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    Wyoming Sun
    Wyoming Sun
    Wyoming Sun
    Ebook166 pages2 hours

    Wyoming Sun

    By Edward Bryant

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    About this ebook

    East of your nightmares, west of your dreams...

    Here are the venturers:

    A thirteen-year-old boy on the Great Plains in 1850 must contend with hunger, smallpox, and intruders from a world and time he can barely imagine.

    A young woman reporter and an elderly biologist become party to the strangest conspiracy of the century.

    An ex-Senator, resigned and in disgrace, returns home to the mountains only to find that the past is not dead — just deadly.

    A young Indian man discovers that the ultimate winner may not be so easy to predict in a clash between cultures.

    A quartet of old friends find their lives inextricably tangled with what may be a ghost from the prehistoric past.

    These are portraits in fiction of the West... fantasy as colorful as an old-time rodeo... science fiction as contemporary as the energy industry.

    "Ed Bryant is one of the poets of speculative fiction; his stories ar more than speculation, more than metaphor. They create a mythos. The myth throbs as some dark center we believe true in a symbolic, if not actual way. One of the highest goals of literature is the creation of myth which gives us insight into ourselves and our world. Bryant gives us that insight into a changing Wyoming, where the frontier/cowboy west meets energy technology and its technocrats."
    —Charles Levendosky, Author of perimeters and aspects of the vertical

    "Wyoming Sun justifies all the years I have prodded Ed Bryant to use his native Wyoming background in his writing. As I read the stories, I saw, heard and smelled Wyoming quite differently than before. This collection of short stories is a boon to readers and to librarians, Western Americana with a fantastic science fiction twist. My wager says you read one story, then the entire collection."
    —Ruby Preuit, President, Wyoming Library Association

    "Science fiction in Wyoming? It's true and fantastic, created by Ed Bryant in response to his home state. He links the past, the present and the future through believable characters, realistic detail, and fantasia. His unpredictable designs leave open doors that invite the reader's imagination, offer creative experience that captures interest to the last page and beyond."
    —Peggy Simson Curry, Author of Red Wind of Wyoming and Fire in the Water

    Although born originally in New York, Edward Bryant grew up on a cattle ranch at the foot of the Sybille Canyon between Laramie and Wheatland, Wyoming. He graduated from Wheatland High School in 1963 and then attended the University of Wyoming as a General Motors Scholar. Since 1969 Bryant has worked full-time as a freelance writer, producing over a dozen books, two screenplays, and scores of short stories and articles. He has also worked as an artist-in-residence for the Wyoming Council on the Arts and other sponsoring bodies. He has won two Nebula Awards for best short story of the year.

    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!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherReAnimus Press
    Release dateOct 23, 2016
    ISBN9781370246823
    Wyoming Sun
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      Wyoming Sun - Edward Bryant

      WYOMING SUN

      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

      Neon Twilight

      The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age

      Fetish

      Darker Passions

      Trilobyte

      Predators and Other Stories

      © 2014, 1980 by Edward Bryant. All rights reserved.

      http://ReAnimus.com/authors/edwardbryant

      Cover Art by Scot A. Weir

      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.

      If I attempted to thank everyone whose generous aid went into this cooperative publishing venture and these stories, there would be little space left for the fiction. So thank you, friends. You know who you are.

      Jo, thank you especially. This book would not have been...

      ~~~

      For Walter Edens

      who saved me from the horrors

      of Freshman English.

      ~~~

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Prairie Sun

      giANTS

      Teeth Marks

      Beyond the Sand River Range

      Strata

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      "I do not fear the future. I do fear the lazy utilization of Wyoming’s future."

      —James Michener Laramie August 21, 1979

      Introduction

      Edward Bryant is a Wyoming writer. A native of the state who grew up in the Wheatland area and attended the University of Wyoming in the 1960’s as an English major, he is also an author returning home imaginatively in the fiction collected in Wyoming Sun. Since completing his creative-writing M.A. at the University in 1968, Ed has become—through talent, originality, hard work, and tenacity—one of the state’s most successful writers. Currently an editor (20 76: The American Tricentennial), workshop instructor, winner of the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best short story of 1979, and author of two volumes of stories (Among the Dead and Cinnabar), a novel (Phoenix Without Ashes), and with two further books forthcoming (Particle Theory and A Kingdom by the Sea), Ed Bryant is nationally recognized as a fine science-fiction and fantasy writer whose future will be interesting to watch, but whose present accomplishments are already large.

      This alone would make Wyoming Sun appealing to readers as a volume of fiction by an excellent craftsman. But other qualities are apparent in the stories collected here. For example, the concept of place—an involvement with a particular well-realized locale, which is important to many who write about a region—is evident throughout Wyoming Sun, whether the story’s setting is the Oregon Trail near Douglas, Wind River Canyon, a small town like Fremont in the central part of the state, or a futuristic Casper that is both familiar and blurring into uneasy mutation. Bryant’s stories are not nostalgic in their use of locale and authentic Wyoming backgrounds, and certainly not sentimental. He does, however, see the land—and nature itself—as possessing a brooding spirit which is in opposition to man’s abuses, folly, and egotism... and capable of emerging into terrifying forms in such stories as giANTS and Strata.

      A second, sometimes related aspect of interest found in Wyoming Sun is the ethical/moral element which James Michener’s epigraph touches upon. Prairie Sun is a story that considers values placed upon charity in 1850, during the immigration West, as they conflict with those of a sterile, regimented future. The treatment of the state’s Native Americans is highlighted by an ironic turn of the screw in Beyond the Sand River Range. And Strata, in its revelation of conflict between environment and exploitation in Wyoming, is much more than what its author calls a scientific ghost story, though it is that too. If speculative fiction provides images of where we might be heading, in Bryant’s hands it can also question the ethical cost of getting there. And do so within the framework of entertaining storytelling.

      Not surprisingly, then, we find ourselves responding to these fictional reflections of Wyoming as stories both intriguing and solidly written. Within them are people whose characters are explored in psychological depth, such as Frank Alessi, in Teeth Marks, who returns home to his destiny after a political career disintegrates, his whole life exposed mercilessly before the story’s end. And Dr. Paul Chavez of giANTS, who tells us that following the death of his wife, I disengaged myself from most sectors of life and decided to hold onto the past and call it good, but is almost jarred into salvation by a young woman reporter. We can recognize the sound portrayals of Paul Onoda in Strata, a Sansei survivor of Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center who drives himself toward success as an exploration geologist for an energy company, and the woman he marries, Carroll Dale, rooted to the land through several generations of ranchers.

      Such figures take on complexity and interest in Bryant’s writing, but characterization is complemented by skillful plotting in which resolutions of the conflicts are both jolting and subtle. Events are thrown into entirely new perspectives in Beyond the Sand River Range, resolved into sharp, ironic symbolism in giANTS and Strata, or into contemplative senses of horror and understanding in Teeth Marks and Prairie Sun. The reader is surprised at times by plot, as he should be in stories that avoid predictability. To Bryant’s credit, the plot turns also take us deeper into character and meaning, rather than creating contrived shock or titillation.

      Ultimately we become impressed by the author’s ability to make language convey not only what is happening with his characters and their actions, but also to influence our emotions and responses to what occurs. Teeth Marks and giANTS are perhaps the most obvious examples of language and style at work, but the other stories display similar control and effectiveness, though in differing ways.

      Here then are stories involving Wyoming backgrounds and people which illuminate past, present and future... and what meanings they may hold when viewed by an intelligent, imaginative mind. They are stories both entertaining and written with skill, for Ed Bryant is a professional in his field whose work indicates that, in one sense or another, Wyoming’s literary tomorrows could indeed be fantastic.

      Robert Roripaugh

      University of Wyoming

      THIS FIRST story is set in 1850. A science fiction story taking place in nineteenth-century Wyoming? Well, why not? Just because the bulk of science fiction deals with the future doesn’t decree that SF cannot concern itself as well with the past. Good science fiction, as with the best fiction of any variety, attempts to deal first and foremost with the love and hate, trust and betrayal, all the other personal ties between human beings that link us in any era. Hard answers to genuine human problems are demanded, of Micah, the boy—young man, rather—in "Prairie Sun," as he finds himself in decidedly curious circumstances on the plains east of Casper in the year 1850.

      "Prairie Sun came about as a direct result of Strata, the final story in the book. In June 1979 I attended the Wyoming Writers annual workshop, held that year in Riverton. Afterward, a friend and I drove up and down the Wind River Canyon, doing research and taking notes for Strata." Then, driving toward Casper on U.S. 20-26, I saw a historical marker commemorating the Oregon Trail. I looked at that bleak stone and thought back to Mrs. Roberts’ fifth-grade Wyoming history class. I remembered the lore of wagon trains trekking westward and something in my brain went click. A few weeks later, I wrote this story.

      Prairie Sun

      Stillness.

      Except for the boy, nothing moved on the prairie. The hawks did not hunt this morning. Not even the vultures circled in the empty sky. The birds evidently were waiting until Micah Taverner made his kill.

      The heat hung like a heavy curtain over the world. All motion seemed suspended. The thought entered Micah’s mind that on these plains, anything at all could happen. His was a sudden and early maturity, and not one he relished.

      Thirteen-year-old Micah moved quietly—perhaps not so silently as an Indian, but still disturbing the saw-toothed grass with less noise than most others in the company. He balanced his father’s long muzzle-loader carefully, thumb ready to take the hammer off half-cock. A small antelope would be welcome. A young deer would be better. A rabbit would suffice.

      To Micah’s right the River Platte wound slowly east by south, the direction from which the company had come. At this point the road followed a straighter path than the river. The boy’s present course took him up a gentle rise so that he had now attained an elevation of a hundred yards above the river. Within a rod of the Platte, all was lush and green. The grass and the trees grew luxuriantly. Beyond them the world turned to shades of brown and tan and yellow.

      The world seemed to contain little more than the river and the prairie. And the road. Had he wished to stand in the ruts, they would have taken the boy in up to his waist.

      Micah heard a sound in the dead air. He froze, waiting. He

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