Reading Everything is for Winners

If you're wondering, that's the Loch Ness monster carrying a scuba diver in its mouth. And if the back of the book is to be believed, there is probably a story in there about that thing being in love with a person, or vice versa. Or maybe they're both in luv with each other at the same time! Perfect! Unrequited love is crap.

I don't know about the other stories in this book, but the first one, Black Charlie, made me cry, almost. It was really, really, really good, and also very, very good, and beautiful too. When a short story about a giant alien otter from another planet that carves statuettes out of rocks with his teeth and tries to sell them to an art collector using a reformed fur-trapper as an intermediary manages to convey something about love and art and the struggle to find meaning in existence, you have to take notice and then shut the fuck up about all the other books that are out there talking about Iranians flying kites, or about how its SO important and super grayt that brown skinned people in hot countries read some Flaubert or whatever. Shit, pretty much every other book out there can go get burned. Just kidding.

The author is Gordon R. Dickson, and the net doesn't have a lot to say about him, but I'd guess that he probably has some sort of cult following. He died in 2001, at the age of 77. Also, he was an asthmatic, proving that nerds and asthma are married to each other.



Here is a little piece of Black Charlie, which I took some of my own incredibly valuable time to copy down:

But there was one more thing to tell. For a long time, after I returned home from Elman's World, I did not look at the crude statuette. I did not want to, for I knew that seeing it would only confirm what I had known from the start, that all the longing and desires in the world cannot create art where there is no talent, no true visualization. But at the end of one year I was cleaning up all the little details of my office. And, because I believe in system and order- and also because I was ashamed of myself for putting it off so long- I took the statuette from a bottom drawer of my desk, unwrapped it and set on the desk's polished surface.

I was alone in my office at the time, at the end of a day, when the afternoon sun, striking red through the tall window beside my desk touched everything between the walls with a clear, amber light. I ran my fingers over the grainy sandstone and held it up to look at it.

And then- for the first time- I saw it, saw through the stone to the image beyond, saw what Black Charlie had seen, with Black Charlie's eyes, when he looked at Longan. I saw men as Black Charlie's kind saw men- and I saw what the worlds of men meant to Black Charlie. And above all, overriding all, I saw art as Black Charlie saw it, through his bright alien eyes- saw the beauty he had sought at the price of his life, and had half-found.

And, lastly, how super is THIS cover?


Gordon R. Dickson is my dead science fiction homie, and that's the truth of it!