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RANDOM WALK FOREWORD By Spider Robinson Welcome to one of the most glorious journeys ever undertaken. I know this account of it is fictional…but for twenty years now, I have hoped/wished/known that it is not. In some ways, it may be the truest story that even its remarkable author has told us yet. There are times I think I really am on this random walk, and other times when I just yearn to be with my whole heart. Tolkien’s Ring saga spends four books on a walk that leads to nothing more than another stupid battle. This walk leads to a world where no one is lonely, and Mordor has no power… I’m not saying it will be an easy journey. It will test—perhaps beyond their limits—your tolerance, your ability to love, your capacity to forgive. I’ve been having arguments with this book for two decades, now, sometimes angry ones, and I have benefitted from every one….and I venture to guess the same is true for its author, too. It is unquestionably Lawrence Block’s most unusual work so far. I think it must have scared hell out of him as it came out of his typewriter. It certainly baffled its original publishers, who couldn’t imagine how to market it, or to whom. Its only resemblance to any of his other sixty-odd novels (even wikipedia isn’t sure) is its dialogue, which as always somehow manages effortlessly to be entertaining without ever sounding written. The creator of characters like Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner and Chip Harrison is, to put it mildly, not normally given to writing about spirituality. Indeed, one of the self-appointed reviewers at amazon.com is convinced RANDOM WALK is a send-up, a savage parody of the New Age movement “…that dumps its body in a dark alley.” I urge you to ignore him. Don’t just suspend your disbelief: nullify gravity in its universe, and let it float freely, just for a little while. You can always go back and re-read this book cynically later, if you feel the need to—but you will never get another chance to experience it for the first time, and surrender to it. If you do, I warn you it will hurt you some, but I promise you it will thrill you, and I predict that it will leave you larger than you were when you started. Every step of the way I was certain even Larry would not be able to sustain it much longer, and I was positive there was no way it could be ended satisfyingly, and he did both, as elegantly as a Shao-Lin monk walking the rice paper at a dead run. It is one of the most magnificent dreams ever dreamed. This is not satire, but its rebuttal. This is a genuine expression of the same spiritual thirst that underlay the New Age and the Sermon on the Mount and the path of the Buddha and every other cyclical return of hope….but this time with the courage, for once, to look squarely into the heart of darkness, to face the beast within without turning away and at least try, god damn it, to come to terms with it, to forgive it, to ease its pain. In my own genre, science fiction, we usually try to complete a sentence that begins with one of the Three Ifs, as defined by Dr. Isaac Asimov. Perhaps the most familiar to the TV generation is “If this goes on…,” in which the author identifies a current problem and extrapolates it to a future extreme: here are bad things that could happen tomorrow if action is not taken today. Almost as often, the question begins, “What if…?” and the story is purely speculative: what would it be like if you lived in zero gravity, say, or inside a computer? But once in a while, the sentence begins, “If only…,” and those are the ones you remember twenty years later. Stories in which the author had the audacity to suggest a small rewrite to God, one tiny edit that would greatly improve the whole world—if only it were possible. Those are the dreams you dream in the hope that the dreaming of them will somehow hasten the day they come true….the unanswerable questions you keep asking in case somebody smarter or wiser might come along with a better answer than you’ve found alone….the prayers you pray even when you’re certain no one is listening. I spent the Sixties searching, hard, for what Guthrie finds on his random walk, seeking the gift he is given. Or, failing that, trying at least to figure out how to become the kind of man who would deserve it, if it ever should come along. A lot of us were doing that, then. I got hints of it. Elusive scents that couldn’t be pinned down. Wisps of smoke that dissipated as I reached for them. Bubbles that squirted out of my grasp, forever just out of reach. It seemed to involve a lot of hard labor, a lot of freezing in country shacks, trying to get group agreement on whether eating meat was far out or not. The record of history says we failed: most of the communes are gone now; we didn’t become enlightened; we didn’t save the world. But we did change it some, and for the better. We might again one day, with a similar national or generational effort. The pendulum has been in motion for a long time, gathering momentum with each swing, and may yet become a battering ram one day. For what it’s worth, nearly all the people I know who met and married back then are still together, still happy, still living lives that don’t hurt anyone else, and inspiring others to do the same. Today’s generation misses what we had, and knows it. That’s a start. For all you or I know, Guthrie and Sara and Jody and Mark and some friends of theirs with great teeth are approaching your town right now, at about four miles an hour, alternating feet, unnoticed by any but those who need to see them. It might be true. It might. And what if it is? —Tottering-on-the-Brink, Bowen Island, British Columbia 30 August, 2007 Site contents copyright Lawrence Block
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