Tides of Adventure: Collins Creek, #3

By Ron Collins

Aliens, Ray Guns, and Distant Planets

 

Jump in, the water's still more than fine!

 

In Collins Creek, Volume 3, you'll find an eclectic 8-pack of short stories from prolific writer Ron Collins, all of which sprung from the environment of Fiction River original anthology magazines but subsequently found homes in places like Analog, Galaxy's Edge, and Pulphouse. From quantum entanglement to cloning and genetic engineering, these stories explore technology, space, and their impact on the people who live with them (hey, aliens are people, too!).

As different as they each are, these stories all say something about what the future might hold for us.

 

Stories Include:

 

The Colossal Death Ray

The Blue Lady of Entanglement Chamber 1

Bravo and Jazz

My Julie

January 3rd

Often and Silently We Come

Tumbling Dice

Survivors

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyfox Publishing
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781946176295

Ron Collins

Ron Collins's work has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, Nature, and several other magazines and anthologies. His writing has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked developing avionics systems, electronics, and information technology.

Book preview

Foreword

As you can tell from its title, this is the third volume in my collections of stories that came from the Fiction River Anthology workshop that was the brainchild of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

From the project’s inception, this volume has always been the most interesting.

This is because these are stories that were not accepted by the editors they were written for. That’s right, these stories were all rejected on first submittal. In fact, they never appeared in an edition of Fiction River at all. The kicker, though, is that they all proceeded to find homes in other professional publications.

When I was a true newbie—a baby writer as we were sometimes called—I thought the world worked like this: (1) you write a story and send it to an editor, and (2a) if the story is good the editor buys it, or (2b) if the story is not good the editor sends it back. The end.

Alas, it is not true.

Turns out a writer learns to have a difficult relationship with rejection.

Rejection does not mean bad. Rejection, to a writer, means wrong market.

These stories prove that.

Even award-winning stories can get rejected before finding their homes in the hearts of their readers. This volume includes, for example, The Colossal Death Ray, which Mike Resnick loved so much he published it in Galaxy’s Edge, then put it in his Year’s Best issue.

[Insert list of publishers that passed on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series here if you’d prefer a bigger name.]

This is perhaps the most important lesson any writer ever learns.

Quality is not dictated in the mind of the editor.

Quality is not even dictated in the mind of the writer. It is an old saw that an artist can be the worst judge of their own work, and that certainly applies to writers—and especially a new writer who has not yet learned this most important lesson.

Quality is dictated in the mind of readers, and the readers alone.

I think the best way to internalize this is to stop thinking of editors as gatekeepers (as we writers often do), and instead think of them first as readers, then second as artists. The idea of editors as readers is not hard to grasp. It fits the image we have of them, anyway. But it can take a bit of work to see them as artists.

To edit is to create art, though.

All an editor really has is their taste and their viewpoint of what their final product is going to feel like.

That’s a lot, though.

When you do start looking at editors as both readers and artists, you can see how an editor might think, This story works, but it’s not my kind of story. Or maybe, Hey, I really like this story, but it doesn’t fit my vision for this magazine or this anthology.

These things happen, probably a lot more than you’d think.

This volume of Collins Creek is filled with stories whose first reader didn’t like them as much as their second readers did—or stories that fit the vision of the second artist that picked them up better than they fit the first who I sent them to.

They make an interesting gathering of tones and genres, with themes that cover love, survival, and who we are as human beings.

Reading them again has made me happy.

I hope you’ll like them, too.

Ron Collins

Oro Valley, AZ

Introduction: Rejection Means Nothing

Dean Wesley Smith

In a world not so long in the past, WMG Publishing used to hold a writing class called the Anthology Workshop. The format to an early-stage writer would be brutal and we never let them in, to be honest. For experienced professional writers, the format was still tough.

How it worked was fairly simple. Every writer attending at one point a few months ahead of the workshop would get an assignment to write a certain type of story. They had one week to do the story and get it in for a specific editor for a specific project or magazine.

Then the writers would do it again the next week.

Repeat for six straight weeks because there were six editors.

Then everyone had a couple weeks to look at and read every story to decide if they liked it or not. Often over a million words of short fiction to read. Imagine about fifteen anthologies of short stories piled high and you had to read all of them in two weeks.

At the workshop, on one day it would be one editor’s turn to actually buy or not buy. The writers could not say a word, and no discussion was allowed on any story except by the six editors in the front on the stage. The writer had to just sit there and listen to an editor talk about their story, like it, love it, buy it, or reject it. And for what reasons.

As I said, the format would kill any beginning writer not up for the reality of editors buying or not buying stories. There were always about fifty professional writers in the room, and often five editors would love a story and the editor who could actually buy it didn’t.

Ron and his daughter Brigid served as editors a time or two.

And that editor was always limited in word count and number of stories they could take for their magazine or for their anthology. They would have 40-plus stories from professional writers and only 15 spots. So many great stories got passed over for lack of room, or because it just didn’t fit the editor’s taste that day.

We always told writers that they should submit their rejected stories to the top markets after the workshop. Many did, many did not.

Ron did.

And so many of his stories that were not bought for one reason or another at the anthology workshop sold to major magazines. That’s right. That’s how amazing this anthology workshop was. The major magazines were full regularly with stories that were passed on at the anthology workshop.

Well, Ron decided to put his stories that were bought by major magazines after missing in the anthology workshop into this collection. Eight stories. Wow, just wow.

And this is a powerful collection. Four of the eight stories were publishing in Analog.

Now looking at the table of contents, I have no memory of which story was rejected by which editor at the workshop in what year. I am sure Ron does.

But take note that I was always an editor at these workshops and I went on to buy two of these stories for my magazine Pulphouse Fiction Magazine. More than likely I would have bought those two and others actually in the workshop, but I wasn’t the editor he wrote them for. So I had to hope that Ron got rejected by the editor he wrote them for so the story could come back to me later.

Understand how frustrating that is for a writer. You write a story for a specific anthology and an editor like me starts off by saying, I’d buy this.

Then maybe two or three other editors say the same thing, then the story gets to the editor who actually can make an offer on the story, a real offer, and that editor passes. Brutal and yet uplifting at the same time.

But year after year, the process taught us all one major lesson. Rejections mean absolutely nothing. They mean that a story doesn’t fit with other stories, or that the editor was having a bad day, or the editor had already bought a story similar.

But the next editor down the line, down the table, might love it and buy it.

This volume flat proves that lesson in a way you can hold in your hands. Rejection means nothing from one editor if the next editor in line buys the story.

As a professional writer and editor, Ron completely understands this concept.

So I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I did in the workshop and now in this book. A great read by a great writer.

—Dean Wesley Smith

Ron’s Foreword: The Colossal Death Ray

I wrote The Colossal Death Ray for John Helfers and his Recycled Pulp edition of Fiction River. He had bought stories from me before, and I liked this one a lot, so my hopes were high. When it turned out to not be John’s thing, I sent it to Mike Resnick for Galaxy’s Edge, who promptly said it might be the best Ron Collins story he’d read. Since he’d also already bought stuff from me, I knew it wasn’t false praise. Still was an honor to have him publish it in his Year’s Best of Galaxy’s Edge issue. Mike didn’t mince his words often, especially when it came to fiction.

The Colossal Death Ray

The Colossal Death Ray settled into geostationary earth orbit with all the fanfare of a sniper taking to its blind. It wasn’t actually called the Colossal Death Ray by those who placed it there, of course. To them it had a name with more zeal to it. But since it was, in reality, a colossal death ray, that is the name by which we will call for this discussion.

Regardless of your preference for naming, it is true that the machine was a remarkable merging of science and engineering. It was about half the size of a transit bus, and bristling with sensors, energy panels, and communication devices. Its most startling feature was, of course, its five separate 350 Megawatt laser systems, each mounted at the end of a spindly arm that reached from a common center, giving it the look of a black spider against the black, star-filled background.

Its designers were proud of their work, and rightly so. The system required years of painstaking effort to design it and develop it to the point where it could be deployed on this day.

It belonged to a government.

While the specific choice of government in this instance might matter to many, the Colossal Death Ray had no politics. It did not know who had painted its flag on its fuselage, nor did it care. As such, this story does not concern itself with exactly which government had placed it into service except to note that it was a government, and that this government launched the Colossal Death Ray with the stated motive of protecting itself and its people. As such, the Colossal Death Ray’s job was to sit in its orbit, listen to signals that came from the ground, and decide what to do based upon those signals. By doing so, it served to threaten its side of the planet with certain extinction if things did not go its owner’s way.

By all reports, it did this job spectacularly well.

Assuming, however, that things did not go very well for its owners, its second job was to receive a series of coordinates, link its five lasers to them, and render those locations into flat piles of slag. This capability had been tested and proven several times by those same designers who were so proud of it.

On the day the Colossal Death Ray acquired its orbit, engineers on the ground proclaimed it was All Systems Go.

Some three Earth standard years later (99,595,785.67437 seconds, per the Colossal Death Ray’s onboard control unit), the command unit received a signal that consisted of a latitude, a longitude, and some timing parameters. It executed this command promptly, and the city once known as Vancouver was turned into something that, on a clear day,