On A Day That Has No Name
I go out every morning and evening with my nets and my line. I sometimes catch fish, but it is rarely fish that I am looking for.
I have watched the waters carefully. I've climbed to the top of the tallest tree, its bare, storm-broken limbs scratching my arms until I bled, and searched the waters for any sign of shadow. I have watched for sharks, for whales, for porpoises--anything, driven by hunger and desperation, that could pose a threat. Anything, driven by need or fear or loneliness, still alive. I have seen nothing.
For reasons I cannot explain, I absolutely love a good SF apocalypse story. I even write them on occasion ... and really, I should stop. For though I write science fiction stories, and end of the world stories, I can't seem to sell them for the life of me. (The single exception being "A Last Taste of Sweetness," though one could argue that that's just a plain apocalypse story, nothing SFnal about it at all.)
Fantasy stories -- now they're another matter entirely.
So after I spoke to Sean Wallace at World Fantasy (as described in my write-up for "The Voices of the Snakes"), and desperately needed to think of a good fantasy story to write quickly, my thoughts turned to yet another science fictional apocalypse story that I was writing, this one as a rather odd gift for a friend of mine. Now there was no way that I could send a science fiction story to a magazine called Fantasy, but if I could just figure out a way to pull off the transformation ...
One long rewrite later, and with all references to concrete, bleach and jet fuel removed, I had an interesting new creature on my hands: a fantasy apocalypse story. Even more interesting, it worked.
The end of the world ... now with magic!
Published in Jabberwocky 3 edited by Sean Wallace, Prime Books, November 2007.
