From the time we are very young children, we are curious about the mysteries of life. The questions we ask early on are simple ones (“Where do I come from?” “Do angels really exist?” “Can insects think?”). And while the questions grow in number and complexity as we grow older (“What is time?” “Why can man be so brutally unkind to his fellow man?”), the answers remain a mystery.
So here are a group of stories that ask some questions and try to answer others. While many of them were written during the fifteen years after 1960, others have lived in my mind since I was able to think. I don’t know whether you would call them science fiction stories or fantasy stories or just stories. But they are my very personal explorations of these things in life that I have always found most unexplainable, most curious, most mysterious. And, perhaps because of this, I cherish them more than any other writing I have done.
Throughout these speculative stories I have used elements of humor and horror, irony and illumination. But above all, I hope you discover in them my firm belief in man’s ability to endure, despite life’s most profound uncertainties.
I think you may read these stories with pleasure, perhaps with delight, certainly with skepticism, and, I hope, with the feeling now and then that Howard Fast might just have hit the nail on the head.
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his poems for children, observed that “the world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings,” and while happiness is by no means certain, even in a child’s world, the number of things are countless. In these stories, I touch upon the mysteries. Life is filled with mysteries that defy solution, but the mystery itself is of the essence.
I say to you: read and wonder.
Howard Fast
New York City
1989