Dickson!

Dickson! Gordon R. Dickson. Notes by Sandra Miesel. (The NESFA Press, ISBN 0-915368-27-7.)

Made up of: Introduction (Poul Anderson); The Childe Cycle: Status 1984; The Law-Twister shorty; Steel Brother; The Hard Way; Out of the Darkness; Perfectly Adjusted.

Introduction (Poul Anderson): Anderson and Dickson had both been friends since early in their respective careers. They collaborated on several works and influenced each other in many ways beyond writing. This is a nice little essay talking about their relationship. It makes you wonder, though, given our increasingly time-stressed and attention-fractured lives whether these small communities of budding writers will continue to exist in the future. Can internet chat rooms and discussions take the place of a night of drinking, filking, etc., that took place on a very regular basis for these (at that time) young writers?

The Childe Cycle: Status 1984: My first encounter with Dickson's Childe Cycle was in Soldier, Ask Not. I don't think that edition made it clear that it was part of a larger body of work (and a later volume in that body as well). It wasn't until several years later that I came across (as a member of the SFBC) an omnibus edition of Dickson's works (which included Necromancer, Tactics of Mistake and Dorsai! plus an introduction by Dickson and material between each novel that was taken from The Final Encyclopedia, then a work in progress) that I could see the larger picture. All three of the books in that volume interested me and when I tried reading Soldier, Ask Not again, I had a "world turned upside down" moment.

Flash forward from then to the time of this essay (1984). Dickson takes the brief introductory material from that omnibus and expands it multiple ways, throwing in autobiographical detail, plot outlines for the unwritten works, his intentions, his plans and more. Interestingly, what was to be the final novel (as mentioned) took many more years to be written (but not completed) and several novels (The Chantry Guild, Young Bleys, Other) are not even mentioned. The detail on the books never written is particularly interesting, but one wonders if any publisher would have embraced the historical and contemporary volumes. Would fandom? Perhaps now, given the popularlity of works such as Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, Dickson would have found a receptive audience. Alas, we'll never know.

Counts as two entries in the 2006 Short Story Project.

Part of the 2007 Short Story Project.

Part of the 2008 Year in Shorts.