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FOREWORD

Of all my childhood memories, the only good ones concerned science fiction—the time I spent watching shows like Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (granted, the last one was actually horror/mystery, but I was only a preschooler when I first began watching, so I mentally lumped all fantastic television as sf), as well as the weekend creature feature movies ( a mix of sf and horror films a few of the stations out in Los Angeles used to show back in the 1960s, when I lived there for eight horrible years), plus the time I spent reading the small collection of sf short story collections and novels my mother had bought during what she described as her “science fiction period” (which had already been replaced with her “mystery period” and her “romance period” by the time I inherited the books).

Between 1961 and 1969, my mother, her mother, and I lived in California, following my mother’s rather impulsive decision to divorce my father after he’d had two arguments with her about her mother (a compulsive, meddling degenerate). Due to my mother failing to comply with one of the specific clauses of the divorce papers, specifically, that she be required to allow him visitation rights (her mother kept me from him), the judge in the case awarded full custody of me to my father...but there was a two-week gap between her being notified of this court-ordered change in my custody status and my father actually being awarded custody of me; and during that brief period of time, her mother asked for a transfer out of state for her job with a major airline (she was a cafeteria worker whose main duty was to stand around collecting money and flirting with men), and by the time my father came to get me, they’d left, kidnapping me and leaving no clue as to their whereabouts. Despite the fact that neither of them could drive, nor did they have any easy access to a car and driver, they ended up in one of the places in the country where having a car and being able to drive was just about mandatory in order to get around easily. Plus, my mother’s mother’s new job was a far cry from her make-change-and-flirt-endlessly gig; she was stuck in a real working job, setting up trays of food for outgoing planes out of LAX. And she hated actually working.... But to make eight hideously poverty-ridden, abuse-filled, and mentally-crushing years short (for you, at least; they’ll never be that for me), I was blamed for their decision to move away from friends and family, and on top of what I was going through at home on a daily basis, I was the perpetual school goat—thanks to a near-fatal reaction to my dip-tet shot when I was very small.

I’d gotten terribly ill and lost almost all my sense of balance from the high fever I suffered, which not only made me noticeably clumsy in the extreme, but unable to do even the most basic exercises which were required at the time for all students to be able to do, thanks to the disasterous emphasis on phy ed vs. education which was sweeping the country in the early 1960s, a leftover from the Kennedy administration. So I invited the open wrath of every teacher stuck with me from first grade on (I wasn’t allowed to go to kindergarten, since my mother didn’t “believe” in it), plus I was physically ugly, overweight, wore glasses, and between the ages of seven-and-a-half to nine, I went through a physically roughshod accelerated premature puberty which left me with the body and physique of an adult by the time I reached my ninth birthday. I was so grotesquely out of place among my classmates, the school actually accused my mother of lying about my age, and forced me to undergo a brief physical done by a doctor of their choosing, just to verify my age. By the fourth grade, I was more physically endowed/developed than the stick-thin shrew of a teacher I had that year, and she ridiculed, berated and verbally abused me on a daily basis, going so far as to tell me she hated me, wished I was dead, and dreaded seeing my “ugly face” every day in class. (At home, things were no better; my grandmother told me that “the devil in [me] was coming out” and that’s why I had suffered so many physically drastic changes in so short a time—I was being punished for not only looking like my “devil” father, but for “forcing” them to leave their birthplace and family behind.)

Needless to add, I had no friends during my entire time spent in that state, and academically, I was in a weird no-man’s land of being gifted in art and writing, but hopelessly behind in math, science and most importantly from the school’s standpoint, phy ed. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I found out I had dyslexia—until that time, I was constantly being accused of not trying hard enough, being stubborn, deliberately not trying, and being lazy. I was always the person who was not only chosen last for sports teams, but—once the person who was going to be stuck with me realized that I’d be on their team—the one person whom the team captain would beg the teacher to please allow to stay on the bench, since any team with me on it always lost. And once I began to change physically, I was regarded as a freak and openly ridiculed just for showing up at school each day—both the boys and the girls found me repulsive, especially my heavy acne when I was eight years old. Once, I sat there bawling when the school photographer tried to take my picture, while a group of Mexican girls stood behind him, taunting me and telling me how ugly I was—and when my mother saw the resulting picture, she told me flat out, “You look like a witch.”

And on top of everything physical and academic which plagued me, I was incredibly socially inept, just totally unable to connect with any of my classmates....many, many years later, when I was in my forties, I finally found out what caused that—I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. Which wasn’t known back then, alas....

Thus, being a literal freak of nature in so many ways, I could only connect with the characters in science fiction—their differentness was my differentness, and their sense of not belonging mirrored my own.

I do believe that watching and reading science fiction was the lone thing that kept me relatively sane, even though my mother tried to get me to read adolescent romance novels a few years later (romance is actually more alien and unbelievable than sf could ever be to me!), hoping that I’d “grow out of” my interest in science fiction.

The stories in this collection are an outgrowth of my lamentable childhood, as well as a reflection of those things in life which I found fascinating in that they could mentally take me away from the horror of my daily life, and at least on the level of imagination offer me something worth waking up each morning for—at least more so than dealing with my family and others around me who disliked me for what I was.

The universes in this collection center around outsiders, artists, and freaks (be they natural-born or self-made); some of the stories are interconnected, but also designed to stand alone. I’ve also included afterwords for each to shine additional light on both the works and their cultural personal inspirations. But more than a collection, to me this volume is a glimpse into my creative soul—and as such, it may not be perfect, it might not even be logical, but it is what I am, love it or hate it. Personally, I’m more accustomed to being greeted with the latter reaction, but part of me does hope you’ll find something to at least like here, too.

—A. R. Morlan

2009 & 2012