Now I’m a writer, but I feel guilty. This is too much fun. It’s sinful to enjoy life so much. I haven’t suffered enough to be a writer. I like other human beings, I like this sad, smoggy world. I like my agents and my publishers and editors. I even like critics. I love my wife, who is much too beautiful for me.
Clearly, there is something drastically wrong with me.
Or maybe it’s all a dream—yeah, tomorrow I’ll wake up and have to go read law books; put on a suit and tie; smile at people I’d like to be honest with. But for now, today, this minute, I’m going to enjoy every second of that dream.
I can’t give it to you. But I can share a little of it. It’s in this book.
With Friends Like These
J
With Friends Like These.
My favorite writer of science fiction was, and still is, the inimitable Eric Frank Russell. When I was turning in short stories to the magazines instead of papers to my college professors and collecting rejection slips instead of credits and grades, I often wondered why Russell had stopped writing. I miss him.
At the 1968 World Science-Fiction Convention in Oakland, Johm Campbell told me that Russell was his favorite writer, and that he too sorely bemoaned the lack of yarns Russellian. So I decided to try a Russell-flavored Terra uber attes story. Campbell liked it. He never sent acceptance letters—just checks.
And man and boy, that was a change from rejection slips.
As she commenced her first approach to the Go-type sun, the light cruiser Tpin’s velocity began to decrease from the impossible to the merely incredible. Her multidrive engines put forth the barely audible whine that signified slowdown, and she once more assumed