There Is No Escaping . . . Legions in Time!

.

I'm in print again!  That always makes me happy.  This time it's "Legions in Time," which has been reprinted.  It appears in The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF . 

I wrote "Legions in Time" because I'd been feeling grumpy about how slow-spaced too many stories are nowadays.  Slow-paced for no reason, I mean.  So I thought back to A. E. Van Vogt's classic, "Recruiting Station," which just speeds along like racehorse afire, and thought I'd try to write something similar.  I stole the basic premise, in fact, and the dreary future that my protagonist, Eleanor Voigt found herself in.  The story I wrote turned out to be very different from Van Vogt's, but I threw in a couple of details lifted from his story just so it would be obvious that I wasn't trying to hide the story's origin.

I started out the story slow, then sped it up and sped it up some more and sped it up some more -- with the exception of a calm conversation just before the climax -- all the way to the end.  It was a hoot to write, and I hoped it would be a hoot to read.

Then it (cough!) won the Hugo Award for best short story.

This prompted some of Van Vogt's fans to rather angrily demand to know just what I meant by the story.  And I rather shamefacedly had to admit that I hadn't really meant much of anything.  I was just having fun.  Because, let's be honest, it's terrific fun to write something like "Time criminals of the Dawn Era -- Listen and obey."

Anyway, the book looks to be a terrific anthology, as anthologies edited by Mike Ashley tend to be. 

Here's the table of contents:

Caveat Time Traveler by Gregory Benford
Century to Starboard by Liz Williams
Walk to the Full Moon by Sean McMullen
The Truth About Weena by David J. Lake
The Wind Over the World by Steven Utley
Scream Quietly by Sheila Crosby
Darwin's Suitcase by Elisabeth Malartre
Try and Change the Past by Fritz Leiber
Needle in a Timestack by Robert Silverberg
Dear Tomorrow by Simon Clark
Time Gypsy by Ellen Klages
The Catch by Kage Baker
Real Time by Lawrence Watt Evans
The Chronological Protection Case by Paul Levinson
Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm by Molly Brown
Legions in Time by Your Humble Servant
Coming Back by Damien Broderick
The Very Slow Time Machine by Ian Watson
After-Images by Malcolm Edwards
"In the Beginning, Nothing Lasts . . ." by Mike Strahan
Traveller's Rest by David I. Masson
Twember by Steve Rasnic Tem
The Pusher by John Varley
Palely Loitering by Christopher Priest
Red Letter Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch


Really good company to be among, innit?

*