This is my first book. I wrote it ten years ago, in 1975, and its sale was excuse enough for me to quit college - high time, after six years! - and quit my pizza-cook-&-dishwasher job too. I had got my very first rejection slip ten years before that, when I was thirteen, so quitting school and work now seemed to have a fitting symmetry about it. (Later I did have to go back to the job, but at least I never went back to school).

For this printing, I've had to go through the book and touch it up - tighten it here, short it up better there, trim some stuff I can now recognize as unnecessary - and it's been a surprisingly nostalgic experience to get back into the workings of the book after all these years, like digging up a homemade lawn sprinkler system you laid down a decade ago: you see which materials have lasted, you see places for improvements you should have thought of then, you find forgotten initials scrawled into the concrete when it was still wet, and what's this, a set of car keys with a key for that old motorcycle I used to ride to school on.

Let me tell you why I write. I can watch E.T. or listen to Bob Marley and the Wailers, or eat sashimi with wasabi and soy sauce and that stuff seems to be grated radish, and just be grateful that I frequently have the money to avail myself of them and happen to live in a world where such things exist; but when I finish reading a fine book - The Shining say, or MacDonald's A Deadly Shade of Gold, or Amis's Girl, 20 - I'm left with an uneasy feeling that simply having paid my three dollars wasn't enough. Like the primitive cargo cults who built straw replicas of the airplanes they see flying past overhead, I want to express my gratitude by doing it too. I suppose if I were a distiller I'd feel this way when I tasted Laphroaig or Wild Turkey or Plymouth gin.

So I can clearly see, when I reread this, what sorts of stories I was grateful for in 1975; science fiction, of course (I first read Heinlein's Red Planet when I was eleven), and adventure and swordfights (I think you could rub the flat of a sharp pencil point over any page of this book and read "Raphael Sabatini"), and a bit of low humor in the pull-the-chair-our-from-under-the-fat-boy vein (the Three Musketeers, Dumas's rendition or Richard Lester's, has always delighted me).

You know, it occurs to me that my tastes haven't improved a bit in ten years. In fact, just to show you how little I've learned, this summer I quit my job again.

This book always seems to have that effect on me.

Wish me luck!