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My hope is that the frisson the tiny shock of new awareness, the little spark of seeing the accepted from an uncomfortable angle, will convince them that there is room enough and time enough, if one only has courage enough, to alter one's existence.

"My message is always the same: we are the finest, most ingenious, potentially the most godlike construct the Universe has ever created. And every man or woman has the ability within him or her to reorder the perceived universe to his or her own design. My stories all speak of courage and ethic and friendship and toughness. Sometimes they do it with love, sometimes with violence„ sometimes with pain or sorrow or joy. But they all present the same message: the more you know, the more you can do. Or as Pasteur put it, `Chance favors the prepared mind.’ "I am antientropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, `He only wrote that to shock.’ "I smile and nod. Precisely.” So we find that Ellison's effort to "see" the world through a glass of fantasy is not really much different from Kurt Vonnegut's efforts to "see" it through a glass of satire, semi-science-fiction, and a kind of existential vapidity ( "Hi-ho . . . so it goes . . . how about that"); or Heller's efforts to "see" it as an endless tragicomedy played out in an open-air madhouse; or Pynchon's effort to "see" it as the longest-running Absurdist play in creation (the epigram heading the second section of Gravity's Rainbow is from The Wizard of Oz” -I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto . . ."; and I think that Harlan Ellison would agree that this sums up postwar life in America as well as anything else). The essential similarity of these writers is that they are all writing fables. In spite of varying styles and points of view, the point in all cases is that these are moral tales.

In the late fifties Richard Matheson wrote a terrifying and utterly convincing tale of a modern-day succubus ( a female sexual vampire). In terms of shock and effect, it is one of the best tales I've ever read.

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