Elizabeth Moon
MOON FLIGHTS
In memory of my grandfather,
Edwin James Jamerson,
who loved stories and storytelling
and was a storyteller himself, of the
cracker-barrel-and-whittlin’ school.
Introduction
by Anne McCaffrey
What a treat! To write an introduction for a writer whom I hold in high esteem. All her books are on my “comfort shelves.”
I think it was Bill Fawcett who first introduced me to Elizabeth Moon for her book, Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, the first volume of The Deed of Paksenarrion. Then, when I was looking for another collaborator to finish the Planet Pirates trilogy, I took him up on his suggestion of using EMoon—as she is respectfully known as in Dragonhold. Having read the first novel, I was certainly more than interested and she proved interested in writing Sassinak. With her background of service in the Marines—not that anyone regarding this tall slender woman with long black hair coiled on her pate would ever think she’d been a captain in the Marines. But she was willing to write with me and I was delighted. We actually met about then, at an Atlanta Dragoncon. We both felt that we must have known each other in some distant incarnation, as we were comfortable with each other very quickly. I certainly admired her work. I gave her a basic summary of what I thought the novel should contain and where I wanted to go with it. WOW! She took it and ran.
So, she got the trilogy up to the final book and she did most of Generation Warriors. She phoned me one morning, from the depths of Texas, to ask if she could put in an opera about the tragedy of the heavyworlders. I told her to run with it and the sequence is enough to stop your heart and start your tears, tragic and beautifully handled. I could even like heavyworlders after that. What started out as a notion to mind to have a planet that stayed in the Mesozoic Age—and thus dinosaurs survived—was a fun sort of script and we did have fun with it. Jody Lynn Nye wrote the really hard one, The Death of Sleep, and then we all got in the act.
So now you have a collection of stories from this imaginative and highly inventive author and I get the chance to urge you to read it. Which I most certainly do…not that you’ll need much nudging for you will recognize her name and probably have read her Heris Serrano series or the latest fun run of hers, Vatta’s War. With great pride and pleasure, I add that her magnificent The Speed of Dark quite rightly won the Nebula Award with which science fiction writers compliment their colleagues. A powerful and gripping story of how one young man fights the handicaps of autism and makes his own way in a “normal” world. As the lad has told me, “normal” is a setting on your washing machine. Not only has that book been honored but she also wrote Remnant Population, which is very much a sneak-up-on-you, which I recall cackling about for the sheer mischief she created for her main characters and winds it all up with an ending every author would like to have achieved. I still find myself reading it, just for the fun of the ending. Wish I could write like that.
EMoon has been a not frequent enough guest at Dragonhold as much because we are both “into” horses as being science fiction writers. Her novel Hunting Party, set on a planet that is devoted entirely to the chases of the inedible by the unspeakable, earned her an invitation to join a proper English hunt for a day. She asked could she stay over with me on her way back. She had also been complaining about not finding a horse in Texas who jumped. (Well, ALL Irish horses jump!) So I suggested that she stop here first and I would see that she had a ride or two on a proper hunter horse. She did so, which was serendipitous because, as some of us here feared, the English hunt put her up on an old racehorse. She had neither steering nor brakes and how she stayed on at the speed she was going to keep up with the pack is another tribute to her expertise and determination. Fortunately before her arms and legs gave out, others were changing to second horses, and she was quite within hunt manners to end the session without disgracing herself, S-F, Texas or the Marines.
So, dive into this collection with the assurance that you will have your mind set at ease, your ears scratched and your eyes pleasured and maybe learn something new in the process. That’s what good writing’s all about… teaching the reader something new or an aspect to something familiar that they hadn’t quite considered before.
Well done, EMoon!
If Nudity Offends You
When Louanne opened her light bill, she about had a fit. She hadn’t had a bill that high since the time the Sims family hooked into her outlet for a week, when their daddy lost his job and right before they got kicked out of the trailer park for him being drunk and disorderly and the kids stealing stuff out of trash cans and their old speckled hound dog being loose and making a mess on Mrs. Thackridge’s porch. Drunk and disorderly was pretty common, actually, and stealing from trash cans was a problem only because the Sims kids dumped everything before picking through it, and never bothered to put it back. The Sanchez kids had the good sense to pick up what mess they made, and no one cared what they took out of the trash (though some of it was good, like a boom box that Carter Willis stole from down at Haley’s, and hid in the trash can until Tuesday, only the Sanchez kids found it first). But when Grace (which is what they called that hound, and a stupid name that is for a coonhound, anyway) made that mess on Mrs. Thackridge’s front porch, and she stepped in it on the way to a meeting of the Extension Homemaker’s Club and had to go back inside and change her shoes, with her friends right there in the car waiting for her, that was it for the Sims family.
Anyhow, when Louanne saw that $82.67, she just threw it down on the table and said, “Oh my God,” in that tone of voice her grandma never could stand, and then she said a bunch of other things like you’d expect, and then she tried to figure out who she knew at the power company, because there was no way in the world she’d used that much electricity, and also no way in the world she could pay that bill. She didn’t leave the air conditioner on all day like some people did, and she was careful to turn off lights in the kitchen when she moved to the bedroom, and all that. All those things to keep the bill low, because she’d just bought herself a car—almost new, a real god buy—and some fancy clothes to wear to the dance hall on weekends, now that she was through with Jack forever and looking for someone else. The car payment alone was $175 a month, and then there was the trailer park fee, and the mobile home payments, and the furniture rental… and the light bill was supposed to stay low, like under thirty dollars.
It occurred to Louanne that even though the Simses had left, someone else might have bled her for power. But who? She looked out each window of her trailer, looking for telltale cords. The Loomis family, to her right, seemed as stable and prosperous as any: Pete worked for the county, and Jane cooked in the school cafeteria. No cord there. The Blaylocks, on the left, were a very young couple from out of state. He worked construction; she had a small baby, and stayed home. Almost every day, Louanne had seen her sitting on the narrow step of their trailer, cuddling a plump, placid infant. Directly behind was an empty slot, and to either side behind…. Louanne could not tell if that ripple in the rough grass was a cord or not. She’d have to go outside to see for sure.