The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

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Nobody who knew him in 1972 would have guessed that James Blaylock would one day be the most original science fiction writer alive, which he now is, Cordwainer Smith and Philip K. Dick no longer being with us. Blaylock also writes fantasy, and some people would say that’s all he writes — but those people would be noting the consistent tone and assuming a consistent substance. Lovecraft’s several science fiction stories often get categorized as supernatural horror for the same reason.

In 1972, though, when he and I were in college, I don’t think many people would have guessed he’d be a writer at all. He was a dedicated surfer in his spare time, and his part-time job was doing construction clean-up — knocking down garages and sawing the roofs off of houses, sometimes at the wrong addresses by mistake. And for a while, before changing his major to English, he was a Psychology major. That didn’t work out, luckily — I can’t think of anybody less suited to that narrow discipline than Blaylock — though the world may have thereby lost a spectacular psychiatrist. I picture a sort of mix of Carl Jung and Federico Fellini.

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