Texarkana
I'm working late tonight, which is no surprise, and REM's "Texarkana" popped up on the playlist just as I was wrapping up.

"Texarkana" is one of my favorite work songs, if only because it was inspired -- or so the story goes -- by "A Canticle for Leibowitz," one of the great spec fic novels. As with many REM songs, the lyrics mostly baffle me, but there's something in the mood of the song that captures the post-apocalyptic faith of a world baptized in flame. On my list of things to do someday is a notation to write a story titled "Twenty Thousand Miles to an Oasis."

Walter M. Miller Jr., Leibowitz's author, is one of the great enigmas of spec fic. Between 1951 and 1957 he published over three dozen short stories and won a Hugo award. In fact, "A Canticle for Leibowitz" originally appeared in 1955, 1956, and 1957 as a series of three novellas in F&SF. The novellas were collected and published as Miller's first novel in 1959.

And that was it. Though he lived for almost forty more years, he was never able to finish another story. The sequel to Leibowitz that was eventually published posthumously had to be finished by another writer. Miller shot himself before it was done.

Would it be worth it? To write a few dozen good pieces, and one work of transcendent genius, only to have the ability slip forever through your grasp? I think that'd be a hard burden, a writer's apocalypse, resistant to any faith.

Catch me if I fall. It could have been Miller's refrain.