Introduction to
THINGS LOST

As children, often we saved the tastiest morsels for the end of the meal, torturing ourselves with expectation. As if some nether deity were looking over my shoulder in the preparation of this anthology, savoring like a good meal my anguish and agonies of writing introductions, the tastiest (to the demon) morsels—i.e., the toughest for me to write—would come at the flagging-energy last stride of the task.

Tom Disch is the Devil's Dessert.

You see, Tom Disch was the only writer I excluded from the first volume, Dangerous Visions, out of personal dislike. (I realize this brings you up short; I'm sorry to reveal to those of you who consider me unflawed, estimable in every way, that I am a capricious, cranky creature. I hope it won't ruin our relationship. After all we've meant to each other.) I was wrong, Lord how wrong I was. But to have to now crawl, to apologize, to abase myself before you, the readers, who were denied Disch earlier, and before Disch himself, who is too little the nobleman to eschew gloating, is a chore of hideous ugliness. Yet it must be done. And that is probably why I placed Tom's story so far to the rear of the book. No, no, don't hand me any of that logic about tagging-off the book with one's strongest entries; I know that's good policy, and I did it in DV and have done it here as well . . .but no, I cannot escape my responsibility and my guilt. I've put off Disch all through this book because of this very moment of fear. I sit before my typewriter, my fingers trembling and an eldritch tic twitching my right eye. Without hedging I must confess that Thomas M. Disch is a young colossus among writers of the imaginative. I must state clearly and without hope of absolution, that for base and mingy reasons I denied Disch his rightful place in the Dangerous Visions roll call. Mea bloody culpa!

No good to protest that the two stories Disch sent for that first collection were awful; no good to protest that he was snotty and supercilious to me when first we met; no good to protest spite and malice motivated me. No good.

All of that can be chalked up to my lack of perception, my inability to perceive what grandeur other, nobler writers found in Tom Disch.

I am base clay, and deserve your sneers.

Condemned to Hell, certainly. But at least by this public recanting I escape the limbo land of Purgatory. To Hell, of course, for my lousiness (a Hell, no doubt, where the imps will jab me with tridents and force me to read, over and over again, till the end of time, paperback copies of Tom's novelization of The Prisoner, from the TV series of the same name). Oh, hell!

Yet in order to save my immortal soul, I must fulsomely praise the work of Disch, a writer of complex and experimental fiction, whom even those who loathe the "new" writing find impossible to badmouth.

And though it must pall on the A,DV reader by this time, my saying "such-and-such a writer is unlike anyone else," still it must be said again, about Disch.

(It occurs to me that even though my hype for each writer singles him or her out as a rara avis, nothing I could say is closer to the core of truth; and nothing dispells more quickly all this "New Wave" nonsense; for each writer in this book is a rara avis. How the hell do you compare a Disch with a Vonnegut, or a Tiptree with a Wilhelm, or a Parra with an Anthony? Each one does his or her number in a manner that would be totally alien to all the others. I can't see Chad Oliver writing Joanna Russ's "When it Changed" or Ben Bova writing Gene Wolfe's "Against the Lafayette Escadrille." Each creator is a wave unto himself. They fly alone. They don't clump. They don't flock. It is in the nature of a miracle, that we have so many, so different, all at one time. But to say this anthology is representative of any single school of writing—why, that's the Monday morning quarterbacking of silly reviewers and sillier "critics" who must find their days and nights joyless indeed.)

Tom Disch has created so many memorable stories, in such a short time, that it was inevitable he should be a featured luminary in the DV cast. And it was insanity for me to have excluded him, whatever the cause. And for those who like happy endings, Tom and I are friends now. So much so, that Tom even suggested I help him with a new title for "Things Lost" when it was called something else. I enter that tiny act on my part as amelioration for my original sin, in hopes Tom has some "in" with the Man at the Gate.

And now, genuflecting all the way, I bow out and leave you with Mr. Thomas M. Disch.

"Biography:

"February 2, 1940. Des Moines, Iowa.

"Grew up in Minnesota: St. Paul, Minneapolis, Onamia, Fairmont, St. Paul.

"Two and a half years at NYU.

"A year in advertising, all the other kinds of book-jacket jobs.

"When we met, Harlan, it was the second Milford conference I'd come to, in Summer of '65. I was back at an ad agency briefly, after a long spell in Mexico writing The Genocides. In fall of '65 I set off for Europe with John Sladek. In Spain, and later in England, I did my share of the work on our collaborative novel, Black Alice.

"(Which may be a movie, Paul Monash has optioned it; by the time A,DV goes into production we should know.)

"And also those two stories that I submitted to Dangerous Visions. I insist that you mention both by name: they were 'I-A' and 'Linda and Daniel and Spike.' You hated them. 'Things Lost' was written only a couple months after those two stories, in February of '66. It was then the opening sequence of The Pressure of Time. I did another stint of writing on that book from April to June of '67, a portion of which appeared in Orbit 7. At the same time I did an extensive revision/expansion of 'Things Lost.'

"For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on Pressure, and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realize I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standard sf advance. To earn a living writing sf I'd have to speed up my rate of production by 3 or 4 times. No."

Bibliography

SF

The Genocides (Berkley, 1965)

Mankind Under the Leash (Ace, 1966)

Echo Round His Bones (Berkley, 1966)

Camp Concentration (Doubleday, 1969; Avon, 1971)

The Prisoner (Ace, 1969)

102 H-Bombs (Berkley, 1971) (short stories)

Fun with Your New Head (Doubleday, 1971) (short stories)

In collaboration with John Sladek:

Black Alice (Doubleday, 1968; Avon, 1970) (under pseudonym of Thorn Demijohn)

Magazines

Stories in the sf magazines (but never Analog), Playboy, Knight, Escapade, Mademoiselle, Transatlantic Review, Paris Review. In all, some 60-plus pieces.

Poetry in Epoch, Bones, Minnesota Review, Ronald Reagan, New Measure, and lots of little mags.