Therefore, when I started to write the introduction to this book, I wanted to offer the same kind of inspiration to anyone reading this preface. I wanted to tell potential writers there's no magic involved: just work and discipline, gradually developing your insight and technical skills. There is, no doubt, some indefinable quality called talent, but neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to tell if you have it. All you can do is write and write and write—and of course, read and read and read—in the same way that Olympic marathoners simply run and run and run. (Yes, I know marathoners do more to train than just running…and there are useful training exercises for writers, too. But the heart of running is running, and the heart of writing is writing. Everything else is auxiliary.)

Unfortunately, when I tried to write that kind of inspirational material for this book, the results truly sucked. They reeked. They blew dead bears (as teenage boys were fond of saying around the time I read Dangerous Visions). The whole write-up was godawful claptrap, so utterly pompous and idiotic my computer started to make gagging sounds. It only went to prove another thing Shaw said in his introduction to Three Plays for Puritans: the reason many writers don't publish prefaces is that they can't write them.

So what can I say? If you want a good preface, go read Shaw or Dangerous Visions… or another of my favorites, Samuel R. Delany's preface to Distant Stars. All I'm going to do is talk about the stories in this book: how they came to be, why I wrote them, and perhaps what I think of them now.

One more note about talking about one's work. There's a story (probably false, but I still like it) that the first time Beethoven played his Moonlight sonata, someone came up to him afterward and said, "The music was very beautiful, sir, but what did it mean?"