Weep for the Moon – Baxter, Stephen

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One of the unexpected pleasures of editing In Dreams is getting a story which is totally at right angles to your expectations. For instance, from his career to date, you wouldn’t expect Stephen Baxter to write a story about Glenn Miller – one of the first superstars of modern popular culture to exploit the single as an artform. After all, in only a few years Baxter has established a reputation as a writer of Universe-spanning hard SF, with a slew of popular stories set in the same future history, and a novel, Raft, which Time Out called ‘rigorous, vigorous sci-fi [sic] at its enjoyable best’.

But like all of Baxter’s stories, this one has a solid speculative idea at its core. As he explains, ‘I guess we’ve all had the experience of having a fragment of melody lodge in the consciousness and refuse to go away . . . It seems to me that one of the sadder aspects of the current fragmentation of the popular music scene is the loss of the source of such melodies. Once, it seemed, the music of our culture was lodged in all our heads; now the music is almost fragmented enough for us to carry around our own sub-genres, sharing nothing.

‘This got me to wondering what would happen if we suddenly needed to reassemble our shattered popular culture. And I mean, we really needed to . . . The result is “Weep for the Moon”.’