Introduction to
THE 10:00 REPORT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY . . .

As I sit down to write this introduction to Ed Bryant and his story, he lies sleeping in the blue bedroom with the enormous bird kite hanging from the ceiling, in the "west wing" of my home here in Los Angeles. About half an hour ago he took home his date, a gorgeous lady named Roz, who had too much cheap wine to drink and got kittenish as hell.

It ain't easy to write about Bryant. He has become one of my very closest friends, and all the things I'd like to tell about him, like the morning I'd lost touch with reality and desperately needed to know what day it was, and he told me with grave seriousness that it was "National Mackerel Commemorative Day," won't mean a thing to you. You'd have to know Bryant and his warped, utterly black sense of guillotine humor to know what a trauma that was.

For openers, he is a rare delight as a human being; a genuinely good man with the kind of sensible morality and ethic that Jim Sutherland says is holding the frangible world together. For seconds, he is a joy to the heart of any writer who takes another writer "under his wing" and hopes the acolyte will break away and develop his own voice, his own successful career. On that point, in short, Bryant is getting it on. In one year he's sold twenty-five very good, very professional stories and articles. And he's getting laid regularly now. For a WASP from Wyoming, that's enormous forward-striding.

Yet Bryant is peculiar, and it is this peculiarity that makes him something that should be on display in the Smithsonian. Today, for instance, I said to him, "Ed, you're getting weirder and weirder. I can't put my finger on it, man, but you seem to be getting more surreal." He looked at me from above his ginger-colored mustache with the odd unfocused stare of a Polynesian water bird, and mumbled, "You mean I'm not relating to everyday objects." Yes, I agreed, that was it. "Start relating, Ed. Talk to your rug, listen to your hand, get chummy with a coffee pot and the doorknobs. Make friends." He stared at me.

"I can't talk to my rug," he said sadly, "it's too self-involved. It has piles."

I walked away.

Born 27 August 1945 in White Plains, New York, Edward Winslow Bryant, Jr. moved at the age of six months with his family to southern Wyoming, where the elders took up cattle ranching. He attended a one-room country school for the first four grades and spent the rest of his secondary education in Wheatland, Wyoming (population 2350). Thus far his life parallels that of Lincoln. He attended college at the University of Wyoming, treading water for a year as an embryo aerospace engineer then, recognizing the error of his ways, switched to liberal arts. He received his B.A. in English in 1967 and an M.A. in the same field a year later. In his "official" biography, Bryant lays down all the preceding dull information, neglecting to mention the one truly important act of his otherwise pedestrian life. He noticed, picked up and bought the August 1957 issue of Amazing Stories and became a—shhhh!—science fiction fan. Somehow, he managed to keep it a secret from all of those in the literary world who've seen him burst on the scene these last couple of years, who envision him as being untainted by the fannish life, a pure creature of Mainstream Literary Origins. Nonsense. He was a fan, a grubby, scrofulous fan who published an illiterate fanmagazine called Ad Astra.

(Incidentally, that August 1957 Amazing Stories included in its contents one of the classic tales of modern sf, "The Plague Bearers," which opened with these deathless lines:

I came up behind the Screamie as he grabbed the girl, and shoved the bayonet into his neck. It was a rusty blade, and went in crookedly. I had to stick him again to finish the job. He fell, moaning and clutching at his streaming neck. I kicked him under some rubble.

Modesty forbids me heaping the unstinting praise due the author of that now-classic tale of man's nobility, but it is easy to see where Bryant's deranged inspiration came from. Yechhh.)

Because of this unnatural interest in Things God Never Intended Man to Screw Around With At Toward, he attended the first and second Clarion (Penna.) College Workshops in SF & Fantasy, 1968 and 1969, which is where I first encountered him. Bryant tells it like this:

" . . .a traumatic experience which Changed My Life; I received the criticism, instruction and encouragement necessary to make me believe that maybe, just maybe, there was something in my writing worth sharing with the universe."

In actuality, the pathetic quality of his attempts at writing so touched the hearts of all of us on the staff—Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Fritz Leiber, Fred Pohl and a lady anthologist whose name escapes me—that we labored harder with him than those who genuinely had talent. You know how it is: you always feel warmth for the retard in the group.

Well, as it turned out, Bryant, this lame, who up till then had been making a precarious living in and around Wheatland, Wyoming as a deejay, shipping clerk in a stirrup buckle factory and as general layabout, fastened leechlike on your editor and the next thing I knew he was inhabiting (like some fetid troglodyte) the blue bedroom here at Ellison Wonderland. Like the man who came to dinner, he ventured out of Wyoming to attend the SFWA banquet, West Coast division, in early 1969, stayed awhile and went away till September of that year, when he returned, saying he was just "stopping by." Nine months later I was compelled to hire a young lady of great personal warmth and questionable morality, to lure him away to New York. I wanted to change the linen and air out the blue bedroom. He returned here in March of 1971 and as of this writing he doesn't look like he's ever going to leave. The pile of gnawed bones is growing larger in the blue bedroom. The smell is something Lovecraft would have called "a stygian uncleanliness, foul beyond description, spoor of the pit and festooned with moist evil."

Nonetheless, Bryant keeps working, his only saving grace. He's appeared in Quark, Orbit, National Lampoon, New Dimensions, the LA Free Press, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Worlds of Tomorrow, If, New Worlds, Infinity, Nova, Universe, both Clarion anthologies and a host of men's magazines, such as the quality periodical Swingle, which refuses to run a photo of a woman unless she has 53D breasts.

Appearances in these one-handed publications have so permanently warped Bryant's already twisted view of the universe that when I had a few dates with a young lady who is the current rage of the sexploitation films, he ran amuck and wound up at one of her film producers', and the next thing I knew he had a part in a class epic titled—are you ready for a consummate horror?—FLESH GORDON.

Now he lurches about the house looking like a detail from one of the deranged etchings by the Marquis von Bayros, and tells me about Flesh, Dr. Jerkoff, Prince Precious and something called the giant Penisaurus, which is large and wormlike and slides in and out of a soft, pink, moist, undulating cave.

It is very difficult retaining one's lunch in company of Edward Winslow Bryant, Jr.

The story that follows, however, was his first sale. It was, in fact, the first story bought for this book. Which, because of the time it took to put this book together, makes it four years old. Many there may be among you who will contend this makes it unrepresentative of the advances in technique and tone that have informed Mr. Bryant's subsequent already-published works. Not so. He has made no advance in four years, and this is still the best thing he ever wrote.

And finally, those out there who have heard unsavory rumors of a novel Bryant is writing, will have to wait a while longer for confirmation. Oh, the novel is almost finished, and he has several publishers nibbling (but then, let's not get into Bryant's sexual proclivities), but as I had written and sold a sensational short story titled "At the Mouse Circus," I felt it a bit crummy of him to title his novel, The Mouse Circus. We had quite a go-around about that. He steadfastly refused to change the title, told me, in fact, to fuckoff. So I "persuaded" him to change it. I waited till four in the ayem, when he was asleep in his cave, and sneaked in with a wet sponge. Sitting on his chest, I awakened him to face the possibility of clean water actually touching his body. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the thought of water so terrified him, he acceded to my polite request, and as of this writing the novel is untitled. Until he comes up with a new one, he can't market the book.

So if you like the story that follows, why not send some title suggestions to Bryant. Send them care of General Delivery, Wheatland, Wyoming, because I swear by the time this book is released, eight months from now, he ain't gonna be here!