Story Details
Published on 2024-09-02
Categories Science Fiction Aliens
In "What the Dormouse Said," the psychedelic 60s at a small men’s college becomes the perfect backdrop for an encounter of the third kind, hidden in plain sight. Amidst cannabis smoke and a counterculture zeitgeist, a group of misfit students navigate an unfolding and surreal reality. When a giant white rabbit enters the scene, the lines between hallucination and truth blur, leaving them questioning what’s real, what’s just a trip, and when exactly did the alien invasion begin?
Author Details
Bruce McAllister’s short fiction has over the decades appeared in SFF&H magazines, literary journals, “year’s best" volumes, and, God help him, college textbooks; and won or been shortlisted for awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nebula, the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson Award and others. His three novels are the very-young-man’s-ode-to-future-merpeople HUMANITY PRIME, the esp-in-war DREAM BABY and the gentler THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA : A MEMOIR OF MAGIC. His first published story was written at 16, reprinted in Judith Merril’s THE YEAR’S BEST S-F, and later reprinted in the final volume of Isaac Asimov’s Golden Age of Science Fiction anthology series. Bruce was associate editor of the Harrison/Aldiss “year’s best sf” series for some years and co-edited with Harry Harrison the controversial anthology THERE WON’T BE WAR. HIs Hugo-nominated short story, “Kin,”—about a boy from the projects in a future LA who hires the scariest assassin the known universe--was chosen by LeVar Bruton to launch his podcast series LEVAR BURTON READS. After a childhood of moving every two years in a Navy family and living on one ocean after another, saltwater in him forever, he now lives happily in SoCa not far from the sea. STORY NOTES FOR WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID I’ve spent most of my career as an sf writer exploring the alien—from alien lizard hordes invading a watery planet of mutated humans three thousands years from now to a sweet bipedal Arcturian with a love of human philately to the alien inside us, the Other, the outsider, and even the alienation of a military kid who didn’t know who he was—and this story is no exception. I was a drug wimp during the 60’s, sticking (like the narrator of “What the Dormouse Said”) to pot and not excessively; but I made up for it with the reading and writing of sf, trippy as those activities were. My wife tells me she felt stoned when she read this, but I swear I wasn’t stoned writing it. Everything in the story is quite true. It all really happened. Honest. And course SF is its own trip, as we know.
What the Dormouse Said, by Bruce McAllister
Author Details
Bruce McAllister’s short fiction has over the decades appeared in SFF&H magazines, literary journals, “year’s best" volumes, and, God help him, college textbooks; and won or been shortlisted for awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nebula, the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson Award and others. His three novels are the very-young-man’s-ode-to-future-merpeople HUMANITY PRIME, the esp-in-war DREAM BABY and the gentler THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA : A MEMOIR OF MAGIC. His first published story was written at 16, reprinted in Judith Merril’s THE YEAR’S BEST S-F, and later reprinted in the final volume of Isaac Asimov’s Golden Age of Science Fiction anthology series. Bruce was associate editor of the Harrison/Aldiss “year’s best sf” series for some years and co-edited with Harry Harrison the controversial anthology THERE WON’T BE WAR. HIs Hugo-nominated short story, “Kin,”—about a boy from the projects in a future LA who hires the scariest assassin the known universe--was chosen by LeVar Bruton to launch his podcast series LEVAR BURTON READS. After a childhood of moving every two years in a Navy family and living on one ocean after another, saltwater in him forever, he now lives happily in SoCa not far from the sea. STORY NOTES FOR WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID I’ve spent most of my career as an sf writer exploring the alien—from alien lizard hordes invading a watery planet of mutated humans three thousands years from now to a sweet bipedal Arcturian with a love of human philately to the alien inside us, the Other, the outsider, and even the alienation of a military kid who didn’t know who he was—and this story is no exception. I was a drug wimp during the 60’s, sticking (like the narrator of “What the Dormouse Said”) to pot and not excessively; but I made up for it with the reading and writing of sf, trippy as those activities were. My wife tells me she felt stoned when she read this, but I swear I wasn’t stoned writing it. Everything in the story is quite true. It all really happened. Honest. And course SF is its own trip, as we know.
