Neon Twilight
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About this ebook
Three of Ed's wonderful space opera stories, collected in one volume! "Waiting in Crouched Halls," the first reprint of "Neon," and featuring his Berserker story, "Pilots of the Twiglight."
Because of Ed's financial needs, almost all the profits from this book go directly to Ed. Donations to help with Ed's medical and other financial needs are also most appreciated via www.FriendsOfEd.org. Thank you!
Edward Bryant
Edward Bryant is the multi-Nebula Award winning author of over a hundred short stories, over a thousand essays and reviews, and one novel with Harlan Ellison, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES.Ed's complete collected works are in the process of becoming available from ReAnimus Press.
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Neon Twilight - Edward Bryant
NEON TWILIGHT
by
EDWARD BRYANT
Produced by ReAnimus Press
Other books by Edward Bryant:
Phoenix Without Ashes
Cinnabar
Among the Dead and Other Events Leading to the Apocalypse
Particle Theory
The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age
Wyoming Sun
Fetish
Darker Passions
Trilobyte
Predators and Other Stories
© 2013, 1990 by Edward Bryant. All rights reserved.
http://ReAnimus.com/authors/edwardbryant
Cover Art by Fran Eisemann
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
~~~
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
WAITING IN CROUCHED HALLS
PILOTS OF THE TWILIGHT
NEON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
Eat Coherent Light, Zaharan Scum
This collection is respectfully and affectionately dedicated to that wondrously creative and most adventurous librarian of our time, Andre Norton.
NEON TWILIGHT might be described as the collected space opera of Ed Bryant. That sort of image probably comes as a bit of an astonishment to those who already have a preconceived notion of who I really am as a writer. Who I am, professionally, has always been something of a mystery. For about a decade, I tried to parlay the image of being one of the hottest new SF writers of the 70s. Then, in a sudden turnabout (personality change? chemical imbalance? sharp blow to the head?), I spent most of the ’80s as primarily a horror and dark fantasy writer. All the while, I was participating in, teaching, and directing writing classes, workshops, and conferences. I also was making occasional forays into film and television, as well as writing book reviews for such as Twilight Zone Magazine, Mile High Futures, and Locus. There are apparently those, for god’s sake, who only think of me as an sf critic, whatever that might be, and who are not all that aware that my adult professional life has been essentially wrapped around the act of crafting short stories. But I digress. The point of this is to submit that hardly anybody out there who reads my fiction at all thinks of me as a writer of SF adventure fiction or space opera.
After all, I’m serious. I write heavy stuff. Dark, often. Cynical, sometimes. Me, I’ve got a somewhat different self-image, of course. To my mind, most of my fiction is built around a core of desperate romance. I’m just a big softie. Yup. And in here’s some of the proof.
Waiting in Crouched Halls
is by far the oldest story included, dating back around two decades. It appeared effectively simultaneously in the spring 1971 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, a short-lived companion to Galaxy and If and the June 1970 issue of Adam Bedside Reader, an L.A.-based girlie magazine. Don’t scoff too loud until you see the contents page of that magazine. In the early ’70s, there were quite a few writers, myself included, who partially supported ourselves through the good offices of Jared Rutter and the other editors who assembled the PG-13 rated (or really a soft R) men’s magazines in the Adam/Knight stable. Some of the other contributors to the same issue that published Waiting
were Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, John Lutz, William Rotsler, and B. Traven. Not too shabby a company, I think. Anyhow, that’s when I was practicing my trade as a journeyman writer in Southern California. Waiting
is a rather shrill tale of murky sexual passions in orbital battle. I’m afraid it’s chock full of a lot of barely submerged post-adolescent hormones, for which I can’t and won’t apologize.
It’s also a peripheral Cinnabar story—the only one not included in CINNABAR back in 1976. Little did I know at the time that Waiting
would strangely prefigure Pilots of the Twilight
fourteen years later. Pilots
came about because writer/editor Fred Saberhagen performed an act of sheer bravery when he sold Tor on the idea of creating a seven-way collaborative novel (read shared universe anthology
). The courage came when Fred not only contacted such as Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, who seemed like obvious choices, but then enlisted Roger Zelazny and proceeded to recruit unlikelier sorts such as Stephen R. Donaldson, Connie Willis, and me. Fred didn’t lay down many hard-and-fast rules. All we were really asked to do was to craft a story taking place in the Saberhagen Berserker Universe, a hard-nosed place where large and ancient artificial intelligences in the form of war machines, implacably programmed to destroy all organic life, rummaged around the star-lanes looking for flesh-and-blood critters to trash.
It seemed too bizarre to work as a successful literary endeavor. What did I know? 1985’s BERSERKER BASE is still in print and still turns back healthy royalties. I can’t complain at all.
It took forever to write my part of the project. I recall blowing off most of a year before finally getting a handle on what I wanted to do. I remember when and where. It was early in January 1984 after attending a New Year’s holiday observance at George R.R. Martin’s home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was driving back to Denver with my friend Leanne Harper in her nifty old red Pontiac Firebird. Crossing northern New Mexico in the dark, as an eerie, Vincent-Price-would-be-proud mist closed in, we talked about some of the scattershot elements I wanted my story to include.
Andre Norton was mentioned many times. I can recall buying the special Ace edition of THE LAST PLANET from the Teenage Book Club in junior high. I read that book many times. It was the same with THE STARS ARE OURS and STARMAN’S SON and the Solar Queen novels. I was enthralled with her nonstop adventures peopled with tough, resourceful characters who behaved with bravery and honor.
There are a lot of Norton elements, filtered and recombined through my own sensibilities, included in Pilots of the Twilight.
You must never divulge this secret, but just as Robert A. Heinlein was the major young-reader influence on Connie Willis, so was Andre Norton for me. No kidding.
Once I had my handle on the story, I simply buckled down and cranked out a lot of pages. And then I rewrote. Some elements stayed; others departed. I found that the end was too cursory; it had to be expanded for the sake of balance. I fine-tuned my explanation for why a space-faring society would have sleek, aerodynamically designed space-fighters, and—especially—why those spacecraft would make whoooshing noises as they zoomed into battle, as well as why there would be noisy explosions in airless space. Hey, I was having fun. It’s a real challenge to try to justify the Star Wars approach to actual science.
Pilots
kept me plenty amused during its construction. Small jokes and nods of the hat kept appearing. For those inclined to look for such things, Robert W. Service gets a considerable nod herein; so do Lewis Carroll, Marvel Comics, a former editor of Omni, and even Alfonso Bedoya in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. There are plenty more. Because of a charity auction at a small Colorado science fiction convention, fantasy artist Real Musgrave found himself transmogrified into an alien.
But with all the fun and games, I still wanted to execute a solid story about characters who felt, and things that matter. I hope I succeeded.
The new story, Neon,
was written specifically for this collection and appears here for the first time. I wanted to return to the universe of Pilots
and take a quick look at what happens to the grandchildren of heroes. Neona-Gae Anila, Neon herself, is the granddaughter of the protagonists of Pilots of the Twilight.
She’s the sort of young woman who, if she were around today, would probably be picketing a mall furrier while wearing an Amnesty International T-shirt with a prominent button