George R. R. Martin - Dreamsongs: Volume I

CONTENTS

ONE
A FOUR-COLOR FANBOY

TWO
THE FILTHY PRO

THREE
THE LIGHT OF DISTANT STARS

FOUR
THE HEIRS OF TURTLE CASTLE

FIVE
HYBRIDS AND HORRORS

for Phipps, of course,

there is a road, no simple highway,
between the dawn and the dark of night.

Im glad youre here to walk it with me.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

BY GARDNER DOZOIS

A LTHOUGH HES BEEN A MAJOR PLAYER IN SEVERAL DIFFERENT GENRES FOR MORE THAN thirty years, has won Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, and World Fantasy Awards, George R. R. Martin has finally made it, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The sure and certain sign of this is that someone elses book was recently advertised as being In the tradition of George R. R. Martin! When youre successful enough, when your books sell well enough that publishers try to entice customers to buy someone elses book by saying that its like yours, then youve made it, youre a really Big Name Author, and no argument is possible.

If you doubt me, think of the other writers whose names are invoked with the phrase in the tradition of to sell books: J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling. Thats pretty heady and high-powered company, but theres little doubt that Georgewho, with his epic A Song of Ice and Fire novel sequence has become one of the best-selling, and, at the same time, most critically acclaimed of modern fantasistsbelongs therealthough if youd told young George, the unpublished eager novice, that one day his name would be ranked in such august company, Im sure he wouldnt have believed youwouldnt have dared to let himself believe you, believe such an obvious wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Another thing the young George might not have believed, and something that many of his legions of present-day fans might not even know (and one thing that this collection is designed to demonstrate), is that George would become prominent in several different fields of endeavor. George has had respectable careers as a science fiction writer, a horror writer, a fantasy writer, a writer and producer for the television industry, and as an editor/ compiler/concept-originator for the long-running Wild Cards series of stories and novels by many different hands, which has now reached its sixteenth volume, with the seventeenth on the way. What George has accomplished in each of these fields would satisfy many another professional as a lifes workone to be bragged about, in fact.

Not George, though, the greedy swinehe had to go and reach well-deserved prominence in all of them!

Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as a mainstay of the Ben Bova Analog with vivid, evocative, and emotionally powerful stories such as With Morning Comes Mistfall, And Seven Times Never Kill Man, The Second Kind of Loneliness, The Storms of Windhaven (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), Override, and others, although he was also selling to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets during this period. One of his Analog stories, the striking novella A Song for Lya, won him his first Hugo Award, in 1974.

By the end of the 70s, he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer, and was producing his best work in that categoryand some of the best work by anyone in that periodwith stories such as the famous Sandkings, perhaps his single best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980, The Way of Cross and Dragon, which won a Hugo Award in the same year (making George the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year), Bitterblooms, The Stone City, Starlady, and others. These stories would be initially collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now, he had mostly moved away from Analog, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Haviland Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the 80s in the Stanley Schmidt Analog, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella Nightflyersmost of his major work of the late 70s and early 80s, though, would appear in Omni, at the time the best-paying market in science fiction, the top of the SF short-fiction food chain. (The late 70s also saw the publication of his memorable novel Dying of the Light, his only solo SF novel.)

By the early middle years of the 80s, though, Georges career was turning in other directions, directions that would take him far from the kind of career-path that you might have forecast for him in the 70s. Horror was starting to burgeon then as a separate publishing category, in the early and middle 80s, and George would produce two of the most original and distinctive novels of the Great Horror Boom period of the 80s: 1982s Fevre Dream, an intelligent and suspenseful horror novel set in a vividly realized historical milieu, still one of the best of modern vampire novels, and 1983s big, ambitious, rock n roll horror apocalypse, Armageddon Rag. Although still considered a cult classic by some, Armageddon Rag was a severe commercial disappointment, and would pretty much bring Georges career as a horror novelist to an end, although hed continue to write horror at short lengths for a while, later winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story The Pear-Shaped Man and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella The Skin Trade. (Although most of Georges horror was supernatural horror, hed also do some interesting work during this period with science fiction/horror hybrids, including the above-mentioned Sandkings and Nightflyers, two of the best such stories ever produced, perfectly valid both as science fiction and as horror at the same time.)

The fact that the Great Horror Boom of the 80s was itself beginning to run out of steam by this point, with stores pulling out the separate shelves for horror theyd put in a few years before and publishers folding their horror imprints, probably helped George with his decision to turn away from the horror genre. Increasingly, though, hed turn away from the print world altogether, and move into the world of television instead, becoming a story editor on the new Twilight Zone series in the mid 80s, and later becoming a producer on the hugely popular fantasy series Beauty and the Beast.

Highly successful as a writer/story editor/producer in the television world, George had little contact with the print world throughout the mid-80s (although he did win another Nebula in 1985 for his story Portraits of His Children) and throughout most of the decade of the 90s, except as editor of the long-running Wild Cards shared-world anthologies, which reached fifteen volumes before the series faltered to a stop in the late 90s (it has made a resurgence in the new century, though, after a seven-year hiatus, so that Wild Cards is back in business as I write these words). By then, soured on the television business by the failure of his stillborn series Doorways to make it onto the air, Martin returned to the print world with the publication in 1996 of the immensely popular and successful fantasy novel