For twenty-some years now I've been haunting second-hand bookstores and snapping up every Schmitz novel or collection I luck onto. I thrust copies of The Demon Breed, Agent of Vega, A Pride of Monsters, or The Universe Against Her into the hands of friends and I say, "Here, read this you'll love it!" They do and, as they take up haunting second-hand bookstores in pursuit of everything else Schmitz ever wrote, spare copies get harder and harder to track down.

With this volume, NESFA has come to my rescue. At last, I've a new collection of Schmitz stories to thrust into the hands of friends!

I don't know which stories NESFA has chosen to include here (although I did threaten some poor fellow with Dire Consequences if they left out "The Second Night of Summer"), but I do know you're in for a good time reading them. They're by James H. Schmitz ...

I'd have had it easier if NESFA had asked me to write an afterword. In an afterward, I could have run on for pages, pointing to each story in turn and saying, "Look at that!" and "Catch this!"

But ... an introduction?

I've an ingrained objection to coming between an author and his readers. The objection is all the more heartfelt when that author is James H. Schmitz, a writer I admire above all for his sense of mischief.

Whatever the story, he always found a way to play havoc with his readers' expectations. He could take any cliche and, by turning it upside down, inside out, or back on itself, make you sit up and take notice of things you'd never seen before. And leave you smiling over the discovery as well.

If you've never read his work before, I'll be damned if I'll be the one to spoil the surprises he's got in store for you.

As a reader, I pick up a Schmitz story to reread whenever I need the Good Stuff. As a writer, I'm still trying to figure out how he gets away with some of the things he gets away with -- and I reread Schmitz stories in the hope that someday maybe I'll learn enough to get away with it, too.

(This man wrote a story in which the hero sleeps through the conquest of a planet, and wakes no less the hero of the story for having missed the battle. What is "The Truth About Cushgar"? I have got to learn how to get away with things like that!)

Rather than spoil any specific surprises these stories hold in store for you, I'll take this opportunity to flag a handful of purely Schmitzian techniques for you. Chances are you'll be too busy reading the stories to spot them the first time, but you might want to keep your eye out for them when you reread the stories.

Heroes, villains, monsters -- they're all here -- but Schmitz has worked his fine mischief on each and every one of them. There's never been anyone quite like him, and you're about to have the pleasure of learning why.

HEROES

A word about the "default setting." In computer terminology, the default setting defines how the computer will operate. Default settings are simple enough to change ... if you know they're there and if you're willing to take the conscious and deliberate action necessary to change them.

When James H. Schmitz first started writing sf, the default setting for "hero" was white, male, and in his twenties -- and a writer didn't change the default setting without good reason.

"Good reason," I regret to say, was biological -- or what passed for biological in the cultural stereotyping of the time. If the writer needed a protagonist who would protect a child, the protagonist would be female. If the writer needed a protagonist who was irrationally jealous, the protagonist would be female. If the writer needed a protagonist who was a secretary or a schoolteacher ... ditto.

In those rare stories where the default settings were changed, the change was a forced one; and the change in the default setting was itself the point of the story.

Not where Schmitz was concerned. He knew the default settings were there and, to judge from the stories, the knowledge gave him a fierce itch to change the settings to his own specs. The result is the most unconventional collection of heroes you ever saw.

I use the word "heroes" deliberately. A conventional "heroine" was, at the time, little more than the hero's girlfriend. But Schmitz wrote heroes and many of his best were female.

A complaint I've heard all too often about Schmitz's work is this: "But ... but there isn't any reason for Nile Etland to be a woman!" There's no reason for Heinlein's Lorenzo the Magnificent to be a man, either. But that's the reader's default settings speaking.

Flick out of the default settings and there's no reason an interstellar agent can't be female, no reason a career bureaucrat can't have an insatiable sense of curiosity, no reason the ecology of an alien world can't be the hero of the story.

Change the default settings and you might even wind up with a story like "The Second Night of Summer," a particularly mischievous example that's one of my favorites.

Keep your eye on the hero in a Schmitz story -- she's not who you expected.

VILLAINS

And neither is the villain

If a story has a villain, that means you're reading space opera instead of the "classier" problem-solving sort of sf, right? Not always ... and especially not when it's a Schmitz story, where even a villain can be out of the ordinary.

In 1965, Schmitz wrote "Balanced Ecology," a story in which the villains are clear cutters. You read that right: the villains are people who want to cut down a planet's forests purely for monetary gain. But "Balanced Ecology" is problem-solving sf ... from the point of view of the world at risk.

In "The Custodians," Schmitz gives us an ethical space-pirate in league with a group of arms smugglers as the villain of the piece and then (I suspect he chuckled while he did it) he proceeds to pull off a trick ... No, no, I can't tell you. You've got to see him do it to appreciate it.

Keep your eye on those villains -- there's not a preened mustache in the lot.

And while you're at it, keep your eye on what happens to those villains in the end. Contrary to the blood-thirsty conventions of his time (and ours), Schmitz prefers rehabilitation to punishment and treats his villains accordingly.

Even without knowing which stories NESFA'S chosen to include here, I guarantee you'll see an example of this treatment. It'd be almost impossible to put together a collection that didn't have one. If the choice had been up to me, I'd have given you "Gone Fishing" as the best example.

Told largely from the villain's point of view, the story at first seems all too predictable. Schmitz seems to telegraph the ending, the fate of the villain ... until he takes the story one step further -- to show you what happened after the ending you expected. You're left shaking your head and smiling because you didn't see that coming.

Yes, keep your eye on the villain and on the fate of the villain.

MONSTERS

Agreed; a monster is not the same as a villain. But there was, at the time, a conventional monster. Repulsive to look at, it dripped ichor and smelled accordingly. In all, it was the sort of thing a hero would instinctively kill on sight.

"But there was a time," Schmitz wrote, in his introduction to A Pride of Monsters, "when the monsters were very real and very close. [...] And the beast remains part of our heritage, unforgotten; it pads through the dark back-ways of our minds, peers out into our dreams. There is a kinship, a bond, between it and us.

"[...] A monster, essentially, is something which appears more formidable than you, with intentions toward you that are at best unguessable. Perhaps we are trying to regain our monsters. The real ones ..."

Schmitz set out to do exactly that, to help us regain our monsters. He gifted science fiction with a dozen or more of the most memorable monsters ever seen in the field, among them "Greenface," the janandra, the Worm World ...

In A Tale of Two Clocks, you'll find my favorite, a monster named Pili. Pili has long golden hair and smells of ripe apples -- a scent that raised hairs on the back of my neck for months after I first read the novel. In "Lion Loose," you'll find a Schmitz monster that looks like "a barn door with dirty fur" (and its intentions are so unguessable that I find myself surprised all over again each time I reread the story).

Watch those monsters -- they're not what you think.

And watch too the reactions of a Schmitz character confronted by a monster. There's no "instinctive" kill-on-sight. Far from it, as you'll see in the following quote from "The Winds of Time":

"On the other hand, Geftly realized that he wouldn't now be able to bring himself to eject the janandra out of the cargo lock and into the Great Current. Its intentions obviously hadn't been friendly, but its level of intelligence was as good as his own, perhaps somewhat better; and at present it was helpless. To dispose of it as he'd had in mind would therefore be the cold-blooded murder of an equal." Schmitz just can't keep his hands off those default settings, can he?

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Here's another odd thing for your consideration. Most action/adventure heroes exist in a vacuum. They may have girlfriends and they most assuredly have sidekicks, but they don't have family and they don't have friends. The difference between a sidekick and a friend is enormous, but the sidekick has become so conventional as to go unnoticed -- except by James H. Schmitz.

A Schmitz hero has both friends and family.

Try to imagine a typical Heinlein hero taking a problem to his father. Not easy, is it? But that's Telzey Amberdon's first thought when she believes her friend Gonwil's life may be in danger. What's more, Telzey's father believes her and acts on the belief.

As in real life, not all family members are likeable or even good, but good or bad -- they exist. And family is always something to be taken into consideration. Even a space pirate has a sister. He may not have seen her for some time but she remains, for him, a consideration ... and that makes him a very different sort of space pirate indeed, as you'll see in "The Custodians."

STYLE

Not much of a stylist, Schmitz nevertheless had style. There's something about his choice of words I want you to keep an eye out for. It's yet another example of the mischief inherent in his work (and it's a handy little technique that even the rawest beginning writer can use to good advantage).

He treats each of his characters as an individual. He does so in a deceptively simple fashion that nevertheless adds a depth to his work that many writers of the time lacked.

Even today there are a number of writers who consider gender (at least, the female gender) a perfectly good substitute for character motivation or for exposition. To such a writer, the phrase "being a woman" sums up a female character in toto. This is a tic , and the sign of an extremely lazy writer. (It's also a sign of contempt for the reader; the writer assumes you've bought into the same stereotypes and that you won't question them.)

Let me give you an example of common garden-variety laziness: "Being a woman, she couldn't keep the secret." If the divulger of secrets in question had been male, that same lazy writer would have written: "He couldn't keep the secret from Roger Williams -- he and Roger had been through too much together."

The first character described reinforces a stereotype and makes the female character "representative" of her entire gender, to its derogation. The second character is an individual with an individual reason for his specific behavior in this instance.

This difference in treatment was once quite common in sf (and a number of writers still do it). Female characters are treated as generic and representative, male characters as specific and individual.

Once again, Schmitz took notice of the stereotyping and took action against it. Gender is not sufficient reason for the behavior of a Schmitz character.

"Jessamine was a sweet and understanding woman," says Schmitz of Telzey's mother, "but she had the streak of conservatism which tended to characterize junior members of the Grand Council of the Federation."

No tics here. Schmitz was not a lazy writer.

In fact, it's a good idea to take any apparent stereotyped behavior or attribute in a Schmitz story as a warning flag. If he makes much of a woman's fashionable wigs, you'll likely find they're concealing some very interesting electronic equipment. If you think you see a black chauffeur, you've been conned. If you think you see Trigger Argee behaving irrationally because she's obsessed by love, you've got one hell of a surprise coming.

To James Schmitz, the stereotyping of other people is always a mistake. A person who stereotypes others lacks the flexibility to deal with the real world. Bigotry is inevitably dangerous to the bigot.

My favorite Schmitz novel this week, The Demon Breed, is all about the hazards of bigotry. In it, one of his characters sums up humans this way: "To say that the human is thus and so is almost always to lie automatically. The species, its practices and philosophies remain unpredictable. Individuals vary, and the species varies with circumstances. This instability seems a main source of its strength. We cannot judge it by what it is today or was yesterday. We do not know what it will be tomorrow."

I couldn't put it better myself ... but I'd like to add that he accords the same individuality to his non-human characters as well. And, in so doing, he makes you aware of them as people, even if they rock like a stegosaurus without the spine frills.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE PLOTS

Here's a plot -- Our hero has an old wreck of a cargo ship and one chance to make a go of interstellar trade. If he succeeds, he'll also get the hand of the lady back home in marriage. On his first trip out, he comes across some slave-girls in need of rescue ...

This plot was old when Verne and Wells were children, though in their day the old wreck of a cargo ship would have had tattered sails instead of dented plates. And it's this hoary old chestnut that Schmitz took for the plot of his novella "The Witches of Karres."

"The Witches of Karres" appeared in Astounding in December of 1949. In March of 1950, when John W. Campbell, Jr., counted up the votes for best of that issue, he found that the readers had awarded "he Witches of Karres" first place in the Analytical Laboratory -- over the formidable competition of Isaac Asimov's "... And Now You Don't" and Robert Heinlein's "Gulf"!

How did Schmitz do that with a story whose every plot turn was cliche? Read The Witches of Karres and you'll see for yourself, but I'll give you a hint ... Every time the plot was supposed to take a turn to the right, Schmitz hung a left -- or a zig-zag.

The story always opens in a port bar in the midst of an argument. You know what happens next, of course. Our hero has to fight his way out ...

"The Witches of Karres" opens in a spaceport bar. An argument (over which planet, Nikkeldepain or Porlumma, has the sillier name) heats to threats. "But the captain only smiled politely, paid for his two drinks, and left."

And you're left blinking in surprise. No bar fight? That isn't the way this story is supposed to run.

Then the captain rescues those slave-girls ... Schmitz heard the word "girls" (and you didn't). The slave-girls are actually girls, aged fourteen, "five or six," and "nine or ten." (The captain "wasn't very good at estimating them around that age," Schmitz explains.) Worse still, Schmitz gives you the uncomfortable feeling that his captain is rescuing the slavers from the slaves, rather than vice-versa.

Pure action/adventure every step of the way, "The Witches of Karres" can easily be taken at face value and read for the genuine excitement of its galactic sweep. (I've hooked half the kids in my neighborhood on sf with this book.) But watch your own expectations as you read, and you'll read it with double the delight.

Throughout the novella and the additional adventures recounted in the later novel of the same name, Schmitz takes one cliche after another and wrings its tail... until you howl with laughter. I warn you, though: reading The Witches of Karres will also leave you with a permanent raised eyebrow and a snort of derision for any writer who does the expected in a space opera.)

My vote for the unlikeliest exchange ever written in space opera is still the final exchange between Goth and Captain Pausert in the novella version of "The Witches of Karres." And, no, I'm not going to quote it here. You'll have to find a copy for yourself.

See you in the second-hand bookshop. Psst you'll want that copy of The Demon Breed, too, and Agent of Vega, and ...

IN CONCLUSION

I've kept you from the stories quite long enough. Turn the page. Be ready to reset. Keep your eyes open for those twists, your ears open for the sound of a friend's voice, your mind open to all the possibilities of humankind (including those that come in unfamiliar forms) and sniff the air from time to time for the sweet scent of danger.

Here, read this -- you'll love it!