The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

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Brian Stableford. The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

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Writers of imaginative fiction are often asked where they get their ideas from. The fact is that they come from anywhere and eve­rywhere, that the writerly state of mind involves living in an atmos­phere that is as profusely-scattered with ideas as the cities of indus­trial England used to be with the smoke-particles that served as nu­clei for the precipitation of smog. Literature is, after all, little more than a temporary weather-phenomenon, which flourished for a while when the climate was conductive and is now in the process of dying out, not because of the activation of any kind of Clear Air Act but merely because the intellectual air we breathe nowadays is too arid to support it. Most writers, however, find that sort of explanation too tedious, so they mostly manufacture shorter and wittier formulae for use as replies. I always say that I steal them, although I readily ac­knowledge that this is an empty boast. It is after all, great writers who steal; the rest of us merely borrow.

One of the side-effects of the historical growth of prose fiction, which became as profuse as an Amazonian rain forest in the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries, although it will presumably dwindle away to a mere blasted heath in the twenty-first, is that the smoke-particles around which literary ideas might form were intensively recycled, recklessly multiplied in the meantime by a quasi-microbial process of fission. The easiest place for any modern writer to find ideas to steal, or merely borrow, is the work of other writers.

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It was, in any case, extremely unlikely that my work would lead to anything which could qualify as a “cure” for those afflicted with the Innsmouth stigmata, but there was really no longer any need for that. The Innsmouthers had taken care of the problem themselves. I remembered what I’d said about gross malformations being elimi­nated from the gene-pool by natural selection, and realized that I’d used the word “natural” in a rather euphemistic way—as many peo­ple do nowadays. The selective pressure would work both ways: the incomers who’d re-colonized Innsmouth after the war would have been just as reluctant to marry people who had the Innsmouth look as people who had the Innsmouth look would have been to pass it on to their children.

Gideon Sargent was certainly not the only looker who’d never married, and I was sure that he wouldn’t have, even if there’d been a girl who looked like he did.

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