The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.

A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise -- as was their author during the years when they were being written.

This third of a projected eight volumes of Grand Master Silverberg’s short form fiction focuses on his literary output from 1969 to 1972. Many of the 16 stories share what Silverberg describes as the era’s “Day-Glo splendor” and take a questioning, cynical tone, often with discontented characters searching for some kind of transcendence... Longtime fans and new readers alike will cherish this collection.

Silverberg wrote several novels and fewer short stories in the period this volume covers, during which losing his house in a 1968 fire and responding to the social and political turmoil of the 1960s affected his writing. Nevertheless, he produced such widely recognized classics as ‘The Feast of St. Dionysus,’ ‘Good News from the Vatican,’ ‘Caught in the Organ Draft,’ ‘Thomas the Proclaimer,’ and ‘Going.’