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Time and the Riddle: thirty-one Zen stories At last! A complete collection of Howard Fast's "Zen stories" -- a unique blend of fantasy, science fiction, philosophy, and humor. Written over a period of twenty years and including Fast's latest work, never before published, these stories combine the comic with the cosmic, the playful with the profound. As a whole, they are marked by paradox and poetry, irony and suspense, mystery and hope. To their world-famous, best-selling author, they are, moreover, "the most important writing I have done." Like the scientists in a few of these stories, Fast bends time and ties knots in space to give us another view of reality. He takes the ethics and habits of mankind out of their comfortably familiar context and examines them from another dimension. So skillfully does he weave the fantastic with the commonplace, that we do not bother to question the existence of giant ants, half-inch men, time warps, telepathic children, lakes of blood, or the devil himself at the doorstep. Instead, our wonder is directed toward the paradoxes inherent in human existence. And from this literary magic, comes a sudden vision, a flash of understanding, in a laugh, a shudder, or simply a smile. We have been taken a step beyond time to come a step closer to the riddle. from the dust jacket of the 1975 Ward Ritchie first edition Contents Foreword by Louis Untermeyer ix Introduction by Frank Campenni xi 1. UFO 1 2. The Hole in the Floor 7 3. General Hardy's Profession 15 4. Echinomastus Contentii 31 5. Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal 45 6. A Matter of Size 57 7. Show Cause 71 8. The Martian Shop 83 9. The Pragmatic Seed 105 10. The Trap 111 11. The Hoop 205 12. The Cold, Cold Box 219 13. The Talent of Harvey 233 14. The Wound 255 15. The General Zapped an Angel 267 16. The Price 277 17. The Vision of Milty Boil 289 18. Cato the Martian 301 19. Not with a Bang 313 20. The Movie House 317 21. Cephes 5 335 22. Of Time and Cats 345 23. The Interval 357 24. The Egg 367 25. The Insects 377 26. The Sight of Eden 391 27. The Mind of God 405 28. The Mohawk 417 29. The Mouse 425 30. The Large Ant 435 31. The Hunter 445 Afterword by the author 481