The Butterfly Kid: The Greenwich Village Trilogy Book One

This is the first in the wonderful hippy scifi trilogy, and all three are by different authors. This one, and the final by Waters, are a little more disconnected and hippy like than the second by Kurland, but all are great fun to read. Only the Kurland has been reprinted since the 1970s, so they will be hard to come by until some intelligent publisher reissues them, and most publishers today are the opposite of intelligent. If you can, read all three. They are wonderful fun

First in a series of three loosely linked novels (Michael Kurland "The Probability Pad" and Tom Waters "The Unicorn Girl" are the other two in the series. All three books are among the funniest I've ever read, as well as complete with allusions to 60's culture and other science fiction. The Waters book, for example, begins in Berkeley in the 60's, and segues neatly into Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy universe. Please God (and publishers!), introduce a new generation to the glories of reality pills, lobsters with attitude, and slipping universes.

I'll pass on details of Butterfly Kid; others have done that well here. Get a copy and read it. (If you live in Connecticut and can't get a copy, write to me at [email protected] and come over and read mine.) I also have a copy of The Unicorn Girl, the second book in the "series"... but McCaffrey's entry of the same name seems to have eclipsed any references to it in the various search databases. I can, further, find no reference at all to Waters' "The Probability Pad" (supposedly the third entry in the series) in any search database. I'm beginning to suspect that Waters never got around to writing his contribution.

If you "participated" in the 60's counter-culture (either rock n roll or drugs), whether you remember very much of it or not, you will find this book hilarious! Chester Anderson can turn a phrase in unique ways and paint scenes so vivid (and so improbable) that I laughed out loud many times on my first reading. I then read it again and again and again, always finding new things to smile at. I loaned my copy to a friend. He lost it. I bought another copy. I lost it when I moved 10-12 years ago. I've looked to replace it ever since. I mean, really! The idea of a bunch of hippies sitting around waiting to get high enough to save the world is funny enough, but the blue lobster's idea of torture, connecting Chester to machines which made him experience illusions, and dreams that he would have PAID for, is just too much! "I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit. I wasn't thinking very well at all! Masterpieces of understatement throughout. "She was blonde or so, wearing white capri pants just too tight enough." Anyway, if you're "stuck in the 60's," this is a must read.

What do you get when a band of six-foot-tall, blue lobsters from another planet secretly land in Greenwich Village, befriend the village idiot, plan to introduce a hallucinogenic drug into New York's drinking water, and the only thing that can prevent global conquest by crustaceans is a busload of Hippies? Chester Anderson's "The Butterfly Kid", that's what you get, baby. Chester Anderson, as a character in the book somewhat loosely based upon himself, stumbles upon a teenybopper in the park one day, and is surprised to see him create butterflies out of thin air! Not much later, Chester's friend Andy suddenly dons a dayglo-blue halo around his body. Upon further investigation, it turns out that the village idiot, one Laszlo Scott, has been distributing some new drug throughout the village, and it's effect is quite unique, quite exciting, and horribly dangerous. When Chester and his roommate, Mike, discover the extra-terrestrial shellfish source of the new drug, and what they plan to do with it, it becomes a race against the clock for Greenwich Village's not-quite-finest to thwart the alien's plan by any means necessary. Although this book is pretty hard to find (it's been out of print for twenty or so years now), it's definately worth searching for. S. Daniel Wilson, California, USA