Metamorphosis Read online

  These stories came into being when one of the teachers in the program suggested a “major author” class with James P. Blaylock as the author in question. I protested. Predictably, the students informed me that I had no say in the matter, and the class carried on for fifteen 3-hour meetings during which they read and discussed more Blaylock than is strictly speaking healthy. The teacher launched a contest for which students would write “Blaylockian” stories. There was a lot of good work turned in, but Brittany, Alex, and Adriana shared first prize. What prize? We hadn’t thought of that. In a moment of wild abandon I suggested that as a prize I would collaborate, adding my two cents worth to the stories, and that we would try to sell the result. Wild abandon seems to work out pretty well sometimes.

  Of the three stories, Brittany’s, “P-38,” with its dusty sidewalks and fading shadows, seems to me to read a little bit like a Powers and Blaylock collaboration. I’m thinking of “We Traverse Afar” and “The Better Boy.” It’s set in Tim’s old Alville neighborhood, which happens to be right across the street from our school. Alex’s story turned out to be fairly dark, reminding me some of elements of Winter Tides or Night Relics, although I’m pretty sure she hadn’t read either one before writing the piece. It’s a sort of story that I wouldn’t have written if left to my own devices. That’s one of the things I particularly like about collaborations, especially these. Adriana’s story is set in downtown Orange, my own neighborhood. As Stan Robinson one time pointed out, it exists in a kind of time warp. I suspect that some of my neighbors are hatching out dinosaur eggs as we speak.

  I’m the first to admit that there’s often a notable level of nostalgia in my stories and novels—a regret for things passing away: people and houses and objects that are disinclined to give up the ghost (which is one of those clichéd, ready made phrases that actually has elements of both truth and poetry in it). Sometimes the ghosts should be laid to rest, and sometimes they should be invited in and offered a room of their own. Brittany, Alex, and Adriana caught that element effortlessly and authentically, each in her own way.

  Tomorrow night is graduation, and the three of them, along with twenty-six other seniors from the department, will be pitching their mortarboards into the air, free at last. I’ll be handing out ribbons, and I’ll do my share of clapping, but I won’t be able to shake the knowledge that way leads on to way, as the poet said. I doubt that I’ll be inclined to pitch anything into the air.

  Jim Blaylock

  June, 2008

  A Note from William Ashbless

  BILL SCHAFER OUT there at Subterranean Press asked me to say a few words about this book, and I’m happy to oblige. If you’ve read Blaylock and Powers, maybe you know who I am, and maybe you know that Bill calls me in to oversee things whenever the two of them are putting up some kind of literary project. It might surprise you to know that when I was a younger man I was a bouncer at Bumsteady’s Hidey-Hole, a watering place down at the old Pike in Long Beach. Literary bouncer is more in my line these days. The pay isn’t much, but I take a certain pleasure in the work, and I can assure the worried public that Brittany, Adriana, and Alex will be paid for their efforts. Yesterday I saw to it that Blaylock returned that high-definition TV to Costco along with the Red Devil Automatic Hot Dog Cooker and the King O’ Lounge chair. I’ve got my eye on the man, and those three young women can rest easy.

  Now I don’t mean to rain on Blaylock’s parade, but I’m a man who values the truth. When Blaylock anted up the idea to start this writing department at the high school out in Santa Ana, he did what you might call some finagling. What he actually told Dr. Opacic was that he would “bring in Ashbless” to put things together for him. Dr. Opacic was keen on the deal, because he had read some of my work, and so he put up the capital to make it happen, with Blaylock as the go-between. I knew nothing of it at the time, and I wouldn’t know anything for close onto three months.

  What happened was that Powers and Blaylock whittled the money away over the course of the summer, eating pizza and driving around town doing what they call research. Come late August all they had to show for it was litter—a back seat full of empty pizza boxes and doughnut bags. They showed up at my apartment on Ximeno late one afternoon in a pretty bad way, saying they wanted to hire me on as a “consultant,” and could I please have something put together by Tuesday? Otherwise, they said, there’d be forty kids crying their eyes out on the 10th Street sidewalk in Santa Ana.

  So I up and did it. I stayed up late and called in favors, and come Tuesday they had themselves a program and teachers to boot. What I got for my efforts was a six pack of Dad’s Root Beer and a bag of some kind of hot pepper potato chips that turned out to be stale. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’d do it for the children.

  And now I’m going to put my stamp of approval on this volume, and point out how happy I am that Blaylock has found these three brilliant young women to write his stories for him. He says that he put in his “two cents worth,” but I’m pretty sure he got change back for his effort. Anyone who’s read the man’s “work” can see in a cold moment that he farmed these out, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude.

  William Ashbless

  Long Beach, California

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  Also by James P. Blaylock

  The Elfin Series

  The Elfin Ship

  The Disappearing Dwarf

  The Stone Giant

  Langdon St Ives

  Homunculus*

  Lord Kelvin’s Machine*

  Other Novels

  The Digging Leviathan

  Land Of Dreams

  The Last Coin

  The Paper Grail

  The Magic Spectacles

  Night Relics

  All The Bells On Earth

  Winter Tides

  The Rainy Season

  Knights Of The Cornerstone

  Collections

  Thirteen Phantasms

  In For A Penny

  Metamorphosis

  James P. Blaylock (1950 - )

  James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © James P. Blaylock 2009

  All rights reserved.

  The right of James Blaylock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11772 3

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover ot
her than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  * not available as SF Gateway eBooks