Nightside CIty (28 page)

There wasn’t anybody else I wanted to call,
so I didn’t. I shut down every system in the place and got my
bags.

And then I headed for the port.

I didn’t know for sure what would happen in
the City, but I could guess. Sayuri would be spanked and sent home.
Orchid and Rigmus and the rest would be sent for reconstruction.
Mishima would carry on, looking for the big break, probably
wondering what the hell he had gotten messed up in during his lost
time. The Nakada family had the money and power to see to all of
that.

Nightside City would go on for a while. The
miners would come in and gamble away the pay they spent their lives
earning. The tourists would come and gawk and gamble. The city
itself would go on. And in time, right on schedule, the sun would
rise. The long night would be over, and the city would die.

One thing I did know for sure.

I wouldn’t be there to see it.

For years, when people asked me what was my favorite
of all the novels I’d written (which is, by the way, not a good
question to ask—it’s very much like, “Which is your favorite of
your children?”), if I answered at all, I would name
Nightside
City
. Thanks to Carlisle Hsing’s first-person narration it’s
got a more distinctive voice than any of my others; I put a huge
amount of thought and effort into the world-building and
extrapolation, and was generally pleased with the result. I
consider it some of my best work, at any length and in any genre. I
still think it’s the best novel I produced in the 1980s.

I’m not the only one to think so;
Nightside City
came closer to making the awards ballots than
any other novel I’ve written, and I’ve heard from several readers
who loved it, including FoxAcre’s proprietor, Roger MacBride Allen.
I had hoped it would be part of a steady development of my career
as a science fiction novelist. I started work on a sequel almost
immediately.

Alas, it didn’t out work that way. Sales were
unimpressive—apparently because readers considered me a fantasy
novelist. My fans didn’t want SF, and SF readers didn’t want me.
The sequel,
Realms of Light
, wasn’t finished until 2010,
when I finally couldn’t stand to neglect it any longer, even though
I generally stick to fantasy these days.

I still think
Nightside City
is a
pretty good book. There are some dated elements in it, but it holds
up reasonably well, and I’m very glad to have it back in print.

There are a few miscellaneous items I’d like
to mention about it, for the historical record, and a few comments
I’d like to make:

While I wasn’t in any great hurry for most of
it, I wrote the last eight chapters in five days in October,
1987—or rather, four days that weren’t quite consecutive, as I
didn’t write anything on the second of those five days. I have no
idea how or why I did this; I’ve never managed so productive a week
before or since.

The book was written under contract to Avon
as the second half of a two-book contract. When I turned it in,
though, Avon’s editors didn’t know what to do with it—I was told it
would need revisions, and that a letter explaining what was needed
would be sent to me within the next few days. I was told this for
four months; under the terms of the contract, failure to request
revisions or pay me within sixty days constituted a rejection and
cancellation of the contract, so eventually I withdrew it and sent
it to Del Rey, which bought it immediately for 25% more than Avon
was paying. Avon’s acceptance check and decision that it didn’t
need revision after all arrived the day after Del Rey’s acceptance;
returning that check uncashed was difficult, even knowing Del Rey
would pay more.

Epimetheus, Prometheus, and the other planets
of the Eta Cassiopeia system were all designed by the late Dr.
Sheridan Simon, an astrophysicist at Greensboro College whose
hobbies included theoretical planetology. The basic idea of a city
gradually slipping onto the dayside was mine, and the genesis of
the whole thing, but he was the one who worked out the
mechanism—the off-center core, the damped rocking, and so on. I
have dozens of pages of his old computer print-outs filed away,
giving the exact numbers for the whole thing. Dr. Simon’s work
provided the rainbelt, the slushcap, the convection winds, etc. Eta
Cass II, the molten inner planet, was the result of his playing
with the physics and realizing it was possible; it wasn’t in my
original plans at all. A great deal of what makes this novel as
good as it is was his doing, and I am eternally grateful for that.
Dr. Simon was a good friend and a great mind, and I miss him.

The combination of first-person narration and
a female protagonist pissed some readers off when the book was
first published, and triggered long debates on the old FidoNet
science fiction echo—people accused me of deliberately hiding
Hsing’s sex until halfway through the book. Actually, it’s first
mentioned on page 13 (of the print edition; about halfway through
chapter one – ed), and I wasn’t deliberately hiding anything, since
I assumed the back-cover blurbs would give it away anyway; it just
didn’t come up in the first few pages. I found it odd that it was
so important to some people.

At least one person found it far more
disturbing that I described a 24th-century society where the ruling
class is all of Japanese ancestry, the middle class Asian or mixed,
and whites and blacks are on the bottom. I suppose this was partly
a concession to ‘80s/cyberpunk style on my part, but it seemed
reasonable then, and still seems fairly reasonable—except now, if I
were keeping class divisions by ethnicity at all, I’d probably make
the ruling class mixed Chinese and Japanese.

The technology isn’t as embarrassingly out of
date as in some old science fiction, but I think I backed the wrong
horse in choosing Hyundai and Daewoo as the major
personal-transport manufacturers. Well, Stanley Kubrick showed Pan
Am flying orbital shuttles in 2001...

Nightside City
clearly does owe
something to the cyberpunk movement—hardly surprising for a novel
written in 1987—but reading through it now, I see a lot more of
Raymond Chandler’s influence than William Gibson’s.

The sequel,
Realms of Light
, sends
Carlisle Hsing back to Nightside City briefly to fetch her brother
Sebastian off Epimetheus when things start to really go bad there,
and involves her in a plot to assassinate Grandfather Nakada. A
third volume, involving Carlisle Hsing’s sister Alison and possibly
titled
The End of the Night
, was outlined but never
started.

At a small science fiction convention many
years ago I donated the right to be a character in an upcoming
story to a charity auction, offering the purchaser a couple of
options as to where he or she would appear. The winning bidder made
the mistake of choosing Realms of Light, the story of those offered
that took the longest to be published; I therefore knew, through
all the years it took me to write that sequel, that no matter what
else I might change, the captain of Grandfather Nakada’s personal
starship is named Colby Perkins.

– Lawrence Watt-Evans

Gaithersburg, 2001

Revised 2010

Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of more than forty
novels of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as over a
hundred short stories, including the Hugo-winning “Why I Left
Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.” He has served as president of the
Horror Writers Association and treasurer of SFWA, and was the
managing editor of the Hugo-nominated webzine
Helix
throughout its brief existence.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, he has
lived for more than twenty years in the Maryland suburbs of
Washington. He has a wife, two grown children, and the obligatory
writer’s cat.

Visit his website at
www.watt-evans.com
find him
on Facebook.

Realms of Light

Return to the universe of the classic SF
detective-noir novel
Nightside City
and to the casebook of
hard-boiled, soft-hearted Carlisle Hsing Someone is trying to kill
a powerful business magnate, and it looks like an inside job. He
needs an outsider to investigate the case-an expendable outsider.
He offers Carlisle a deal. Risk her life and everything she has,
return to Nightside City, save those she left behind, unmask her
client's deadly enemy, and have riches showered upon her-or else
die in the attempt.

Among the Powers

Centuries before, the planet called Denner's Wreck
had been rediscovered, and the agrarian society that had existed
there for millennia treated the handful of high-tech newcomers like
gods. Now one of the primitive hunters has become caught up in the
affairs of the Powers-and discovered that one of them has gone mad!
(Previously published as
Denner's Wreck
.)

Shining Steel

John Mercy-of-Christ was born and raised on
Godsworld—a planet settled by Christian Fundamentalists who then
lost all contact with the rest of humanity. With no external
enemies to fight, the people of Godsworld fought among themselves,
and John is a fighter, a war leader for one tribe. But then he
encounters people he can't fight, people with technology far beyond
anything Godsworld has seen in centuries. The ways and powers of
the newcomers are vast and incomprehensible, and the odds against
him seem insurmountable-but he's not about to just give up. After
all, God is on his side. Or is He?

Crosstime Traffic

Twenty tales of Fantasy and Science Fiction by
Hugo-Winning Author Lawrence Watt-Evans, master of many genres.
Includes the Hugo-winning story “Why I Left Harry's All-Night
Hamburgers.”

Celestial Debris

Celestial Debris
includes stories that have
long out of print, a story never before published in the United
States-and 'One Million Lightbulbs,' published for the first time
anywhere.

Order online at
www.foxacre.com
or at any online bookseller.