John Dalmas:
excerpts from Otherwhens, Otherwheres

This collection is of truly diverse short pieces having little in common except the author —and that each story has its own introduction. So I’m excerpting the introductions, which tell a bit about the story and how it came to be.

Introduction to "Gullikksen and the 500-Pound Hallucination"

Once upon a time I lived in a different universe, one without spaceships. Ships, but not spaceships. Intermittently from 1947 to 1953, I made my living on the last great merchant fleet powered by Scotch boilers stoked with coal by men with shovels. Many of us (though not me) were immigrants or their sons: Game-leg Paddy, Onni Hietala, Nut and Bolts, Bumboat Charley, Firedown Gallagher...some of them great storytellers. Young and impressionable, I enjoyed knowing them, being one of them. And I loved the boiler rooms, dark, brooding, and hot. Big as haybarns, they extended from the bilge plates all the way up to the lifeboat deck. Most of the lower half was filled with the great boilers, enough room being left for stowage, and for the stoke hole where the firemen (stokers) wielded their tools. Above the boilers were little more than catwalks, the six-foot induction fan, the smokestack that disappeared through the overhead, and along the catwalks, wires strung by the firemen to quick-dry their laundry.

The boiler room: a realm of ash dust, stinking fumes, and especially heat; your dungarees stuck to your thighs from the sweat.

Years later, with the old coal burners replaced by behemoths burning oil or diesel fuel (not a shovel or slice bar to be found), I told myself I’d someday set a science fiction story on one of those old-timers. Eventually I did. This is it.

There’s also a story about the story: I’d written it with F&SF—the magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—in mind. I knew it wasn’t "an Analog story." Nonetheless, my wise old agent of the time, Larry Sternig, sent it to Stan Schmidt at Analog.

Larry was right, but I was too, kind of. Because Stan replied, "I can think of two or three good reasons we don’t use stories like this one, but I’m buying it anyway."

Introduction to "Moonlight Nocturne"

During the Prohibition Era, the St. Clair River, connecting Lake Huron with the Lower Great Lakes, was a significant waterway for bootleggers. But not all the smuggler’s boats went up and down the river; many went across it, from wet Canada to dry Michigan. And although the mobs dominated the racket, any farmer with a rowboat and money enough to buy a few cases of whiskey in Canada, could go into the business in a small way.

It could be dangerous though, and not just because of the G-men. Which gave rise to stories; I read some of them when I was a kid.

Fifty years after the Prohibition Amendment was repealed, Herb Clough resurrected Leslie Charteris’s much loved Saint mystery magazine, with Charteris’s cooperation. And I decided to try my hand at writing mysteries. "Moonlight Nocturne" was one of the results, and Herb bought it, along with a couple of others. But before "Nocturne" could be used, distribution problems sank the venture, and those stories paid for but unpublished were reverted to the authors.

I later sold "Nocturne" to a different publisher, Pulphouse, which published it. I believe you’ll like it.

Introduction to "Picture Man"

Back in the ‘60s I was a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, stationed at Colorado State University. Sixty miles south, the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, had an engrossing research project in progresss: an investigation of a psychic photographer. A man strange and interesting enough that U of C was inviting scientists of other agencies and specialties to take part in the studies. These outside scientists included a physiologist friend of mine, who brought in U of C’s Professor Jule Eisenbud to give a slide lecture to a full auditorium at CSU.

Eisenbud’s show blew my mind, and later inspired this story.

I wrote it with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in mind, but my agent sent it to Omni, which rejected it. Ditto Analog, ditto Asimov’s. Finally it did go to F&SF, which published it. And to cap it off, after being rejected by three magazines, it made two of the three SF "best of the year" collections, so I got paid for it three times.

Which illustrates, among other things, that editors have their own tastes, and magazines their own personalities. And that sometimes persistence pays.

A final comment: as a person, the story’s scumbag "Professor Boeltz" in no way resembles his real-world counterpart, Professor Jule Eisenbud, a good guy.

Introduction to "Out of the North a Giant"

This introduction will be more about writing than about the story. Specifically I’ll address the advice that some writing professors have given their students: "Write from experience." At first listen that sounds like sage advice, but on reexamination it may sound idiotic, certainly for aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy. Actually it’s more sage than idiotic., but mainly it’s food for thought.

For now let’s leave it at that. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

The origins of stories are diverse. One day I sat down at my typewriter (remember typewriters?) to begin a new story, and from my fingers flowed an opening sentence: "There came out of the north a giant." I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t foreseen it. From there it proceeded the same way: a totally right-brain action.

But it tapped a fertile soil of experience that included some grad-school readings on the early history of Indiana, and a series of letters written to my mother-in-law by a man she would never meet—a boyhood friend of her dad. The first letter was dated 1906, when she was twelve, the last 1942, when the writer was a very old man. Letters that told somewhat of life on the Indiana frontier, and how land was cleared there in the years before and after the War Between the States. All second-hand experience for me, but it fitted my own experience in "deadening" cull trees in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Also, by the time I wrote this story, I’d come to know, first hand and at length, the nature of mountain terrain and mountain winters in Colorado.

Even so, the heart of this story is far from anything I’ve experienced. It is sheer imagination. But experience direct and second hand provided a setting, and details, that help make the story real to the reader (and the writer).

And finally, experience with people, experience also both live and second hand, that make it powerful and poignant.

In writing, particularly in writing science fiction and fantasy, "second-hand experience" plays a particularly important role. It’s not surprising that almost all science fiction authors read a lot, beginning early in life, reading that includes a lot of science fiction, and typically quite a lot of science and history.

Introduction to "The Railroad"

Jerry Pournelle, a highly successful science fiction novelist, has a Ph.D. in political science and another in psychology, along with a master’s in experimental statistics and system engineering, and a bachelor’s in math. Back in the 1980s, brainstorming with some other knowledgeable and creative people, he created an imaginary but plausible star system. It was centered on a white dwarf, one of whose planets was a brown dwarf circled by a large, human-habitable moon. The moon they named Haven. It’s astrogeophysical complexities resulted in very peculiar living conditions for the life forms that evolved there, and for the humans who migrated there—conditions that include several variations of night and day, and extreme weather fluctuations. Fun to play with, but I wouldn’t care to live there.

Next, Jerry and friends gave the colonists a history, rooted in an earlier series of stories by Pournelle and Larry Niven. A history no kinder to the colonists than Haven was. After writing it all up, they sent it to some science fiction authors, inviting them to write stories set on that world, to be published as The War World series.

When you set up a shared universe like that, you leave enough slack that your authors can postulate conditions of their own within the broader context. Which creates potentials for embarrassment. Thus in the first volume, one story included, peripherally, a Finnish colony known as "Novy Finlandia." The story was a dandy, but the name of the colony? Novy is Russian, and Finlandia is latinized Swedish. And the Finns are language proud, and Russia their traditional enemy. Historically the Finns have borrowed German words (during the Middle Ages), Swedish words through much of their long history together, and English recently. But scarcely Russian. The name "Novy Finlandia" was going to annoy just about any Finn and Finnish American who read it.

I mentioned this to the editor, and he told me if they got further stories touching on "Novy Finlandia," he’d let me see it during the editing process.

So guess what. One of the early volumes was edited by someone else, and included a story in which the focus was on "Finns" from "Novy Finlandia." The author batted zero, starting with his Finns having Russian surnames and speaking their "Finnish dialect of Russian." He was a good story teller, actually, and the story would have been fine if he’d simply called his characters Russians. Of course, not many Americans know enough about Finland and the Finns to see the problem, but even so... Beyond which, the author was new to the print media; his earlier credits were in screenplay writing.

So when the original editor invited me to write a story for Volume 4, I said sure, if I could set it in "Uusi Suomi" (Finnish for New Finland). And if I could ignore the geographic location implied in the offending story. I could then get the earlier boo-boos to actually make sense; I could mend the wound. The editor, bless him, said "do it."

"The Railroad" is the result. I hope you like it.

Introduction to "The Stoor’s Map"

One evening in 1990, Brian Thomsen, a senior editor at Warner Books, called to say that he and Baird Searles were planning a theme anthology to be titled Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows & Weefolk. He had a great piece of cover art for it (by Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, no less), and wondered if I’d write a story to go with it.

I said I’d have to see the cover art first. When I saw it, I loved it. "The Stoor’s Map" is the story that grew out of it.

Introduction to "Tiger Hunt"

The concept of this story came to me full-blown. It would be about Ron and Melody Cordero, who’d resulted from research in human genetics. Two very intelligent and otherwise gifted tailor-made humans. But inevitably there were some erroneous assumptions in the geneticists’ understanding, and the "tailor-mades" would live their lives sorting out and learning to deal with the results. "Tiger Hunt" is a cusp in the lives of Ron and Melody.

I made this story as dirt-real as I knew how. (I generally do.) I knew the approximate location from the start: studying topographic maps refined it. Then I phoned the Cascade County road department and spoke at length with a surveyor who knew the terrain intimately.

When I’d finished writing it, it seemed to me I’d written something special, and I sent it off to Stan Schmidt at Analog. Stan said he’d have used it, but he already had a story about a Pleistocene wildlife refuge, and didn’t feel he should run another soon.

Jim Baen published it in New Destinies, and asked for a sequel, a novel. I’d already thought about that, but declined the invitation. I’d have had to spend time in Uruguay, knew no Spanish, and at any rate couldn’t afford the trip.

Introduction to "The Ides of September"

In Ellery Queeen’s or Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery magazine, I forget which, I once read a short story about a Cajun sheriff in the Louisiana bayou country, and really liked the ethnic flavor. I’d already decided to try my hand at mysteries, and an ethnic back-country sheriff seemed a good way to make use of my personal background.

In the 1940s and '50s I’d worked in the Lake Superior region, and loved it. Especially Upper Michigan, partly for it’s natural beauty, and partly for the flavor of its ethnic colonies, most of them Finnish. (The old colonization projects had settled immigrants in ethnic groups, which have since intermarried a lot, greatly reducing the ethnicity.)

So I wrote "The Ides of September," setting it in a fictional Upper Michigan county at the beginning of the 1980s. Matti Seppanen, its Finnish-American sheriff, is the central figure. I hoped it would turn into a series. The Saint promptly bought it and asked for more.

I’d realized from the git-go there was a problem with setting a detective series in a sparsely populated backwoods county. There might be two murders in a decade, both involving whiskey, and neither requiring much investigation. But by creating a concentration of lakes in the western part of the county: lakes with considerable resort development, and outsiders with money to fuel their vices...

At the end of the story I’ll add a few comments about the principal characters—after you’ve gotten to know them.

Afterword to "Ides of September"

By the time I’d finished "Ides," it seemed to me that Matti and Mary had to have a June and November romance, and marry. So when Keith Bancroft, The Saint’s editor, suggested the same thing, that settled it. Except it didn’t, because The Saint folded, killed by distribution problems. But still...

In 1990 I wrote a novella set in about 2010, featuring a young detective in L.A., where there are all kinds of crimes. His name is Martti Seppanen, son of Matti and Mary. The novella dealt with a very science-fiction crime, so it appeared in Analog science fiction/science fact for April 1991. In October 2001, Martti resurfaced in a Baen Book, The Puppet Master, a futuristic detective trilogy in one volume.

Martti's parents, Matti and Mary, would have been proud of him. As his literary grandfather, so am I.