Other People's Playgrounds eBook

Cover illustration by Lee Moyer.

Every now and then, writers get the chance to work in worlds they didn’t create. This is uniquely enjoyable; it gives a writer the chance to pretend to be someone else, or to riff on somebody else’s good idea. But these stories, however much fun they are to write, often fall by the wayside once written. They’re neither fish nor fowl, not wholly the product of the writer or of the person who devised the setup he or she is using.

Other People’s Playgrounds collects a baker’s dozen such stories. Harry Turtledove has fun in the worlds of writers as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and Jerome K. Jerome, Philip José Farmer and S. M. Stirling, or J. D. Salinger and Fred Saberhagen.

What might happen if the Three Men of Three Men in a Boat ran into a vampire or a werewolf? What was the fall of the mighty imperial world, Trantor, in Asimov’s Foundation universe really like? And what did Martin Padway, the resourceful hero of Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, forget till almost too late? The stories in Other People’s Playgrounds answer questions like these and more.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Trantor Falls
• Three Men and a Vampire
• Three Men and a Werewolf
• Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers
• The Catcher in the Rhine
• The Last Word
• The Fake Pandemic
• The Fillmore Shoggoth
• Interlibrary Loan
• Nine Drowned Churches
• Eyewear
• Two Thieves
• The Man Who Came Late

Trantor Falls
(excerpt)

Foundation’s Friends, the tribute anthology for Isaac Asimov, was the first one to which I got an invitation. I was delighted to accept; I don’t know how often I’ve been through The Foundation Trilogy, and I find something new every time. “Trantor Falls” is set in the period between the two big sections of Foundation and Empire, as the Galactic Empire is falling to ruin. It probably tells more than Asimov would have wanted to with Second Foundation still ahead of him, but that’s an advantage someone writing for an audience familiar with the whole trilogy has.

***

The Imperial Palace stood at the center of a hundred square miles of greenery. In normal times, even in abnormal times, such insulation was plenty to shield the chief occupant of the palace from the hurly-burly of the rest of the metaled world of Trantor.

Times now, though, were not normal, nor even to be described by so mild a word as abnormal. They were disastrous. Along with magnolias and roses, missile-launchers had flowered in the gardens. Even inside the palace, Dagobert VIII could hear the muted snarl. Worse, though, was the fear that came with it.

Three Men and a Vampire
(excerpt)

Like Connie Willis, I first learned of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat in the pages of Have Space Suit—Will Travel. I was fourteen or fifteen then, and soon discovered we happened to have a copy in the house. I read it, was delighted, and have been an admirer of Jerome’s ever since. When the chance came to do a couple of stories involving the Three Men (to say nothing of the dog), I grabbed it with both hands.

***

It’s the most extraordinary thing, it really is. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t made a silly mistake.

But life is like that all the time, isn’t it? A chap I know married the girl who fell into his lap—yes, literally—when, as was his habit, he stuck out his long legs and big feet in a crowded train compartment and dozed off. Such stories haven’t always happy endings. Some years later, I had to trade places with him at a fancy dinner party; they’d seated him next to her, and she was, by then, his former wife.

A happy ending to this particular tale I’m about to tell you? Let us not, as the shilling shockers say, anticipate.

The Fillmore Shoggoth
(excerpt)

Here is the first of three Lovecraftian stories I’ve included in this collection. They’re fun to do, both because of the many weird and terrible things H. P. Lovecraft created and because I get to shoehorn them into the world that went on after he passed away. I should note here that the band HPL isn’t exactly the real world’s band called H. P. Lovecraft. Nor is Howard Phillips exactly the real world’s writer called H. P. Lovecraft. The scientific name for the penguins from the Mountains of Madness is my own invention, though it’s plain that they belong to the same genus as Emperor and King Penguins. Finally, you may recognize a cameo from a song by a band that isn’t HPL or even H. P. Lovecraft.

***

HPL comes down to San Francisco from Marin County. They have a gig at the Fillmore tonight, playing with the Loading Zone and Crome Syrcus. Not all the guys in the band have quite come down, but hey, that’s, like, just a sign of the times, man. Pharmaceuticals are your friends. Spring 1968. Signs and portents in the air.

Okay, sure, signs and portents are always in the air, but spring of 1968 is especially bad for them. The Tet Offensive. LBJ saying he won’t run again. Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party (though Hubert wouldn’t know what to do with a soul if he tripped over one in the street). Martin Luther King shot down like a dog in Memphis. Ghettos exploding. The Antarctic iceberg off the Northern California coast. All kinds of weird shit going on.