Devils and Etc.
by the Editor
Lot of writing about death this month.
Tanner Willbanks and Mat Capper both lost friends, and there's a kind of brotherhood similarity to their stories. Both the friends are not what one would usually put on the Angel side of the ledger; most people would doubtless put them under Devil. Which just goes to show what a complicated word 'Devil' is–or should be.
Because if we don't see the Angel and the Devil in ourselves, how are we going to see the world clear? I mean, insofar as you can see the world clear (a never ending experiment/program, that). If you project all the Devil in yourself outward, you're going to impoverish your own world, and you're going to make a lot of mistakes in other people's, too.
Harvey Lillywhite ponders that one. Where is the boundary, anyway, between Evil and Good? That there is one, we're sure…but we're also sure that it shifts and changes, just like the sand bars under the sea.
Hecate Kantharsis contemplates what's under the ocean and finds we're not in control, which is refreshing coming from an engineer, who presumably has been tasked by mankind to make sure we are. It's good to know engineers recognize Reality when they see it. David Horowitz , as usual in his quiet way, stalks Reality from a certain solid point of view. B.J. Beauchamp meets the Devil, and I'm still wondering what the outcome was. Dirk Quigby finally goes on his first research mission to the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife. And David Budbill points out that the Devil We Know is us, as Pogo once memorably said, us in our triumphalist, always right, always a winner mode of being (this means you, my fellow Americans; Canadians can look away while we have an inhouse discussion of our own flaws).
A special welcome to Phyllis Peters, whose story PHONE CALL made me laugh out loud, and gave me the idea for this issue in the first place.
And have a look at GREENBEARD this issue; we really think Hunt has outdone himself. Just when I was getting frustrated that there were no women in the piece ("it's HARD to get a woman on a pirate ship in the eighteenth century," is, I believe, how the author explained himself)…we get a whole witches' coven (and what a coven!) and the start of a love story (and WHAT a love story!).
Welcome back.