STRANGE TRAVELERS

For anyone who may have been deterred from reading STRANGE TRAVELERS by negative or nonexistent publicity: get the book. It's superb. Now if only Wolfe would assemble all those other uncollected stories... =====

I'm ready to start discussing this. How about it? Everybody got his or her copy yet? A few I've read before, being published in mainstream SF sources. Most were originally published in odd places, and heretofor hard to find. My initial impression, for reading a half dozen, is that there are a LOT of religious allegories in this collection. In fact, I'll be interested to see if perhaps that is the organizing theme of this particular book. The title could easily fit (strange travelers being humanity, God, and the devil, travelling together....) Let me skip so as not to spoil, and take up one story. . . . . . . . . . . The story called "1, 2, 3, etc." (I dont' have my copy here, and that's only approximate). Anybody want to analyze this one? Is it a tossaway, or a more serious story? The other story from the place this was originally published is an allegory of life from a Christian standpoint. As for "123 etc", I missed any clues as to what the white powder is supposed to be, or why dialing a phone would have brought it. Cocaine? Something else, like cocaine but deadly? There's probably a larger grid around this story that explains it. Anybody wanna give it a shot? Nutria