H. P. Lovecraft would say, “When the stars are right”—well, we had the Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties and eventually we’ll have something else, something new and yet old, some fresh Era of Wonderful nonsense all over again.
When?
Ah, there’s the rub.
But, listen, I’ve been getting too serious and profound for my own good or for your amusement. Michael Kurland calls The Unicorn Girl an entertainment and also a fantasy, and he’s right on both counts. We all need an entertaining fantasy now and then, and Michael has created a wonderful one for us.
Just the other day I reread The Unicorn Girl for the first time in more than thirty years. Seamlessly I found myself slipping from the grim present into a past that never quite existed, but nearly did, and surely should have. I found myself an invisible d’Artagnon heading off on an adventure with the three mod musketeers Anderson, Kurland, and Waters, and their lovely companions Sylvia and Dorothy. My only complaint with the adventure was that it ended too soon, but that’s always a sign of a book that one loves.
Michael tells me that the memo to subscribers to Crawdaddy magazine is authentic, and it makes me wonder if I’ll ever collect the money that Crawdaddy has owed me since 1969. Nah, I don’t think so. The attribution to William Lindsey Gresham is also authentic; Gresham was one of the great, tragic literary talents of the Twentieth Century and I commend his works to you. Other poetry in The Unicorn Girl is Michael’s own creation, and damned skillfully executed at that.
In this book you will encounter one of the world’s great natural story-tellers. I’ve worked with Michael on several projects in recent decades, and can tell you that his is one of the most startlingly creative minds I have ever encountered. We would be working along on a story or on a piece of nonfiction, and I would have thought or written myself into a seemingly inescapable literary cul-de-sac. Time after time, Michael would take over the helm and turn the narrative in a direction that I not merely hadn’t thought of taking, but hadn’t imagined existed.
And suddenly, we were off and rolling again.
That’s what happens to the adventurers in The Unicorn Girl.
Now here’s another delight you can look forward to. I mentioned that I was saddened when I’d finished reading The Unicorn Girl. But on this occasion, The End is not really the end at all. No! Barely had I finished reading The Unicorn Girl when my friend Maurice Newburn surprised me by handing me a copy of Perchance, by Michael Kurland.
What was this?
I thought I knew all Michael’s books, or at least knew of them, and had read most of them. But here was one I’d never even heard of. I skipped home merrily clutching the book and discovered that, twenty years after the publication of The Unicorn Girl, Michael had produced a—well, yes, I’ll take a chance and call it a sequel.
Perchance is another wondrous adventure in the realm of multiple realities. Once again people go blipping from one earth-variant to another. The characters aren’t the same as in The Unicorn Girl—or are they? Delbit and Exxa bear a suspicious similarity to Michael and Sylvia, and their leaps and scrapes are as breathtaking as those of their prototypes. The mood is, perhaps, a trifle darker, the tone just a little more serious, but to this reader at least Perchance reads like Unicorn Girl II.
Perchance is out of print at the moment, but if you wish hard enough—visit enough paperback dealers—cruise enough websites—you just might turn up a copy. Or, well, maybe Michael will see fit to bring Perchance back into print. One can certainly wish.
But for now you hold in your hands the one, the only, the original Unicorn Girl. It’s time to slip an old Harper’s Bizarre or Strawberry Alarm Clock LP onto the turntable, pour yourself a glass of cheap wine, take off your shoes and put up your feet. Then set fire to a little Maui wowee (if you’re so inclined—don’t tell anybody I encouraged you to break the law) and settle in for a trip to a wonderful half-real, half-imaginary era with Michael Kurland and The Unicorn Girl.
FOREWORD
This book was written in 1969, when I was even younger than I am now, and the world was much, much younger than I. It is a gentle fantasy lightly wearing the mantle of science fiction.
I have taken advantage of the re-issue of the book to do a few very slight alterations: tucking in a pleat here, letting out the hem there, changing a word or two in the sleeves, making the lapels wider for emphasis. But I have not attempted to, I would not, update the book, or do anything to remove it from its anchorage at a certain place in time, space, and world view.
For those of you for whom the term “hippy” is at best an anachronism and at worst an insult, I offer this view of the world as we saw it then. Or rather, as we made it up. For all that this is fantasy, reading it again after three decades evokes for me that long-ago time when we random strangers, united only in our belief that things didn’t have to be that bad and that the guitar was a musical instrument, strove together to make at least a few spots around the world sympathetic to whomever came in peace and was willing to share knowledge, coffee, and maybe a few tokes. Or perhaps that was also a fantasy.
The Unicorn Girl is a sequel of sorts to a work by Chester Anderson called The Butterfly Kid. Chester, up until the time I met him, had been a Greenwich Village poet called C.V.J. Anderson. I had recently returned from sharing a life of high adventure with my comrades in the United States Army in Europe. We immediately gave up our previous career goals (I had aspired to become either a major American playwright or a teakettle) and decided to start writing science fiction.
I can only attribute this decision to the fact that we had fallen in with a had crowd. There, in and around Greenwich Village, lived the gang: Randall “The Cardinal” Garrett, Larry “The Whip” Janifer, Phil “Big Bill Tenn” Klass, Avram “The Rabbi” Davidson, Katherine “Beautiful Kate” MacLean, Bob “The Pope” Silverberg, Harlan “The Kid” Ellison, “Logical” Howard Schoenfeld, “Magic” Tom Waters, Willy “The Professor” Ley. They all did it, and they made it look easy.
Chester and I wrote our first book together, Ten Years to Doomsday, and Don Bensen of Pyramid Books bought it and published it, and the cover had an illustration by Ed Emshwiller, and our names in one corner; real small, but our names nonetheless. One reviewer talked about how we had copied the style of Poul Anderson.
Wow!
Without even trying—well, that’s not true, we had tried real hard to write a good book—but without even knowing we were doing it, we had achieved the style of one of the heroes whose residence in that Valhalla reserved for great writers was already assured.
We were hooked!
Then Chester wrote The Butterfly Kid, a fun story and a faithful sociological study of Greenwich Village, as only a work of fiction can be, if you discount the reality pills and the blue lobster people and a few other small details. Or, come to think of it, the blue lobster people may not have been such an exaggeration. He didn’t want to bother making up names for his characters, so he put us both in the book, making himself the narrator, the “Watson,” so-to-speak, and making me the hero—mainly so he could poke fun at some of my more endearing character traits; how could I object if I was the hero?
It was Chester who suggested that I write the sequel from my point of view.
“But I don’t want to make fun of you,” I told him.
“You’ll manage,” he said.
His original suggestion was that I retell the story of
