IT ALL GOES BACK to my childhood of about a year ago, when I read The Maker of Universes. I recall it to have been a sunny Saturday in Baltimore and its morning, when I picked up Philip Jose Farmer's book with the green Gaughan sky and the gray Gaughan harpy (Podarge) on the front, to read a page or two before beginning work on a story of my own. I didn't do any writing that day.

I finished reading the book and immediately dashed off to my local purveyor of paperbacks, to locate the sequel which I knew existed, The Gates of Creation. When I'd finished reading it, the sunny morning in Saturday and its Baltimore had gone away and night filled the day all the way up to the top of the sky. The next thing that I wrote was not my story, but a fan letter to Philip Jose Farmer.

My intention was not to tell the man who had written The Lovers and Fire and the Night and A Woman A Day that I thought these two new ones were the best things he had ever done. If he'd done a painting, composed a piece of music, I couldn't compare them to his stories or even to each other. The two books I had just then finished reading were of the adventure-romance sort, and I felt they were exceedingly good examples of the type. They are different from his other stories, styles, themes, different even from each other, and hence, as always, incomparable. I had hoped there would be a third one, and I was very pleased to learn that he was working on it.

In other words, I looked forward for over a year to the book you are presently holding in your hands.

In considering my own feelings, to determine precisely what it was that caused me to be so taken by the first two books, I found that there are several reasons for the appeal they hold for me:

1) I am fascinated by the concept of physical immortality and the ills and benefits attendant thereto. This theme runs through the books like an highly polished strand of copper wire. 2) The concept of pocket universes—a thing quite distinct, as I see it, from various parallel worlds notions—the idea of such universes, specifically created to serve the ends of powerful and intelligent beings, is a neat one. Here it allows for, among other things, the fascinating structure of the World of Tiers.

To go along with these concepts, Philip Farmer assembled a cast of characters of the sort I enjoy. Kickaha is a roguish fellow; heroic, tricky and very engaging. Also, he almost steals the first book from Wolff. The second book is packed with miserable, scheming, wretched, base, lowdown, mean and nasty individuals who would cut one another's throats for the fun of it, but unfortunately have their lots cast together for a time. Being devilish fond of the Elizabethan theater, I was very happy to learn early in the story that they were all of them close relatives.

A sacred being may be attractive or repulsive—a swan or an octopus—beautiful or ugly—a toothless hag or a fair young child— good or evil—a Beatrice or a Belle Dame Sans Merci—historical fact or fiction—a person met on the road or an image encountered in a story or a dream—it may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe...#8212;Making, Knowing and Understanding W. H. Auden Philip Jos6 Fanner lives West of the Sun at the other end of the world from me in a place called California. We have never met, save in the pages of his stories. I admire his sense of humor and his facility for selecting the perfect final sentence for everything he writes. He can be stark, dark, smoky, bright, and any color of the emotional spectrum. He has a fascinating sense of the Sacred and the Profane. Put quite simply, he arouses awe. He has the talent and the skill to handle the sacred objects every writer must touch in order to convert the reader, in that timeless, spaceless place called Imagination.

Since I've invoked Auden, I must go on to agree with his observation that a writer cannot read another author's things without comparing them to his own. I do this constantly. I almost always come out feeling weak as well as awed whenever I read the works of three people who write science fiction: Sturgeon, Farmer and Bradbury. They know what's sacred, in that very special trans-subjective way where personal specifics suddenly give way and become universals and light up the human condition like a neon-lined Christmas tree. And Philip Jose Farmer is special in a very unusual way...

Everything he says is something / would like to say, but for some reason or other, cannot. He exercises that thing Henry James called an "angle of vision" which, while different from my own a.v., invariably jibes with the way I feel about things. But I can't do it his way. This means that somebody can do what I love most better than I can, which makes me chew my beard and think of George London as Mephistopheles, back at the old Metropolitan Opera, in Gounoud's Faust, when Marguerita ascended to heaven: he reached out and an iron gate descended before him; he grasped a bar, looked On High for a moment, averted his face, sank slowly to his knees, his hand sliding down the bar: curtain then: that's how I feel. / can't do it, but it can be done.

Beyond this, what can I say about a particular Philip Jose Farmer story?

Shakespeare said it better, in Antony and Cleopatra:

Lepidus. What manner o' thing is your crocodile?

Antony. It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates,

Lepidus. What color is it of?

Antony. Of its own color, too.

Lepidus. 'Tis a strange serpent.

Antony. 'Tis so. And the tears of it are wet.

(Act II, Scene VII.)

Indeed, Sir, they are. It is the skill that goes with the talent that makes them so. Each of its products are different, complete, unique, and this one is no exception. I rejoice that such a man as Philip Jose Farmer walks among us, writes there, too. There aren't many like him. None, I'd say.

But read his story and see what I mean.

Now it is a cold, gray day in February and its Baltimore. But it doesn't matter. Philip Jose Farmer, out there somewhere West of the Sun, if by your writing you ever intended to give joy to another human being, know by this that you have succeeded and brightened many a cold, gray day in the seasons of my world, as well as having enhanced the lighter ones with something I'll just call splendor and let go at that.

The colors of this one are its own and the tears of it are wet. Philip Jose Farmer wrote it. There is nothing more to say.

ROGER ZELAZNY Baltimore, Md.