Shatterday, more or less, made me what I am today. Your fault, Ellison. And again, quite beside the point.

So: The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, to which I bid you welcome.

My copy’s the 1979 Pan (UK) edition: On the cover of this paperback, Blood’s a purple thing that looks like a housecat; Vic, behind him, is apparently a boy in his forties, and is, I think, hopping about on one leg. Still, most of Harlan’s British covers had spaceships on them, so I mustn’t grumble. And the back cover calls Harlan “the chief prophet of the New Wave in science fiction,” attributing the opinion to the New Yorker.

Definition time, primarily for those of you born after 1970. The New Wave: a term almost as unproductive as cyberpunk would be fifteen years later on, used to describe a motley bunch of writers working in the latter half of the sixties, loosely orbiting but not exclusively confined to New Worlds magazine in the Moorcock era and the original Dangerous Visions anthology, edited by the author of this collection. (If you want more information than that, go and find a copy of the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and check out the New Wave entry.)

Harlan may well have been a “prophet of the New Wave,” but his foremost prophecy seems to have consisted of pointing out, in the introduction to this volume, that there was no such thing, just a bunch of writers, some of whom were pushing the edge of the envelope.

I never noticed the New Wave as anything particularly distinct or separate, when it was happening. It was Stuff to Read. Good stuff to read, even if it sometimes skirted the edge of incomprehensibility. I read it as I read all adult fiction, as a window into a world I didn’t entirely understand: found Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron a lot of fun, Moorcock’s A Cure for Cancer addictive and curious. Ballard was distant and strange and made me think of stories told over the tannoy in far-off airports. Delany showed me that words could be beautiful, Zelazny made myths. And if they were the “New Wave” I liked it. But I liked most things back then. (“Yeah, that’s your trouble, Gaiman,” said Harlan, when I chided him recently for suggesting that someone I like should be sprinkled with sacred meal and then sacrificed. “You like everyone.” It’s true, mostly.)

I’ve digressed a little.

Fiction is a thing of its time, and as times change so does our take on the fiction. Consider the Reagan section of “Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.”; consider Reagan’s final smile “like a man who has regained that innocence of childhood or nature that he had somehow lost.” Scary, in a way Harlan never intended, writing about the pompadoured governor of California. Yet in another few years Reagan and his smile will have begun to lose meaning. He’ll lose significance, become a name in the past for the readers, an odd historical name (I’m just old enough to know why the Spiro Agnew gag was funny), just as the who and the what and the why of the SF New Wave fade into the black. In a couple of his books James Branch Cabell footnoted the famous of his time, something that was viewed as (and was perhaps partly) an ironic comment—after all, who, today, would bother with an explanatory footnote of John Grisham^* or John Major^† or Howard Stern^*? But Cabell’s ironic footnotes are now useful information. Time passes. We forget. The bestselling novel in 1925 was (I am informed by Steve Brust) Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs. Huh? And who? Still, “Santa Claus . . .” works, and will keep working as long as there are B-movie spy plots to deconstruct; and as long as there is injustice.