The Best of Science Fiction 12

After 'Belladonna', four Vermilion Sands stories appeared between 1961 and 1963. Three more (a 'journey of return to that exotic suburb of my mind') were published last year, filling out a book due shortly from Putnam. In all of them, the fabulous character of the landscape was clearly just that: fabulous — yet so familiar too somehow part of my own experience, that I once spent an afternoon poring over Gazettes and Atlases (never thinking to try an Anatomy) until I satisfied myself with a location on, or near, the coast of Guatemala. Apparently other readers were similarly compelled because the author asked me to specify here:

Vermilion Sands is not in Arizona, or anywhere in the USA, nor on another planet, which one or two people over the years have assumed. Also, there is no sea here, although so many of the images are marine — the Beach ambiance, sandrays and reefs. This is a desert area, but so crystallised that it has almost produced a new fauna and flora of its own.