More About Organisms

Last week I wrote about “The Young Person’s Guide to the Organism”, a novella that appears in my contribution to the Bundoran Buddies Science Fiction StoryBundle. (By the way, that bundle is still available: $20 for a dozen amazing science fiction e-books!)

In this post, I’m going to talk about two more pieces I contributed to the bundle: a pair of stories I wrote on request for my long-time friend, Julie Czerneda.

Julie has edited/co-edited a number of great story anthologies. On several occasions, she ran into last-minute troubles when one of her planned contributors couldn’t deliver a story on time. Julie asked me if I could whip off stories to fill the gap…and since I love tight-deadline challenges, I said yes.

The first time was for an anthology called Mythspring. The idea for the book was that each story should be inspired by some actual piece of Canadian folklore: a legend or myth that would serve as the basis for the story. I said, “Okay,” and went to the library to search for reference material.

I came home with Colombo’s Book of Marvels by John Robert Colombo. Colombo is a long-time folklorist (as well as a poet and quotation collector), so I figured I could count on him to provide me with useful material.

I was right…but the book gave me far too much: dozens of interesting legends. How could I choose just one? Instead, I sort of chose them all. The result was a story called “All The Cool Monsters At Once” in which legendary monsters from all across Canada suddenly crawl out of lakes, emerge from the woods, or drop from the sky for reasons unknown. It turned into my own personal love story for Canada: the ending always brings a tear to my eye.

The second time Julie asked me to write a story on short notice, it was for an anthology called Space, Inc. The book dealt with what jobs would look like in the future—strange science fictional jobs. Since I was rushed for time, I couldn’t do a ton of inventive world-building, so writing a traditional story would have been difficult. Instead, I decided to write a bunch of snippets: vignettes showing a range of future jobs.

But there’s a problem with vignettes. Even if each of them is fine, they need to be tied together with an overall story arc or the reader won’t get a satisfying beginning, middle and end. How could I make such an arc? I started to think of how other writers had done it, and I immediately came up with Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

I love Invisible Cities. It’s full of mind-boggling ideas. It takes its style from Marco Polo’s original travel journals, wherein he described his journeys to and from China back in the thirteenth century. Polo wrote short descriptions of all the strange things he saw. Calvino uses the same technique, describing increasingly weird cities, and framing it all as conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The frame tale gives the story its arc and holds everything together.

I shamelessly copied the format (just as Calvino had shamelessly copied Marco Polo). But just to jazz around a bit more, I based each of the vignettes on the Buddhist Eight-Fold Path. As one does. Hence was born “The Eight-Fold Career Path”, one of the oddest things I’ve ever written. (But someday I’ll talk about “Axial Axioms”, another thing I wrote for Julie on short notice. What if Lao Tsu invented complex numbers, Aesop invented combinatorics, the prophet Daniel invented trigonometry…)