Notes on "The War at Home"

By Lewis Shiner

Labor Day weekend, 1983, Baltimore Maryland, the World Science Fiction Convention. I was walking to dinner with Shawna McCarthy, then editor of Asimov's SF, along with a sizeable crowd of other writers and editors. Shawna said something to the effect of, "Somebody needs to reinvent the SF short-short for the 80s. Editors always need short pieces, but the old twist-ending stories just don't make it anymore."

A few months later somebody sent me a photocopy of "Slow Dancing with Jesus" by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois--published, as it happened, that same summer of 1983, but in Penthouse rather than an SF magazine. When I read it, I thought, "That's what Shawna was talking about." No twist ending, just a perfectly encapsulated piece of beautifully written weirdness.

Around that time the events in the first section of the story happened to me, just as I wrote them down--I had a nightmare about Vietnam, and woke up convinced it had been a flashback. When the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre happened, I had critical mass for a story.

I felt like I had a lot of material, enough for 5,000 words. But for some reason when I started writing it (in longhand, as it turned out, on a business trip to Dallas) I kept boiling it down to just the essentials, and suddenly I was done and it was the short short that Shawna had been looking for. Ironically, Shawna was no longer editor of Asimov's by the time I sold it there--instead it was Gardner Dozois, co-author of "Slow Dancing with Jesus."

Asimov's insisted on changing the word "motherfucker" to "fucker"--which I found odd. Was it then the word "mother" that they found obscene?

Just one note on the frustrations of this business. This was my second story to make it into a best-of-the-year anthology, but the pleasure was somewhat spoiled by a copy editor who decided to change "planes" in the last line to "plane" (singular). Suddenly it sounded like a specific plane, which made no sense at all--"what plane?"

The story went on to be my most-anthologized story, even getting me into the Norton Book of SF.

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