Dydeetown World

Foreword

Dydeetown World began back in 1984, inspired by an opening hook that had lain fallow in my notebook for years. The plot, characters, tone, milieu, just about everything in the story sprang from that one sentence. (It opens section 4 of Part One, if you're interested.) I originally intended it as a short story — five, maybe six thousand words, tops — a quiet little SF tribute to Raymond Chandler whose work has given me such pleasure over the years. I was going to use all the clichés — the down-and-out private eye, his seedy friends, the tired, seamy city, the bar hang-out, the ruthless mobster, the whore with the heart of gold.

The working title was "Lies" because that's mostly what it's about. We all say we revere the truth, but sometimes a lie can be stronger than the truth, better than the truth. There are vital lies — the ones that can give you hope, can give you the strength to keep going when the truth would break you. And sometimes, under the right circumstances, a lie can become the truth I set it in the far future, one I had developed for the LaNague Federation science fiction series (four novels* and a handful of shorts). But "Lies" was going to be different. Rather than bright and full of hope like its predecessors, this story was going to be set on the grimy, disillusioned underbelly of that future. I wanted to move through the LaNague Earth at ground level, take a hard look at the social fall-out of the food shortages, the population-control measures, the wires into the pleasure centers of the brain — things I'd glossed over or mentioned only in passing before.

But despite the downbeat milieu, the story would be about freedom, friendship, and self-esteem. Beneath its hardboiled voice, its seamy settings, and violent events (Cyber/p-i/sci-fi, as Forry Ackerman might have called it) were characters trying to maintain — or reestablish — a human connection.

I disappeared into the story, so much so that it came in at three times the projected length, with a new title: "Dydeetown Girl."

A novella. One that none of the sf magazines wanted because it was too much like detective fiction; and which the detective mags rejected because it was "sci-fi." I began to fear that my ugly-duckling hybrid would be doomed to perpetual orphanhood. But thanks to Jim Baen and Betsy Mitchell it found a home in one of the Far Frontiers anthologies. From there it went on to reach the Nebula Awards final ballot for best novella of the year. It didn't win, but just seeing it listed was sweet vindication.

Betsy Mitchell prodded me into writing more in the "Dydeetown milieu. Her simple suggestion, "Why don't you do something with those urchins," sparked two more novellas, "Wires" and "Kids" (oh, those plural nouns). She also suggested splicing them into a single story.

The result was Dydeetown World

Although written for adults, the novel wound up on the American Library Association's list of "Best Books for Young Adults" and on the New York Public Library's recommended list of "Books for the Teen Age."

The ugly duckling had become a swan.

One scene in "Dydeetown Girl" involves a Tyrannosaurus rex used as a guard animal. That’s right: in a story written in 1985 I used a dinosaur cloned from reconstituted fossil DNA, but I tossed it off as background color.

If only I’d thought to stick a bunch of them in a park…