House of Bones

My friend Terry Carr, who died in the spring of 1987 a month after his fiftieth birthday, was a first-rate editor, responsible for publishing such masterpieces of science fiction as THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and NEUROMANCER. After his death, Beth Meacham, then the editor-in-chief at Tor Books and something of a protege of Terry, hit upon the idea of assembling an anthology of original stories by writers who had been Terry's friends and had had some professional association with him. I was one of those that Beth invited to contribute, along with Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and a dozen or so others.

I had just finished writing "House of Bones," and it seemed to me to be the perfect story for the memorial anthology. Terry was keenly interested in prehistory, and had a fundamental belief that human beings were basically good, howeve unlikely that might seem if one judged by outward appearance alone. So this tale of the last Neanderthal struck me as absolutely right for the book. The anthology, called TERRY'S UNIVERSE, was published in May of 1968, thireen months after Terry's death. "House of Bones" was the first story in the book.

Please note that what is being offered on the Kindle site is a text-only version. It is not the audio edition mentioned in a couple of reviews posted below, which have generated complaints about the price and the audio quality.


Genre: Science Fiction