They Fly at Ciron

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I FIRST wrote “They Fly at Çiron” as a forty-five-page story in my second-floor flat at the dead end of East 5th Street. From my spiral notebooks I typed the first version on a mechanical typewriter in late spring ‘62. My editor did not buy it, however; nor was I really satisfied with the tale. Sometime toward 1969 I gave the MS to my friend James Sallis. Jim reworked the opening. That version appeared as a collaboration under our paired bylines in the June ‘71 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Twenty years later, though, it struck me that the story could still use a pass through the word processor. When I was done, I had a hundred-fifty-page manuscript. For all I’ve added, I’ve kept none of Jim’s inventive amendments. Nevertheless they formed an invaluable critique, defining lacks I’ve now addressed otherwise. As none of Jim’s language remains, I can no longer reprint They Fly at Çiron as a proper collaboration. But neither can I publish it — far truer for this than for the ‘71 version — without acknowledging that critique responsible for anything now in it worth the reading. In 1992, equally detailed critiques of the new version came from Randy Byers and Ron Drummond. And, in my sunny Amherst study, I responded here and there to them the best I could — and the manuscript is fifty pages longer. In one sense, this is my second novel — only it has taken me thirty years to write.

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