Introduction to
WHAT HAPPENED TO AUGUSTE CLAROT?:

I have nothing to say about Larry Eisenberg. Except that he ought to be put away. I have nothing to say about this thing that follows except for buying it I ought to be put away. And if you break up at it as much as I did when I read it, then you ought to be put away, because the damned thing makes no sense, and I don't care if I did try to reject it seventeen times, and I don't care if Larry Ashmead at Doubleday got the same reaction and said go ahead and buy it, because everyone knows Ashmead should have been put away years ago!

Of himself, Eisenberg has this to say: "I've been selling since 1958, first humor, then science fiction, then humorous science fiction. My 'Dr. Belzov's Kasha Oil Diet' (a guide for the fat) appeared in Harper's. 'The Pirokin Effect' (in which I prove there are Jews on Mars) is in Judith Merril's tenth annual of The Year's Best SF. Around July 1966, Limericks for the Loo, a collection of original bawdy limericks (co-authored by George Gordon), was published in England. Games People Shouldn't Play (same co-author) was published in America in November 1966. To support my wife and two children, I do research in bio-medical electronics."

A likely story, indeed! And for those who may ask why such a piece of dreck as what follows should get into a book of "dangerous visions," let me assure you that its convincing everyone who's read it that it should be here makes it the most dangerous thing since Typhoid Mary. You hold him down—I'll call the fuzz.