Earth and Air

Preface

Twenty-odd years ago, not long after Robin McKinley and I decided that we should get married and she should come to live with me in England, she was asked to write a short story about a mermaid. She didn’t have any ideas, so one fine evening we walked down to the village pub to try and think something up over supper. By the time we came home in the twilight we not only had several possible mermaid plots but also a grandiose scheme to collaborate on four collections of short stories about the mythical beings who inhabit the four natural elements: earth, air, fire and water.

I was in the middle of a full-length novel at the time, and when it got stuck, as novels tend to, instead of brooding on the problem I put it aside and wrote a story about a witch’s broomstick. I decided it would do for a start, so I put it in a drawer and went back to my novel. Next time I got stuck I did the same thing. The stories began to accumulate.

Robin had more of a problem. Her stories kept turning into full-length novels. The world would be a poorer place without them, but it meant that though we started about 1995, we didn’t get our Water volume published till 2002. Fire took another seven years. I couldn’t really complain, as one of my own stories had stretched itself into The Tears of the Salamander.

But I am now eighty-four. At this rate I’d be ninety-seven by the time Earth sees the light of day. I have no intention of hanging around that long, so when her current novel, Pegasus, originally begun as a contribution to Air, turned itself into two volumes, then three, I persuaded her to let me see if I could find a home for my long-finished stories about the other two elements.

Here they are.

—PD

PS On the excuse that the alien creatures of science fiction fulfil the same imaginative need as the creatures of myth did for our ancestors, outer space being their element, I have included as a make-weight a story I wrote even before these as a contribution to an anthology with the brief that all the stories must some way or other concern a jury.