Tyrannosaur Faire

By Steve Carper

Product Description
Bold ideas combined with down-to-earth characters mark this collection from one of the unsung innovators of the sf short story. Set in both the near and far reaches of time and space, Steve Carper's stories defy conventional classification. Read them as part science fiction, part fantasy, part mainstream and slipstream. They gambol easily among the classic themes of the field from dinosaurs to space travel to wish-giving witches, transforming each into something new, unexpected, and delightful in a style so vivid that it has been called "worddrunk". Imbibe deeply. This volume collects all of Carper s major works for the first time, and adds a story available nowhere else.

About the Author
Science fiction and writing became inextricably intertwined in Steve Carper's life in 1969 when he attended the St. Louis Worldcon and then saw his article on the con published by the Rochester Times-Union newspaper. His first published work of fiction was written at the 1972 Clarion West writers workshop. That love of genre and concern for the changing realities of the publishing world has been expressed in ten years worth of Writers' Bloc columns for the SFWA Bulletin and as the editor of the 2010 SFWA Handbook: The Business Side of Writing, By Writers, For Writers.

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Steve Carper
P. O. Box 10126
Rochester, NY 14610

"Steve Carper's speculative fiction is sly and scary and sexy and sometimes sad. His knack for wordplay reminds me of early Zelazny and Delany stories, with a 21st century edge. You should read these stories"
-- Nebula Winner John Kessel

"Steve Carper offers original and entertaining takes on, among other things, avian flu, fun, the Vietnam Memorial, and love over time - lots of time. You will learn why you should pit a dybbuk and how glad you should be to not belong to a far-future therapy group. Fascinating stories from a fascinating mind."
-- Hugo and Nebula Winner Nancy Kress

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Carper
• Release date: Sep 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9780979856587

Steve Carper

Steve Carper is the Internet’s leading expert on lactose intolerance. He learned he was lactose intolerant back in 1978 when the condition was virtually unknown. With no books or resources readily available, he plunged into the necessary research and wrote No Milk Today: How to Live with Lactose Intolerance in 1986. There was still more to be learned, so he followed that in 1995 with the larger and definitive book on the subject, Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance. A pioneer on the web, he started Steve Carper’s Lactose Intolerance Clearinghouse (http://www.stevecarper.com/li) in 1997 and moved the active commentary over to the Planet Lactose Blog (http://planetlactose.blogspot.com) in 2005. He’s answered thousands of questions from readers in more than 30 countries.

Book preview

Tyrannosaur Faire

Steve Carper

PLANET LACTOSE Publishing | Rochester, NY

Tyrannosaur Faire

Copyright 2008 by Steve Carper

This is a work of fiction, All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

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This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by David Perlman

From the photomanipulation Sunflower

www.davidigital.com

Farstream Books

an imprint of:

PLANET LACTOSE Publishing

P.O. Box 10126

Rochester, NY 14610

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Smashwords eBook edition

ISBN-13: 978-0-9798565-8-7

Table of Contents

Where My Ideas Come From*

*with page numbers

One Long Summer Night Over at the Tyrannosaur Faire

Reflections in an Empty Pool

A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss

Wrestling with the Demon

The Taste of Worms

Pity the Poor Dybbuk

Goggle a Frog, Kiss a Prince

Grafts on the Memory Tree

Holly: New Paree Prime: Spring Two

Forever with Diamond

The Changeling Variations

Mother of All Neuroses

Harlequins

Where My Ideas Come From*

*with page numbers

Where do your ideas come from?

That’s the most clichéd question in all sf writing. Everybody gets asked that. Except me. Never once. And that’s incredibly frustrating, because I have the answer.

For example, I know exactly where the idea behind One Long Summer Night Over at the Tyrannosaur Faire comes from. It comes from page 272 of Robert Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies. "Strange as it may sound, any average adult human could have won an arm-wrestling contest with a five ton Tyrannosaurus." Sadly, future work by dinosaur kinesiologists have discredited this. Ignore them. The image of an adult arm-wrestling a dinosaur stayed with me for years.

See how easy that was?

Now a confession. The real question, the one that I can’t answer, is How did that sentence spawn an alternate world and the character of Teesha and the whole Tyrannosaur Faire?

No idea. It says a lot about the mysterious process of creation that I wrote the entire story about Teesha and the T without realizing what I had done with the names. If you’ve ever wondered why writers are their own worst editors and critics, now you know. As a consequence what you’ll find in my stories is literally beyond me.

I do know that stories require more than a mere idea. They need characters, settings, plots, scenes, backgrounds, histories, relationships, developments, philosophies, and depth. Ideas seldom provoke more than one or two of those.

I don’t know how stories create themselves in my head. I do know that they come from the slightest spark, like forest fires stemming from a single match. Anything can spark a story. A word. A phrase. A character. A fact. A setting.

Reflections in an Empty Pool came from a trip to Washington and a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Maya Lin’s sculpture is a space, a world, unto itself. Better, it’s a portal that once walked through transports you to a new appreciation of sorrow and loss. The story eerily prefigures 9/11. It didn’t have an internal structure, however, until I had the vision of the Washington Monument unpeeling and disappearing into the sky.

The medical blog medGadget.com decided to hold a contest for a short science fiction story about medicine in the future. It was flu season. I’ve never had the flu. I’ve never had a flu shot. There might be a connection. But this story popped out almost complete and won the grand prize. They ran it without a name, but A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss feels right.

The Jewish ghetto in Shanghai during World War II is a lost fragment of the Holocaust and its survivors. Perhaps one Jew in 400 managed to escape Eastern Europe and reach this Strange Haven, as one documentary labels it. I knew I had to try to capture the surreal existence of this world within a world within a fractured world and Pity the Poor Dybbuk emerged from a mountain of research into Jewish and Chinese lore.

The Taste of Worms was almost rejected by a female first reader after half the story, because she didn’t expect a male writer to finish it the way I did. Admittedly, it’s an ugly package tied up with a pretty bow.

Goggle a Frog, Kiss a Prince is a spoof of cyberpunk. Really. It’s not my fault that by the time it saw print cyberpunk had become such a spoof of itself that everyone took the story seriously. The images were generated by Joel Garreau’s classic work on the new suburbia, Edge Cities. Looking back at the story, I see that I inadvertently and independently invented blogging. You can find an apology in my blog.

Much of what I write are my flailing attempts to capture some essence of life’s major issues. With Grafts on the Memory Tree I consciously tried to focus on a single universal, marriage, and how technology might change an institution already in cultural free-fall. As background, you might consider that I got formally married on the 26th anniversary of the date my wonderful, supportive, and infinitely superlative wife Linda and I moved in together. You only marry once.

Now we’re getting into the truly obscure. Boomerang is a song on Weeds, the first album by psychedelic country folk rockers Brewer and Shipley. One line of lyrics reads, Holly was a wealthy girl. I love Brewer and Shipley, but Boomerang wouldn’t rank in my top twenty of their songs. Nor is Holly was a wealthy girl exactly evocative. Yet Holly: New Paree Prime: Spring Two sprang from my brain Athena-like, almost complete in first draft. Yes, this was years before Paris Hilton no matter the date of publication. The rich are always with us, like E. coli.

Forever, with Diamond appears here for the first time. It’s a story about obsession, not the first in this collection. I’m far too lazy myself to be obsessed by anything, but the emotion fascinates me. As a generalist I’m gobstruck by those who can pour all their time and attention into one object. I’m forever flitting from one interest to another, the world a never-ending source of wonder that can’t be encompassed by a mere lifetime. Perhaps that’s why more people don’t make the effort. The name Lila is of course homage to Peter S. Beagle’s Lila the Werewolf.

A very famous science fiction writer made his reputation in the 1980s with a series of stories and novels in which his protagonists undergo hideous tortures, all of which they survive to come back and win over their enemies. Perhaps he just read too much Nietzsche, perhaps his inner demons are darker than most, but I found the notion deplorable as wish-fulfillment fantasy. In the real world, when torture does not kill, it does not make you stronger. Quite the contrary. All studies show that torture victims overwhelmingly fail to recover from their ordeals. They are broken, quite literally. I wrote The Changeling Variations as a deliberate response, to bring the face of torture closer to home, to a reality inhabited by you and your neighbors rather than distant faceless sufferers. More so now than ever.

Mother of All Neuroses was born during the first Gulf War, when Mother of was an irritatingly omnipresent phrase. Literalizing the abstract is a stock device of humorists, and for good reason. It works. I crammed in every stock sf cliché I could fit into a thousand words and dedicated it to mothers and children everywhere.

Harlequins was by far the hardest story in this collection to write. I rewrote it over and over, trying to make all the pieces fit. It too came from a trip, one to Paris, obviously, a city I instantly fell in love with like countless others, walking its streets until my legs seemed about to fall off. I visited every site mentioned in the story, including the Pompidou Center, with its dull collection of art and its magnificent Picassos. His Harlequin (Portrait of the Painter Jacinto Salvado) called to me. It’s deliberately half-finished, part color, part black and white, neither wholly art nor sketch nor biography. It is life.

Despite their vast differences, Harlequins shares with the title story an origin. When I left a good office job to attempt full-time writing in 1990 I wanted to restart the long-dormant fiction side of me I had mostly abandoned for the world of non-fiction. To jump-start that process, I enrolled in a pair of workshops taught by Nancy Kress. Nancy’s classes have spawned a generation of genre writers in Rochester and many friends. A close-knit community has grown from them. The final versions of these two stories are hardly recognizable as those first drafts the classes saw, but they benefited from the workshopping, as did many of the rest of these stories which were critiqued by writers groups spun off from Nancy’s workshops like clusters of stars from a central galaxy.

These stories are filled with references and allusions and homages and representations of the extraordinarily dense and amazing world we inhabit. As in Brownian motion, the people in my stories are tossed and buffeted by the whirligig of their background reality in a way I hope reflects the way we can never separate ourselves from our omnipresent culture. One thing I love about science fiction is its bigness, the way it can encompass whole worlds in the telling. Slice of life is best done elsewhere; spice of life is our addition to fiction. When science fiction writers devour worlds, they do so in the best possible way, to make them small enough to be served as story entrées for your delectation. Enjoy.

One Long Summer Night Over at the Tyrannosaur Faire

Up ahead Barnum City creeps out along the road, neon jewels wooing the darkness, tendrils of light designed to scoop you in and fool you into thinking you’ve arrived when you have another thousand heartbeats to go. Teesha’s vehicle whips past shops and sundries, bright and gaudy as the city itself. Never leave, she thinks, this town is you, one false step and you’re back being a supplicant in El, depending again on the kindness of pilgrims. Grim, indeed.

Roaring, thumping, bellowing thunder shakes the world so hard Teesha thinks the sun is going to pop right back out of the earth. Think I can’t noways hear? Teesha shouts at the pointman waving his lantern alongside the striped barrier, the flashing lights. Think I can’t hear an entire herd of dinosaurs crossing the road? Prime meaty Ankylosaurs cross the road at a fast lumber, heading straight for the guard shack and maybe a tree and talk pole or two but for the fleet and dangerous Deinonychusians shifting them one degree one.

Teesha blasts through, one spiky tail swish away from oblivion, a lone human herd hurrying to work. Fat-trunked cycads line the road, nodding similarly spiked heads and waving their single-branched arms to welcome Teesha home. Back roads, main roads, all roads lead to the center of town, though one last side road leads to the employee’s back lot. She sweeps across the gravel way too fast, stones pingapingapinging off everybody else’s paint, and hurls herself up and out even before she sets the brake good and tight. Where’s your i.d., Teesha? joshes sweet Norvann at the employee’s gate. Right back where it always is, in the pile of Truly Important Stuff in the explosion I call home. Does this prove I am who I am? She swoops down and kisses his lips, which would blush if lips only could.

Nobody kisses like you do, Teesha, he says, while the gate stiffly rises. Tell Benedikt, she shouts and is gone, gone, gone, mixing and blending invisibly with the crowds. Ain’t s’posed to be any way the simps can tell she works there because she’s not in costume, not at any small rate the costume of jacket with double rows of polished steel buttons and long blue leggings with the white stripe down the side and high peaked cap with Floppy the mascot’s picture that identifies every employee as much as their smiles and clean hands and desperately bored demented glints in their eyes. No, Teesha she wears next year’s fashions from the peacock row stores over in Carnaby’s Gap whose wearers are also the very first to try out the newest and most offbeat offerings here in Barnum as well. And everybody who is above the mental age of nine–and not in dino time–knows this the way they know the Floppy theme song. Everywhere Teesha walks the families, the teens, the couples, the rowdies, the mugs, even their decaying cousins, the damned and dazed, stalk her out of the corner of their eyes, wondering what new wonder out of the thousand, count ‘em, tents and rides and booths here in the grandest pleasure Faire of all time she is heading for so that they can follow her, at their discrete distance and in their own good time, into gobs of glee.

That’s Teesha’s job in the here and now. She’s a glee shill and she’s late. You’re not having fun yet, rumbles a voice, gravelly as the employee’s lot, right into her ear.

Hey, she says, I got to take my full stroll first thing so I know where to apply my talents.

First thing, Benedikt says in her voice, first thing, according to the rules and instructions sheet at base where you never checked in, is that you check in, so I can tell you about any new setups.

Teesha hears the magic words and the magic words are new setups, because even and especially when it is your job you don’t want to play the same game over and over every single getting longer night. Not when there’s times you’re only pretending to have fun ‘cause as she’ll admit only late early mornings in the privacy of her own home, mindless fun by one’s lonesome will bore the soul right out of one’s body if one lets oneself see just how simple it really truly is. And so her inborn native talent, call it sparkle, takes over, dumping her dignity, making her hug Benedikt’s arm so tight that even the laughing couples give them jealous looks.

And we’re standing here, she says, her multi-colored hair, all browns and violets and sea-foam whites, slapping all the way down to the small of her back. Is it good? Is it special?

This one, Benedikt says, setting them off at a brisk walk that just somehow and with no apparent effort manages to steer them past every attraction the Faire has to offer between their former hither and his destination yon, is extra special. Two eves from now lines five thousand beats long so I won’t let you anywhere near it. Until then we’ve got to create . . . word of mouth.

A ride?

Unh-uh.

A contest?

Sort of.

Animals? She doesn’t much like animals. Not up close.

One animal.

One animal is an attraction?

This one is.

Can’t be.

When you’re a kid, what do you dream about?

Right off fast she says, Being bigger and braver and bolder than anyone who ever lived.

And when you’re an adult?

Making your kid dreams come real for one lousy beat out of a lousy life. The ads and billboards