Introduction to
AYE, AND GOMORRAH . . .:

This is the last story in the book. For a very special reason (and not merely because it is the last one to be set in type, smart aleck). It is the end of an adventure and the beginning of a journey. Finis for this anthology and the need to take one last lunge at proving the point the book was intended to prove (in the event, God forbid, all 239,000 words that have gone before have not done the job more than adequately); one last firecracker to light the scene. The end. The last one. Maybe a kick in the ass, one to leave them gasping, a knockout.

The beginning of a journey: the career of a new writer. You can be there as the boat sails, to offer the basket of fruit, to throw the confetti, to wave good-by and we've got our eye on you. The big trip into the big world. The trek. But why this story, by this writer?

Toulouse-Lautrec once said, "One should never meet a man whose work one admires. The man is always so much less than the work." Painfully, almost always this is true. The great novelist turns out to be a whiner. The penetrator of the foibles of man picks his nose in public. The authority on South Africa has never been beyond Levittown. The writer of swashbuckling adventures is a pathetic little homosexual who still lives with his invalid mother. Oh, Henri the Mad, you were so right. But it is not so with the author of the story I have chosen to close out this attempt at daring.

I have seldom been so impressed with a writer as I was when I first met Samuel R. Delany. To be in the same room with "Chip" Delany is to know you are in the presence of an event about to happen. It isn't his wit, which is considerable, or his intensity, which is like heat lightning, or his erudition, which is whistle-provoking, or his sincerity, which is so real it has shape and substance. It is an indefinable but nonetheless commanding impression that this is a young man with great works in him. Thus far, he has written almost nothing but novels, and those for a paperback house praised for its giving newcomers a chance, but damned for the cheapjack look of their presentations. The titles are The Jewels of Aptor, Captives of the Flame, The Towers of Toron, City of a Thousand Suns, The Ballad of Beta-2, Empire Star and an incredible little volume called Babel-17, which won the 1966 Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Ignore the titles. They are the flushed marketing delusions of editors on whose office walls are tacked reminders to COMPETE! But read the books. They demonstrate a lively, intricate, singular talent in its remarkable growth process. Chip Delany is destined to be one of the truly important writers produced by the field of speculative writing. A kind of writer who will move into other bags and become for the mainstream a Delany-shaped importance like Bradbury or Vonnegut or Sturgeon. The talent is that large.

Born April Fool's Day sometime during WWII, Delany grew up in New York's Harlem. Very private, very progressive elementary school education, thence to the Bronx High School of Science, sporadic attendance at City College with a term as poetry editor of the Promethean. He wrote his first science fiction novel at nineteen. He has worked, in the chinks between novels, as a bookstore clerk, laborer on shrimp boats off the Texas Gulf, folk singer in Greece, and has shuttled between New York City and Istanbul. He is married. He currently resides on the Lower East Side of NYC and is at work on a huge science fiction novel, Nova, which will be published next year by Doubleday. Damned little to know about someone who writes as big as Delany does. But it's all he seems to want to say.

However, his fiction speaks more than eloquently. His novels approach timeworn and shopworn clichés of speculative fiction with a bold and compelling ingenuity. He brings freshness to a field that occasionally slumps into the line of least resistance. This freshness is eminently in evidence in the story you are about to read, in its way one of the best of the thirty-three winners here. It certainly classifies as a "dangerous" vision, and one which both Chip and I felt would have been difficult to market to the established periodicals. Though you may have seen a short story or novelette in print before you see the story that follows, be advised this was Chip Delany's first short story. He did nothing but novels before consenting to write a piece for this book. It ranks, for me, as one of the truly memorable solo flights in the history of the genre.