First 200 Words (part 1)
For your reading pleasure, and because we like to tease…here are the first 200 words from:
“Newly Born, Newly Dead”
by Philip José Farmer
Warped from the amniotic sea, I anchored temporarily on a warm dry bed. Outside was a howling snow storm; nearby the frozen Wabash. Father, meanwhile, was wading hip-deep in snow, a lantern in hand, looking for an obstetrician and an honest man. That fearsome season, wolves whipped by hunger came down out of the Canadian forests to snap at Hoosier asses. It was Fimbulwinter; the Frost-Giants were sharpening their icicles in readiness for Ragnarok. The Red Baron was counting his 60th notch or so on his coup stick. A swarthy, sick, Austrian gnome was shivering in the trenches and dreaming of Götterdämmerung.
Forty-eight years later, while science roars down the mountain road, brakes burned out, accelerator jammed, the Pithecanthropus hitch-hiker wishing he had walked, I crouch in a cave in Beverly Hills, I watch Plato’s Magic Lantern show, eyes wet and burning with smog and the human comedy, nose running from inimical pollen and carbon-nitrogen oxides, hands over ears to soften the anguished and joyous screams of children playing on the sidewalk and to dull the bellow and curse of motors revved by drivers hurtling towards the red light of nothing, the Yellow Gold Brick Road turning green beneath the …
(Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)
The rest of “Newly Born, Newly Dead” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.
