The Planet on the Table

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This is remarkable in my experience of Stevens: three consecutive lines that I feel I understand. More than that, I understand the feeling in them; looking at the galleys of my first short story collection, I have that feeling myself, or at least Caliban’s version of it. I am glad that I have written these stories.

They were written over a period of about ten years. Some of them, as you will see, are strictly autobiographical; the rest are not. If you go on and read them, then you and I become collaborators in the strange and wonderful process that is reading fiction. My suggestion, as collaborator, is that you let some time lapse between the reading of one and the next. Perhaps one a day would be a good plan; most health experts and vitamin bottles agree on that schedule, and we want these stories a healthy as possible.

Stevens in his poem also says,

That’s a science-fictional thought, isn’t it? Our star blasts a barren planet with intense radiation; and one of the results is this recombinant string of sentences. Of course there were some intermediate steps along the way: the primordial soup… the dinosaurs… the sun’s radiation that I took on directly, as a child on the California beaches… Or my education, the passing to me of a tradition, and some parts of a craft. This step in the movement from sun to sentence is an important one. I have been very lucky in my teachers, very lucky indeed, and I would like to thank some of them here, in San Diego, Donald Wesling, Fredric Jameson, Andrew Wright, Jack Behar, Lowry Pei, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In Boston, John Malcolm Brinnin and Charles F. Stone. In East Lansing, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Joe Haldeman, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm. And before these, pointing the way, Catherine Lee.

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