The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories by Walter Jon Williams Page A
Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: Science-Fiction
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moments, each striking with the impact of a hammer, each a stunning, percussive blow . . .
Throw a switch, he thought, and the hammerblows would end.
"Katrin deserves mourning," he had told Davout the Silent, and now he had so many more Katrins to mourn, Dark Katrin and Katrin the Fair, Katrin the New and Katrin the Old. All the Katrins webbed by fate, alive or dead or merely enduring. And so he would, from necessity, endure . . . So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
He lay on his back, on the cold ground, gazed up at the world of stars, and tried to find the worlds, among the glittering teardrops of the heavens, where he and Katrin had rained from the sky their millions of children.
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Afterword: Lethe
I started my career as a writer of historical fiction, specifically novels taking place in the Age of Sail, a genre pioneered by James Fenimore Cooper and later practiced successfully by C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, among others. I enjoyed writing these journeyman works, but over time I grew frustrated by the sameness of the setting. Book after book, I had a cast of a couple hundred males aboard a small ship. I longed to break free into the universe, which I eventually did by becoming a science fiction writer.
When I began writing SF, I realized that I could tell practically any story that appealed to me, as long as I set it in a science fiction context, and so I made a list of the sorts of stories I longed to write. The list was as follows:
A future in which everything went right. (This became my novel Knight Moves.)
A future in which everything went wrong. (This became Hardwired.)
A mystery/thriller. (Voice of the Whirlwind)
A first-contact story. (Angel Station)
A Restoration-style comedy of manners. (The Crown Jewels and its sequels)
A hard-boiled mystery. (Days of Atonement)
Within a six-to-eight month period, I had these works outlined, at least in my head. (Voice of the Whirlwind, which I had begun some years earlier, took a little longer.) For the next several years, I went about the task of realizing the works that I had envisioned during that one manic period of creativity.
As I worked my way to the end of the list, I began to worry that maybe I'd lost my creative spark: I hadn't had anything like that period of creativity in the time since.
Then I wrote Aristoi, and I stopped worrying.
None of this has any direct bearing on "Lethe," except to note that the very first thing I wanted to write was the future in which everything went right.
In my versions of this future, every box has been checked on humanity's collective wish list: there is no poverty, war, disease, or death. Some might claim that this deprives the future of the raw material for fiction, but my own view is that, with our inherited burden of tragic distractions out of the way, we might be able to get on with the actual search for meaning.
In any case, getting rid of war and death makes the search for a story all that much more imaginative.
I wrote "Lethe" in a period in which I was looking for just that kind of challenge. In order to challenge myself further, I decided to outdo Comedy of Errors by making the story about two sets of triplets.
And I couldn't avoid death altogether. The foundation of the story, after all, is what happens when death occurs in a culture where death simply does not happen.
It occurred to me that it would make an interesting challenge to write this same story over again from the point of view of any of the other Davouts or Katrins, but I haven't taken up the challenge as yet.
This was the first, but not the last, story taking place in what I call the College of Mystery sequence.
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The Last Ride of German Freddie
" Ecce homo, " said German Freddie with a smile. "That is your man, I believe."
"That's him," Brocius agreed. "That's Virgil Earp, the lawman."
"What do you suppose he wants?" asked Freddie.
"He's got a warrant for someone," said Brocius, "or he
Throw a switch, he thought, and the hammerblows would end.
"Katrin deserves mourning," he had told Davout the Silent, and now he had so many more Katrins to mourn, Dark Katrin and Katrin the Fair, Katrin the New and Katrin the Old. All the Katrins webbed by fate, alive or dead or merely enduring. And so he would, from necessity, endure . . . So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
He lay on his back, on the cold ground, gazed up at the world of stars, and tried to find the worlds, among the glittering teardrops of the heavens, where he and Katrin had rained from the sky their millions of children.
Â
Afterword: Lethe
I started my career as a writer of historical fiction, specifically novels taking place in the Age of Sail, a genre pioneered by James Fenimore Cooper and later practiced successfully by C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, among others. I enjoyed writing these journeyman works, but over time I grew frustrated by the sameness of the setting. Book after book, I had a cast of a couple hundred males aboard a small ship. I longed to break free into the universe, which I eventually did by becoming a science fiction writer.
When I began writing SF, I realized that I could tell practically any story that appealed to me, as long as I set it in a science fiction context, and so I made a list of the sorts of stories I longed to write. The list was as follows:
A future in which everything went right. (This became my novel Knight Moves.)
A future in which everything went wrong. (This became Hardwired.)
A mystery/thriller. (Voice of the Whirlwind)
A first-contact story. (Angel Station)
A Restoration-style comedy of manners. (The Crown Jewels and its sequels)
A hard-boiled mystery. (Days of Atonement)
Within a six-to-eight month period, I had these works outlined, at least in my head. (Voice of the Whirlwind, which I had begun some years earlier, took a little longer.) For the next several years, I went about the task of realizing the works that I had envisioned during that one manic period of creativity.
As I worked my way to the end of the list, I began to worry that maybe I'd lost my creative spark: I hadn't had anything like that period of creativity in the time since.
Then I wrote Aristoi, and I stopped worrying.
None of this has any direct bearing on "Lethe," except to note that the very first thing I wanted to write was the future in which everything went right.
In my versions of this future, every box has been checked on humanity's collective wish list: there is no poverty, war, disease, or death. Some might claim that this deprives the future of the raw material for fiction, but my own view is that, with our inherited burden of tragic distractions out of the way, we might be able to get on with the actual search for meaning.
In any case, getting rid of war and death makes the search for a story all that much more imaginative.
I wrote "Lethe" in a period in which I was looking for just that kind of challenge. In order to challenge myself further, I decided to outdo Comedy of Errors by making the story about two sets of triplets.
And I couldn't avoid death altogether. The foundation of the story, after all, is what happens when death occurs in a culture where death simply does not happen.
It occurred to me that it would make an interesting challenge to write this same story over again from the point of view of any of the other Davouts or Katrins, but I haven't taken up the challenge as yet.
This was the first, but not the last, story taking place in what I call the College of Mystery sequence.
Â
The Last Ride of German Freddie
" Ecce homo, " said German Freddie with a smile. "That is your man, I believe."
"That's him," Brocius agreed. "That's Virgil Earp, the lawman."
"What do you suppose he wants?" asked Freddie.
"He's got a warrant for someone," said Brocius, "or he
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