Decalog 4: Re: Generations |
Short story: “C9H13NO3” first published by Virgin Publishing, 1997,
ISBN: 0-426-20505-7
On the strength of
my short story in Decalog 3, editors
Andy Lane and Justin Richards commissioned this story for Virgin
Publishing’s first non-Doctor Who short story collection. Unusually, the
story is written in the second person singular (or is it?). After my bad
behaviour overwriting the previous story, I had a strict limit of 10,000 words.
I scraped in.
In
the original proposal to
Virgin, before the book was commissioned, the story was called “Dead Man
Walking”. But I decided this was too much like a recent Susan Sarandon
film. The proposal is a bit snappier than my previous one, but shows
stylistically how the story was designed to begin and end. Spot the differences
between the proposal and the final version. Names change, a few of the scenes
are altered, but the structure and the twists are substantially the same.
You
can also read an excerpt from
the middle of the published story.
As an in-joke, I
called the drug “Relucent” after the one word that the editors
insisted I change in my previous short story; and I chose the title in part
because I knew the subscript characters would make life difficult for the
typesetters. (And now it’s difficult for me on this web page – all
that fiddly subscript.)
In
a subsequent interview, I talked a bit about the way the story was
commissioned and edited. There
are not many published reviews of the story, though most of the feedback I received
was positive
Last revised: 06 July 2002