Introduction to
LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE

Ultimately, when the history of these last ten tumultuous years of sf is chronicled, Robin Scott Wilson's name will be listed alongside those of John W. Campbell, Jr., Horace L. Gold, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as one of the men most responsible for helping to create new writers in speculative fiction. The former gentlemen were all writers and editors, and in their capacities as assemblers of many issues of their respective magazines, they molded, as a matter of daily course, talents without number. Campbell, of course, was the master: from the Thirties well on into the Fifties he gathered around him, and around Astounding/Analog, most of those we call Greats today: Asimov, Kuttner, Heinlein, Hubbard, De Camp, del Rey, Sturgeon, Blish, etc. Gold developed yet another kind of writer, and from Galaxy we read Sheckley, Tenn, Budrys, Simak, Wyman Guin, Kornbluth, Bester, Knight and a host of others. Tony Boucher and Mick McComas brought the literary values of sf into sharper focus and developed Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, Leiber, Idris Seabright, Matheson, Chad Oliver, Poul Anderson, Zenna Henderson and others; though many had written for other magazines, they became what we now behold in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Robin Scott Wilson, though a writer of considerable talent, as you will discover (if you haven't met him elsewhere already), is only by default an editor. (His anthology of the best stories from the Clarion Workshops, Clarion [Signet, 1971], has already become a critically-acclaimed necessity for every other sf workshop in the country.) No, by rigorous judgment, Robin is not an editor, and so it is remarkable that his name should be found with those of the acknowledged "forces" in the genre.

The reason for comradeship with the aforementioned germinal influences is all in a name, already dropped:

Clarion.

In 1967, Robin Scott Wilson showed up at Damon Knight's workshop conference for sf professionals in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was a pleasant man, good-looking but essentially bland, the way a good CIA agent should be. (We learned later he had worked for that skulking organization. It explained the crepe-soled shoes and the suspicious bulges in his clothes, bulges we had attributed to malformations of the body about which gentlefolk do not speak, bulges that later turned out to be service automatics, tape recorders, a plenitude of eavesdropping bugs, a two-way radio, harness rigs of explosives and other items of doom, and a very thick, buckram-bound collection of Snoops: The CIA House Organ, 1950–66 much marginally-annotated in a childlike scrawl.)

He nosed about, speaking to Damon, to Kate Wilhelm, to Fritz Leiber, to me and to others. For a while there, we were pricing cabins in Cuba. Finally, however, he took us into his confidence and admitted the paraphernalia was just a matter of habit. CIA men are apparently like old fire-horses. They never get over the thrill of playing G-Man. (Which probably explains J. Edgar Hoover, but that's a horrid of another choler.)

(Sorry about that.)

He further confessed, under threat of having to analyze a Tom Disch story, that he was in the English department of a small liberal arts college, Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania—and he wanted to start a sf workshop for unknown writers. He left, as did we all, when Milford ended two weeks later, and he promised to get in touch with some of us who might care to come in as "visiting faculty." Till that time, there had only been sporadic, usually ineptly-staffed sf classes in a very few colleges and universities. We didn't hold out much hope, but it had been a pleasant encounter.

Even the retina-printing didn't bother us.

The next summer, five of us were drawn to the midland of Pennsylvania where we took part in one of the most exciting experiments ever attempted in the field of sf. Students of all ages were gathered together for the first concerted attempt to "teach" the writing of sf and fantasy. (I put those " "s there, because as we all know, writing cannot be taught. If there is a talent, it can be shown the tools of imaginative writing, and the uses to which they may be put.)

The success of the Clarion experiment is now history. God knows I've crowed about it enough in these pages. But only comparison with other, more prestigious, longer-established workshops shows precisely how successful Clarion has been. As I've said elsewhere in A,DV, if a workshop of fifty or a hundred conferees produces two or three writers who go on to make either a living or a joyful hobby of what they write, it is considered a bonanza. Clarion, in its first three years alone, set forth on a sf world hungry for new voices, at least fifty of its seventy students, and some who have become full-time freelancers, doing quite well, thank you. So Robin Scott Wilson's credits have to include names like Ed Bryant, Joan Bernott, George Alec Effinger, Neil Shapiro, C. Davis Belcher, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Estelle Butler, Steve Herbst, Robert Thurston and others whose names appear in this volume, in Quark, in Orbit, and in the forthcoming The Last Dangerous Visions.

I've taught at a number of workshops, some sf, some general fiction, but even though Robin has moved to Evanston, Illinois and had to pass along the Workshop to James Sallis at Tulane (now making it the Tulane Workshop in SF & Fantasy, Continuing Clarion, a somewhat unwieldy title), I have never encountered a conference as smoothly-run, as productive, as enriching for faculty as for students, as the one that will always be remembered as Robin's gift to the sf world. If Campbell and Gold and Boucher/McComas were the spiritual fathers of the generations of sf writers who brought the form to its present state of respectability and excellence, then surely Robin Wilson will forevermore be known as the driving force who gave first break to the new generation.

All of this quite aside, and forgetting for the moment that there will be a second Clarion/Tulane anthology edited by Robin, it certainly seems unlikely that a pure academic type could have instilled the faith and drive in a project like Clarion: the students demand their faculty be working writers. And on that basis, Robin is included here.

"Last Train to Kankakee" is a strange and artful piece of work, deserving of merit purely as story.

It is doubly a pleasure to present it, however, from a man who has paid his dues to sf in a way most of us never will.

How odd that such a complex human being has so little to say about himself:

"Born 1928 in Columbus, Ohio. Grew up in a house under the cellar steps of which were stacked great mouldering piles of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing, and Astounding. Spent substantial portion of childhood under those stairs along with a considerable pride of silverfish consuming science fiction. Majored in physics at Ohio State but switched to English and girls in my senior year because I couldn't understand mathematics beyond the calculus. Found I could understand English. Took an M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, specializing in 18th century literature and the works of Henry Fielding.

"At various times have been a seaman, college professor, short-order cook, electrician, Navy Lieutenant, fish-cutter, CIA officer, farmer, and writer. Have found all these occupations interesting, none of them lucrative. Am conventional in my behavior, but think lots of dark and unsavory thoughts. When this story was written, I was living in a grey house on a hill overlooking the strip mines of Clarion, Pennsylvania, with two hamsters, a bird, four kids, a poodle, a wife, and some tropical fish. By the time it'll be published I'll have been living for some time just outside Chicago. This may not be an improvement. There are still silverfish in my cellar."