AFTERWORD
I was born and raised in New York City (the Bronx), and lived in or near it for the first quarter-century of my life.
Then I moved to Canada, where I have lived for the past two decades. NIGHT OF POWER was conceived in 1984, when I revisited New York for the first time in several years, and observed both a drastic increase in racial tension and a drastic decline in Caucasian population. I decided to write a novel about the racewar I still believe may be on America's horizon.
The book sold on the strength of a dinner conversation to a senior editor at a house that almost never published science fiction. He loved it—but he left that house for a better job before NIGHT OF POWER was completed. I sensed I was in trouble when the new editor I was assigned suggested that the book urgently needed preliminary historical-transition chapters, showing "how things could change so much between the present and the '90s that Negros would again be angry enough to fight. After all, they've got their civil rights and everything now..." The next three editors were no better; I bought the contract back and resold NIGHT OF POWER to a genre science fiction publisher. Through an honest oversight, that house failed to list the book in its catalogue for that season; since it was physically impossible to order the book, orders were low and sales slow. Nonetheless I secured a paperback sale; that edition had a cover on which no black people were visible; it depicted three white teenagers, shoulder to shoulder amid flaming urban wreckage, armed with axes and morningstars; again, sales were poor. Both editions went out of print fairly fast.
Since that time I have never stopped getting reader mail on NIGHT OF POWER—all of it favorable. To this day, people are still finding copies in out-of-print and second-hand bookstores, and falling in love with it. The majority label it their favorite book of mine. (Interestingly, the half-dozen or so black correspondents have unanimously assumed that I too am black. I am not, although one of my favorite nieces is.) It is one of my own particular favorites. Yet I have so far been unsuccessful in reselling the print rights—indeed, literally unable to give them away, despite a thriving career and ever-increasing sales of my new books. That's why I've offered it to Bibliobytes.
My personal, unsupported theory is that editors—who almost without exception work in New York City—may fear the blueprint I have drawn for high-tech revolution there is too good. There is some basis for this fear: according to the Commandant of the NYC Marine Corps detachment, the scenario I created would, from a military standpoint, work just fine, so long as secrecy were maintained until the actual attack. Manhattan can, in fact, be taken by a division or less—if they're good—and held forever against the combined wrath of the Joint Chiefs. ("If this did come to pass," I asked, "what is the first thing the President of the United States should do, as Commander-in-Chief?" "That's easy," the Major replied.
"Shoot the Director of the FBI." "Okay, what's the second thing?" He shook his head. "Nuke or negotiate, I guess," he said when I pressed him. "I don't think Manhattan can be taken from outside." He said he had once planned mock-assaults on Manhanttan for training, but abandoned the idea because casualties would have been too high. In peacetime... with nobody shooting back!) But I point out that said scenario requires at least one military and sociological genius, perfect security, considerably more technical sophistication than that required for something as simple as constructing a nuclear weapon, massive funding, and total clandestine subornation of the FBI for years in advance—and still offers an excellent chance of failure and massacre. I went out of my way, in writing NIGHT OF POWER, to stack the deck in favour of the rebels, gave them an irresistible edge by positing a hypervaluable and vulnerable centralized data-satellite uplink which so far does not exist—in order to produce the least bloody racewar I could imagine. And even mine is grim—so grim that I had trouble writing it, and rang down the curtain with the issue unresolved. My recurring nightmare is that one day black Americans may really be goaded into open, organized revolution—for if that happens I fear they may be annihilated. If there ever is a real racewar, it is certain to be much worse than mine, a bloodbath without precedent in this bloody hemisphere. For both sides...
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One final observation: I am sourly amused to report that every single editor who has ever read the book has strongly—in several cases, violently—urged me to cut the ten-page soliloquy that opens the final chapter. They invariably describe it as "boring, action-stopping." Those ten pages are the pulsing heart of what I wanted to say in NIGHT OF POWER, the most important ten pages in the book. In a very real sense, the entire rest of the novel exists to support and set up those ten pages. The only thing that can head off racewar, I think, is for a majority of white and black Americans to sit down and have such a soliloquy with themselves, as honestly as possible—and then try to live by the results. It is an awkward and comical enough thing, staggering on two flimsy legs from womb to tomb, and we sure pick some stupid things to fight about along the way. Time we forgave each other, and tottered on together.
—Spider Robinson Vancouver, May 1994
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The editorial policy here at BiblioBytes <http://www.bb.com/> is to not have one— the person who owns the work is the final arbiter. No one at BiblioBytes made any suggestion that the soliloquy in the final chapter be cut— indeed, we encouraged Spider to not only keep it, but to make any editorial revisions he wanted and correct any changes made to previous versions. This revised edition, never before seen in print, is a testament to the author's original vision.