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THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF

C. J. CHERRYH

C. J. CHERRYH

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Table of Contents

Introduction

SUNFALL

Introduction

Prologue

The Only Death in the City ( Paris)

The Haunted Tower ( London)

Ice ( Moscow)

Nightgame ( Rome)

Highliner ( New York)

The General ( Peking)

Introduction to MasKs

MasKs ( Venice)

VISIBLE LIGHT

New Introduction

Original Introduction

Frontpiece

Cassandra

Threads of Time

Companions

A Thief in Korianth

The Last Tower

The Brothers

Endpiece

OTHER STORIES

The Dark King

Homecoming

The Dreamstone

Sea Change

Willow

Of Law and Magic

The Unshadowed Land

Pots

The Scapegoat

A Gift of Prophecy

Wings

A Much Briefer History of Time

Gwydion and the Dragon

Mech

The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB

INTRODUCTION

I started writing when I was ten, when I hadn't read any short stories—or if I had, I didn't think of them as short stories. Stories are as long as stories need to be, and no longer, and I'd never read one that wasn't, from Poe to Pyle. So it never occurred to me that there were classes and classifications of stories. I read stories that appealed to me. I wrote stories until I satisfied the story. Mostly my stories, the ones I wrote, worked out to about two hundred pages handwritten. When I learned to type (self-taught) the stories (also self-taught) blossomed to five hundred pages single-spaced.

The typing picked up to a high speed.

The stories, fortunately, did not proportionately increase in length. I sold professionally—my first novel went to DAW Books, which has graciously proposed this collection of short stories.

But at the time I was writing that first novel, common wisdom said that the route to professional writing lay through short stories and the magazines.

I just didn't think of stories that short. Novels it was. Novels it stayed—until I had several on the stands.

Then I began to say to myself that I could write short stories, if I figured out how they worked. Now, be it understood, a short story is really not a novel that takes place in three to five thousand words. It's a very different sort of creature, compressed in time and space (usually), and limited in characterization (almost inevitably).

Since characters and near archaeological scope are a really driving element of my story-telling, I began to see why I'd never quite written short.

But when I began thinking of the problem in that light, I began to see that the tales I'd used to tell aloud on certain occasions, whether around the campfire or in the classroom, tolerably well fit the description. So I wrote one out: the Sisyphos legend. And a modern take on Cassandra. The latter won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, surprising its creator no end, and I have since written short stories mostly on request, and when some concept occurs to me which just doesn't find itself a whole novel.