Introduction
to
MOTH RACE
With pants legs rolled up, I was standing calf-deep in shark-dotted waters off the coast of Florida watching a pre-Armageddon electrical storm ripping apart the horizon where the Gulf of Mexico met the night sky.
Madeira Beach, 1969.
Somewhere off to my left I could see the vague shapes of Damon, Ejler, Ben and Joanna—still bathing-suited from the day—standing in the slowly rising tide. The indistinct shadowy sounds of their conversation came blurred through the darkness. Lightning cracked the window of the sky.
I realized someone was standing near my right side, had been for some time. "It's the death of the sky," he said. I turned to look at him but he was in darkness. "Damned thing about it is, every morning it gets born again; and there aren't even any scars."
That was how 1 met Richard Hill.
We became friends, then he went away, then he came back and we were friends again, then he went away again and when he returned the next time we were not friends. Now it's on the mend. These things take time. Rationality doesn't help.
But all through it, there was never any doubt: it was as Damon said, "Richard Hill is a fine writer."
A brief autobiography of Richard Hill, touching high spots, reads:
"I am twenty-nine years old, divorced, father of two sons. I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and live now in Los Angeles.
"I have been variously employed, as bus boy, shoe salesman, lake cleaner, lawn mower mechanic, pop corn concessionaire, ambulance driver, bread truck driver, Navy journalist, radio announcer, pizza cook, television newsman, Coast Guard reserve officer, teacher of English and humanities in high school and college, and swimming pool manager. I regret very much never having been a lumberjack or merchant seaman—those staples of writers' biographies—but it just never worked out that way. I am presently earning a meager living as a substitute teacher and free lance writer.
"I've sold two novels, the first of which, Ghost Story, appeared as a Live-right hardcover in September of 1971. The second, Brave Salt, will attempt to predict the future of Haiti. I'm also working on an autobiographical novel to be entitled Flight of the Bolo-Bat. I've sold stories to several sf anthologies, such as Orbit, Quark, Worlds of Tomorrow, and this one; to little magazines like New Campus Review, Florida Quarterly, and South Florida Review; to men's magazines including Knight, Adam, and Swank; and some places I'd rather not mention. One of my stories appeared in a freshman English text and my M.A. thesis on John Dos Passes was published in the University Bookman and is being distributed by the USIA. I've published a couple of poems in magazines nobody ever heard of, and I've done a lot of journalism for periodicals ranging from Sunday magazines to the L.A. Free Press and Rolling Stone. I'd like eventually to write some screenplays.
"I've spent the last year or so trucking from Florida to New Orleans to California to Florida, etc., in a series of escape attempts from some unpleasant realities. I'm weary of that now. If I have any control over what happens next, I'm going to grow here in California like a barnacle."