Murder by the First

My story Murder by the First just came out in Strange Tales of Space and Time (Although Amazon claims it came out in June, the editor said it came out today, and since he’s writing the checks…).

This is the second story I wrote when I started getting more serious about writing again (about a decade ago). The first story sold fairly quickly, but this one…didn’t. I just checked my records, and it turns out it was rejected 31 times before finally being accepted somewhere! This probably says something about never-giving-up or, more likely, an anti-lesson on being bloody-minded.

I’ve always been fond of this story, but I can see why it wasn’t immediately popular amongst editors. The premise is that an inventor creates a machine that can exactly duplicate a fully-formed adult, along with all the memories of the original. The question then, is if a person is created with this machine, and the original then immediately commits a murder, is the duplicate equally culpable, even if he didn’t pull the trigger?

I’ve mucked with this story a lot over the years, Ship-of-Theseusing it into a (hopefully) better-written story while still being the same story. It would be have been an interesting experiment to see if some of the original venues that rejected it would take it now. All I’d have to do is make identical copies of the editors from before they first rejected it. Sadly, I’ve only just got the machine working…