There I was. And Hollywood became, for the first time since I’d arrived, not a grungy, lonely, frustratingtown whose tinsel could strangle you…but a magic town whose sidewalks were paved with gold; a yellow brick roadleading to a giant mushroom where I could perch if I simply hung in there.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and ELLISON WONDERLAND is back in print, thanks to the good offices ofMichael Seidman and Olga Vezeris of New American Library.

And just to show that fairy tales sometimes do have happy endings, dear readers be advised I’m really okaynow. There is a mushroom, and I’m sitting on it, and I’ve been writing better here in magic town than I ever didanywhere else, and I’ll keep on doing it till I run out of mushroom or magic (and that is not a reference, to dope,which I don’t, so I ain’t), and here, like a good penny, is ELLISON WONDERLAND again.

Welcome to my world.

HARLAN ELLISON

Los Angeles

March, 1974

Commuter’s Problem

The trouble with Miniver Cheevy (child of scorn who cursed the day that he was born) was that—aside fromthe fact he was a bit of a fink, with no understanding of the contemporary image he projected—he was alwaysbuilding dream castles, and then trying to move into them. It’s muddy thinking, youth, to expect to do any better inanother epoch than the one you’re in. A guy who is a foul ball in one time, must assuredly be so in another…unlesshis name is da Vinci or Hieronymous Bosch. And the poor soul in this little epic is named neither, which may be thereason he suffers a