Incidentally, this was the first story in which I decided to have fun with the title. Science fiction stories typically have terse no-nonsense titles…and for a long time, I thought titles like that were absolutely necessary if you wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. Finally, of course, I realized what a ridiculous notion that was—not only did many great stories have out-and-out florid titles, but one doesn't always want to be "serious" anyway. Therefore, I chucked out my preconceptions on what titles "must" be and have felt better ever since.

"The Children of Crèche": Once upon a time, there was a thing called gonzo journalism. It's not entirely dead—I still stumble across delightfully over-the-top pieces of supposed reportage that are really just an excuse for mouthing off in extravagantly purple prose—but I fear the glory days of gonzo are gone, gone, gonzo. Readers of "Crèche" have told me they're sure I'm imitating someone, but they can't tell who. Sigh.

(The answer is I'm not imitating anyone specifically; I'm simply having flashbacks to Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Harlan Ellison in Tick-Tock mode, and a whole bunch of other writers who fed my gonzo cravings in the late sixties/early seventies. Hee-whack indeed.)

By the way, this is my earliest story featuring a scalpel. Don't ask me why, but scalpels keep popping up all over my writing…scalpels and mutilating corpses. It's a good thing I despise Freudian psychology, or I'd be really, really worried.

"Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer": This is the one story I've written as me, Jim Gardner, rather than from some fictional point of view. It's not quite a true story—I never actually sat down and wrote out the "scribbles" as they appear—but the ideas did cross my mind as I saw how the press tried to deal with the twentieth anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. Our beloved media (as they so often do) wrote around the facts without ever truly connecting to the reality of what happened.