Rayguns Over Texas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Texas Over Rayguns

  It’s All Lew’s Fault

  Books Are My Thing:Adventures in Texas Science Fiction

  Babylon Moon

  Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine

  The Nostalgia Differential: A Jerry Cornelius Adventure

  Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids

  Rex

  The Atmosphere Man

  La Bamba Boulevard

  Operators are Standing By

  The Art of Absence

  An Afternoon’s Nap, or: Five Hundred Years Ahead

  Grey Goo and You

  Defenders of Beeman County

  Sovereign Wealth

  Jump the Black

  Timeout

  Pet Rock

  Take a Left at the Cretaceous

  The Chambered Eye

  Best Energies

  Appendix A: The Essential Texas Writers

  Appendix B: Other Texas Writers You Should Check Out

  Appendix C: The Essential Texas Artists

  Author Biographies

  About the Editor

  For Lew,

  Without whose patience and lessons all those years ago,

  this book would never been a reality.

  Texas Over Rayguns

  Bruce Sterling

  This sprightly book is the second collection of regional Texan science fiction and the first in a long generation. Rayguns Over Texas features Texan science fiction writers of every known variety: native, imported, male, female, grizzled veterans, and dewy neophytes.

  Here the reader will see Texan writers tackling some themes that loom large in their extensive neck of the woods. Among them are such cogent issues such as immigration (by space aliens), narcotics (for Artificial Intelligences), gunfire (to bag dinosaurs), and the rough handling that pop stars from Beaumont and Lubbock can sometimes receive in Hollywood.

  Since Texas is bigger than many major European nations, it’s a diverse place. Its sprawling acreage combines the variant cultures of the Old South, the Mountain West, the Midwest, and the Mexican frontier. Texas also has a unique regional cuisine (Tex-Mex) and regional forms of ethnic music (Western Swing, conjunto, Texas blues).

  Regional Texan literature is based on folkloric and Southern Gothic themes of suffering, endurance, and transformation: a saga of parents, children, and their land. However, Texan science fiction writers are people of a specific temperament. They are visionary fantasists from a global subculture that creates science fiction books, movies, television, games, comic books, costumes, conventions, and collectibles. So they’re not junior partners of Texan regionalists; they are ornery and into their own thing.

  This science fiction subculture has been rooted in Texas for quite a while.Most of everyone in science fiction has heard of Robert E. Howard, the comrade of Lovecraft and the pulp-fiction creator of “Conan the Barbarian,” whose work still thrives after 80 years.

  Rayguns Over Texas contains a marvelous work by Aurelia Hadley Mohl, a literary translator and ardent suffragette. This intensely futuristic effort of imagination was published way back in 1865, in the smoking ruins of Aurelia’s Confederacy. Aurelia’s time-travel fantasy reveals itself as a rather typical work of Texan science fiction, in that it’s got a leaping, headlong fantasy elements, wry social commentary, peculiar local lingo, and number of sharp political digs.

  It takes some grit to be a Texan science fiction writer, for they’ve never been over-burdened with help and are blissfully unaware of other people’s literary rules. Somewhere within this form of genre writing, there remains the tall-tale braggadocio of a thinly scattered people taking root in a vast frontier.

  Texas is rough and tough. It boasts a violent climate, replete with tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. It’s been the site of massacres, ethic cleansing, and colossal natural and industrial disasters. Politically, Texas has always been a one-party state, with its public affairs in the hands of a camarilla of alcaldes and good old boys. Texas has handguns galore and one of the planet’s largest prison populations. Texas has known economic collapse, military defeat, occupation, and centuries of racial oppression and grinding rural poverty. Those may be the stark facts, but they don’t much bother any creative figure in this book. If anything, all that merely gives them some extra swagger.

  Texas is also advanced. The raw, spectacular landscape of this former republic is covered with a superbly engineered infrastructure of highways, oil derricks, gas lines, transmission towers...windmills, ports, canals, spacecraft control centers, military bases...drones, nuclear weapon assembly plants, ultra-clean computer chip assembly factories--yes, most anything that technology can conjure up has been deployed on the people of Texas. Commonly, they even inflict that stuff on other people.

  In summary, Texas is an earthly paradise for the geek maven and the optimistic curmudgeon. Such are the authors here, and such is the editor of this book, Rick Klaw. Rick is a wry, jolly, self-starting guy, full of initiative and undaunted by the odds, and it’s because of him that this book happened.

  By the way, there’s not a raygun to be found in this book. I looked for rayguns, but it turns out that the title is just a wink to the knowledgeable reader there--something like silver spurs on the spotless boots of a Texan computer mogul.

  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did.

  Bruce Sterling--Bullard, Texas 2013

  It’s All Lew’s Fault

  Richard Klaw

  In 1989, I was 20 years old and in Austin (from Houston) for about a year, working at the Book Stop in Lincoln Village. I had just returned from lunch, where I read Lewis Shiner’s contribution in the first Wild Cards volume. “The Long, Dark Night of Fortunato” starred a truly unusual hero, a pimp who derives his special powers from Tantric magic. His method of interrogating a dead man had the virtue of never being tried before, not just in Wild Cards, but likely in the whole of fiction. With my mind still reeling from the story, I took my afternoon shift at the cash register. My first customer was Lewis Shiner.

  Lew became a regular, stopping in a few times each week. We’d discuss books, movies, comics, music, and sometimes writing. In the Austin of that era, every 20 year old was either a student, a struggling musician, or a neophyte writer. I loathe school and can’t carry a tune. I finally worked up the nerve to show Lew a story of mine. Eventually, we started meeting once a week for lunch with screenwriter and film editor, Thomas Smith, at the Lone Star Cafe.

  Shiner took to calling our group The Lone Star Roundtable. We’d discuss projects, engage in critiques, and discuss literary history. Lew taught me how to be a professional writer and an editor. He started introducing me to other members of the Austin writers’ community. Most importantly, Lew gave me the confidence to pursue my own path. My first edited book came out from Blackbird Comics when I was 22 and my first anthology one year later.

  By the mid-nineties, Lew had relocated to San Antonio before eventually settling in Raleigh, NC; while I became the managing editor of Mojo Press and worked as the manager and buyer of Austin’s SF/mystery bookstore, Adventures In Crime & Space. During this period, I ensconced myself within Austin fandom, regularly appearing at conventions and getting to know members of the group Fandom Association of Central Texas FACT, who run most of the SF events in central
Texas. After Mojo folded, I re-invented myself as a pop culture journalist and focused my energies primarily on writing essays and reviews.

  After a 15-year hiatus, I returned to book editing in early 2013 with The Apes of Wrath from Tachyon Publications. My apes-in-literature reader proved popular and garnered almost unanimous acclaim.

  When I discovered that FACT, which had entered publishing in 2006 with Cross Plains Universe, wanted to produce a book for the 2013 World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, I leapt at the opportunity. I proposed a survey of Texas science fiction, with reprints of classic stories and essays detailing the breadth and depth of the work. FACT rejected my proposal, but countered with an intriguing suggestion: an anthology of original science fiction from contemporary Texas authors.

  I readily agreed, especially since I already had a similar idea sitting on my hard drive. Rayguns Over Texas initially crystallized as a concept in the early 2000s, when Jayme Lynn Blaschke and I each independently conceived of a 21st century incarnation of the first Texas SF writers anthology, Lone Star Universe. We teamed up and shopped the idea (under the title Rayguns & Armadillos: Fantastic Fiction from the Texas Frontier) for years to no avail and eventually shelved it.

  FACT and I hammered out some guidelines: the contributors had to have a current Texas residency and at least 80% of the book should be new material. I made a general call for submissions and ended up with 17 original stories from a wide range of Texans on a variety subjects and locales. I decided on two rarely seen reprints.

  The first came from Aurelia Hadley Mohl, one of the first professional female Texas journalists. “An Afternoon’s Nap, or: Five Hundred Years Ahead” tells the story of a man who falls asleep and wakes up some 500 years later in a utopian society. The obscure tale appeared in four consecutive issues of the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph in late December 1865. Mohl left no evidence explaining why she wrote the story and never produced another science fiction story.

  Bradley Denton’s “La Bamba Boulevard” previously appeared in the FenCon VIII Program Book, September 23-25, 2011. Brad felt this story, which he sees as companion to his award-winning novel Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede, deserved to be read by a wider audience. I think you’ll agree.

  I tapped long time fan, writer, and bookseller, Scott A. Cupp to supply a first hand account of Texas science fiction history and three appendices on essential writers and artists. For the Appendix B: Other Texas Writers You Should Check Out, Scott and I decided to not include the writers in this book. From our perspective, the very fact they are here makes them someone to check out.

  I then recruited Texas ex-patriot and current citizen of the world, Bruce Sterling, one of the luminaries Shiner introduced me to back in the day, to write the introduction exploring the nature of Texas science fiction.

  It really is all Lew’s fault.

  Books Are My Thing:

  Adventures in Texas Science Fiction

  Scott A. Cupp

  I met my first science fiction writer in 1972. I was a fan of the genre and had begun writing some really bad science fiction with my friend, Henry Melton. Chad Oliver, a name I was familiar with from the magazines, was giving a talk on the University of Texas campus, so Henry and I went to a local used bookstore. In a fit of serendipity, I found one of Oliver’s books there. It was his Winston juvenile novel, Mists of Dawn. The front free flyleaf of the book (half of the Alex Schomburg, dual-page spread that adorned most Winston SF books) was missing. The bookstore had written “Free” on the exposed title page. Free was a good price, so I took it. When I took it to Chad to get signed, he saw the remnants of the price and smiled. “You might have been overcharged,” he said.

  A few months thereafter, a girlfriend noticed that the University of Texas Science Fiction Society was taking a trip to Enchanted Rock, out near Kerrville (just outside of Austin). Everyone was welcome. I went and my life changed.

  I met the core group at that trip. There was Bill Wallace and Dianne Kraft, Walton “Bud” Simons, Carmen Carter, and Bruce Sterling. Al Jackson, the founder of the group, was not there. I became part of the group, and in March 1973, we all went to College Station for AggieCon 4. The guests there were Chad Oliver, Jack Williamson, and Bob Vardeman. There were films, a couple of panels, and a book room.

  Starting with a Harlan Ellison trip to College Station, TX, and Texas A&M University in 1969 (which ended with a food fight), the annual gathering came to be known as AggieCon. As I write this, AggieCon is preparing for their 44th convention. I was sorry to have missed this first AggieCon.

  Books are my thing. I love them and have lots of them. I saw books for sale in the dealers’ room for three or four dollars that I had seen recently in the local bookstore for only a quarter. I went back to Austin and bought them. The next year, I bought a dealers table at the convention and sat and watched the parade go by. Among the people I saw that year were Anne McCaffrey and Keith Laumer, the convention Guests of Honor. The other folks I met that year included Harlan Ellison (making a return trip to College Station), Lisa Tuttle, Ed Bryant, Howard Waldrop, Steve Utley, Joe Pumilia, and more. I sold and talked books. In other words, I had a great time.

  Soon, Austin became a center of science fiction activity. The Turkey City Writers Workshop had begun. Held a couple of times a year, the workshop had new and established writers reading and critiquing each other’s work. Sometimes, the critiques could be devastating, especially if Sterling took an interest in it. Turkey Citizens included Waldrop, Sterling, Pumilia, Tuttle, Lewis Shiner, George W. Proctor, Jake Saunders, and others. I was not writing then so I just listened and learned.

  AggieCon remained the regional convention. At AggieCon 6, I met Tom Reamy. Reamy was there promoting his short story, “Twilla,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as selling memberships to the World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Kansas City in 1976. I bought my membership for (if I remember correctly) five dollars. The AggieCons were great in those days. The student-run Cepheid Variable club managed the convention. They put together a film program that, in the days before VCRs, made it easy to own or see a film. It was amazing. I remember watching The Wizard of Oz, Jason and the Argonauts, and Flesh Gordon (a film Reamy had worked on) on their huge screen.

  In 1977, I was there when they screened The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time. This was a major deal since, the week before, the University had kicked the Gay Liberation organization off the campus. TAMU, at this time, was still heavily influenced by the Corps of Cadets, which produced many military leaders. The Rudder Tower auditorium had around 800 or so attendees, with maybe 30% members of the Corps. When Frankenfurter came down in the elevator and began singing “Sweet Transvestite,” you could hear the collective gasp of the Corps and the rapid exit of a large portion of the audience.

  AggieCon was also great because the Memorial Student Center there had a large serpentine lounge known as Phred. I spent many fine evenings on the sofas there discussing books, films, and life in general with writers I had met there, like Joe R. Lansdale, Bill Crider, James Reasoner, and Neal Barrett, Jr. At first we were left alone to our discussions, but over the years other fans came to hang out, listen to our conversations, and contribute. Few who were there will ever forget the “Mars Needs Chickens” discussion.

  I remained in Austin, enjoying my time with the UTSFS until 1976. I graduated and, as a graduation present from myself, I went to Kansas City for MidAmericon, the World Science Fiction Convention. I met a variety of writers. I recall interrupting a conversation between Robert Silverberg and Frank Herbert to get their autographs in my program book. I also met Phil Farmer and A. E. van Vogt at this show. Robert Heinlein was the Guest of Honor, and I was delighted to see and hear him speak. I was also ecstatic as I got to hold Joe Haldeman’s Hugo award for The Forever War while he signed my paperback copy.

  In 1976, I first met Wil
lie Siros from El Paso at AggieCon. We shared a booksellers table. Willie was selling some MicroGames and I had paperbacks. By 1977, I was back in San Antonio since I had a real job I still collected books, attended AggieCon, and went to Austin for a good sf fix every now again.

  During one of those visits, I got talking to Willie, who had moved to Austin. We discovered that we had a great many things in common. Soon, we were selling books together at conventions. Willie and Robert Taylor, another Austin fan, decided that Austin needed its own convention. Armadillos are an iconic figure in Austin, promoting beer and rock and roll. So the logical name for the convention was ArmadilloCon. The ArmadilloCon model was fixed on new writers, with the Guest of Honor being a writer who had never before been a GOH at a North American convention. In April 1979, ArmadilloCon 1 was held at the long gone Villa Capri Motel. John Varley, fresh from the Nebula banquet and still carrying his award for “The Persistence of Vision,” was the writer guest and Jeanne Gomoll, a feminist fan, was the Fan Guest of Honor. Silly things happened at the convention, but not many can compare to the ten or so people playing science fiction charades late Saturday night in Varley’s room. Obscure Cordwainer Smith titles, like “Golden the Ship was Oh, Oh, Oh” and “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal,” were stumping the feminist team while titles such as “Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Your Faces Filled with Light,” and “Why Has the Virgin Mary Never Entered the Wigwam of Standing Bear?”, were tough ones presented to the men. Maybe you had to be there.

  Another tradition began at that convention. Howard Waldrop closed the convention with the reading of a new story. He had created a picture of a dodo in the carpeted walls of the hotel to accompany his reading of “The Ugly Chickens.” ArmadilloCon became my favorite convention right then and I have attended every one since. Throughout the years ArmadilloCon guests have included George Alec Effinger, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, John Sladek, Pat Cadigan, Charles Stross, Gwyneth Jones, Kage Baker, Sharon Shinn, Sean Stewart, Dan Simmons, Scott Lynch, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I was fortunate enough to be the Toastmaster at ArmadilloCon 31 in 2009.