Slaughterhouse-Five is not my favorite of Vonnegut’s works—that would be Cat’s Cradle—but it is the most powerful. Semi-autobiographical, Slaughterhouse-Five allowed Vonnegut to write about the bombing of Dresden, which he survived, by approaching it askance. I like to imagine that writing the novel was both difficult and cathartic for him. Because “Peace in Amber” was both for me. It was the first time I tried to write a detailed account of my experiences on September 11, 2001.
All of the details in the story you just read are as accurate as I can make them. Writing it down, I bawled. Some days, I just sat with my laptop and cried, not knowing what to write. Like my pain for years, I hid the process from those around me. By the time my girlfriend got home from work each day, my face was dry. I tried to not look tired. There were other days that I shuffled around the house muttering to myself that life wasn’t worth living. Through it all, I wrote and deleted. Wrote and deleted. It’s impossible to convey to you, reading this, how different writing felt at the time.
I’ve always beaten deadlines by a mile. This one came and went. But slowly, the form of the piece fell together. And gradually, there were details of the day that I could look at without it crippling me. I’d been avoiding so much for so long. Not just the imagery, but the helplessness. And the agony I felt thinking my best friend was gone, and then seeing him again, and then the survivor’s guilt, the something close to elation soured by death’s specter.
At the end, the piece I dreaded most and got through in the worst manner helped me like no other. I have no idea what it reads like to the general public. Is it the inscrutable mess that I sometimes feel like it is? Impenetrable? Surreal? Discordant? Discomforting? I hope so. It’s what Slaughterhouse-Five feels like when I read it again and again. And it’s what that day felt like as I revisit it far too often.
Acknowledgments
A handful of editors changed the course of my life. They are the reason this collection—or any of my works—exists.
It started with Lisa Kelly-Wilson, a friend I knew only as an avatar on an online forum. When I posted one day that I’d written a rough draft of a novel (Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue), Lisa offered to give it a read. She was an academic editor and a fan of science fiction—I think she wanted material to humiliate me with on the forum. It was that kind of relationship.
To both of our surprise, Lisa loved the book. With force, she nixed my plan of giving the novel away for free on my blog. Instead, she offered a round of edits and suggested that I get it published. Lisa quickly became a motivating force in my writing life: a mentor, an advocate, and, I daresay, a fan. When she and her husband drove across the country to attend a reading of mine in Charleston, South Carolina, I was able to finally throw my arms around her. The memory of that moment is as vivid to me today as it was seven years ago.
With Lisa’s urging, I began to query agents and small publishers. Within weeks, two presses made offers. I went with Norlights Press, run by Nadene Carter, with whom I immediately connected. Nadene taught me legions about the craft of writing, simple things like not head-hopping and how to write with a more active voice. Stuff most writers already know. I was learning on the fly, editing a chapter ahead of Nadene using whatever I could learn from her previous suggestions and corrections. Between Lisa and Nadene, I got over the crippling fear of having my words made public. Now it was merely nausea-inducing.
When I decided to self-publish, one of the most important people in my life became my most important editor: my mom. A voracious reader, my mom was the first person to see my drafts, and she became my reliable editor and typo-finder. She also played the role of agent, demanding more pages from me on a regular basis. At the time, my readership numbered in the dozens and then gradually the hundreds. My mom gave my writing career an urgency not at all in line with my popularity. Thanks for believing in me, Mom. I’ll get you something new to read soon.
Just when I was starting to think my writing was halfway decent, along came some jerk named David Gatewood to assure me otherwise. My novel Wool had become a New York Times best seller and the highest-rated novel on Amazon the year of its release. Whatever confidence was seeping in, an email from this complete stranger soon destroyed it. The subject of the email was: “162 things wrong with WOOL.” The body of the email listed every mistake in gruesome detail.
David’s corrections were incorporated into all subsequent editions of Wool, and I asked if he would edit my future works. Overnight, Mr. Gatewood became my indispensable editor and unbelievably hilarious critic. When word spread of his talents, David quit the world of banking, where he was so desperately needed, and became instead one of the most sought-after editors in publishing. I wouldn’t be half the writer I am today had David not reached out to me. Thanks for everything you do not only for me but for the community, my friend.
Each of these editors did more than correct mistakes in my writing; they attempted to correct mistakes in my self-esteem. I’ve never been a fan of my writing. Crippling self-doubt prevented me from completing a novel despite two decades of trying. And so the editors in my life were as much about curation and motivation as polishing prose. There is a history of this in the genre of science fiction. Editors like John W. Campbell and Hugo Gernsback were talent scouts first and foremost. Their skill lay in spotting raw ability, refining it, and then publishing that talent in magazines and anthologies that would sell and launch careers. A handful of such editors have wielded outsize power in shaping science fiction. Today no editor is doing this as well as John Joseph Adams.
John and I met at Worldcon five years ago. Over lunch, we brainstormed a series of three apocalyptic anthologies that became the Apocalypse Triptych: The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come. The insanity of this project was that I would not only contribute a story to each book but assist in the editing. I soon found myself published alongside many of my heroes—some of the most talented writers working in the field today—and I was also expected to edit their works!
My appreciation for what the editors in my life have done for me grew enormously through this process. Editing is a special skill, harder in many ways than writing, and I was fortunate that John was there to clean up my mess. He also motivated me to write three difficult and emotional stories for the series, then proceeded to wrest more short stories from me for his various anthologies and his award-winning Lightspeed Magazine.
The stories he inspired me to write are included here, as well as pretty much every other short piece I’ve ever written. Before this collection came into being, these stories were scattered, some lost, some unpublished, some brand-new. I thank John for not only making it possible to publish this book, but for thinking it needed to exist in the first place.
Along with my brilliant agent, Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Agency, each of these incredible editors has shaped my writing and my life. They convinced me to share some of my ideas with you. And you, dear reader, have done the rest. I am eternally grateful to you all. Without you, none of this would exist.
Hugh Howey
Panama Canal, Panama
January 2017
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About the Author
HUGH HOWEY is the author of the New York Times and USA Today best-selling Silo trilogy (Wool, Shift, and Dust). The first volume, Wool, has been translated in forty countries. He is also the author of Beacon 23, Sand, the Molly Fyde saga, and many other books, and is the editor, with John Joseph Adams, of the Apocalypse Triptych series of anthologies.
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Hugh Howey, Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories
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