Free Night & Demons by David Drake Page B

take a look at it. Mostly all there was to see was snow, but this time he was in luck.
    The peephole looked out at the spring where couples used to cavort. Wally was there with his entourage, checking the generating turbine he’d built to power the first electric lights in his new home. If Howard understood the preparations he’d seen going on in the royal palace last week, telephones were about to follow.
    When Wally turned with a satisfied expression, Howard waved. He knew the little fellow couldn’t see him, but it made Howard feel he was sort of keeping in touch. Wally walked out of the image area surrounded by courtiers.
    Howard checked his watch and sighed; he needed to get moving. He’d promised the company fencing team that he and Genie would at least drop in on their match with Princeton. After Howard instituted morning unity-building fencing exercises throughout Strangeco, a number of the employees had become fencing enthusiasts.
    Howard took a last look at the pool in the other world. He’d never seen Wally take a sip of the water, and it didn’t seem likely that he ever would.
    After all, a powerful wizard like Master Popple had to beat off beautiful women with a stick.

SMOKIE JOE

    I’ve recently begun writing big-budget fantasy novels. The first question interviewers ask me is almost invariably, “Why did you switch from military SF to fantasy?”
    The truth—as this volume proves—is that I started out writing fantasy. After I got back from Southeast Asia in 1971 I had first-hand knowledge of war and the military. I used that background in science fiction stories which eventually (and I mean eventually) got me a name for writing military SF; but I love fantasy, and I’ve never stopped writing it.
    A British writer and editor, Michel Parry, edited a number of interesting original (or partly original) horror and fantasy anthologies in the 1970s. These didn’t pay a lot—I believe everything I sold Michel was at a penny a word—but they were sales (and to real publishers like Mayflower and Star) at a time when there were very few outlets in the US for fantasy. (More places in the US would buy SF. For the most part I got rejections from them, but there were at least magazines to which I could send my stories.)
    One of Michel’s odder endeavors was to edit Devil’s Kisses and More Devil’s Kisses , anthologies of erotic horror stories, under the name Linda Lovecraft—the trademark of a chain of British sex shops. My understanding is that Linda Lovecraft, like Juan Valdez, was the figment of a marketing weasel’s imagination; I recall Michel saying that he’d wondered if he was going to have to appear in court in drag and a blond wig after the raid.
    We’ll get to the raid later.
    Michel asked me to submit to the second volume; I wrote “Smokie Joe.” (The idiosyncratic spelling “smokie” seemed right for the character. I don’t know why.) There’s sex in it, but I don’t want to meet the person who gets an erotic thrill from this one.
    “Smokie Joe” is a deal-with-the-Devil story (set in Joliet, Illinois, though the setting isn’t crucial to the plot). My problem with most of the genre is that the Devil doesn’t come through as really evil. My Devil is evil; and I don’t trivialize evil, especially since I came back from Viet Nam.
    Michel sent me a copy of More Devil’s Kisses hot off the presses. That was a good thing, because no sooner had the book hit the newsstands than the police impounded all copies on an obscenity complaint and briefly locked up the in-house editor. The charges were dropped when the publisher (Corgi) pulped the whole edition.
    Because the matter didn’t go to trial, there’s no certainty as to which precise matters were the subject of the complaint. The best bet is that the Chris Miller piece had caused the problem, but that was a reprint from a magazine which had been sold in Britain without objection. The only other evidence is that when the book was