There are seismic temblor authorities who contend it all began with the tsunami that resulted from the sub-sea earthquake in the Taiwan Trench that inundated Japan and took Tokyo out of the international financial community permanently.
Whatever sequence of major upheavals proceeded from that disaster—referred to by survivors, to this day, as The Divine Hiccup—within four months the interlocking temblors had latticed the Earth’s crust, finally building up a pressure directly under the Tropic of Cancer at 23°302N 38°72152E—about one hundred kilometers due south of the port city of Yanbu’ in Saudi Arabia at the bottom of the Red Sea, Al-Bahr al-Ahmar.
When the mantle exploded, the fissure slithered north-northeast beneath the mountains of the Harrat al-‘Uwayrid where some unknown impediment forced the massive energy toward the surface, shattering the mountains, severing a gigantic chunk of the Madyan, leaping the Straits of Tīrān and Jūbāl, taking out the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, and racing across the Arabian Desert.
When the juggernaut reached the 27th Parallel approaching the 32nd Meridian, it just said t’hell with it, and blew out nine hundred kilometers of Egypt, reducing everything between Cairo and the Aswan Dam to a fine powdered ash that made for spectacular sunsets for decades to come.
And there, in the caldera that had been the Valley of the Kings, all supposition surrounding the myths of Atlantis came to an end as the lost continent thrust up its highest mountain. For thrice thirty thousand years The Spire of the Sun had lain hidden beneath the desert. A mountaintop sheathed in solid gold; at its apex, hewn from the basalt, the House of the Heavens; a temple whose underground levels fell dizzyingly for a mile inside the mountain; prayerhouse to deities so arcane and ancient that not even the sigh of their names had come to us through antiquity.
When the archaeological teams from Thule and Brasilia and Sydney landed their huge choppers in the sea-washed plazas of the House of the Heavens, and the scientists entered the three great triangular portals that swung open at the touch of a finger on center-pivots, they roamed far and deep, and they came, at last, to the central nidus of the Atlanteans. And it was there, on a golden tabulary, they found—perfectly preserved as if waiting for the light of the stars to fall upon its inscribed pages of thinnest beaten silver—the lost manuscript of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook.
No?
You’re not going for it?
Well, okay, so it isn’t eons, it’s only twenty years—give or take a cardiac arrest or two—since this book was put under contract. But it seems like eons, to hear Jack Chalker and Otto Penzler tell it. And tell of it they have, in Jack’s case for two decades, which could, I suppose, be considered reason enough for kvetching; but in Otto’s case it’s only been about three years, even though I promised to deliver the manuscript in thirty days.
So, okay, I admit it. I’m running a little late this century. But I’ve been sick.
The forty-six columns (and ancillary material) that constitute the raw, 484-page manuscript of the Hornbook have awaited assemblage between hardcovers more than fifteen times as long as it took to write them. With the exception of the final three columns—written for a long-defunct periodical called The Saint Louis Literary Supplement in 1976—all of this 120,000-word volume (including a complete, hitherto-unpublished motion picture screenplay) was written in one unbroken fourteen-month burst of journalistic activity.
Between the essays on television contained in my books THE GLASS TEAT (1970) and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT (1975), and the cultural ruminations that make up AN EDGE IN MY VOICE (1985), lie the essays of the Hornbook, written between 26 October 1972 and 13 December 1973.
I don’t need anyone to tell me that this “trove” of “lost writings” is not as important as, say, locating buried scrolls from the Great Library at Alexandria, pre’first burning. But in the twenty years since the Hornbook columns appeared in the pages of the Los Angeles Free Press and the L.A. Weekly News, some decent measure of literary celebrity has come my way; and if what has been published under my name has any lasting merit—one hopes, but it’s never anything better than a crapshoot—then this substantial chunk of prose is certainly (at least) another measure of ultimate worthiness. Posterity needs all the help it can get. Ask John Fante or Frederic Prokosch or Shirley Jackson. We all need a pat on the back, even unto the grave.
(Quentin Crisp has written: “Artists in any medium are nothing more than a bunch of hooligans who cannot live within their income of admiration.”)
Original column logo by Gahan Wilson
At least one full generation of readers has grown up since I wrote these wonky little essays on the passing parade. The concerns of those years near the end of the Vietnam war, near the end of the reign of Nixon, near the end of a period of heightened social consciousness, now seem like musty, if amusing, reminiscences of ex-Flower Power advocates bent on boring their yuppie-in-training offspring. Nonetheless, voices of yesterday speak in these pages and, for kids to whom nostalgia is breakfast, there may yet be a few bemusing stories to recount.
Had this book been published when it was first signed up, it would have spoken directly to the times. Twenty years after the fact it offers itself in a different language entirely. But whether in Urdu or Serbo-Croat or Cockney, the stuff that really counts never changes. Courage, friendship, integrity, passion, idiocy, and the variegated pratfalls of just folks translate easily.
From East Atlantis, the lost Hornbook is delivered from the House of the Heavens, situated conveniently near the new Atlantis Marriott, the Trump Trylon and Perisphere, the Taco Bell Shopping Mall and Driving Range, and the spectacular MGM-Sanyo HundredPlex Theater, straight to you.
Be kind. We’ve had a long journey, and we’re sorry we kept you waiting.