INTRODUCTION

I think of "Soft" as an AIDS story, possibly one of the very first pieces of fiction influenced by the syndrome.

I'm a fairly regular reader of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Report Weekly. I remember seeing the 6/5/81 issue in which patients with the syndrome later to be known as AIDS were first described. The term wasn't coined until more than a year later. Back when I began writing this, AIDS was thought to be a result of the constellation of infections that were part and parcel of the urban male homosexual's promiscuous life-style. There was talk also of a possible single etiologic agent, but that was only theory then.

Although directly triggered by a bodybuilder's remark that the whole country was going soft, the story grew out of these reports. The real-life confusion seen in AIDS's early years is reflected in the confusion and vacillation displayed by the story's authorities regarding the etiology of the softness.

It's not a pleasant piece. Publishers Weekly called it "vivid and viscerally wrenching."

That's what I was shooting for.