This is another post about the short stories in Organisms, the collection of stories I contributed to the Bundoran Buddies Science Fiction StoryBundle. This time I’ll talk about “A Clean Sweep With All The Trimmings”.
There’s a backstory underlying “Clean Sweep” that I may turn into more stories someday, or even a novel. It starts from the idea that an alien race might make sophisticated servant androids that outlive the race itself. After all, it’s quite possible that humans could make intelligent machines that last a long time. If humanity itself then dies off (e.g. through a pandemic), the machines will still be programmed to act servants, even if they have no one to serve.
So I imagined a set of ageless “ideal servants” created by a long dead alien race and still roaming around the galaxy looking for masters. They can change their shape into anything that would make a master happy. Similarly, they change their personalities too. The changes happen automatically—the androids aren’t consciously aware of what they’re doing, they just change physically and mentally to be whatever their current master would find most suitable.
You might think that these androids would be general-purpose servants, able to do anything…but I thought it would be more fun if they specialized. Perhaps there’d be an Ideal Accountant, an Ideal Valet, an Ideal Secretary, etc. There’d also be an Ideal Sexual Partner, because of course there would.
This led to a question: “What would happen if this ideal found its way to Earth?” I could see people fighting to possess it, and the poor android forcibly kidnapped by a succession of ruthless owners. To make the conflicts more extreme, I envisioned it falling into the hands of a mobster. This would lead to a blood gang war as various gang leaders tried to grab the android for their own.
So my first attempt at the story was very Quentin Tarantino. It was pretty damned sordid, and it didn’t work. But it had one interesting trick—it was told from the viewpoint of the guy called in to clean up after all the bad stuff happened. This was basically the Harvey Keitel character from Pulp Fiction. He had a “big picture” view of the story which let him figure out what was going on.
As I said, the Tarantino version of the story didn’t work. But I thought the underlying set-up was good, and I liked telling the story from the viewpoint of a “cleaner”.
How could I tell a similar story without it being ick? Simple answer: Damon Runyon.
Runyon was a reporter who hung out with gangsters in the 1930s and 40s. His most famous work is Guys and Dolls, a collection of short stories that became the basis of the famous musical. Many of the folks Runyon wrote about were killers and very bad people…but his quirky writing style somehow made them seem charming rather than psychotic.
I love the way Runyon wrote, so I decided to steal it whole hog. I rewrote the story in Runyon’s tone of voice, and this time it worked really well: funny and sweet rather than mean and dark. As a result, “A Clean Sweep With All The Trimmings” is one of my favorite stories.
James Alan Gardner 