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terraformed largely by Baha’i colonists. “For a Little Price” is the
background story for the two published works.
The printer was evidently barely cool after sending off “Devil” when I
began work on “For A Little Price.” My earliest dated manuscript bears a
date of 1986, and there is one earlier than that. I wanted to tell the backstory,
the attempted hijacking of a starship, a device so powerful that it could
easily destroy a world. But I didn’t want this to simply be some space-opera
adaptation of an airline hijacking. From the start, I wanted it to be from the
hijacker’s point of view. This would make my central character possibly the
most unlikable fellow ever to tell a science fiction story first-person. This, I
knew, was going to be a very difficult story to tell well, the most challenging
thing I had ever attempted to write. And to do it, I was going to have to both
learn more about Islam, and figure out what was in the terrorist’s head, two
very different things.
I was raised a Christian, but I knew, from the start, that Islam does not
support terrorism. So I intended, from the start, to write the story to show
that the terrorist had made a horrible mistake, and knows it in the end. I had
also recently read a story by Charles Harness, “Summer Solstice”, in which
the ending of the story was obvious almost from the start, yet the story was
still compelling. And so I decided to start the story by revealing the ending.
I spent a couple of months digging up reference works and reviewing
them, including two versions of the Koran. As I expected, I saw nothing in
the Koran to support terrorism, but plenty to condemn it. The same was true
of the other background material. As the “Islamic Revolution” unfolded in
Iran, I had been disgusted to see how much that was going on fit better with
studies I’d read of Hitler’s tactics, or with Machiavelli’s recommendations to
his prince. After reading the Koran, I started to wonder if the leaders of the
revolution ever had.
I wrote four versions of “For a Little Price” between 1986 and 1994,
three of which were submitted to Analog. The basic story from the point of
view of the terrorist changes very little in the successive versions, but the two
later versions attempt to moderate his darkness by interspersing sections
from the points of view of investigators or the starship crew, at the
suggestion of Analog’s editor Stan Schmidt. With his rejection of “Price 4”
(1994), he suggested I eliminate the terrorist’s point of view entirely. At that
point, I simply slid the drawer shut on the story, assuming it would never be
published.
Finally, Ahmed Khan announced this anthology on the Analog forum,
and I offered version four for his consideration. To my total amazement, he
said he actually liked it, but requested I make a few relatively minor changes
to make the story comply with the basic premise of the anthology. To this
end, I changed one of the starship crewmembers to a Muslim, which required
replacing one section, changing several paragraphs of another, and a global
name change. Other than that, the story is little changed from the 1994
version, and the part of Shahid is extremely close to the original.
I think it is important that readers realize this story was not written in
reaction to the sad events of September 11, 2001. Instead, having written it,
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