[j. d. worthington]

As part of that reading listed above, I've now dipped into my collection of stories by W. C. Morrow, The Monster-Maker and Other Stories -- which I am reading in order of their original publication, rather than their assemblage here -- with "A Glimpse of the Unusual", which is the sort of story I have difficulty believing would see publication today. It is simply a type of tale that I don't think editors would even give a second thought to... but it's a rather effective handling of the concept, even if bizarre; and at the end one is left with more questions than answers, and unsure even whether the entire thing (that is, the narrator's story) is a joke in bad taste, a fabrication, a madman's maunderings, or a straightforward account of a lunatic situation... though I incline toward the idea that it is a picture of a disturbed mind, save that he is so coherent and able to extricate himself from situations so handily.

I've also read a fair amount of Sterling's fantastic poetry by this point, and am quite impressed. I think that, save for Smith's own The Star-Treader or The Hashish-Eater, I've never encountered such a concentrated bit of cosmicism as I see in some of Sterling's works, such as The Testimony of the Suns, among others. Sheer genius here, and exquisitely expressed. Also a few more of CAS's poems, which run the gamut from such cosmic visions to delicate mood-pieces expressing some of those very fleeting impressions which come to a person only a handful of times in a life, yet which can exalt the spirit more than perhaps anything else I know....