Alien Sex полностью

The path to publication for “Dancing Chickens” was odd and twisted—just as, some will say, the story itself is.

We’ll start with Leigh Kennedy. Back before Leigh was a successful novelist living in Britain, she rose as a shining star in the firmament of the Northern Colorado Writers Workshop. The workshop has been around for at least a decade and a half, and has included such members as Connie Willis, Dan Simmons, Steve Rasnic Tem, Simon Hawke, John Stith, Vance Aandahl, and David Dvorkin. One day Leigh Kennedy was musing about a childhood memory: as a little girl in her mother’s kitchen in Central City, high in the Colorado Rockies, Leigh had discovered the pleasures of sticking her hand inside whole uncooked chickens and making them dance like puppets. True, you had to crack the joints on the legs and wings, and the tactile sensation was pretty icky, but there was a certain Gregory Hines appeal to the whole process. This was long before similar dancing chickens appeared on the TV comedy series, “Fridays,” and the image was indelibly encoded in my neurons.

Then there was the Al Pacino movie, Cruising. Controversial, in part, because of its depiction of gay leather bar culture, the film introduced the quaint custom of fist-fucking to mainstream audiences. My kid brother and I saw the movie in a now-shuttered movie palace in downtown Cheyenne, and noted the audience seemed something less than enthusiastic.

At some point before all this, I had been enormously impressed by Robert Silverberg’s Nebula-winning “Passengers,” a grimly powerful story of humans manipulated by alien forces. That emotional charge stuck with me.

Sometime early in 1981 I put fingers to typewriter keys and forced this story out. Although much of the reaction of my fellows in the writing workshop was positive, adjectives such as repulsive, morbid, and depressing were also tossed around. I felt some pessimism about the story’s commercial prospects.

Then, close to Christmas, editor Marta Randall cheerfully bought the story for New Dimensions 13. I discovered I was in the company of such contributions as Vonda N. McIntyre’s “Superluminal” and “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” by Howard Waldrop. I was happy.

Pocket Books scheduled the anthology for its June 1982 list. Advance copies were sent out to reviewers. And then, true to the books series number, it was canceled. The official word was that too few advance sales had been generated to warrant publication.

Marta regretfully returned the rights to the story to me.

In the meantime, Michael Bishop had been bugging me about contributing an original to his Light Years and Dark anthology, a project intended to be both comprehensive and daring. I sent him “Dancing Chickens.” Michael didn’t like the story at all and returned it with kind, but final words.

Somewhere along the line, Ellen Datlow saw the story at OMNI and bounced it, saying it was dynamite but entirely too raunchy for the magazine. Then, hearing of the Bishop rejection, she did me a great kindness. She took it upon herself to persuade Michael to read the piece again. He did, decided he liked the story better than before, and reversed his first decision. “Dancing Chickens” finally appeared in Light Years and Dark late in 1984. It hasn’t been reprinted since.

Not all stories, of course, go through these Byzantine turns. But fictions are like kids, and some are more difficult than the others. I’m talking content here, too—not just marketing glitches. I hope you found “Dancing Chickens” as difficult a child to read as I did to write.