Bought a fresh typewriter ribbon and sailed off into a new life.

My wife Gay and I were living in the Washington suburbs then, going to the University of Maryland—but if I was going to be a writer, we could live anywhere, so we packed everything into an ancient Ford van and fled the Washington traffic and noise and snow for sunny Florida.

We went down to Brooksville, where fellow SF writer Keith Laumer lived—he’d said you could practically live for free there, picking oranges off the trees and catching fish for protein. It wasn’t quite that easy, but it was doable. Our rent on a three-bedroom cottage was $100 a month, which came to about 2500 words at my average rate, four cents. I could do that in two good days—make it three—and then start paying for the groceries, to supplement those free oranges and fishes, which anyhow had lost their charm.

My first novel, War Year, came out, and was a critical success, although it never made much money. But Gay had a job, teaching Spanish at the local high school, and along with my regular-if-sporadic writing income, we were doing pretty well.

The science fiction novels I was working on were both episodic; I could sell their chapters to the magazines as stand-alone novellas. One was
The Forever War,
which I was calling
Hero
, and the other became
All My Sins Remembered
(its working title was “the spy story”).

The conventional wisdom at the time was that there was no real money in magazine fiction, and no future; you had to write novels if you were going to write full time. But the magazines paid our rent and took us to Europe on a shoestring. They also gave me exposure for stories that ran the gamut from New Age surrealism to
Analog
-style hard science fiction.

In retrospect I can see that they gave the writing life a kind of continuity and rhythm. I’ve never been a prolific writer, by science fiction standards, but writing and selling a couple of short stories a month made me feel like a pro. I might not have known it then, but I’m certain of it now: a beginning writer needs confidence and validation. You can get it from your pals and relatives and teachers telling you how good you are, but trust me: all that is vapor compared to the reality of a check with an editor’s signature. Somebody you don’t know actually parted with his money for a chunk of your imagination.

That can become routine, but the first time makes you giddy with possibilities. (Giddy enough to rent a van and flee for the Sunshine State.)

The writing itself never does become routine, because you don’t know where it comes from, and you can’t know how long it will last. Forever, you hope, whatever finite number of years that turns out to be. Meanwhile, you hope to keep surprising yourself and pleasing others.

I’ve often wished it were still possible to make a living writing just short stories. I came close to doing it for a year or two, around 1970 and 1971, when there were markets galore and short work paid more per word, and per day, than novels were bringing in. I tried to write a thousand words a day (which became 500 words of final copy), and I kept track on a clipboard beside my typewriter. There was a special charm to that kind of writing. I’d always have several stories in some stage of incompletion; while I showered in the morning I’d either come up with a new idea or decide which in-progress story I’d work on. Then get the coffee percolating and sit down with a fresh stack of paper, and have at it.

One thing that a novelist misses, that a short story writer has all the time, is the satisfaction of being near completion. And though finishing a novel that you’ve spent a year or more on is a special satisfaction, well, you do only get it once a year or so.

I don’t know much about Charles Dickens, but they say that when he was writing short stories and came to the end of one, he inscribed a little flourish of a curlicue, and set down his pen. I do know how that feels, even though now it physically may be pulling a piece of paper out of the machine, or just hitting Command-S and sitting back. A job well done, or at least done as well as you can.

Here are some I’m still satisfied with.

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “HERO”

I remember the day I started “Hero”—probably the most important day in my writing life, since that turned out to be the beginning of
The Forever War.
At the time, though, I was just idly typing.

My wife and I had driven down to Florida, to visit fellow writer Keith Laumer and escape the snows of Washington, D.C. The second day we were at his place—a modernist mansion on a wild island in the middle of nowhere—she and Keith drove into town for groceries, and I sat down at the dining room table with my manual typewriter and absolutely no idea of what to write.

I had been out of the Army for a year and a half, and had a vague ambition to write a science-fiction war story. So I remembered an absurd day in Basic Training, slogging through midnight snow supposedly training for jungle warfare, when they herded us into a frigid Quonset Hut where a young lieutenant stepped up onto a podium and intoned “Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”

None of the methods articulated in the speech was particularly useful, as it turned out. But a couple of years later, I started a career with it.