Stable Strategies and Others

Afterwards by Howard Waldrop

You don’t know what a joy it is to write about Eileen Gunn.

For one thing, she’s about the only writer I know who turns out stories even more slowly than I do, which is a rare thing in this damn field…

You’ve just read one long-overdue swell collection of her stuff: she’s waited thirty-something years for it, and so have you.

As Bill told you in his foreword, and the quite-capable Ms. Gunn has explained in the story-notes themselves, these stories are the product of a vast number of synchronicities, coincidences, and of having one of the screwiest of odd-job histories in the Western world. (Eileen has oiled cucumbers in the Pike Place Market: lots of people have had that Seattle entry-level job: how many people you know who’ve done that also worked with Bill Gates when he was still in the garage, too?)

Peripatetic ain’t the word for this gal (Cosmas Indicopluestes had nothing on her). When I first met her, she was living in Lompoc (or somewhere like that) in CA; then the letters were coming from Eugene OR; suddinkly (as Popeye would say) the return address was Seattle (where, haring off around the world all the time, she stayed for a couple of decades). In the last six years, suddinkly it’s Brooklyn; a couple of clicks on the year-o-meter it’s San Francisco; two more and she’s back where she started in Rain City, where maybe she’ll stay another decade or three…

She once took the Trans-Siberian Express, east-to-west (she speaks Russian at least as well as the average Kazakhstani). When she later went to Italy (she speaks Italian and Latin at least as well as the average Fescinni) the local commies threw her a block party because she’d actually been to Mother Russia…

All this to a lady who was born in Worcester (pronounced Were-chest-or) MA…

She knows everything about computers (and has for thirty years) without once being a dweeb about it, and I don’t hold her computer-literacy against her. (“Computers and cell phones are, by and large,” I said ten years ago, “there to make morons feel important.”) She’s designed some great web sites (I hear) and she’s the editor/publisher of InfiniteMatrix.net, which you ought to check out.

This lady went to the Clarion SF Writers Workshop in the mid-’70s, and started selling stories as fast as she could write them after that (two, sometimes three a decade…). She’s done penance ever since by being one of the directors of the Clarion West workshop on-and-off the last twenty years; a thankless damn job.

She’s working on a biography of Avram Davidson, one of those truly great and irritable iconoclasts who occasionally grace this benighted field. She got to know him in the last few years of his life when their peripatets crossed and he lived a ferry-boat ride away in Bremerton. The book will be a wow.

Eileen’s also, like me, been threatening people with novels for the last, say, 20–25 years now… (I’ve read parts of two of them and they’re both swell: I want to read the whole things, right now.)

But the best of what she’s done is in this here book you just read (you are reading this last, aren’t you?). There’s even the recipe from the Tiptree Bake Sale Book (and I know from personal experience she makes one mean cherry cobbler, too). There’s “Nirvana High,” which is a collaboration with Leslie What (who was at that same mid-’70s Clarion workshop and is just now publishing her first novel). There’s also that rarity — a four-way collaboration that is not a joke-story, “Green Fire”; I don’t know who did exactly what — I know that they made it work.

I either read, or heard Eileen read, an earlier version of “Computer Friendly” — I was doing my Sidney Greenstreet imitation for weeks afterwards (“I don’t know what you’re going to do, sir, but by gad, I’m sure it will be astounding, simply astounding! Meehehe-hee.”) What I wasn’t prepared for in this final version was the depth of feeling — nay, poignancy — of its central concept, and the seeming ease with which Ms. Gunn brought the whole thing off.

And she never ever takes the easy way out — there are plenty of mediocre writers out there who can do that, and fast, too! — she follows up on what the stories want to be saying.

Take “Fellow Americans,” for instance. She wrote the story for the original anthology Alternate Presidents. (When it was published, the book had a wonderful, evocative cover of Thomas Dewey holding up the misprisioned Chicago Tribune with its headline, “Truman Defeats Dewey”…) On its surface, the story seems to be about Richard Nixon — The Tricky Dick Show — and there’s Dan and Marilyn Quayle (“S. Danforth Quayle? Wasn’t he the Mayor of Duckburg?” — Calvin Trillin) — and I guarantee, if you’ve read it, you’ll never forget Nixon’s story of taking LSD and Pat crying for the music trapped in the piano… But this is just the outside — fine as it is — of the story. Yeah, Dick Nixon was veep in the ’50s, blew the ’60 election, and the Senate try, entered showbiz. And Dan is the same dweeb veep he was when the story was written.

But the election Eileen chose to write about was the 1964 one. Goldwater won. Not only that; he was re-elected in ’68. (It shows how much times have changed that, before his death a few years ago, the real Goldwater sounded like a reasonable man compared to the flaming Nazi gasbags who’ve taken over his Republican Party…) Eileen’s story is Goldwater’s story — the Party’s story is Nixon’s showbiz one. Goldwater was the Republicans’ Harry S Truman, setting up, in Gore Vidal’s word, The Imperial State — the one we’ve been living with the last 40 years or so.

This was the quietest (and funniest) story in an anthology not noted otherwise for subtlety. (As someone once said, in American politics, there are still people pissed off about the Compromise of 1850 and the Gadsden Purchase…) Ms. Gunn took a Cold Hard Look at the Whole Thing, not just the alternate election she wrote about. She did not do the Easy Thing — which would have been: Goldwater and Nuclear Defoliants in Viet Nam.

And there’s never been a story like the title one of this collection. It’s pure distillation of the ’80s/’90s Power Cleavage/Dress for Success syndrome which swept the business schools and worlds like that year’s Tortilla and Screen Door Jesuses. The story has something to say.

As do they all.

It’s so good to finally have them all in one place you can reach for in the bookshelf, instead of looking in ten or twelve anthologies and magazines.

I couldn’t be prouder of Eileen, or of this collection, if it were of me, and this book was one of mine.

March 30, 2004