Electricity

Being an introduction of sorts to this week’s story, which will run in this space tomorrow. With introductions, as with most things, I am of two minds: On the one hand, I firmly believe in letting the meaning of the work speak for itself; on the other, I am a huge fiending nerd for the procedural, and I love to know and talk about where things come from and how they come to be. So for some — though probably not all — of these stories, I imagine I’ll be writing one of these little forewords, the explanatory notes that would go in the collected edition that will never be published. I promise, in any case, to never pull a Harlan Ellison and write an introduction that’s longer than the story itself.

Two huge events happened in the summer of 1969, within weeks of each other — both game-changers, both with seismic impact on culture and industry: the moon shot and Woodstock. Both were first and foremost triumphs of logistics and technology, and as such were natural subjects of speculation for science fiction. For some reason, though, there’s been a lot of SF written about, and for, and in some cases by rocket scientists — but hardly any for audio engineers. The sound systems that (say) Meyer Labs crafted for the Grateful Dead in the 1970s represented a technological leap on a par with anything devised by NASA, but they haven’t been fodder for imaginative extrapolation the way that spacecraft have. And that’s both a shame and an unforgivable oversight. Innovation fuels imagination. And there’s always innovation happening somewhere, often in unfamiliar fields; and there are fresh stories there.

That’s the respectable origin story for tomorrow’s piece. The truth is considerably more stupid: I made this goofy audio mash-up on a whim and wanted to create an in-universe rationale for its existence. So I came up with the idea of a slipstream alt-history story about a big electric rock festival happening in 1937 or so, with a bunch of the American labor movement’s biggest figures on the bill — all of it, an elaborate justification so I could write about Aunt Molly Jackson singing over a Led Zeppelin riff.

And then I realized that maybe I had something here besides a bizarre conceptual gag, so I kept writing; it took a long time, because somewhere along the line the voice became an essential element of the story. When I realized I could write the riff out of the story altogether, I knew I was on the right track.

I am, as I’ve surely noted elsewhere, horrible with titles. The story started as “Red Dog Black Dog” and stayed that for a long time; it went through a couple of fleeting working titles before I started calling it “There Is Power In A Union.” That’s the title under which it will run in this space, tomorrow, at noon Eastern time. See you then.