When I was young my parents would take all of us to the library once a week. We would trade out the books we had checked out the week before for new books to read. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
We had librarians who were more than happy to make recommendations for us based on what we liked to read. As they got to know us over the years, they knew our reading level and what we enjoyed reading.
It was a librarian who brought me to the anthology section of the children’s department. She said that anthologies were a good way to try a lot of authors and find new ones that I might like to read more from. She was right.
They had a horror anthology where I first read Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” and Robert Block and Edger Allen Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and many others. There were science fiction anthologies and mythology anthologies. I first read Harlan Ellison in one of those anthologies.
It is in anthologies that you can read both well-established writers and the up and comers to the writing profession.Continue reading
I don’t read many anthologies these days. Maybe I should. I’ll usually read those containing one of my stories, like the upcoming Thrilling Adventure Yarns, edited by my friend Bob Greenberger and featuring my short barbarian adventure story, “Dreams of Kingdom,” but it’s been decades since they were regulars in my to-read pile.
I used to read them by the stack when I was kid, back in the 1960s. Science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, mysteries, and even literary anthologies (once I discovered literature). Anthologies are like treasure chests full of every conceivable kind of wealth, no two objects alike. If you don’t like one story, chances are the next one (or the one after that) will be more to your liking.
The first anthology I remember reading was Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking 1967 collection of state-of-the-art-and-beyond science fiction short stories by the elite of science fiction, past and present, from Isaac Asimov to Robert Zelazny. This 500-plus page tome took the SF community by storm, and it was home to that year’s Hugo Award winners for best novella (“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Philip Jose Farmer) and best novelette, “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Lieber (which also won the Nebula), and the Nebula Awarded best short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany.Continue reading
Michael Jan Friedman’s “The Responders” posits a superhero mystery, based on the Beatles: If the Fab Four had stayed together, who knows what kind of music they could have made. But of course, they didn’t stay together—according to some sources because of John Lennon’s soulmate, Yoko Ono, who pulled him away from the other Beatles and ultimately broke up the group. Well … what if someone like Yoko had been brought into the inner circle of a superhero team? What would have become of them?
For Michael’s answer, here’s an early look:
The Responders
By Michael Jan Friedman
They’re not like us.
I’d heard that said about them before I got assigned to Special Investigations, six years ago now. But back then, I didn’t know what it meant.
After all, I’d only seen them on the news to that point, flashing across the screen in their black jumpsuits with the red ‘R’ stitched over their hearts. I hadn’t observed them up close, hadn’t felt their presence.
Their power.
But they weren’t just stronger than we were, endowed by a trick of fate with abilities the rest of us could only dream about.
They were different, as different as my Uncle Burt and a blind salamander.
Some, like Maser, reminded you of that difference from time to time. No brag, as some guy on TV used to say, just fact. As it turned out later, he was a scientist—to a fault, even considering all the breakthroughs he’d made as DeVonte Larson, professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania—and he didn’t see any point in soft-peddling his superiority.
Smoke was more elusive, as you’d expect. She, it came out last year, was a Senator’s daughter, and she’d seen her old man Kenny Parmenter make a decades-long career for himself in Washington without saying a single coherent thing. So by the time Jessica saved her dad and his staff from those white terrorists, she was an expert at hiding in plain view.
Others, like Antaeus, didn’t avoid questions. But he didn’t give you much information either. Mainly he let you come to your own conclusions—about him, about the team, about why they did what they did.
The poor bastard had to be carrying a lot of hurt around.
Anybody who looked the way he did, hideously scarred from the day he got his powers, had to be carrying something.
He was a teenager when it happened, name of Eddie Fields.
It’s all public now. He woke up one morning and had the ability to tap into Earth’s magnetic fields, bend steel as if it were licorice, crack diamonds in his bare fists.
But at the same time, he’d developed these lesions. Long, livid scars, or at least that’s what they looked like. All over his body, including his face. Made it hard to look at him.
Together, those three were The Responders. In the beginning, people called them The First Responders, but that took too long to say. So it became just The Responders.
They were good, right off the bat. And they tackled everything, from earthquakes to hostage situations to that missile North Korea swore was an accident. Once they even cracked a stolen car ring in the Bronx, though they must have been bored that day.
People loved them. And from what I could tell, The Responders loved each other. At least, as far as anybody could love a guy like Larson.
Then came Koyomi Seiku.
She started out as a fan of Antaeus. Wrote him letters, sent him e-mails, worshipped the hell out of him. Somebody else may have taken it all in stride. But Antaeus? The way he looked, he wasn’t used to female attention.
She begged to meet him, just to get his autograph, she said.
For one of the most powerful human beings on the planet, he could be pretty shy. But eventually, he said yes.
They met at a mall on Long Island. Antaeus was dressed in a trenchcoat with a hat pulled down low. Koyomi was the only one he told he’d be there.
She was nineteen, a first-year civil engineering student at NYU. Cute, long black hair, Goth but not really. And smart, no one ever argued that.
She got Antaeus’s autograph, but that wasn’t all she got. They sat at the mall and talked for a while. Then they went to the beach, which was cold but pretty much deserted that time of year, and talked some more.
Why did I choose a story for the upcoming Love, Murder & Mayhem anthology with characters more often associated with horror/urban fantasy for a science fiction story?
In part because I’ve wanted to revisit Frederic Dravyn, the beleaguered vampire lord of a bloodline in suburban New Jersey, ever since I wrote the first story featuring him for a previous anthology. The original story took a humorous look at a serious subject — how suburbs divided along racial, religious, economic, or similar lines can take the first steps toward integration despite those differences. If you’re familiar at all with very diverse towns like Piscataway (yes, that’s the real name of a real place), you’ll get the idea.
This time, I saw the chance to introduce aliens to a town full of vampires, werewolves, witches, and humans as a way of taking this exploration to the next level. When the species inhabiting Piscataway are faced with hostile outsiders, they’re motivated to unite their town beyond fundamental tolerance. They’ve been co-existing up until now by keeping to their own enclaves – separate, but equal – but many still maintain prejudices against one another. But that’s no longer good enough if they want their community as a whole to survive, thanks to the aliens.
Now they have to truly connect with their neighbors and band together against a common threat. The aliens themselves represent three races that only differ from one another in the most superficial, cosmetic way, yet simply cannot, will not, surmount their mutual hatred in order to survive. This shows our Piscatawayans just how bad things can get if they continue to allow simmering bigotry and self-segregation to outweigh all other considerations.
I couldn’t resist exploring a familiar trope – the worldly immortal who somehow falls for a regular and vastly younger human. I’ve always been amused by the idea that a vampire who existed for centuries could find any sort of commonality with a human. As Dravyn wonders, what would a vampire/human couple even find to talk about? How could they ever be anything close to equals in a relationship? It was fun to follow a line of internal story logic that I think (I hope) makes his attraction for human neighbor, Diana, at least somewhat believable.
This story was a lot of fun to write. I hope you enjoy reading it, too!
Hildy Silverman is the publisher of Space and Time, a 50-year-old magazine featuring fantasy, horror, and science fiction (spaceandtimemagazine.com). She is also the author of several works of short fiction, including “The Darren” (2009, Witch Way to the Mall?, Friesner, ed), “Sappy Meals” (2010, Fangs for the Mammaries, Friesner, ed), “The Bionic Mermaid Returns” (2014, With Great Power…, French, ed.), “The Great Chasm” (co-authored w/David Silverman, 2016, Altered States of the Union, Hauman, ed.), and “A Scandal in the Bloodline” (2017, Baker Street Irregulars, Ventrella & Maberry, eds.). In 2013, she was a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award for her story, “The Six Million Dollar Mermaid” (Mermaids 13, French, ed). In the “real” world, she is a Marketing and PR Specialist at Sivantos, Inc.
