Introduction to
LAMIA MUTABLE

I've never been to England—a trip I lust to make—and hence have never met M. (for Michael) John Harrison. Further hence, I won't trouble you with conjectures or maunderings about Mike, save to note that he writes lovely stories of considerable muscularity, sensitivity and impact, not to mention some of the friendliest letters an editor could conceive of receiving. This year I will be going to England for the first time—thereby making Moorcock and Brunner and Aldiss wish they had never extended the invite—and I will make it a point to meet Mike Harrison. For those of you concerned by the lack of Ellisonian viewpoint on this author, along about 1973 a self-addressed, stamped envelope sent to me via Doubleday, asking for the minute précis on Harrison, will net you a dandy typewritten insert for this volume.

Moving right along, folks, here is Harrison:

"Born 25 years ago in Rugby, a place where aristocratic children are educated. Nobody else ever goes there. I was educated with unbelievable ineptitude at a meat-factory of a school that guaranteed to turn a teenager into a horn-rimmed research chemist in no less than eight years. Nobody aristocratic went there. I loathed it. I was a failure. I spent a short time working with horses in a fox-hunting stable, where I learned that a feudal system still operates in rural England, and that the New Peasantry like it. Or maybe they're the Old Peasantry, still dizzy from learning that the world is round and that Jesus has pretty much had it. I spent an even shorter time at a teacher-training college, where I learned that 90% of all teachers are dedicated to producing clean, short-haired adding-machines, using children for raw material. I got sick of the whole glossy educational machine and came to London, simultaneously robbing the college of its best female student. I've been here ever since, learning to write and getting progressively hungrier.

"I began to write when I was sixteen, turning out veiled sexual allegories that got consistently banned from the school magazine. My first short story was published in 1966; I won't say where, because it embarrasses me. The story, that is. I can't tell you what direction my writing is taking because I don't know yet."