And it feels good. Not only because I want to be judged on the merits of what I write, as opposed to being judged as a representative of a genre that means one thing to one reader and quite another thing to someone else, but because it permits the publication of a book like this. (The fight isn’t quite over yet, either. Nine chances out of ten, when you bought this book it was in among the giant cockroach and berserk vacuum cleaner books. It was in the “sf section,” right? And it isn’t even remotely a book of sf stories. Oh, there are four stories out of the sixteen that could be called fantasies, but I guarantee that nowhere in these pages will you find a spaceship, a robot, an android, a mad scientist, a death ray, a bug-eyed monster, an ecology parable, a malevolent computer, an alternate universe, an insect big enough to eat a city, a menace from interstellar space, a lost race of super-scientific villains or even a mention of the planet Mars. But there it was, right between a Philip K. Dick novel on one side, and a Philip José Farmer novel on the other. Now those are pretty heavyweight guys in whose company to languish, waiting for you to come along to buy me, but it’s a ripoff. They write sf, they say they write sf, if you buy one of their books with sf on the cover you’ll be getting sf of a high order, and no one will feel cheated. But think how annoyed all those dudes are gonna be who picked up this book, paid for it, got it home and are now reading what you’re reading. “What,” they’ll be saying, their fingers balling up into fists, “what the hell is this? Not sf? Not my nightly fix of extrapolation? No sci-fi to wile away the hours?” And they’ll read, oh, say, “Pride in the Profession,” which is a story about a little guy who always wanted to be a hangman, and they’ll finish the story and — even if they liked it — they’ll hurl this book against the wall. “I been robbed!” they’ll shriek.