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WAR FOR THE OAKS

Emma Bull

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

WAR FOR THE OAKS

Copyright © 1987, 2001 by Emma Bull

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Terri Windling This edition edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Design by Jane Adele Regina

This book was originally published by Ace Books, Berkley Publishing Group, in 1987.

An Orb Edition Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bull, Emma, 1954—        War for the Oaks / Emma Bull.             p. cm.         1. Women rock musicians—Fiction. 2. Minneapolis (Minn. )—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Fiction. 4. Women Singers—Fiction. 5. Fairies—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552. U423 W37 2001 813'. 54—dc21

2001027117

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This book is for my mother, who knew right away that the Beatles were important, and for my father, who never once complained about the noise.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are past due to Steven Brust, Nate Bucklin, Kara Dalkey, Pamela Dean, Pat Wrede, Cyn Horton, and Lois Bujold; they always want to know what happens next. Thanks also to Terri, who thought it was a good idea; Curt Quiner and Floyd Henderson, motorcycle gurus; Pamela and Lynda, for the cookies; Val, for comfort and threats; Mike, for the keyboards; and Knut-Koupeé, for all the guitars.

For the singin' and dancin': Boiled in Lead, Summer of Love, Têtes Noires, Curtiss A. , Rue Nouveau, Paula Alexander, Prince and the Revolution, First Avenue, Seventh Street Entry, and the Uptown Bar.

But most of all, to Will, for the whole shebang.

Contents

On the Folly of Introductions

Ideally, works of fiction don't need to be explained. When I see one of those scholarly and well-crafted essays that always seem to precede a volume of Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker, I skip it. Yes, I do. If it looks promising, I come back and read it when I'm done with the fiction. But I'd rather not know beforehand that a character is based on the author's brother, or that the author had just been cruelly rejected by his childhood sweetheart when he began

chapter 10

. I like biography; but Charlotte Brontë isn't Jane Eyre, and Louisa Alcott isn't Jo March, and I don't want to be lured into thinking otherwise if the author doesn't want me to.

I wonder sometimes how authors would feel if they read the introductions that spring up in front of their works after they're too dead to say anything about them. What if that character had nothing to do with the author's brother but was actually based on the writer's dad's stories about what it was like to grow up with Uncle Oscar? What if the author was rejected by his childhood sweetheart, but it was secretly something of a relief to him by that point, though he never said so to anyone? And does

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read differently if the reader knows that?

It's all just too darn risky, this business of introductions. If I weren't me, I'm sure I'd be working up to declaring here that "Bull's experience as a professional musician clearly informed War for the Oaks. " But since I am me, I get to dodge that bullet. I'd had very little experience as a professional musician when I wrote this book. I was extrapolating from things I'd seen other people do, things I'd read and heard. War for the Oaks was written from the backside of the monitor speakers, as it were, and it wasn't until after the book was published and Cats Laughing came together (Adam Stemple, Lojo Russo, Bill Colsher, Steve Brust, and me, playing original electric folk/jazz/space music) that the novel became at all autobiographical. (By the time I became half of the goth-folk duo the Flash Girls, I was pretty used to the involvement of supernatural forces in one's band. Half kidding. )