Читать книгу The Unicorn Girl - Michael Kurland - Страница 5

FOREWORD

This book was written in 1969, when I was even younger than I am now, and the world was much, much younger than I. It is a gentle fantasy lightly wearing the mantle of science fiction.

I have taken advantage of the re-issue of the book to do a few very slight alterations: tucking in a pleat here, letting out the hem there, changing a word or two in the sleeves, making the lapels wider for emphasis. But I have not attempted to, I would not, update the book, or do anything to remove it from its anchorage at a certain place in time, space, and world view.

For those of you for whom the term “hippy” is at best an anachronism and at worst an insult, I offer this view of the world as we saw it then. Or rather, as we made it up. For all that this is fantasy, reading it again after three decades evokes for me that long-ago time when we random strangers, united only in our belief that things didn’t have to be that bad and that the guitar was a musical instrument, strove together to make at least a few spots around the world sympathetic to whomever came in peace and was willing to share knowledge, coffee, and maybe a few tokes. Or perhaps that was also a fantasy.

The Unicorn Girl is a sequel of sorts to a work by Chester Anderson called The Butterfly Kid. Chester, up until the time I met him, had been a Greenwich Village poet called C.V.J. Anderson. I had recently returned from sharing a life of high adventure with my comrades in the United States Army in Europe. We immediately gave up our previous career goals (I had aspired to become either a major American playwright or a teakettle) and decided to start writing science fiction.

I can only attribute this decision to the fact that we had fallen in with a had crowd. There, in and around Greenwich Village, lived the gang: Randall “The Cardinal” Garrett, Larry “The Whip” Janifer, Phil “Big Bill Tenn” Klass, Avram “The Rabbi” Davidson, Katherine “Beautiful Kate” MacLean, Bob “The Pope” Silverberg, Harlan “The Kid” Ellison, “Logical” Howard Schoenfeld, “Magic” Tom Waters, Willy “The Professor” Ley. They all did it, and they made it look easy.

Chester and I wrote our first book together, Ten Years to Doomsday, and Don Bensen of Pyramid Books bought it and published it, and the cover had an illustration by Ed Emshwiller, and our names in one corner; real small, but our names nonetheless. One reviewer talked about how we had copied the style of Poul Anderson.

Wow!

Without even trying—well, that’s not true, we had tried real hard to write a good book—but without even knowing we were doing it, we had achieved the style of one of the heroes whose residence in that Valhalla reserved for great writers was already assured.

We were hooked!

Then Chester wrote The Butterfly Kid, a fun story and a faithful sociological study of Greenwich Village, as only a work of fiction can be, if you discount the reality pills and the blue lobster people and a few other small details. Or, come to think of it, the blue lobster people may not have been such an exaggeration. He didn’t want to bother making up names for his characters, so he put us both in the book, making himself the narrator, the “Watson,” so-to-speak, and making me the hero—mainly so he could poke fun at some of my more endearing character traits; how could I object if I was the hero?

It was Chester who suggested that I write the sequel from my point of view.

“But I don’t want to make fun of you,” I told him.

“You’ll manage,” he said.

His original suggestion was that I retell the story of The Butterfly Kid, but from my point of view. Now that would have been a tour de worthy of the force, but I cowardly chose instead to tell what happened after.

A much belated thanks to Chester Anderson and T. A. Waters for their friendship, both in the pages of this book and in that other fictional construct we call “real life”; to Jake Holmes for his lyrics and Carol Hunter for the frog letter; to William Lindsay Gresham for having written Nightmare Alley and to the ancient invisible Chinese sage on the other side of the I Ching, who provided so much of the direction of this, you should excuse the expression, plot.

And so, as you will soon see, “It was a year after the butterflies....”

—Michael Kurland

2002 / 2011