Heads to The Storm (v1.0) by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

George R.R. Martin

I first discovered Kipling in the early seventies, when I was living in Chicago and working as a VISTA volunteer. How I managed to avoid him throughout my childhood is hard to say, but I managed it somehow, and I might have kept on managing it if my roommate at the time hadn’t just happened to have a paperback copy of The Jungle Book lying about.

I certainly would never have sought out Kipling on my own, at least not then. The thing you have to remember is that it was the early seventies, that is to say, the tail end of the sixties, and I was just out of college, a conscientious objector, very much into the antiwar movement and all other movements of the day. I knew a lot about Kipling for someone who’d never read him. I knew that he was racist, sexist, imperialist, in the habit of glorifying war, and all-around politically incorrect.

What I didn’t know was what a good writer he was.

That is, I didn’t know it until that day I picked up my friend’s copy of The Jungle Book, out of idle curiosity, and found I couldn’t put it down. I’d known that Mowgli was the inspiration for Tarzan, of course, but since I’d always found Burroughs unreadable and Tarzan insipid, that hadn’t made much of an impression. Mowgli was a different matter. On the worst day he ever had, Kipling could write rings around E. R. B. and all his like, as I soon discovered.

Mowgli was the start, but soon after I sought out the poems, the Just So Stories, and all the rest, and I’m glad I aid. He’s still not politically correct, and I don’t suppose he ever will be, although I found that most of his supposed sins had been vastly overstated. Like all of us, he was a product of his times, be they the 1890s or the 1960s.

But that’s not important. What matters is the work he left behind him, and the work is superb. He knew a lot about humanity, and he could make nis words sing.

And my story? I wrote it in 1974, not long after I stumbled over The Jungle Book, and it was the title—from what is perhaps my favorite poem in the book—that inspired the story. In a way its an homage to Kipling; in another, it’s an answer. 1 don’t know if Rudyard would have agreed with me, but that’s okay. I still don’t always agree with him, but his people and places and words still live in my memory and talk to me, and in the end that’s what really counts.

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