False Dawn (34 page)

“Nothing left? Damn it,
I’m
left.” There was savagery in his voice and the Pirate light in his face. “Don’t you ever say that again. Who wants children in this fucked up world anyway? Thea, I have what I want, and I don’t ask anything more.”

She touched his face lingeringly. “Go back. Please go back.”

“Not without you.”

Sadly she shook her head. “I won’t.”

“All right,” he said taking the hand that touched him. “Go where you want and I’ll go with you.”

She made a miserable attempt at smiling “There might not be any place
to
go.”

“There might not,” he agreed. There was a moment of silence between them as the wind grew sharper. Then she turned southward again, and keeping his hand tightly in hers, she led the way into the dark mountains; and the snow that followed them covered their footprints as if they had never been.

AFTERWORD

This book was written in 1972; its first chapter appeared in a slightly different form in Thomas N. Scortia’s anthology
Strange Bedfellows
. This book was published in 1978 from Doubleday. Sharon Jarvis was its original editor, and she asked for a 10% trim on the length, and to soften some of the language, including substituting hell and damn wherever possible, requests which I did my best to accommodate; when she left Doubleday, Pat loBrutto took her place at the editorial helm, and shepherded—to mix the metaphor—it into print.

Although it isn’t easy to identify the origins of many works, there was one early precursor to
False Dawn
that I can identify as contributing to the book: in 1968 I attended a lecture on the dangers to crops due to the interaction of insecticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and herbicides, as well as potential related damage to streams, lakes, and rivers if current practices went unchecked, as well as explaining some of the reason the contamination was hard to identify and often difficult to stop. Concerns about environmental issues were on the rise just then, and I took advantage of the information gleaned that evening to pursue my own inquiries into the dangers the lecture had addressed.

At the time of its original appearance, there was a fashion in dystopic science-fiction that supposed a world ruined by nuclear war, the results of which often included the Good Guys living in remote regions not unlike eighteenth century agrarian communities, while the Bad Guys clung to devastated cities and behaved like Nazis. Even at the height of their popularity, I found such works unconvincing: if the world was wrecked, it was wrecked—no exceptions—and the chance of exercising moral impact on survivors through righteous character and idealistic practices are not factors in endurance of this, and most other, species. I’ve often called such stories Shangri-la fables, and because I found them hard to believe, I decided to do a novel in which there is no utopia.

For this e-edition, I have clarified certain parts of the story, restored a few deleted portions of the book, explained a bit more of the background of the crisis as well as Thea and Evan’s relationship, but I have kept its vision the one that framed it all those years ago. I haven’t tried to update it to modern consciousness regarding climate change, nor interpolate actual events that have come after the original publication of the novel, though I have shifted the dates so that the story takes place a decade later than I originally set it. It may be that
False Dawn
is now, at least in part, grim alternate history, not dystopic futuristic speculation, but it remains the story it was from the start.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

15 December, 2011

www.ChelseaQuinnYarbro.net

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The first chapter of this book originally appeared as a short story entitled “False Dawn” in
Strange Bedfellows
, edited by Thomas N. Scortia © 1973.

An edited version was printed by Doubleday in 1978.

Copyright © 1978 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

978-1-4976-4982-8

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