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A Rob Hunter Reader
Rob Hunter
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Robert Hunter
ISBN-10: 0615240690
Type: Fiction
Pages: 256
Copyright: Sept 1, 2008
ISBN-13: 9780615240695
As of this writing there are as yet no Rob Hunter tote bags, umbrellas, refrigerator magnets, ties, bumper stickers, etc. The stories collected in Lost in Willipaq are a selection of previously published tales. Typically the afterlife of a short story consists of gathering dust until the writer’s heirs and assigns shred it for packing nick-knacks and other writerly impedimenta. Not quite the half-life of linoleum. And what of the loves, lives, hopes and aspirations of its citizens? Must they float forever in a shimmering noösphere playing whist and watching the flights of eidolons? Boring. Hence Lost in Willipaq. To misquote Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have seen the future and it’s not yet...” The call, dear reader, is yours.
Many of the tales of Willipaq will be old friends―you have read them on your computer; the book began life as a handful of Internet downloads. Three years and 8000 downloads later, the tales have spun off into their own trade paperback edition. The print version weighs in at sixteen stories plus a novella and three essays—92,000 words and 256 pages. With seven new tales and more than double the pages, it's a steal, as well as being longer. There are seven new stories—The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie, E Pluribus Human, The Red Sneaker Zones, The Year They Invented Frozen Lemonade, Scope Virgin, Dead Man in the Yard and The Runaway Bungalow, a novelette.
The collection can rightly trace its existence to a gotcha moment when I was rewriting the script of A Special Providence prior to going into the studio to record a batch of MP3s. Yes, there is life after publication.
Providence was a story cobbled together around a synthesis of What If: an Old Testament Jehovah opts for contemporary technology to make a personal appearance/said Supreme Being will distribute largesse/the only available beholder is a gormless loser who will settle for a jelly doughnut. I had in 2002 written in, then out, a long-suffering wife with a fixation on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Cosmos, while well-remembered by a select few had been off the air for decades. Then comes 2005 and the Science Channel brings Cosmos back, digitally remastered. Wow.
In addition to polishing the tales for reading aloud, there are seven new sto-ries in Willipaq2—E Pluribus Human, The Red Sneaker Zones, The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie, The Year They Invented Frozen Lemonade, Scope Virgin, Dead Man in the Yard and The Runaway Bungalow, a novelette.
Rob Hunter
Pembroke, Maine
October 2008
Excerpt
Our mother was called to claim her husband's bodiless head. She picked out a handsome stone of speckled gray Vermont granite for the resting place of what was left of her late husband. “Lost in Willipaq,” read the stone. Willipaq was the name of the small Maine town where David, our father, died. There was a mix up and our father's body had been cremated by mistake. They still had the head however, neatly tagged and in a box.
—Klein, the Clone
“Arrgh! See me neck, lad?” The pirate's head hung at a grotesque angle from where the long executioner's knot had settled at the base of his skull. Theophrastus Bigelow was a big man—the weight of his fall through the executioner's trap had broken his neck but had not killed him immediately. He lifted a ten-kilo strand of gold chains to reveal his scars. “Admirable, what-oh?” The mark of the hangman was stamped on Bigelow's throat. Bigelow succumbed to gales of laughter. “I didn't die from the drop; I swung and strangled, me laddy-buck. Whadda ye think o' that?”
“I think it's rather nice that you didn't die all at once,” Randy said.
—The Runaway Bungalow
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