Trips, 1972-73

"The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds. "A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise -- as was their author during the years when they were being written." --Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction Table of Contents: Introduction Something Wild is Loose In Entropy's Jaws The Reality Trip Going Caliban Good News from the Vatican Thomas the Proclaimer When We Went to See the End of the World Push No More The Wind and the Rain Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch The Feast of St. Dionysus What We Learned from This Mornings Newspaper The Mutant Season Caught in the Organ Draft Many Mansions