In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Hank Davis

When an editor includes a story of his own in a book (a possibly disreputable but nonetheless common practice), a certain diffidence accompanied by a bit of foot-shuffling is in order, as when one is seen in public doing something legal but not quite respectable. So, I’ll just mention that this turned out as a combination of Keith Laumer and H.P. Lovecraft, two writers who loom huge in my mental landscape. Of course, Laumer would have done it better, at least before his stroke, and while Lovecraft appreciated what he called “the interplanetary story” (as when he heaped praise on C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau”), he never showed any interest in writing such yarns himself. Maybe if his beloved Providence had established a colony on another planet . . .

Hank Davis is an editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old!), he was led astray by sf comic books, and then by A. E. van Vogt’s Slan, which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog, If, F&SF, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions, but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.