Organisms

Just released: the Bundoran Buddies Science Fiction StoryBundle! This bundle of 12 ebooks contains work by such luminaries as Robert J. Sawyer, Madeline Ashby, Tanya Huff, and yours truly!

A bit of background: Bundoran Press is a science fiction publishing house run by my friend Hayden Trenholm. Hayden organized this bundle as a way to raise Bundoran’s public profile, as well as to provide an easy and affordable way for readers to buy a dozen great books.

My contribution to the bundle is a set of stories grouped under the title ORGANISMS. The central piece is a novella called “The Young Person’s Guide to the Organism”. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it’s the first published League of Peoples story.

The subtitle of the novella is “Variations and Fugue on a Classical Theme”. So let me briefly get all artsy and explain what that means.

You might be aware of The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a piece of music by Benjamin Britten. The piece introduces the various instruments of a symphony orchestra by presenting a theme and variations. First, the whole orchestra plays a melody by Henry Purcell (that’s the theme). Then the flute and piccolo play a variation of the theme; then the oboes play another variation; then the clarinets; and so on, through all the woodwinds, then the strings, then the brass, then percussion. The final section of the piece is a fugue which starts with the flute and piccolo again, then adds the oboes on top, then the clarinets on top of that, and so on until the whole orchestra is playing the fugue together…after which the brass section blasts out the original theme over top of everything else.

The piece itself is well worth listening to. There are several versions on YouTube, so if you’re interested, have a look.

What I did was write a novella with the same structure. The “theme” of my story is First Contact—a classic sf theme indeed. The plot begins with a gigantic alien organism entering our solar system and slowly proceeding toward the sun. Each section of the story is about someone’s experience of making contact with the organism, as told to a “young person”. (In many sections, a parent is telling one or more of their children about this amazing thing the parent saw.) The final part of the novella (the “fugue”) consists of brief snippets when all the “young people” have their own moments of first contact with the organism, eventually culminating in humanity making first contact with the League of Peoples.

So let’s just say that the story is structurally ambitious. It dates back to 1992 and I’m sure there are a ton of things I’d change if I ever decided to rewrite it…but I’m still quite fond of the story and am glad to see it get some new exposure.

And that’s just one of the stories in ORGANISMS, which is just one book in the bundle! Maybe in the next few days, I talk about more of the stories in the book.