It started with failure. I left my job and couldn’t find another. I had no girlfriend. I had to move back to my parents’ house. So of course I wrote a sci-fi novel. It was so bad I really don’t want to even think about how it was bad. Another failure.
For some reason I started writing another. I greatly admired Jack Vance. I mean I really, really wanted to be Jack Vance. I failed at that too. I had meant to write a fun planetary romance like Vance’s City of the Chasch. What I got was If We Live.
This was in 1982. The book was such a peculiar combination of things that I never imagined I could publish it. It sat in an Eaton Bond typing paper box. Waiting.
Then I met my wife. We had four kids. We had careers. In other words, we got busy, in every way. We moved from house to house. The Eaton Bond box moved from basements to attics. Always waiting. Forty three years passed. I retired, but my wife kept working. I was bored. I pulled out the box, and… Maybe there was something there? I scanned the manuscript to pdf, tried to convert it to Word with OCR, ended up re-writing practically all of it. So here it is.
IF WE LIVE 