Introduction to
CHING WITCH!

In the ghastly, seemingly endless and (quite obviously to me) artificial brouhaha about "old wave science fiction" vs. "new wave speculative fiction," the majority of those putting in their unnecessary comments have overlooked one salient and saddening fact. By creating a paper tiger and fleshing it with reams of copy so it seemed a threat, many older, long-established writers have taken unto themselves feelings of inadequacy. On half a dozen occasions during the preparations for DV and A,DV when I approached men and women who had been my personal favorites when I was doing the reading necessary to catch up with the field since 1926, I was confronted with a shamefaced (again the word pops up), saddening response that "I can't write that new stuff."

Three of the most potent, formative talents in our genre in the Forties, refused even to attempt a story for these volumes, having convinced themselves that they were fit only to write what they'd been writing for years; that no one wanted to see them experiment; that if they tried some experimental writing, they'd fail miserably. No amount of cajoling or reassurance could sway them from that sad state of mind.

I conceive of it as the greatest single evil of the "new/old wave" nonsense. And I suggest to those writers that they consider now Ross Rocklynne.

Ross Rocklynne is fifty-seven years old. He was born during the First Balkan War in which Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia fought Turkey. He was born in the year President Francisco Madero of Mexico was murdered by Huerta and civil war broke out between Huerta's and Carranza's forces, resulting in Pancho Villa's taking over as a dictator in the north. Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States when Ross was born, the year King George of Greece was assassinated. That was 1913, just one year before Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated at Sarajevo. Ross contends he was conceived at the same time as Tarzan, sometime in 1912. Fifty-seven years old, friends and self-deprecating writers.

The first Rocklynne story to appear in print was "Man of Iron," a short piece in Astounding Stories for August of 1935. He was twenty-two at the time. I encountered Rocklynne's work late in the game, 1951, when I read with considerable awe, "Revolt of the Devil Star" in the now-defunct Imagination: Stories of SF & Fantasy, a story about sentient stars. It was well beyond the terms and intents of what was being written in the field. It was—Ross will excuse the phrase, I hope—very avant-garde. It was also exquisitely written. I rummaged through used magazine shops in Cleveland to find other Rocklynne stories and read with delight "Jackdaw," "Collision Course," "The Bottled Men," "Exile to Centauri," "Time Wants a Skeleton" and later, others in magazines whose names are merely memories to the young writers of today: Planet Stories, Future Science Fiction, Startling Stories; Archduke Ferdinand, Woodrow Wilson, Francisco Madero.

The latest story by Rocklynne to appear in print is the one that follows. "Ching Witch!" is as fresh and original and now as anything turned out by the young turks I tout so heavily in these pages.

Most men fifty-seven years old whom I encounter, spend their time telling me what a sorry state the youth of today are in, how no one has any respect for law and order, how Dr. Spock has created generations of sniveling, self-indulgent, anarchistic snots. When I met Ross Rocklynne, at last, five years ago, I thought he was in his thirties and somehow had acquired the secret of mastery over aging. He is as young and forthright and forward-looking in his view of life as the most au courant campus intellectual.

Is there a message in the life-style of Ross Rocklynne for the writers who said they couldn't write for A,DV because they were too old-time? Is that message clearly present for those of us who think we're with it today and forever "of our time"?

In the event the reader misses the deep respect of the editor for Rocklynne in these words, let me hasten to add it goes far beyond the fact that the editor is 5'5" and Rocklynne is 6'2" the testament of constant growth to which Ross Rocklynne's life attests is solidly encapsulated in the story that follows, written with a talent and insight denied to many of the younger writers whom we laud regularly.

I would say more about Rocklynne, but the biographical information he sent me for this introduction is so fine, so much of the man, that I think no one could introduce you to the creator of "Ching Witch!" better than the creator himself.

Snotnoses of the world, I give you Ross Rocklynne the man . . .after which Ross Rocklynne the writer will speak his marvelous piece.

"In 1953 L. Sprague de Camp wrote me for information for his book SCIENCE-FICTION HANDBOOK. I stalled. At the time I was studying under a black-bearded guru, and my vows precluded discussion of the ego. Besides, I thought it ridiculous that Sprague wanted to write about me, as I had stopped writing; I wished he wouldn't. Back came another request. Egomania leaked through, and I finally wrote a weak-kneed account of myself. Sprague returned a postcard which was a fire hazard, saying I had been one of eighteen writers on whom he'd intended to devote a chapter, but my contribution had arrived far too late, so that now he could only insert my name. I suppose it's too late to apologize, but looking back, I would have appreciated being a chapter in that book. At the time, however, the world was coming to an end. Being dramatic about it (mystery herewith injected) I died for more than ten years. The black-bearded guru became white-bearded and I had achieved neither death nor rebirth. Still, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the eastern pantheon are the pivots of my Beliefs today; that and the Teaching of the black-bearded one who became white-bearded. But I departed with What I Knew, or Thought I Knew, and went to see what was Outside. Science fiction was.

"I was conceived when Tarzan was. (Philip José Farmer overlooked this angle.) I was no Tarzan, being red-headed and freckled and starting out kind of plump. Nonetheless, at age seven I was swinging through the trees over the old canal which ran through Cincinnati and saw a canal boat being pulled by mules. This could make a person historical. I was the almost typical barefoot boy roaming a vast yard composed of woods, meadows, dairy, canal, and lands beyond.

"At home, my father, a machinist, entered an occasional story contest. He also invented; and worked at the problem of perpetual motion. One invention, which was not developed or patented by him, was the hydroplane, which he thought might lift ships out of the water to escape World War I torpedoes. Another device was the half-gear, which though it revolved in one direction, caused a back-and-forth motion in the mechanism to which it was attached; I saw this one at work in a General Motors exhibit in New York City in 1939.

"Later my father and I developed two inventions and sold the rights to Popular Mechanics for $3.00 apiece: the funnel-shaped keyhole, and the upside-down pocket.

"My mother was a hard-working and conscientious woman who in the evenings played the piano, or the mandolin in duet with my father on the guitar. Holidays such as Christmas and Easter always had all the trimmings of candle-lighted trees and eggs, and always gifts. Today, she maintains the early traditions. When crossword puzzles came in, she worked the first one; still does them. This interest in words therefore cuts across three or four generations, for my two sons have no trouble beating almost anybody at Scrabble.

"At age twelve, the product-sob-of-a-broken-home, I was placed into a boys' school called the Kappa Sigma Pi where I stayed five years. A Tarzan-like friend threw me about in an effort to develop my skinny self. He also introduced me to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, which became a fixation. At night in bed we threw feathered darts at each other across the room until one lodged in my chest. We also crawled and leaped at night on the steep outside of the old building, an art which was called 'ramification.'

"In that same school I inherited a subscription to Amazing Stories. The covers were by Frank R. Paul, who, unknown to our present culture, invented color and knee-pants. I entered, at this age level, a manuscript in the new Science Wonder Stories cover contest.

"New York City, 1939. First World Science Fiction Convention. There are fans here who will become big names. People here I will know right up to the present, and others I will meet again for the first time in thirty years at the Baycon in '68. Now comes 1940 and the Chicon. Charles R. Tanner, Dale Tarr and I, who did not then realize we were one of the early fan groups ('The Hell Pavers'), made the Chicago scene. And then, for me, marriage. California. War work. There were interims of writing, these interims being productive in other fields beside science fiction.

"But an old nervous ailment began recharging its batteries. There were two sons. Four years work in story analysis at Warner Bros. Then divorce. I worked for a literary agency. My brain grew peach fuzz. A variety of work was to follow, selling and repairing sewing machines, driving and dispatching for a taxi outfit, operating machines in a machine shop, salesman in an art shop, a brief stint lumbering.

"Suddenly: 1950, and dear old Ron cleared the way for all of us in Astounding, and I was well into dianetics. From there it was only a step or two to the black-bearded guru who became white-bearded. Suddenly, again: it was 1964, and I was walking free in Westlake Park. By mid-1967 I started, slowly, to write again. It came about like this, a brilliant thought, 'I betcha I could write a story and have it published. I betcha!'

"Writing is still slow. The story I like in the morning is hateful at night. The see-saw is time-consuming, and often I think I had better look for some other kind of fun, except that I've already been on the merry-go-round. So I don't know. I should mention one writing project having to do with my study of the somesthetic senses (using myself as the authentic and self-authorized laboratory). The somesthetic senses tell us about what goes on inside our bodies, and are pressure, pain, and warmth or cold. Our old ideas on the meaning of pain, for instance, will be reversed in this here now book I'm thinking about. It will be shown that the pain and the injury, or the pain and the illness, are opposite things. The pain is investigative and coordinating, not only a 'warning.' As such it could be used on purpose to reverse some changes in morphology. This set of ideas would be presented as a tool some people might find useful. I ride the see-saw on this one, too."

Ellison again. There is an old Chinese curse that wishes on the recipient that he "live in interesting times." In these days and nights during which we find ourselves (as Rod McKuen would phrase it, God help us) "trapped in the angry," we live in the most interesting times of all. Wilson and Sarajevo seem, and are, far behind us in what was, even as hostile as it might have been, a much quieter time. We tend to accept as truth the proposition that if we aren't deeply committed to change and action, we have no soul.

Ross Rocklynne grew up in that quieter time and has, by his own words, paid his dues. But he is not a shouter or an antagonist or even a jingoistic radical. He is merely, and with substantial glory, a fine writer who has come through all the years of his life with his talent intact, as now he unarguably proves.