The following are the two introductory essays included in Jim's Time's Hammers story collection.

It's Three O'Clock:
Do You Know Where Your Monsters Are?

Perhaps, as a Chekhov character says of women in Uncle Vanya, you can only become friends after the affair is over.

Some thirty years ago, for about ten minutes, I was a full-fledged science fiction writer, published in the magazines and in anthologies of original writing such as Orbit and Again, Dangerous Visions, soon scooped out of rural Iowa (where I'd given up pretending to be a student, for which I had little knack, in favor of pretending to be a writer, at which I remain passable) to edit New Worlds.

I never really left science fiction, but just went on pursuing my own interests, drifting further and further out to sea. I sent postcards back from time to time. I visited.

At any rate, I'm happy to say that we're good friends now, science fiction and myself.

When I paid those visits, folks were always wanting to know where I'd been. But rumors of my silence were greatly exaggerated. I'd been dancing all along — wearing different masks at each ball. Stories, poems and essays showed up regularly in places like the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Pequod, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. You weren't supposed to do that, of course. But I've done it all along. I'd had my first poems for Ann Arbor Review and my first stories for the science fiction magazines accepted at the same time; I'd published in Transatlantic Review while I was editing New Worlds.

So science fiction and I cohabited back then. And when our interests began to diverge, we parted happily. George Effinger may have put it best. "I didn't really resign from science fiction," he said years back. "What happened, I think, was that when the music stopped playing, no one had a chair for me. So I'm just going to go on doing what I do, writing what I write, standing up."

Here I am, then, at three o'clock in the morning, all alone, standing up.

There's long been a peculiar relationship between science fiction and its practitioners, one remarkably documented in the series of informal essays Barry Malzberg collected as Engines of the Night. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, sensing perilous downdrafts, have taken care to distance themselves from the field. Others believe the constraints of the form integral to its power and appeal, much as one finds imaginative freedom within the strictures of the sonnet or blues, and lobby against importation of values from outside. Some have kept stacks of hats by their typewriters, from time to time taking off the one with the Science Fiction logo and putting on Mystery, Western or Men's Adventure. Science fiction's great originals, meanwhile, people like Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber and Philip José Farmer, have simply gone on about their work, largely ignored, making griffins out of sparrows, doing what they do, standing up.

As I've remarked elsewhere, many of us who began writing in the Sixties during the New Worlds era perceived SF as a kind of working man's metaphysical fiction, Borges in stainless steel, Cervantes on the half-shell. It came up in the back of our minds like small hammers insisting that there was another world besides, or beside, this one. We believed that science fiction, speculative fiction, might provide the contemporary mythology, a form that would pull together all the old literatures' themes while at the same time revealing profoundly new ones.

For all its brief life as a genre, Richard Lupoff notes, science fiction has carried out these periodic flirtations with maturity, reaching up and out, sending water over the sides in rolling waves, before relapsing to its usual mishmosh of crude narrative and hackneyed themes. Those who mistook the one-night stand for true love were left waiting at the station.

Writing this, I'm intensely aware that, in speaking of science fiction, what I load onto the truck is almost certainly quite different from the cargo you take off. Most commentators throw all science fiction, fantasy and anything smelling faintly of them into the same bin, babies unseen in the bathwater; there seems little choice. But the genre is now so large and varied and compartmented that the term has ceased to be of much use, like the earlier, once useful term jazz. If we're talking about Kenny G or Eric Dolphy, we're not only saying different things, we're speaking a different language. Likewise, science fiction extends from hordes of heroic-fantasy trilogies at the east border, to the latest Star Trek tie-in on the south, to the furthermost psychic explorations of a J. G. Ballard (there in the northern mists), to the uncategorizable Stanislaw Lem and the innovations of Sturgeon, Bester, Delany, Bill Gibson. Loading the truck, I shove cases of Cordwainer Smith up against Cortázar, stack Landolfi and Lem over there by Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop alongside Pynchon. That doesn't clear things up much, I know, but it makes for a hell of a load.

So for convenience's sake, let's agree that we both know what it is we're talking about. Almost certainly we don't, but without that fundamental agreement all communication much beyond the bounds of "Leave my food [or your mother] alone" becomes impossible.

Anyway, there I was, at the station, three o'clock in the morning.

Even back then Tom Disch argued that science fiction was irretrievably an adolescent literature, an argument taken up at length by Norman Spinrad in Science Fiction and the Real World. Come to life in the swamp of pulp fiction, the genre never could quite get its feet clear of the mud; like Aristophanes' Socrates, it kept stumbling into potholes while gazing at stars. Disch, Malzberg, Spinrad — and yes, Lem, who's taken science fiction most severely to task — would agree that there's something perverse, something epicene or niggardly at its center, which forever confounds science fiction, racking its promise with commercialism and mere cleverness, carrying the coals of received wisdom to the Newcastle of wonder, holding out offers to expand our consciousness through travel yet giving back, when we send in money, only the same old postcards.

"The doors have been thrown open to start on a great quest," in Michel Butor's words, "and we discover we are still walking round and round the house."

When I began reading it, SF was outlaw literature, with absolutely no literary cachet whatsoever — no cachet period. Only brainy, odd children read the stuff, and there remained something smarmy and illicit about it; a part of the pleasure was my sense of transgression. We science fiction readers thought about things, knew things, worried over things, others did not.

Looking back on the writers I have most admired, too, what I find in common among many of them is a similar maverick status. When everyone else stood, they sat. So I skipped without a thought, wholly by instinct, past much of the approved canon and settled on the like of Tristram Shandy, Machado de Assis, Chandler, Boris Vian, Miss Lonelyhearts, Marek Hlasko, Queneau, John Collier, Blaise Cendrars. I sought edge literature, yes, but also people writing at the edge, writers not so much lighting out for the territory as dragging the territory back with them farting and belching and smelling unmistakably ripe to civilization.

One of science fiction's or the fantastic's great strengths is its ability, like poetry, to throw into sharp relief the world about us: to make it new again, large again; to wipe out our assumptions, automatic responses, certitudes. Now, this is precisely what any good literature does — what Lionel Trilling called its "adversary intent." As for how this stuff works, Vian put it best in the avant-propos to his still-astonishing L'Ecume des jours:

Its so-called method consists essentially of projecting reality, under favorable circumstances, on to an irregularly tilting and consequently distorting frame of reference.

Thirty-four years of stories here, then, in these two volumes. Not all of them by any means, but a goodly portion. Plucked from science fiction magazines like F&SF and Amazing Stories, excavated from anthologies like Orbit and Full Spectrum, rediscovered in uncategorizable venues like New Worlds and The Edge, saved from drowning in literary magazines like the Georgia Review and South Dakota Review, discovered hiding in the upstairs closets of Alfred Hitchcock's, Gallery, Ellery Queen's, one of them even written on commission for the BBC.

Obviously no one is safe.

Forward, Bravely, Into the Anthills

Thirty-four years of stories.

What comes back to me for the most part are a lot of early mornings. I know some of these stories were written during the day, they had to be, but whenever I think back it's always three in the morning and I'm sitting at a table or makeshift desk somewhere in a circle of light. With the world buzzing against my window, maybe, and I'm thinking "Sure glad I got the screens up in time." Or listening to the world's feet clomping around on the porch, wondering should I go look and see what's out there.

The other thing that comes back to me is the astonishing number of places these stories were written. London, some of them, in a bedsitter with gauzy curtains like bandage slapped against the sky and stairways narrow as ladders. Some of the earliest in rural Iowa, looking out over cornfields and the houses of Mennonite neighbors. A second-floor studio apartment in the East Village whose downstairs vestibule was a favorite sleeping spot for the neighborhood's homeless. Damon and Kate's house in Milford that I rented along with Tom Disch and where we could never be sure just how many visitors might be tucked away in upper rooms. An apartment in Boston that you reached by climbing up, always up, from the streetcar tracks, bank upon bank of cement steps, Azteclike; I lived there when my first book came out. Various apartments in New Orleans whose cockroaches, I swear, moved along with me en masse. A converted garage in Texas where I watched women deliver their children to daycare across the street as I sat to begin writing in the morning and watched the kids get retrieved (this was the summer I wrote The Long-Legged Fly in a month, much of what would become Renderings, and at least two dozen new stories, plus assorted poems, essays and reviews) as I continued on into the night.

Short stories were always what I loved most, always what I intended to write. I'd take "The Man Who Lost the Sea" or Gogol's "The Nose" over any number of earnest Bildungsromans and tales of crumbling marriages; I found it hard to believe (and still do) that any novel could say more about political repression, the human soul and the sources of art than Cortázar's six-page "Graffiti." Having sold my first story, written in a week, for the awesome amount of $300 (this was in 1966), I assumed I would just go on doing this, failing to take into account that, first, I might not be able to write a story every week and, second, that one or two of them might not sell for such splendid sums. In fact, as the market began collapsing a few years later, my checks dwindled steadily, to $100, to $36.25, to $10. Till finally I was out there strutting my stuff on the corner, the literary equivalent of Storyville mattress women. Boxes slowly filled with the complimentary copies of magazines that were often my only pay and followed me from apartment to apartment, city to city, over time squashing down like well-used cushions or old boots.

But I'm not going to write here about trying to make a living as a short-story writer. That all too soon would have one part of my audience laughing uproariously and the other, a very small part, weeping.

Short-story writing. The lemonade stands of literature.

I had started off publishing, as I said, in science fiction magazines and anthologies. Later, in large part due to a wonderful lady named Eleanor Sullivan whom, alas, I was never to meet, I began publishing as well in mystery magazines. Meanwhile, not content with this simple, pure obscurity, I pushed ever onward to new frontiers, heeling my mule all alone over the ridge (for no Indian guide would accompany me; bearers threw down their loads and fled shouting Bwana, Bwana not go there!) towards literary magazines with baker's-dozen circulations that were seen chiefly, in many cases solely, by other contributors.

Yes, I did wonder sometimes, as I stuffed another perfectly innocent envelope with return postage, or tore one open to find my manuscript bearing the hoofprint of the paper clip that clasped a form rejection to its bosom, whether this was not a silly thing for a 33-year old (or 43-year-old, or 53-year-old) supposedly professional writer to be doing. But I just went on doing it, like some out-of-control, perpetual-motion existentialist making his leap into faith, nostrils pinched shut with finger and thumb, again and again, on permanent replay. Headin' em up, movin' em out.

Years ago I wrote a piece for American Pen suggesting that, abandoned by mainstream publishing, our literature — even then we'd begun to miss it, you see, and to go looking for it — had fled to the literary magazines. They were like those remote islands in science fiction upon which prehistoric life has survived into the present. I truly believed that. Some years later I again wrote on the subject, saying that now I didn't know where our literature had gone. That I had looked and couldn't find it. That if anyone had seen it recently, they should call; I'd pay for information, photos, confirmed sightings. I put its face on milk cartons.

Well, as it happens, a lot of our literature was sidling its way over towards mystery and crime writing. The situation was similar to what had obtained with paperback originals in the Fifties, when writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis could pursue their demons, turning out these highly original, intensely personal novels, yet still make their livings as professional writers. Science fiction in the Sixties, when I began writing it, was just then unfolding (soon the airlocks would slam shut again) and had much the same sense of practical freedom about it. Michel Butor said of science fiction that anticipation had created a language by which in principle we could examine anything. Damned if we couldn't — and didn't! But now writers like Jerome Charyn, K. C. Constantine, Jim Burke, Daniel Woodrell and Walter Mosley were discovering that mystery and crime fiction would let them write the kind of books they wanted, personal books, literary books if you will, and still have an audience.

I'm a little slow, but eventually I figure things out. I'd made my way to Chandler and Hammett while in London, and once back in the States, in short order, to Chester Himes, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald. In my flat off Portobello Road, gauzy curtains slapping at sky through the open window but never making contact, I had written an odd story, all threat and paranoia, titled "And then the dark—." I followed it with one titled "Winner," then over the years with others: "Blue Devils" and "DC al FINE" (which oddly enough earned substantial sums upon broadcast over Italian radio) for Cathleen Jordan at Hitchcock's; "I Saw Robert Johnson," "Dogs in the Nighttime," "Joyride" and "Good Men" all for Eleanor at Ellery Queen's; most recently, "Vocalities" for John Harvey and "Shutting Darkness Down" for BBC radio.

Somewhere in there, too, begun as a short story, completed as a novel, came The Long-Legged Fly. Then others buzzing at the screens. By which time I could pass in most company. I had become, almost without noticing it, bilingual.

Or had begun talking in tongues, perhaps — perspective is everything.

But listen. Savages, barbarians, creep towards you from without and within, savages at every border, every edge, just outside the light. They look like you, they have learned to speak like you. Soon none of us will be able to tell them apart. But we, your writers, can help you. We can defend you. We've always aspired, you see, to be outlaws, hired guns, eternal outsiders, long riders. We've always intended to be dangerous.

Please.