Cat's Pajamas Read Free

describe the most outrageous events, thus becoming his own straight men. He astonishes the reader by refusing to be astonished, even when pint-sized aliens battle in Central Park, deserving infants are drowned in Holy Water, or newlyweds awaken to find their brains preserved in jars.
    The tales in this volume are narrated for the most part with a repertory of Victorian flourishes and cadences. Morrow’s tone is authentically (if deceptively) high, even as his adventures partake mightily of the low. Who else can speak of the “despairing throng” and at the same time let us know that they piss, they eat bran flakes, they communicate with Mars via harpsichords and dry cell batteries.
    Dry indeed.
    The drollery is as Victorian as the sensibility is modern, even post-modern. Morrow is after the biggest of Big Game, and for all their seemingly casual hilarity (and for the most part, they are funny as hell) these tales deal with the eternal, unanswered questions. They will rock your world. Sometimes slyly, sometimes directly.
    â€œThe War of the Worldviews” is perhaps the wildest, most original take ever on the oldest trope of SF, alien invasion; while for those with darker tastes, there is “Auspicious Eggs,” set in the bleakest post-holocaust universe since Walter Miller’s.
    For every laugh there is an inhalation of brimstone. So be warned.
    Who else among modern SF writers (and Morrow, to his great credit, refuses to refuse the label) has worked so hard to sharpen the swords of satire? And had such fun doing it? His is a hard act to follow. Most of us are content with smaller targets than God and Man (not to mention Woman).
    He is our Voltaire, casting a cold eye on both the follies of the day and the fashions of philosophy. He is our Swift, skewering his enemies with a smile.
    He would be our Twain, except that we already have one. He is in fact our Morrow.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS
    AUGUST 7
    O NE THING I’VE LEARNED from this catastrophe is to start giving Western science and Newtonian rationality their due. For six days running, professional astronomers in the United States and Europe warned us of puzzling biological and cybernetic activity on the surfaces of both Martian satellites. We, the public, weren’t interested. Next the stargazers announced that Phobos and Deimos had each sent a fleet of disc-shaped spaceships, heavily armed, hurtling toward planet Earth. We laughed in their faces. Then the astronomers reported that each saucer measured only one meter across, so that the invading armadas evoked “a vast recall of defective automobile tires.” The talk-show comedians had a field day.
    The first operation the Martians undertook upon landing in Central Park was to suck away all the city’s electricity and seal it in a small spherical container suggesting an aluminum racquetball. I believe they wanted to make sure we wouldn’t bother them as they went about their incomprehensible agenda, but Valerie says they were just being quixotic. In either case, the Martians obviously don’t need all that power. They brought plenty with them.
    I am writing by candlelight in our Delancey Street apartment, scribbling on a legal pad with a ballpoint pen. New York City is without functional lamps, subways, elevators, traffic signals, household appliances, or personal computers. Here and there, I suppose, life goes on as usual, thanks to storage batteries, solar cells, and diesel-fueled generators. The rest of us are living in the 18th century, and we don’t much like it.
    I was taking Valerie’s kid to the Central Park Zoo when the Phobosians and the Deimosians started uprooting the city’s power cables. Bobby and I witnessed the whole thing. The Martians were obviously having a good time. Each alien is only six inches high, but I could still see the jollity coursing through their little frames. Capricious chipmunks. I hate them all. Bobby became terrified when