Eileen Gunn sent me a very complimentary introduction as expected. As she pointed out to me in an email exchange, an introduction for a collection should be one long compliment. The trick is to find somebody who actually has something nice to say about your work, and since Eileen has published my work in the past she was a good choice. She's also an excellent writer herself who really knows from where she speaks. Check out her website for more about her:

www.eileengunn.com

Here's an excerpt from her intro:


I have to admit I don’t know a whole lot about Douglas Lain. I already told the Homeland Security guy everything I could remember, so don’t bug me about it, okay?

[...]

I do know this, as well: he writes what he sees.

He sees a world in which baffled aliens relentlessly pursue married men with small children (“Music Lessons”), and in which baffled aliens are men with small children (“Identity is a Construct”). I’m confident that’s reality as he knows it. (Doug has four children. At least some of them are small.) He describes his reality in the gentlest of terms, with a stunning command of dialogue and a knowledge of the way men and women talk to one another when they really are speaking of something else entirely.

Doug’s stories exist in a space where reality is labile, a space that has its own rules and expectations, and commands a sort of mental poetry. Lain-space is governed by shadowy, irrational forces that most humans never encounter directly, kind of like Homeland Security...