“Cyberpunk” has been much on my mind lately, or more accurately, in my face.
I’ve received the usual batch of fall semester queries from students writing papers, a few more requests from various publishers seeking reprint and/or translation rights—one of which was worth taking seriously, so I did, and I’ll have more to say about that book when we get closer to the publication date—and one request from an incredibly dedicated fan who had turned up a nice clean copy of the November 1983 issue of Amazing Stories and wanted me to sign it, specifically in the white space at the top of page 94.
Oh. That means I have to look at page 94 again.
Here,
for your reference, is what the top of page 94 looks like. Note the
introduction that George Scithers wrote more than 40 years ago for the
original magazine publication of the story. Please read it closely.
And now, the story that some of you have heard or read before, but most probably have not.
___________________________
I no longer remember the name of the con. It
was somewhere around 35 years ago and I want to say it was a
WorldCon, but really don’t remember. What I do remember is that I was
with a bunch
of other mid-list, mid-life, and mid-career pros, we were in the
professional SF/F writer’s natural habitat—the hotel bar—and we were
having just a great old time, drinking heavily and swapping divorce
horror stories. My first wife, Nancy, had just kicked me out, changed
the locks, and filed for separation, and to be honest, I deserved it. In
those days I was Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer,
and I was a real jerk.
Later, when I sobered up, it began to disturb me. It wasn’t just that being a writer seemed to be toxic to marriage and family: it was how readily the writers I knew (and at the time, being on the SFWA board of directors, I knew hundreds of successful writers) accepted this toxicity. I realized I could count on my fingers all the writers I knew who had intact first marriages and functional families. By and large my peers were women whose cats were their surrogate children; women who had had one or two children with male gametes supplied by one or more long-gone donors; men who would never get married and father children because they just didn’t swing that way; or worst of all, really successful male writers who had been married, but were now perfectly content to let their children be raised by their ex-wife’s next man. Or woman. Or whatever.
That’s when it struck me. The problem wasn’t that being a writer is somehow toxic to marriage and family. It was a matter of selection bias. My peer group was composed of divorced SF/F writers because we were all, every one of us, people who believed it was more important to our careers for us to be there, at that con, drinking with our fellow writers and editors in a hotel bar, than at home with our wives and families.
This, in turn, explained a nascent trend I at first thought I was only imagining I was seeing. The world of SF/F—at least, the social, con-going, dedicated fandom part of it—was not merely family-neutral, but in the process of turning actively family-hostile. And the problem wasn’t just with passing trends in genre fiction, or the idiosyncrasies of the current batch of editors who bought it, or the greedy bastard publishers who printed it. The problem was the writers.
It was too late to save my first marriage. The best I could hope for was
to try to have a good post-marriage for the sake of my daughters. Later
I remarried, and added a step-son and another son to the family. I
worked—really worked—at being a good husband and father, and quit
going to cons, unless I could go with my family. The last major con we went to was Dragon Con, and we went as a family.
Emily would have loved Dragon Con. She grew up to be a costumer, a
crafter, and a devoted fan of all things Harry Potter. We lost Emily this week, 16 years ago, in late September of 2009—suddenly, from a natural
cause that was undiagnosed, unpredictable, unpreventable, and
apparently had been waiting years for the opportunity to kill her.
People often ask why I don’t try to put together a complete collection of all my short stories
from the 1980s and 1990s. That photo at the top of this column is the
reason. Whenever I try to do it, I get as far as the introduction George Scithers wrote for the
original magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” and then grind to a stop. Other
people look at my publication credits and see a bunch of short stories,
some of them pretty good, some Nebula-nominated, some even world famous.
What I see is all the time I stole from my daughters’ childhoods
and all the damage I did to my first marriage, chasing the mirage of
being Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer.
A few people know that in 2010, when we went to Dragon Con, it was
between the time Karen (my second wife) was diagnosed with breast cancer
and the first round of what turned into a twelve-year odyssey
of
surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and then more of the same.
Karen beat the odds, I guess. When she was first diagnosed she was
told to expect she had two more years to live; perhaps five, tops. She fought hard against it, and survived for twelve.
What even fewer people know is that in December of
2012 my first wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma.
After a five-and-a-half year battle, she left this world in August of 2018.
For those of you who ask why I don’t go to WorldCon anymore or
why I really don’t give a flying fig about any of the many cat-fights and
pissing contests that are forever going on inside the world of SF/F
writing and fandom: seriously, are you kidding? You think that stuff is important?
Forty-two years later, we know some of the answers to the questions
George Scithers posed in his introduction to “Cyberpunk.” Nancy and Emily now sleep for
eternity, side-by-side in a small churchyard cemetery in rural
Minnesota.
As for me? You can’t fix yesterday. But you can learn from experience, and try to pass on what you have learned.
This was my experience. Learn from it.
