• “Hoops,” like everything I write, is about motivation and moral ambiguity: what makes people do what they do and how they justify what they do when it results in evil. The characters in it are essentially characters I had used in my novel Concourse; I found I couldn’t let them go so easily. The story, like so many stories, is about dreams unfulfilled and unfulfillable, and undreamt. It’s also about people who have no power and very little experience with justice, using what power they can scrape together to demand justice — and, in the end, it’s about the impossibility of justice: a word we use all the time, but one, I think, with no real meaning.
Allen Steele was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his B.A. in communications from New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, and his М.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He became a full-time science fiction writer in 1988, following publication of his first short story, “Live from the Mars Hotel” (Asimov’s mid-Dec. ’88). Since then he has become a prolific author of novels, short stories, and essays.
His novels include Orbital Decay; Clark County, Space; Lunar Descent; Labyrinth of Night; The Jericho Iteration; and The Tranquillity Alternative. He has also published two collections of short fiction. Rude Astronauts and All-American Alien Boy.
His “The Death of Captain Future” received the 1996 Hugo Award for host novella, won a 1996 Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award, and was nominated for a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His novelette “The Good Rat” was also nominated for a Hugo in the same year. Orbital Decay received the 1990 Locus Award for best first novel and Clark County, Space was nominated for the 1991 Phillip K. Dick Award.
Allen Steele now lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and three dogs.
• Until the idea for “Doblin’s Lecture” occurred to me, virtually all of my published novels and short stories were science fiction; although my last two novels are suspense thrillers, they’re primarily SF in terms of genre classification. When I sat down to write this particular tale, though. I wasn’t concerned about which genre it would fall into: I simply wanted to tell a good, scary story.
A couple of years ago. I read a brief item in the New York Times about how Jeffrey Dahmer, the convicted serial killer, had received about $30.000 since he had been sent to prison, principally in the form of small checks sent from people who apparently felt sorry for him; one of his benefactors had gone so far as to give him a Bible along with a check for several thousand dollars. I then recalled reading elsewhere that John Wayne Gacy made a tidy profit from sales of his paintings while he was on death row. Charles Manson occasionally receives royalties from the songs he wrote before he became notorious: a small indie label has released an album he recorded while in prison. And since the New York State Supreme Court recently struck down the “Son-of-Sam Law” as unconstitutional, there’s nothing to prevent David Berkowitz from writing a best-selling memoir (a “kill-and-tell”). So why would anyone give money to these monsters, or pay for their mediocre art?
The answer is obvious: America is fascinated with serial killers. We regularly send books like The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, anti Mind Hunter shooting up the bestseller lists, and we make movies like Natural Horn Killers and Seven into box-office hits. Multiple murderers, both real and fictional, are staples of popular culture. Which person has better name-recognition: Stephen Hawking or Jeffrey Dahmer? Hawking is the most brilliant physicist since Albert Einstein while Dahmer slaughtered dozens of young men, but who is more famous?
Playing the “what if” game common to science fiction. I then asked myself: If Manson or Berkowitz (or, speaking in the past tense, Gacy or Dahmer) were put on a university lecture circuit, would I buy a ticket to see him speak? Yes, I probably would, it only out of curiosity. And it I knew that he would perform a demonstration of his... well, talent... during the course of his presentation? Probably not, but only because I’m squeamish about violence.
However. I’m sure I could easily scalp the ticket for a few hundred bucks an hour before showtime.
Brad Watson is from Meridian. Mississippi, and earned degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of Alabama. His first book. Last Days of the Dog-Men, was published by W. W. Norton in April 1996: Dell published a paperback edition in the spring of 1997. He has taught creative writing at the University of Alabama and currently teaches at Harvard University.
• “Kindred Spirits” grew out of a couple of anecdotes people told me while I was a reporter on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I heard the story of a man who repeatedly — with little effect — beat up his wife’s lover. And I heard the story of a wild pig hunt that went wrong. When I first wrote my story. I dressed these anecdotes up considerably but had nowhere to take them. The stories of the murders — the narrator’s story of a murder trial and the loss of his wife, and Bailey’s story about his own ill-fated marriage — began to form around these early anecdotes as I worked on successive drafts. And I began to understand the kindred natures of these men and their stories, their patterns of violence, betrayal, and loss.
John Weisman is one of the select company of authors to have written both fiction and nonfiction New York Times bestsellers. He has written seven novels, including four in the current, best-selling Rogue Warrior® series. Two of his nonfiction projects. Shadow Warrior, the story of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, and Rogue Warrior, the autobiography of Navy Commander Richard Marcinko and the top-secret unit Seal Team Six, were the subjects of 60 Minutes segments.
Weisman and his wife, Susan, a State Department official, live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with their three dogs.
• I hadn’t attempted a short story since college. Then Jim Grady called and asked me to contribute one for a collection he was putting together as a way to raise money for a charitable organization called Share Our Strength. With the perfect confidence of the naff, I told him he’d have something from me in a couple of weeks. Then I.sat down and tried to write. Nada. Bupkes. I must have false-started half a dozen times. Problem was, writing a short story was impossible. I write novels; that’s marathoning — you grind out the words day after day. Grady needed a forty-meter dash. I had no idea how to start, how to dig down to get the right traction for this word-sprint.
Finally, I convinced myself that I wasn’t writing a short story, but the prologue to a new novel. That worked. Indeed, once I’d shattered the initial psychological barrier, the characters broke away; started acting on their own, and the story told itself. One interesting sidebar to the little psy-op I ran on myself is that I definitely want to see a lot more of the protagonist of the story. And so, “There Are Monsterim” may turn out to be the prologue of a novel after all.
Monica Wood is the author of Secret Language, a novel; Description, a book on fiction writing; Short Takes, a teaching guide to contemporary fiction; and 12 Multicultural Novels: A Reading and Teaching Guide. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologized.