Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds
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Authors: Joe Haldeman
Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds
Joe Haldeman
For science fiction fandom.
Contents
Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds
Introduction
The Confederación Stories
The Confederación is a universe I use whenever I need a starfaring, interstellar-commerce background for a story. (I know that you can argue against the possibility of both “starfaring” and “interstellar commerce,” but hey, these are
stories
!) I made up the background originally for two novellas that aren't included here, “To Fit the Crime” and “The Only War We've Got.” They make up about half of the novel
All My Sins Remembered.
I wrote the story “To Fit the Crime” back in 1971, in response to a request by Hans Stefan Santesson for stories about crimes that could only be committed in the future. I guess it was either rejected or the anthology never got off the ground. For whatever reason, the story appeared in
Galaxy
magazine, and reader response prompted the editor to make me a generous offer for another novella in the same universe. I did the practical thing and let it grow into an episodic novel.
The novel
Starschool
, a collaboration with my brother Jack C. Haldeman II, also takes place in the Confederación universe, and there are four other stories with that setting, which are collected here:
“Passages” started out with a typo. I typed the nonword “fireworms” instead of fireworks, and that suggested possibilities, so I copied it onto a little piece of paper and stuck it on my bulletin board. About ten years later I actually started a story about fireworms, but it seized up after a few pages. For some years I tried different angles with it, but nothing worked until I realized I had to throw out the damned fireworms. Then everything clicked.
Nobody has ever noted that this story shares a character with
All My Sins Remembered.
It takes place a couple of years before the last chapter of that book.
“A !Tangled Web” started out as a goof. Jerry Pournelle and I were talking about
Star Wars
, and he said, aw hell, every science fiction writer has written that aliens-in-a-spaceport-bar scene a dozen times. I hadn't, though, so I thought I'd better. It was a lot of fun to write, and I don't think any of my stories has elicited more favorable responses from readers and other writers. I should drink beer with Jerry more often.
“Seasons” is a lot more serious, not to say somber. I think it's one of my most successful stories, but it started out as a kind of intellectual challenge. I'd contracted to do a novella for the book
Alien Stars
, whose theme was “conflict with aliens.” I didn't want to do a simple space-war story, so I came up with an idea that involved an epistemological conflictâsome humans certain that they understand how these simple aliens see the world, and they're dead wrong.
In the process of planning the story I read a bit about what other writers and critics had said about the novella. Irving Howe, in an excellent essay that prefaces
Classics of Modern Fiction: Ten Short Novels
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), said,
Whereas the short-story writer tries to strike off a flash of insight and the novelist hopes to create the illusion of a self-sufficient world, the author of the short novel is frequently concerned with showing an arc of human conduct that has a certain symbolic significance. The short novel is a form that encourages the writer to struggle with profound philosophic or moral problems through a compact yet extended narrative.
Another writer pointed out that novellas often mirror the structure of classical drama, which got me to thinking: Classical tragedy is built around the main character having a tragic flaw, a
hamartia
, that ultimately causes him to make a mistake that provokes the gods to harm him. How could you express that structure in terms that were secular and futuristic? I wound up with a situation where the main character is a scientist, and her equivalent to
hamartia
is an unquestioning faith in her professional intellectual tools, in the scientific method. And it isn't the gods that turn on her; it's her own subject matter.
Finally, “The Mazel Tov Revolution” is a piece of silliness that I wrote as an extended joke on fellow writer Jack Dann. The background to it is in the story's introduction in my collection
Infinite Dreams
âsuffice it to say that I had to write a funny story that involved a Jewish character and the effect of faster-than-light travel on political power.
Essays
Three of these essays were articles written for publication that for one reason or another were not published. I do think they're good, or they wouldn't be in this book.
“Not Being There” was a post
-Challenger
-disaster piece commissioned by
Rolling Stone.
I'm not sure why they didn't print it; possibly it was because they didn't like it. I collected my kill fee, though, and never marketed it elsewhere; too long and, for mundane publications, no longer timely by the time they rejected it.
I also thought “War Stories” was too long and too timely to remarket. It was a “gang review” of a bunch of related Vietnam books that I did on assignment for a literary magazine. They sat on it for a year, and finally rejected it with no comment. I suspect it was not liberal enough, in some narrow literary/political sense, but they didn't ask for any particular viewpoint, so I fell back on honesty. At least they did reimburse me for the books.
“Photographs and Memories” I wrote to sort out my feelings about the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit “The Perfect Moment.” I sent it off to
Playboy
and the editor said that if he had seen it a few months earlier, he would have bought it, but the Mapplethorpe exhibit was closing (Boston, where I saw it, was its last city) and by the time it got into print, the story would be cold. Fair enough; I didn't try to sell it elsewhere.
But there's a weird circle of events that leads back to
Playboy.
I teach a science fiction writing workshop every fall at M.I.T., and the assignment I give the students the first day is a “where do you get your crazy ideas” exercise. I assign each of them a random topic from a list of science fiction “motifs,” like time-travel paradoxes, first contact, and so forth, and for the next class meeting they have to bring in a two-page beginning based on that idea.
If you've never written stories yourself, this may sound an awful lot like teaching a kid how to swim by throwing him in the deep end. Actually, it's not. In a curious way, it makes the writing easier. To demonstrate how easy it is, I have someone pick what he or she thinks is the hardest topic on the list, and while the students spend an hour filling out forms and stuff, I sit in front of them and write out two pagesâthe Harlan Ellison of my generation!
That particular year, the student chose “Science and Art in the Future.” The two pages seemed to have promise, so I followed up on them with the brainstorming diagram on pp xii-xiii, and went off to the Mapplethorpe exhibit for inspiration. “Photographs and Memories” resulted as a byproduct.
The two pages and diagram sat around for a year. I was headed off for a summer of travel and was just finishing up the novel
Worlds Enough and Time;
when it was done I thought I would spend the rest of the summer doing short work. The two pages wound up growing into a novella, “Feedback,” which ultimately sold to
Playboy
, and should be out a few months before this book.
“Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds” and “Confessions of a Space Junkie” belong to the venerable genre of science fiction convention Guest-of-Honor speeches recycled into articles. They both have interesting autobiographical materialâinteresting to
me
, anyhowâand this seemed like a good place to put them together. They relate to the others, as well.
Story Poems
If you skip this section the book will burst into flame and burn your house down. Maybe.
Okay, nobody reads poetry anymore unless they are themselves poets. Fortunately, perhaps, there are more poets living today than existed in all the centuries preceding the invention of the typewriter.
Of course a lot of these poets
are just people
who hit the RETURN key whenever they feel like it.
But that phenomenon is beyond the scope of this introduction. Suffice it to say that there is a persecuted minority of poets who think that poetry could be more popular with actual readers if it only were more interesting. It might even venture toward accessibility. It might even tell a story now and then; in fact, there are some stories that beg to be told as poems.
I did “Homecoming” and “Time Lapse” in response to requests from editors of “theme” anthologiesâAnne Jordan wanted science fiction stories about home towns for
Fires of the Past
(St. Martin's, 1991) and Ellen Datlow wanted modern to postmodern vampire stories for
Blood Is Not Enough
(Morrow, 1989).
“Saul's Death” is unlike the other three story poems in that it follows a classical form: two linked sestinas. Readers familiar with formal poetry or modern poetry will probably see the
hommage
here to Ezra Pound's riveting brutal poem “Sestina: Altaforte.” I once gave a reading of this poem without mentioning the connection and James Dickey came up afterwards and clapped me on the shoulder and said “Way to go, Ezra.” To this day I'm not sure whether that was a compliment or a dig.
“DX” was just something I had to write. I blasted out the first draft of it in one four-hour sitting, feeling weirdly possessed. I've mentioned elsewhere that I think it may be genuinely unique in that it's both pure autobiography and actual science fiction.
