"Night Piece" was published in an "All Star" issue of the Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, featuring stories by:
Brian W. Aldiss;
Kingsley Amis;
Poul Anderson;
Isaac Asimov;
Chris Neville.
I published a post called "Aldiss, Amis, Anderson, Asimov, Lewis." Thus, I almost exactly reproduced the F&SF "All Star" roll call - which I have only just noticed while referring back to the enigmatic "Night Piece."
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I too have found Anderson's "Night Piece" a disturbing and difficult story. The best commentary I can think of or find about that piece is Poul Anderson's own prefatory comments to that story (pages 33-34 of the collection THE GODS LAUGHED, pub. by Tor in 1985). PA began this preface by stating authors prefer some of their works over others:
Still, an author obviously prefers some stories to some others,
whatever may be his reasons for doing so. I've stuck my neck out
by choosing "Night Piece" for this collection. It's quite unlike anything
else I've done. But that's precisely why I'm fond of it. The basic idea
of the story, the problem which arises as a consequence of that
assumption, and the resolution of the problem, could have been
handled in a straightforward narrative fashion. That didn't seem very
challenging, though, nor very rewarding in this case, where the sig-
nificant action takes place entirely within a man's mind. I have no
pretensions to being a Kafka or Capek, but it did seem to me it would
be interesting to use, or attempt to use, some of their techniques. By
going at the job sideways, perhaps I could suggest what it would
actually feel like to be caught in a situation such as was being
postulated.
Therefore "Night Piece" is at least three concurrent stories,
two of them symbolic. I'm not likely to do anything of this sort
very often--some of those archtypes scared the hell out of me--
but I hope that I succeeded in getting across a small part of that
which I was trying to get across.
An important point to remember about "Night Piece" is about a scientist who discovered that another race lived on Earth alongside Homo sapiens. A race so different from ours that human beings were not aware of that species existence. And how "contact" with that race nearly destroyed the scientist.
Sean
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