Breakfast in the Ruins

Barry N. Malzberg

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people

or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Barry N. Malzberg. A much shorter version of this work appeared as The Engines of the Night, copyright © 1982 by Barry N. Malzberg.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN 10: 1-4165-2117-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2117-4

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First Baen printing, April 2007

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Malzberg, Barry N.

Breakfast in the ruins / by Barry N. Malzberg.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original."

Includes Engines of the night, originally published in

1982.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-4165-2117-8 (trade pbk.)

1. Science fiction--History and criticism. I. Malzberg,

Barry N. Engines of the night. II. Title.

PN3433.8.M33 2007

809.3'8762--dc22

2006101313

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright Information

The Engines of the Night, copyright © 1982, by Barry N. Malzberg

Grandson of L'Envoi, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

Interregnum, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction, copyright © 1976, by Mercury Press, Inc.

Introduction to Meditations, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

On Engines Again, copyright © 1992, by Pulphouse Publications

Atomic Power, copyright © 1992, by Pulphouse Publicatoins

Tripping with the Alchemist, copyright © 2003, by Spilogale, Inc.

Some Reflections on Freud, Fantasy & The Jewish Condition, copyright © 1989, by the Baltimore Jewish Times

I: Not I, copyright ©, 1981, by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov

On Decadence, copyright © 1992, by Pulphouse Publications

Cliftonized, copyright © 1993, by Pulphouse Publicatons

Over The Waves, copyright © 1993, by Pulphouse Publications

Thus Our Words Unspoken, copyright © 1994, by Wizards of the Coast

A Formal Feeling Comes, copyright © 1995, by Wizards of the Coast

Thinking About Compulsion, copyright © 1993, by Mystery Scene

The Shores of Suitability, copyright © 1982, by Penthouse Publications, Ltd.

Some Notes on the Lone Wolf, copyright © 1991, by Barry N. Malzberg

Introduction to Writers and Other Culprits, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

Flowers for Daniel, copyright © 2000, by Barry N. Malzberg

Falling from the Air, copyright © 1992, by Pulphouse Publications

Dark of The Knight, copyright © 1976, by Damon Knight

Afterword to Dark of The Knight, copyright © 2002, by the Science Fiction Writers of America

On Fredric Brown, copyright © 2001, by NESFA Press

The Stochastic Writer, copyright © 2005, by Barry N. Malzberg

The Dean of Gloucester, Virginia, copyright © 2005, by Barry N. Malzberg

Inextricable Disengagement copyright © 2006, by Barry N. Malzberg

On Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1992, by Pulphouse Publications

The Bend at the End of the Road, copyright © 1993, by Mystery Scene

The Cloud Sculptor of Terminal X, copyright © 1991, by the New York Review of Science Fiction

Presto: Con Malizia, copyright 1994, by Mystery Scene

Repentance, Desire and Natalie Wood, copyright © 1993, by the New York Review of Science Fiction

The Man Who Lost the Sea, copyright © 2003, by NESFA Press

Ruthven Agonistes, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

The Passage of the Light, copyright © 1993, by Science Fiction Age

The Last Millennium, copyright © 2007, by Barry N. Malzberg

Part I:

Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium

Introduction to the Baen Edition

The Engines of the Night was assembled in the Fall of 1980, published in February 1982. About half of the volume collected essays written before the conception and sale of the book, the remainder of the essays were written for the collection itself. (Many were placed serially.) "Corridors", the short story which concludes and summarizes the work was on the final Nebula ballot in 1983; the book in its entirety was a Hugo finalist (for "best related nonfiction") that year. In neither case or category did it win and it would have—I came to understand—violated premise and conception if it had. This is a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode. "The history of science fiction is a history of failure" I wrote somewhere a long time ago and Engines of the Night was an attempt to explain why this was so.

That book comprises the first half of the eponymously titled Breakfast in the Ruins. The second half collects most of my writing and certainly the better writing on science fiction in the near quarter of a century since.

Earlier Introductions to Engines follow and fairly well explain the situation.

I am indebted to James Baen and David Drake for this volume. Engines already bears a dedication but I would like to dedicate the second half of this and the consequent new work in its entirety to the memory of Henry Walter Weiss (2/10/40-11/3/91).

Part One

The Engines of the Night

DEDICATION

IN MEMORIAM

Mark Clifton

Edmond Hamilton

Cyril M. Kornbluth

Henry Kuttner

". . . the aggregate amount I paid out as an editor to everybody, over a period of thirty years from 1939 to 1969, as editor of Astonishing Stones and Super Science Stories, as editor of the Star series of original anthologies for Ballantine, as editor of more than a dozen reprint anthologies over that period and finally as editor of Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow, and others for nearly a decade—the total of checks, for all of them put together, to every contributor, is probably about [a] quarter of a million."

—Frederik Pohl 1979

"Almost everybody in science fiction tends to stay in science fiction."

—Henry Morrison 1978

Introduction to the 2001

Electronic Book Edition

When I assembled this book—a conflation of essays written for various magazines in the 1970s and some entirely new work, about 50/50—in 1980, I had one small and one very large ambition. The large ambition was to utterly change the face of my time (as Mailer so winningly put it in Advertisements for Myself), bring science fiction to full literary respectability, get science fiction with me at the head of it into the literary and academic canon, bring the teeming masses to new understanding, have flowers at my feet and houris at my head all of the time. The minor ambition—I calculated that my more megalomaniac purposes were as Damon Runyon would put it at least six to five against—was to have a book on science fiction which would sell modestly, have a kind of modest permanence . . . a book which like Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder or James Blish's The Issue at Hand would have a kind of sub-life over the many years and would, like those remarkable testaments, be regarded as required reading for any writer interested in publishing science fiction. The Knight and Blish books are irreplaceable, the first (and for a very long time the only) works of serious criticism of category science fiction, and it was my prayerful, not in this case at all megalomaniac, hope that The Engines of the Night might join those two works in the sub-basement where from time to time uninformed readers would take the volume out and appalled readers would subsequently replace it.

The work was certainly more personal than either Issue at Hand or In Search of Wonder. Unlike Blish or Knight, I brought my own writing experiences (and glancingly my personal life) into the text; it mingled attempts at objective history or criticism with cries de coeur of the most chilling sort and intentionally or otherwise emerged as a kind of masked autobiography. I had in the previous decade often said that I would write my memoirs at forty; Engines of the Night was indeed assembled at approximately that age and it is as close to a memoir as I am likely to get. Writers, given enough time and space, will tell you everything even if they are insistent upon telling you nothing. Even Hemingway's and Faulkner's secrets, even Nabokov's most private obsessions are spilled out on the pages. Sometimes you need a decoder: the Royal Russian and Big Ernie were clever guys. Sometimes you barely need a decoder as with Engines of the Night. One can map my personal and professional odyssey over the first fifteen years of my working involvement with science fiction closely through this work.

Did I succeed? I think it fair to say that I failed in my major ambition; the Republic is still standing and science fiction remains compartmentalized within the academy and most general review media; it has had its moments over the years intervening but in the main is as despised and marginalized a category of literature as it was in 1980, which is to say somewhat despised and significantly marginalized. Nor, the last time I looked left and right, did I note flowers at my feet, houris at my lips, or even a get-well card. The minor or at least more realistic ambition stands problematic in its resolution: Engines sold about 3500 copies in its hardcover edition—not too bad for Doubleday science fiction, which wasn't fiction—and had a modest trade edition; both have been out of print for a long time and this composes its first reissue, seventeen years after the trade edition. The work did not win science fiction's Hugo Award and The Science Fiction Encyclopedia refers to it as "ignored."

But then again and twenty years later I still receive occasional letters on this book (and even more occasional requests for a copy should I have any extras on hand; I no longer do); it has a reputation perhaps beyond its audience and it seems over the years to have been read by more than half of the writers who came into the field since its publication to produce any body of work, and it has perhaps an even larger percentage of readers among science fiction writers who were my contemporaries and predecessors. There was nothing quite like this work—this is not necessarily self-praise—before it was published; in its wake there have been some similar works but very few of them have been published by other than small press. (Thomas M. Disch's Dreams Our Stuff Is Made On published in the late '90s is an exception or an anomaly, modeled in small degree on Engines, which, incidentally, Disch hated; it was reviewed widely within and without the genre and won a Hugo . . . Disch however had relatively little to say about his own body of work, his own struggles in and then out of the genre.) This is a subterranean work. I wouldn't call it a "cult book"—that condescension or pejorative masked as praise—but it is one whose sub-life meets the more modest version of the hopes surrounding its preparation and delivery.

How does this look more than twenty-one years later? (I delivered the work to its Doubleday editor, Patrick LoBrutto, on 10-4-80.) As a summary of my own experience and the circumstances and history of the genre in 1980, it stands reasonably well. (One reviewer pointed out that despite the subtitle Science Fiction in the Eighties, the book had virtually nothing to say about that decade-to-come.) As a predictive work the reviews are mixed: this utterly missed William Gibson and his imitators whose stoned-out computer cowboys and dot-matrix emptiness brilliantly anticipated and became then conflated with the computer culture. Then again, there is that remarkable paragraph in the essay Science Fiction Forever which begins, "I do not know what the science fiction of the eighties will be, it probably will look very much like the science fiction of today as we live through it, but I am fairly certain of what the science fiction of the nineties will be," and then lays out the present publishing situation with acerbity and dead-on compression. Here are the niche publishers, the small press, the novelizations, the media licenses, the overtaking of science fiction by fantasy coldly noted ten years before the time; a train wreck (a train wreck for me, anyway) viewed in the distant offing and absolutely nothing to be done but to describe. Here is the marginalization of science fiction, which, as Norman Spinrad and I said in virtually the same words, was to become "A small special interest at science fiction conventions." Here is adumbrated the disappearance of a constantly replenished, knowledgeable fan base. Here, if you want to peer hard enough, is the disappearance of the magazine collector and the market for back-issues. Not bad for the time; science fiction is not, as I have been insisting for decades, a predictive medium, that was never its purpose . . . but nonetheless this was pretty good. It's about the only prediction through the book which was. (Told you it wasn't a predictive medium.)

Some of the book was written in elegiac mood; if not science fiction as I understood it, then at least my career was being mourned and I felt (note the introduction) that in some ways, not good ways, my career was paradigmatic of the arc of the category itself. Science fiction has produced remarkable work within its three-quarter-of-a-century category confines; "our first masterpieces began to appear in the late 1930s," as I wrote, and there have been many since then, right up unto the present day. But at the same time that the clichés, the hardware, the very language of science fiction have utterly permeated the scientific and popular culture (this was part of Disch's point) the category itself has become marginalized and perhaps the more arcane. The contents of a current issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine would be incomprehensible, I think, to most general readers; what is left of "true" science fiction has become utterly self-referential. I do not think that a general reader would have been as confused and put off by a 1947 or 1956 Astounding, a 1953 Galaxy as that general reader would be by the current IASFM; this is less true of Fantasy & Science Fiction only because that magazine by definition devotes some significant proportion of its contents to fantasy. Fantasy is more comprehensible to a general audience, as Judy-Lynn del Rey noted and can reach places and people that science fiction never can.

Engines of the Night, no less than its subject—historical category science fiction—is time-bound; it is a work of its time addressing its time. This is not necessarily a bad or even a limiting issue; as I noted in an anthology afterword some years before Engines, from great rigor can come the greatest freedom, from the most specific can come the most general; surely Herr Bach of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of the Fugue would agree, so would Big Ernie whose motto in the 1920s and 1930s might as well have been "Specify, specify; particularize." High mountains and dead leopards, that was Big Ernie, that is the science fiction propitiated by Engines; a high, cold, distant carcass; an emblem, a signatory like the book itself, the book a mark of how far at least one science fiction writer might go before he perished.

—December 16, 2001

Introduction to the

Original Edition

These essays were written by a man whose first science fiction story appeared in the late nineteen-sixties, who rose to minor prominence in the early to mid-seventies, watched his career suddenly (and not entirely on his own responsibility) plummet in the middle of the decade, and who spent the last of the seventies lurching toward the Bethlehem of 1980, not so much trying to be born again, as to assess the roughness of the beast. The career in many ways paralleled the arc of political and social consciousness through that period: the questioning of institutions and institutionally propounded insight, the rocking of those institutions, and then, after Nixon's eviction in the middle of the period, a speedy and effective counterrevolution which got some of us out of the temple right quick.

I have not had (I raise my right hand) the most successful or prominent career in science fiction in the seventies but I have had, I think, the most clearly symptomatic—the career which did indeed most survive in reaction to the larger political and social developments of that time. The perspective is peculiarly mine, of course; I make no claims for its universality. If anything, I argue the other way: for its particularity. No one right now could regard science fiction in quite this way.

Any of us who read or write in the field can make that statement, of course. We behold what we have become. But if there is any particular cachet to my perspective it comes because my career is, perhaps more than some, metaphoric.

And then, maybe it is not. My career is no way for a young science fiction writer; I am no model of a Modern Major General. Reading and writing a lot of science fiction over a long period (and long it has been) will if nothing else grant humility: modestly garbed in sackcloth and cosmeticized with ashes, I sally beyond the mirror at my own risk now and in only a modestly adventurous spirit.

But I never, as I kept on reminding myself through the decade, had possessed ambitions which were initially large-scale. Science fiction had not been much more than an experiment. How far could I go . . . what could I get done . . . what could I say . . . how much could I get through, before they caught on or caught up? was the basic question. What would science fiction do—not so much to the world, but to me?

I found out. Surely did.

—1980: New Jersey

The Number of the Beast

Well, what is it? Fifty experts—as the old Yiddish saying might have it—will produce fifty-one definitions. Still, we all try; here I am in Collier's Encyclopedia:

"Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history."

Workable and cautious, but it does not evade what could be called the Arrowsmith problem—Sinclair Lewis's novel, that is, which all of us science-fictioneers would instinctively agree is not of the genre, would probably fall into it under the terms of this definition. Certainly, technological (medical) change is an important aspect of this novel as are the effects of science upon the protagonist and his marriage. Clearly, my definition would also exclude some of the whimsical short stories of Robert Sheckley, whose bemused characters face the absurdities of a slightly disorienting metaphysics in the recognizable present: there is nothing technological about these stories, much less concern with technological change, and yet they appeared, most of them, in Horace Gold's Galaxy and fit indistinguishably into the format of that magazine. On the basis of this kind of work Sheckley was recognized in his early career as one of the most promising of the new writers. My definition would also exclude Randall Garrett's Darcy series, whose novels and novelette depict an alternate present in which magic has assumed the role of science and modern science never found its way into being discovered. Change, to be sure, but not technological change: here is genre science fiction that deals with technological absence.

Shrug, consider the bar bill, try Theodore Sturgeon's nineteen-forties dictum: a good science fiction story is one whose events would not have occurred without its scientific content. This is promising—among other things, it manages to summarize, for the decade, the essence of John W. Campbell's editorial vision in Astounding . . . but Anne McCaffrey's dragons could not fly in Sturgeon's science fiction and Sheckley's work, right through his great novel Dimension of Miracles, would not fit. Nor would the visions of J. G. Ballard and his descendants; if The Terminal Beach or The Drowned World are about anything, they are about a world in which science has failed and gone away . . . and yet the works of Ballard are considered central to any understanding of post-1960s science fiction.

James Tiptree's famous The Women Men Don't See has no science in it either, nor does Robert Silverberg's 1972 novel Dying Inside, generally regarded as one of the pivotal works of the decade. (It concerns a telepath, who has lived concealing his gift, slowly losing his powers in early middle age in contemporary New York.) Then, too, Sturgeon's definition would admit not only Arrowsmith but many novels about science—Morton Thompson's Not As a Stranger, Peter George's Red Alert, George P. Elliott's David Knudsen. Any definition so inclusive would obviously attenuate a category which, however ill-defined, is very clearly understood by its readers, writers, editors and critics to be a distinct and limited (if not really limiting) form of literature.

Perhaps one throws up one's hands and dives back to the fifties to Damon Knight's "Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say 'this is science fiction.'" Lots of truth in that; whatever trouble we may have with definitions, there is a consensual feeling among those of us who pretend to understand the form: McCaffrey's Dragonflight belongs in the genre and Arrowsmith does not. Check the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the bibliographies. Still, if Knight's path of implied least resistance is the way to go, I would prefer Frederik Pohl's useful, provocative, and contained: "Science fiction is a way of thinking about things."

Science fiction, then, is a methodology and an approach. Pohl is surely on the trail of something important here, and if one could define what that way of thinking about things is, one perhaps would come as close to a working definition of science fiction as will be needed to understand almost all of it. Let me have a try at this, noting my indebtedness to A. J. Budrys, who has prowled this corridor some, most notably in his introduction to John Varley's collection The Persistence of Vision.

Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure. What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn. It will be these changes—those imposed extrinsically by force—which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to).

Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives. When the aliens debark from their craft to deal with the colonization assignment, the saved and the unsaved, adulterous and chaste, psychoanalyzed and decompensated will be caught in their terrible tracer beams and absorb the common fate. When the last layer of protective ozone is burned out by International Terror & Trade, discussion leaders, the born again and the members of the American Psychological Association will all go together.

This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today. Because this vision is inimical to the middle class (which has been taught that increased self-realization is increased control), because it tends to trivialize if not actually mock the vision of the modern novel and drama (the shaping of experience is its explanation), genre science fiction has been in trouble in America from the outset. It has been perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of the culture. Science fiction has had a hearing from those who control access to the broad reading audience at only a few points in its history (I suggest 1946, 1957, and 1972) and in every case has been swiftly repudiated. The successful media science fiction of the seventies (most, though not all of it, debased adventure stories with crude science-fictional props) has forced literary science fiction into juxtaposition with the culture. The increase in readership funneled in by Star Trek and Star Wars has indicated that publishers will not permit it this time to go away . . . but science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago.

It is my assumption that it never will be. Science fiction is too threatening.

At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature. It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance. As the technology becomes more sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up—this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither—despite the hostility of the culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of most of its readers—neither will science fiction. It, if no given writer, will persist; will run, with the engines, the full disastrous course.

Some notes on how it ran and how it runs follow, at length and in humility.

—1980: New Jersey

L'Etat c'est moi

In mid-1969, as the recently appointed and juvenescent (twenty-nine is not an age, as the poet should have pointed out; it is a condition) editor of the Bulletin, the semimonthly publication of the then four-year-old Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), I wrote and published an editorial mildly critical of NASA's public relations and of the Apollo project itself. It was written in reminiscence of the December 1968 mission captained by Frank Borman in which the moon was circled and Genesis liberally quoted; the invocation of the Old Testament seemed to me a failure of church/state separation and also an interference with what might have been private responses to a voyage which struck me as overridingly significant and mystical. I said all of this in a rather halting fashion (I did not then have much of a handle on the personal essay) and kept it to a decent four hundred words and devoted the remainder of that issue, once again, to market reports, contract summaries and communications amongst SFWA members, most of whom appeared to be not greatly enamored of one another.

Cries of pain and rage descended as if by parachute upon the modest premises in New York where the hapless publication and hapless remarks had been prepared. They descended also upon the quarters of the SFWA officers and trustees and these worthies, conferring shortly thereafter, decided and rapidly informed me that my services in science fiction were more urgently needed elsewhere and right away . . . I should immediately become a full-time writer in this field, that was to say, Would I please? Now? Write only fiction, that was to say. Clearly the officers did not wish the editorship of the Bulletin to interfere with my burgeoning career, and I was sent on my way from that volunteer position with due regard and extreme haste. (I thought at the time that to be fired as a volunteer was some kind of low, but learned as the years went on that science fiction offered humiliations more intricate and absolute.)

Why? I hear a question from the back. What's going on? I'm kind of new here; why did they fire you for what you call a few mild anti-NASA, anti-Borman remarks? NASA went down the tubes a long time ago and Borman's working for an airline, isn't he? On television commercials and all that. Everybody knows that Apollo didn't play downtown. You were speaking for the majority. Unless, of course, those remarks weren't so mild. You always had a tendency to underestimate your effect on people.

Well, maybe I did. Point conceded. Nonetheless, let me tell this in my own way; it is a shade elliptical but in the end all will come clear, as the widow said to the bishop. My correspondents seemed in the main to think of science fiction as a kind of research and development arm of a technology administered by the government.

To them—and they represented the SFWA at the time and probably now, although the focus of the argument has shifted—the field was not so much to be an arena of exploration and debate (as many of us who came into science fiction in the sixties had been encouraged by the climate of the times and Michael Moorcock to think) as it was Gernsback's Flowering—it existed to popularize technological advance, to dazzle the unsophisticated public with visions of the machinery and miracles to come. That was what Gernsback wanted, all right (with the secondary ambition of interesting young men in science as a career—and however Hugo may have failed in that secondary aim, we now know that he succeeded completely with the first).

Of course I had taken a different view. (I usually do.) I thought at the time that I spoke for many readers and writers. The evolution of the field literarily and stylistically through the thirties and forties and the introduction (almost from the outset of Campbell's editorship) of a strong dystopian element in speculation (which Horace Gold seized and brought to the center of the field) had led me to feel by 1969 that it was late in the day indeed, and that science fiction had a more important role to play in the culture than to serve as a cheerleader for technological advance. I thought that NASA was the public relations arm of the scientific establishment. I thought that both were pimping for Johnson's slut of a war tucked away (so Johnson hoped) in the back district. I thought a lot of things.

I also feel, more than a decade later, that I was right, that my attitude in time prevailed not only in the country but in the field itself; that my attitude was symptomatic of much of the serious work done in the decade . . . but I am also sure that I misjudged the feelings of most of the writers and all of the editors. These people did not regard science fiction so much as a speculative medium as one functional to the prevailing standards of the culture.

There was fear in those letters. One correspondent who worked for the space industry felt that his job was threatened, that he might actually lose it if the Bulletin reached his superiors, who would find him the member of an organization whose official voice questioned their practices. (He might have been right.) The fear was less personally based elsewhere but no less palpable: where did I get off knocking NASA and the government, the President and Borman, the church and the Bible for heaven's sake, just when the Apollo project and the enormous attention it garnered were on the verge of making science fiction an acceptable pursuit?

This was a core argument. It was not hard for me to understand it even at the time. For decades, science fiction readers and writers had been regarded by the academic/literary nexus and the media as a bizarre group, aficionados of the subliterate obsessed by the arcane; now Borman and the boys were making all those crazy stories appear somewhat predictive.

Just at the point where a science fiction writer might finally get a hearing at the universities or by a Hollywood agent, an official voice was railing against their great patron. Didn't I—well, didn't I understand how it used to be? Didn't I remember how the magazines went to rout in the fifties and how for decades a science fiction writer could not even be regarded as a writer by the most miserable graduate assistant in English?

Didn't I remember how academically connected writers had been forced to publish under pseudonyms in the forties because revelation of their sf orientation to the department head might have threatened their position? Didn't I remember those two-cent-a-word (at the top) magazine rates and $500 all-rights book contracts?

What was wrong with me, anyway? If I had objections to the spirit or public relations of the project, why didn't I put them in my bag of pretensions and where the moon don't shine? Was I out to destroy science fiction? If science fiction appeared in the position of speaking against NASA or Apollo, what man in the street would ever take us seriously again? One correspondent attacked not my arguments but my grammar. Another suggested that I was merely jealous. (I had a few defenders but they came in late and semiapologetic. First Amendment and all that.)

So, tossed out, I went away at least from the Bulletin (eventually I went away from the SFWA but that is another, less interesting and symptomatic issue, and sometime later I even came back but that is the least interesting of all), but I took from the experience a not unenduring lesson. (Hard spankings are meant to do this, I kindly told my daughter: make you remember.) That lesson has been further articulated in the Collected Works—and a good thing too, since we all must write from experience and almost every full-time writer is shorter on it than he would like to admit.

The lesson was this:

Science fiction, for all its trappings, its talk of "new horizons" and "new approaches" and "thinking things through from the beginning" and "new literary excitement," is a very conservative form of literature. It is probably more conservative than westerns, mysteries, or gothics, let alone that most reactionary of all literatures, pornography. Most of its writers and editors are genuinely troubled by innovative styles or concepts at the outset, because they have a deep stake by the time they have achieved any position in the field in not appearing crazy. This was certainly true in 1969 when the field was still a minor if marginally respectable genre. It is more true yet at the beginning of the eighties when it has become, for a concatenation of factors, perhaps the most predictably profitable part of the publishing subdivisions of many conglomerates and when licensing of Star Trek or the Lucas properties is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The conservative nature of science fiction today is no longer an intimation, not even a standard. It is a necessity.

Very difficult to squeeze the innovative stuff into the category anymore. Not impossible—note Benford, Varley, Gotschalk, X, Y and Z—but hard as hell. Why bother, eh Carter? How can you—how can I—take it seriously anymore?

—1979/1980: New Jersey

I Could Have Been a Contender,

Part One

Revisionist canon now holds that science fiction would have had a different—and superior—history if Hugo Gernsback, by creating Amazing Stories in 1926, had not ghettoized the genre, reduced it on the spot to a small asylum plastered with murals of ravening aliens carrying off screaming women in wondrous machines from a burning city and thus made it impossible for serious critics, to say nothing of serious writers, to have anything to do with it. After all, in the early part of the century novels of the speculative and fantastic were part of the literature; the Munsey magazines ran futuristic adventure serials all the time, and Hawthorne and Melville were writing fantasies or absurdist speculation without any damage to their literary credibility.

It simply could have gone on that way, the revisionists suggest; science fiction would not have been thrown into a charnel house which it would spend four decades trying to escape, seeking that respectability and acceptance it had possessed before Gernsback defined it and made it live by its worst examples and most debased audience.

The argument has a certain winsome charm—I believed it myself when I was but a wee lad, and some of our best or better minds hold to it right now—but is flawed. At the risk of aligning myself with Hugo Gernsback, a venal and small-minded magazine publisher whose reprehensible practices, long since detailed, were contemptible to his contributors, partners, and employees, I think that he did us a great service and that were it not for Gernsback, science fiction as we understand it would not exist. We would have—as we do—the works of fabulation in the general literature—Coover, Barthelme, Barth, and DeLillo—but of the category which gave us More Than Human, The Demolished Man, Foundation and Empire, Dying Inside, The Dispossessed, and Rogue Moon we would have nothing, and hence these works would not exist. It is possible that some of these writers, who were inspired to write science fiction by a childhood of reading, would never have published at all.

"Science fiction builds on science fiction," Asimov said once, and that truth is at the center of the form. Before Gernsback gave it a name (he called it "scientifiction," but close enough; Ackerman a few years later cast out a syllable), the literature did not exist; before he gave it a medium of exclusivity, its dim antecedents were scattered through the range of popular and restricted writing without order, overlap, or sequence. It was the creation of a label and a medium which gave the genre its exclusivity and a place in which it could begin that dialogue, and it was the evolution of magazine science fiction—slowly over the first decade, more rapidly after the ascension of Campbell—that became synonymous with the evolution of the field.

Only the rigor and discipline of the delimited can create art. Musicologists considering Bach, who worked within desperately restrictive format, will concur as will those considering the sonata form. The sonnet and the eight-bar chorus of almost all popular song and operetta give similar testimony. It was the very restraint with which science fiction was cloaked from the outset which gave the genre its discipline and force. Without the specialized format of the magazines, where science fiction writers and readers could dwell, exchange, observe one another's practices and build upon one another's insight, the genre could not have developed.

The first-generation science fiction writers—those whom Gernsback, Harry Bates, and F. Orlin Tremaine brought into Amazing and Astounding after their small stock of recycled Wells and Verne had been used—worked under the most generalized influence and without canon: their work showed it. The second generation—those identified with Campbell—was composed of people who had grown up reading the early science fiction and were prepared to build upon it. The third generation, coming in the nineteen-fifties, was composed of writers who had correspondingly more sources and possibilities (and also a larger stock of ideas already proved unworkable or exhausted), and the increasing subtlety and complexity of the form through their years testifies once again to, as it were, the influence of influence . . . upon influence.

Science fiction, as John W. Campbell once pointed out expansively, may indeed outdo all of the so-called mainstream because it gathers in all of time and space . . . but science fiction as it has evolved is an extraordinarily rigorous and delimiting medium. Like the canon and the fugue, the sonnet and the sonata, like haiku, it has its rules, and ß interface, characteriological attempt to resolve the conflicts between the two: this is science fiction.

The fact pervades all the decades after about 1935: no one could publish science fiction unless exposed to a great deal of it; virtually everyone who has ever sold a story has a sophisticated reader's background in the form, usually acquired just before or around adolescence. At the underside, this has led to parochialism, incestuousness, and the preciosity of decadence (and there has been too much). In the end it may even be these qualities which finish science fiction off, make its most sophisticated and advanced examples increasingly inaccessible to the larger reading audience. But whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium and for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsback, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.

—1980: New Jersey

Anonymity & Empire

To the American literary community—to the American arts establishment—the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the first half of the decade, almost no books at all: no anthologies, no reprints, no second-serial rights. Novels and stories were written for genre magazines of limited circulation, were published and went out of print, presumably forever. Asimov has written that everything about his career after 1946 came as a surprise; he had no idea at the time he was writing "Nightfall," "Foundation," or the robotics series that this work would live beyond the issues of the magazines in which they appeared. This did not bother him (it might have bothered others) at all: what purpose did science fiction have except to live briefly and die forever in the magazines for kids? There was sufficient reward in becoming part of the ongoing literature. The Queens Science Fiction League was certainly not the world, but for the young Asimov its approval and awe were all that he could have asked.

It must be understood that in certain respects science fiction was no different for its writers, offered nothing less, than did the other branches of popular literature. It was pulp and appeared in the torrent of pulp magazines which by the hundreds got on in various degrees of health until wartime paper shortages and, finally, the curse of television put almost all of them in the ground by the beginning of the fifties. Western and romance writers, adventure and sports pulpeteers, also worked for a half cent to two cents a word and knew that when the magazines went off sale their work would never be seen by a nonrelative or nonlover again. (Mystery writers did have a small book market but in the pre-Mystery Writers of America days only a vanishingly small percentage of magazine work could in expanded form find a book market—and advances, averaging around $250 even for first-rank writers like Woolrich, were an insignificant part of their income.) The difference between science fiction writers and those of the other pulp genres, however, was that science fiction writers took their work seriously, put far more into it psychically and were writing (because of the dominant presence of Campbell) to a consistently higher standard, an imposed rigor and specialized background. It was impossible, then as now, to write science fiction without the most intimate reading knowledge of the form, simply because the field was advancing so quickly in its language and devices that each story either made a direct contribution to the ongoing literature or risked rejection on the basis that it did not.

Surely—I defer to my sometime collaborator Bill Pronzini here with whom I have discussed the issue—western, romance, sports, and certainly mystery writers might have been no less serious about their work, no less dedicated or professional. They certainly were not their inferiors technically, and the anonymity must have had profound effects upon them no less than upon the science fiction writers.

But almost all the science fiction writers were specialists. If they did not have a thorough working knowledge of the literature and the cutting edge, they did not survive. By 1940, very few of the science fiction writers who had been in Astounding prior to Campbell were still there; others had been thrown out and their names—Schachner, Schopeflin, Cummings—were legion. They had been evicted not through Campbellian malice but because they were either unable or unwilling to meet his editorial demands.

Campbell did better—felt that he had no alternative, really—by bringing in writers who had no sales background or alternate markets at all so that he could work with them from the outset . . . and because they had no alternate markets, they were less inclined to put up a battle against Campbell's demands.

Most of the pre-Campbell writers were pulp generalists who wrote through the entire range of fiction magazines and for whom science fiction constituted only a small percentage of output. Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat, for instance, were enormously prolific and successful pulp writers; science fiction was only 10 percent of their output (and after their eviction less than that), but ironically they are remembered now only for their science fiction. Lester del Rey in his time did a fair amount for the confessions and sports magazines, but most of the first Campbell generation—Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, de Camp—wrote little else. (The Kuttners under their own names and a plethora of pseudonyms wrote a great deal of fantasy but did not appear, as far as can be determined, to any extent in the other category magazines. The Kuttners, however, knew where to bury all the bodies.)

The rigor of the medium, demands of the market, and anonymity in which the work was done must have had their effect upon these writers. Asimov's feelings are known, but one can only surmise what science fiction did to the Kuttners, who were turning in work like "Vintage Season," "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "Shock," "When the Bough Breaks" for a cent and a half a word; what science fiction did to van Vogt, who was turning out over two hundred thousand words of it a year working sixteen hours a day in a small apartment (and doing some confession stories too); what science fiction meant to Heinlein, who wrote Sixth Column for about $900 and "By His Bootstraps" and "Universe" for maybe $300 each—all of these writers putting out this work without an inkling that it would ever appear again or be read by other than the young core audience for the magazines.

In a sense this anonymity may have been liberating—one of the benefits of writing without a sense of posterity or audience may be a great and abounding freedom, the conviction that since what one is doing really does not matter one can, accordingly, do anything one wants—and the texts and commentaries of the time indicate that to a degree all the writers felt this way. It was a new kind of fiction being written in a different fashion; the knowledge that it was breakthrough literature of a sort might have been comforting to writers who could rationalize that what they did was too ambitious for a mass audience. Nonetheless, the record makes clear that almost all of this generation were finished by the end of the decade and looking for other things to do. Heinlein had turned (after a few stories for Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, the first mass-magazine science fiction in decades) to the juvenile book market and was writing on contract for Scribner's with only a few "adult" novels—The Puppet Masters, Double Star, The Door into Summer—serialized in the magazines. L. Ron Hubbard with A. E. van Vogt and Katherine MacLean had disappeared into the Dianetics Institute, from which the latter two emerged to write again only a decade and a half later. L. Sprague de Camp turned to nonfiction, juveniles, and a scattering of fantasy and was a small factor in fifties science fiction. Asimov had taken a doctorate in biochemistry, and in 1949, after a few months of excruciating ambivalence, took a full-time teaching position at Boston University (the controlling aspect of his decision being that he had never made nor had any reason to believe that he could ever make a living from science fiction).1

The Kuttners had returned to school at USC, seeking undergraduate degrees in psychology and then going on to graduate work; Henry did a series of mysteries for Harper's but with the exception of "Humpty Dumpty" (finishing off the series published immediately thereafter by Ballantine as Mutant), never appeared in Astounding in the decade and only once in Galaxy (and once in Fantasy and Science Fiction). Del Rey and Sturgeon stayed in the hunt but changed their markets, Sturgeon publishing only one story in ASF in the nineteen-fifties and del Rey a bare scattering. The creation and expansion of the book market for science fiction, the restoration to print (in certain cases highly remunerative) of the work written in anonymity must have been highly gratifying to these writers, but it appeared to inspire none of them to return to the steady production of science fiction. An entire new generation—one could say several generations—of science fiction writers were needed to pursue the vastly expanded category in the fifties and of course they presented themselves. Among them were the finest writers who had ever worked in the form, and collectively they gave science fiction its great decade.

But the first Campbell generation did not play a significant role in the science fiction of the fifties. Nor did Campbell: he stayed behind, doing exactly as he had been doing; but science fiction had been taken from him and, as the decade went on, surely he knew it. His magazine began to enact his increasing bewilderment and recrimination. The price the forties had imposed had been exacted; the battle had, long after the fact, been won . . . but only after the writers had ceased to fight. This late outcome from early and lonely struggle must have been the true bitterness of the decade for these writers, and why so very few of them, although relatively young long after the decade, were unable to reproduce their best work.

Anonymity is at least an openness of promise; outcome, whatever it may be, is a weight upon the heart.

—1980: New Jersey

I Don't Know How to Put It Love But I'll Surely Surely Try

Back in the innocent early seventies when it became a regular program item at the science fiction conventions, the panel on Sex and Science Fiction was a draw, guaranteed to get the audience not only awake but in motion before noon. That was a long time ago, to be sure; now the topic has subdivided like a maddened amoeba: fragmented into panels on Homophobia in Science Fiction, Feminism in Science Fiction, Stereotyped Images of Intercourse in Science Fiction, Phallic and Breast Imagery—it is quite enough to unsettle the mind of an aging man who grew up in this field on a diet of Catherine Tarrant's judiciously copy-edited Astounding. I can barely cope.

Nonetheless, writers being either sharply ahead or seriously behind their time (usually both and simultaneously), I am just about ready now to address the subject of sex in science fiction. It occurred to me sometime in 1976 that I had spent most of the decade up until then locked in a room typing, and when I stumbled out blinking it was with the feeling that I would have to be slowly and gently reacquainted with the world. The adolescent lunge as free after-care clinic. So it is the generality with which I must deal.

Most of my contemporaries have already had their says^2 on the issue (on the Sunday morning panels not unaided by raucous shouts from the audience and bottles of beer) and now it is, as Clifford Irving did not entitle his "authorized" biography of Howard Hughes, My Turn.

Sex in science fiction. Well, then. Sex in the literature of science fiction? Or in the lives of the respective writers? Or—modesty makes one tremble—in the conventions and other social events of the field? These are significant topics, each of them, and together they induce a collective sense of woe. To deal with all within the space of a single essay not only would be an accomplishment of thundering magnitude but would be to take clinical depression to its next logical step, mania and the beginnings of acting out. A middle-aged suburbanite had best watch himself.

Accept delimitation, accept the Hemingway theory that the power comes not from what is said but what is unsaid; accept one's condition and discuss sex in the literature of science fiction.

One can inaugurate the conference by saying that until about 1952 in American genre science fiction there was none at all. There was heavily masked, coded, templated (that last, now fashionable academese) sex to be sure: aliens carrying off women in the pulp magazines, men carried off by or carrying off machines in Astounding; men beat up on one another quite a bit in all the publications and women stood in an odd relationship to technology, usually failing to understand it.

This undertext could be explained by the merest undergraduate in Psychology 5, Introduction to Human Development, but not until Philip Jose Farmer and Sam Mines conspired as author and editor to publish The Lovers and its semisequels in Startling Stories did sexuality as an important human drive having the power to motivate, enlighten, damage, or dignify become incorporated into a genre which had already existed as a discrete subcategory for more than a quarter of a century, three hundred and twenty-five months of magazine issues, perhaps twelve thousand stories of varying lengths in which not once did anything resembling carnal knowledge occur onstage. Never.

Twenty-seven years of asceticism are not easy to deny in life as well as art. Carnality may whisk one through the barriers in an instant, but the implications often are not understood for many years. The Lovers was well-received—Mines, doubtless to his relief, got away with it clean and Farmer published a few semisequels (Mother, and Open to Me My Sister)—but matters otherwise remained unchanged. In 1958, Theodore Sturgeon was able to smuggle in cautious intimations of homosexuality and the polymorphous perverse, and nothing less than sexual passion is the lever that makes Budrys's Rogue Moon go, but as late as 1965, science fiction was still a genre which in the main denied the existence, let alone the extent, of human sexuality.

(It became a grim or frivolous game for some of the writers who were, of course, not fools, to see what they could slip by without editorial knowledge or consent. One famously was able to get through J. W. Campbell and Kay Tarrant a description of a tomcat as a "ball-bearing mousetrap" and Asimov's 1951 "Hostess" in Galaxy reeked of the perversity of sexual attraction between an alien diplomat and a repressed academic's wife but these triumphs were few and, more to the point, unnoticed. If they had attracted wide attention, the writers would have paid the price.)

All of this began to end at last with Michael Moorcock's publication in the British New Worlds, to whose editorship he had acceded after Ted Carnell, of work by writers like Ballard and Aldiss and Langdon Jones which made frank use of sexual motifs. Two years later, in 1967, Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions delivered in the form of an original anthology thirty-three stories allegedly unpublishable in the magazine markets, almost half of them dealing with sexuality as the central theme. The book was successful and opened the way for many writers and anthologists who went and did likewise. In 1968 in Galaxy, Robert Silverberg was able to get "fuck you" into the sacrosanct pages by putting it in the binarese of a horny and demented computer. (In early 1970 Silverberg got The Word itself into Galaxy right after Harlan Ellison put "shit" into F & SF and just before I slid "cocksucker" into Fantastic.)3

By the beginning of the nineteen-seventies, novels of great or relative explicitness (Silverberg's Dying Inside, The Second Trip, and The World Inside, my own Beyond Apollo) bore the label of category science fiction. Short stories in original anthologies edited by Silverberg, Knight, Harrison, and Carr were also using sexual material. Galaxy continued to run sexually explicit work and by the mid-seventies copulation and masturbation had even made their way into Ben Bova's Analog. By the start of the eighties, although the Promised Land was not outside these windows last time I looked (Moskowitz and I both know that the Promised Land was sacked, looted, and cleaned to the ground by 1938 at the latest), the science fiction writer, particularly the science fiction novelist, began to deal with sexuality in the same freedom that could be applied to technology, apocalypse, political repression, or bigotry a quarter of a century ago.

Why was sexuality so late in arriving? Why was the capacity to depict its full range in fact practically the last element to reach the genre, long after it had become in all other ways a viable literary medium?

The explanation is directly related to the general age of sf readership. Science fiction has always been a genre the majority of whose readers are young. Perhaps nine tenths of them are under twenty-five, close to fifty percent under sixteen. The young are exposed to parental and social sanctions of the most unpleasant sort. Playboy could break the distribution patterns and drag hundreds of imitators through the mesh, but the magazines (and until the sixties science fiction was a magazine genre) were at the mercy of magazine distributors whose wives and children (distributors being able neither to read nor write) felt that science fiction was to be aseptic. The covers were a sell but inside, where the truth lurked, the aliens' designs were simple and wholesome. They sought not to copulate but to kill.

Almost all science fiction published in book form prior to 1965 had appeared previously in the magazines, and almost all the science fiction therein was produced by writers and editors with at least an eye and a half on the whims of the magazine distributors who simply did not want to take chances with products which were (unlike the high-priced Playboy) marginally profitable, nickel-and-diming. One distributor pullout could topple a magazine; if the publisher had a chain his entire line might be endangered.

Accordingly, a kind of least common denominator applied to magazine science fiction: if a given story could be perceived as giving potential offense to anyone, it was the path of least resistance to reject or at least edit it heavily. Catherine Tarrant at ASF and Horace Gold at Galaxy notably did so. Under the circumstances, the remarkable fact was that The Lovers sold at all—and it did, of course, appear in one of the low-paying and marginal pulp magazines of its era, a magazine so endangered already that it went out of business (through no fault of Farmer) less than two years later.

Still and in sum it is now the eighties and science fiction has not only caught on, it has caught up. The dear old field has made all of the changes and is, in the view of many of its critics (not all of them aged), no less dirty than any other branch of modern literature. The critics mutter and murmur but many of their own icons, writers who were models of restraint, have fallen off the wagon in recent years and resolved to show Harlan Ellison and Langdon Jones a couple of things.

Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves has a central section which is about nothing if not exclusively sex, and Robert Heinlein's three most recent novels, The Number of the Beast, Time Enough for Love, and I Will Fear No Evil, are not only about sex but about sexual perversity and its endless lacunae; they are quarter-million-word investigations of subjects—transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, copulation—which even Hubert Selby, Jr., or Henry Miller would not treat so obsessively. (There are entire sentences in Tropic of Cancer which have nothing at all to do with sex. Selby in Last Exit to Brooklyn went on for paragraphs.)

On balance—the panel draws to a close, the participants look wearily at the clock and the audience is shuffling in place and waving hands; sorry, no questions folks, we can hardly bear to go on even when left to ourselves—the question of sex in science fiction is one which seems to have been resolved, by simple majority, in favor of sex. The issue is important now in historical, not textual, perspective.

And that is where the real critical work of the next half century is going to be done; it will address the bigger questions. To what degree did the practical taboos under which it functioned as a form of popular literature alter science fiction? Science fiction has been regarded by the universities for a long time as a debased if energetic form of popular literature—but how much of that debasement was imposed rather than intrinsic? To what degree, in fact, may science fiction be seen as victim rather than perpetrator of its greatest weaknesses? How much false characterization, contrived plotting, coy retreat, dissimulation was forced upon writers who were working in a field which made their work contemptible to them if they were to do it at all?

In short—and this is no small point—science fiction may not have been populated by bad writers or editors but by extraordinarily good examples who, functioning under taboos which would have destroyed those less capable, were able to do more than the distributors, the wholesalers and the audience ever suspected. Science fiction, viewed from this context, might be conceived as a kind of difficult tribute to the human spirit, a monument to cunning.

And then again, it might not. It would be easier perhaps to stand with and for the Kazins and Howes, Abrahams and Charyns to argue that it was (is!) junk about people without genitals for kids of all ages who could barely read or bear to think.

But I do not think so.

I think that in its damages lies its magnificence.

I think that in those necessities suspired the truth.

—1979/1980: New Jersey

Memoir from Grub Street

I edited Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories, bimonthly science fiction magazines, from April 1968 to October 1968; it was not the best of times but was hardly the worst either (although in my youthful exuberance I then thought it was). I was the magazines' only employee, edited them from my bedroom, delivered the copy-edited, blurbed manuscripts to the printer, proofed the galleys. Art and layout were handled by the publisher from his home, the publisher assuming more expertise in these areas (he had to be right) than I. Eventually, a dispute over control of the art—I commissioned a couple of covers but the publisher did not want to use them and I threatened to quit if he didn't—caused me to be fired by telephone on a Sunday afternoon just as the Giants were about to score a touchdown (prophetically they did not), but that is not the subject of this essay nor is my salary ($100 a month to start, merit increases up to $150 right before the end), nor is my self-image at the time as the logical successor to Hugo Gernsback, T. O'Conor Sloane, Raymond Palmer and Paul Fairman. I was quite young.

Amazing, after Ziff-Davis publishers precipitately dumped it and its miserable sister in 1965 because of declining sales (although their last editor, Cele L. Goldsmith, was certainly the best magazine editor extant then), had fallen upon desperate times; the publisher had acquired it, if not for a song, at least for a medley, and it was his hope to float it along by access to the magazine's backlist (Ziff-Davis had purchased all serial rights, granting unlimited reprint). Joseph Ross was his first editor, Harry Harrison unhappily the second and I ambivalently the third: only when Ted White began his ten-year stewardship and commenced to make real inroads on the publisher's obduracy did the publication or its companion have any impact again.

No, my editorship was of little moment and although I was able to find and publish some expert work (Lafferty's "This Grand Carcass," "Yet," Wodhams' Try Again, Richard C. Meredith's first novel, We All Died at Breakaway Station), I never thought of myself as much more than an adequate editor. I was able to separate good from bad and publish the better; this seemed the minimum requirement but I have subsequently learned that in contemporary publishing it is the last. My tenure was obviously too short to matter and the circulation of the magazines—possibly 24,000—would guarantee that whatever I did would be at the margins of a marginal field.

The real point of this reminiscence has to do with the submissions I faced and how they were handled, and it is this which might have relevance now. Consider the situation: Amazing and Fantastic were magazines at the bottom of the extant market. Unlike all the others, they paid on or after publication and, with a single exception (Tom Disch's literary agent fought like a trooper), paid a top rate of two cents a word. They were necessarily perceived by any writer at any level as publications to be placed on the absolute bottom of the list; I would see only what Playboy, Analog, Galaxy, Worlds of If, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Venture, and New Worlds had rejected.4

Nonetheless, the magazines which at that time were publishing only 12,000 words of original material an issue—three stories of average length or a long novelette and a short one—received through the six months of my tenure an average of one hundred manuscripts a week. The scripts came from unknown and unpublished writers in preponderance, of course, but at least 25 percent of them, week after week, were signed by recognized names: some of them, like Leiber or Lafferty, at the top of the market as then constituted; others, like Wodhams, Koontz, Meredith, or David R. Bunch, well in the middle range.

Most of the manuscripts were, to be sure, not publishable, but 15 percent of them (and more than half of those turned in by the professionals) were, and at least a third of that 15 percent, or five manuscripts a week, were outstanding. It is no exaggeration to recall that I received throughout my editorship sixty stories a month which by any standard I could ascertain were as good as or better than anything published in the competing magazines.

I was only able, because of space limitations, to buy perhaps twenty of those stories and perhaps another fifteen which were of lesser standard, which means that I rejected consciously about forty stories which were better than some I bought.5 The word rate in all cases but that of Leiber and Disch was a penny a word on publication or shortly thereafter and all of the writers, every one of them, were glad to accept the terms. The stories were published, one of them (the Lafferty) was in a best-of-the-year collection and a couple more wound up in author collections.

The remainder vanished.

I think of this now and then, think of it in a time when the magazine market is even more constricted and when there are close to a thousand (instead of the five hundred) writers eligible for membership in the SFWA and at least some definition of professionalism. If sixty publishable short stories a month were of necessity being rejected by a bottom-line, penny-a-word market at that time, exactly what is going on now? Worlds of If and Galaxy are gone, Amazing under a new ownership is producing six issues a year (Fantastic is gone), Venture is gone, Playboy no longer does science fiction. Omni and Isaac Asimov's have appeared, of course, but the overall market is still in debit and there are almost twice as many professional writers, to say nothing of the hordes of creative-writing majors of the seventies driven toward science fiction because the quality lit market no longer exists. And there are the usual host of science fiction fans/readers led naturally through their experience to attempt to write.

What is being lost now? How many stories in oblivion, how many careers unable to begin?

What can there be for all of these writers? The field needs—

Forget the field for the moment. We owe the field little at this point. What is the cost to these people of all of that failure and bitterness?

—1980: New Jersey

The Fifties

Harry Harrison, who himself only got really going at the end, called the decade the false spring of science fiction, and Robert Sheckley, whose active early career corresponded almost exactly with the decade, shook his head when we talked about it in 1973 and said, "Well, I squeezed a couple of happy years at the beginning, anyway." James Gunn got a portion of his master's thesis into one of the fifty magazines that were published at some point during those years and at least twenty science fiction writers, it might have been forty, were making an accountant's wage from their trade. By 1960 it was all gone and it was five bleak years and another country before science fiction began to look hopeful again. Now, although some of the writers are still puttering around (and some like Fred Pohl, A. J. Budrys, and Alfred Bester are having significant new careers) it all seems at a great remove—surely as frozen in time, as historical to the younger writers of this day, as the early Gernsback era seemed to my generation. And most of the work, most of the writers, need rediscovery. Many will surely never achieve it.

What happened? A lot happened. The historical theory of synchronicity was demonstrated at the end of the decade as never elsewhere before the era of the assassinations began. When it happens, it all happens together, in short. The massive American News Service (ANS), responsible for magazine distribution, was ruled a monopoly and into forced divestiture. Twenty magazines perished in 1958, and the sales of the leaders were halved. These magazines could not reach the newsstands in sufficient numbers. The audience could not find them. But the audience had already diminished; it had never been large enough to support more than a few successful magazines, a few continuing book lines, and Sputnik in 1957 had made science fiction appear, to the fringe audience, bizarre, arcane, irrelevant. There were dangerous matters going on now in near space but the sophisticated, rather decadent form which genre science fiction had become had little connection with satellites in close orbit.

And other things. Henry Kuttner and Cyril M. Kornbluth died within a month of each other in early 1958. Kuttner, one of the five major figures of the previous decade,6 had left science fiction but was constantly reprinted and was only forty-four. Kornbluth, a decade younger, was indisputably at the top rank. These sudden, shattering deaths—one from a heart attack in sleep, the other from a stroke or heart attack—made a number of their contemporaries question the very sense of their careers. What had all of this gotten Kuttner and Kornbluth? "I was only twenty-three, then," Silverberg said, "but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months." Dead, these writers, after ten or twenty years in the word-rate-on-acceptance mills.

By 1959, Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, had decided to join his founding coeditor, J. Francis McComas, in the semiretirement of freelancing and H. L. Gold was getting out too. Gold, editor of Galaxy, had been literally paralyzed by war-induced agoraphobia; unable to leave his apartment or carry on the semblance of a normal social life, he had been deteriorating for many years, and a period of hospitalization (on a rare, terrified sally out of doors he was struck by a car) convinced him that he could continue editing no longer. Fred Pohl had already been running the magazine ex officio; he took over the title too. And by 1959 only a few steady book markets for science fiction remained. Unplanned, imitative overproduction for an audience imagined larger than it was, the curse of science fiction publishing then as now, had resulted in many publishing catastrophes and only Ace, Doubleday, and Ballantine remained as steady outlets for all but the very few writers such as Heinlein and Clarke who had broken out of the category.

John W. Campbell at Astounding had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean's Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rick Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to ASF in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.

An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field's "new literary merit," "new relevance," "new excitement," "new standards of contemporaneity" as if nothing innovative had occurred before Ballard or Silverberg. Yet, as that second and less significant false spring of the late sixties and seventies also ebbs, the true dimensions of the fifties reappear, however distantly, across the murky waters. Time to reconsider.

Some historical background: at the end of the nineteen-forties, science fiction accounted for perhaps fifty books, hardcover and paperback, published commercially in a year. The field supported perhaps seven magazines, only one of which, Astounding, paid decent word rates (two cents a word on acceptance) or was read by other than a juvenile audience. Five years later, there were forty magazines fighting for space on the newsstands, hardcover and paperback novels and collections were coming out at the rate of two to three hundred a year, and one book editor, Donald A. Wollheim at Ace, was publishing more science fiction in a month than had appeared in all of 1943. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, appearing first in late 1949 and Galaxy, the first issue dated October 1950, were well-financed, carefully edited projects intended to offer Astounding serious competition, and by the inclusion of a wider range of style and thematic approach they sought an expansion of the audience itself. They succeeded at once—Galaxy was to outsell Astounding almost from its inception through the next five years; Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning as a quarterly Magazine of Fantasy, went bimonthly and added sf within a year and then, as its natural audience found it, became a monthly in early 1952—and behind them, entrepreneurs picking up the scent, came a clutch of magazines. Some, like Cosmos, Space, or Rocket Stories, lasted only a few issues, others like Worlds of If or Science Fiction Adventures held through various ownerships for longer, but through 1958 although magazines would collapse, new ones would spring. The growth of the field in a spectral minute was remarkable. In 1953 there were forty or fifty times the outlets for science fiction that had existed five years earlier.

Writers who had struggled with varying degrees of success through the bleak, building years—Sturgeon, Blish, Simak—found to their astonishment that they could almost make a living. A new generation of writers who had grown up under the influence of the Campbell decade were able to leap from late adolescence into full-time freelance writing careers: Budrys, Sheckley, Dick, Gunn, Knight. The enormous expansion of the market was further signified by the fact that the three most prolific writers of the forties, Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and van Vogt, backed away from science fiction to go into other careers^7 and that Heinlein, working on a long series of successful quasijuveniles for Scribner, abandoned short stories entirely as did L. Sprague de Camp, who concentrated on nonfiction.

It was a pretty good time for Francis E. Walter, General Motors, Mitch Miller's Columbia Records popular division and science fiction alike. Some of the field's historians (notably Fred Pohl in a 1975 essay "Golden Ages Gone Away") do not see these factors as unrelated; Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction were among the very few mass markets where, sufficiently masked, an antiauthoritarian statement could be published. There are rumors of professors and engineers trapped in the academies or industry who turned to the science fiction magazines and both read and wrote for them (pseudonymously) avidly as absolutely the only medium where the policies and procedures of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy were explicated fully and mocked. Cyril M. Kornbluth in a 1957 symposium spoke of the hundreds of people in advertising who had thanked him and Fred Pohl in desperation for publishing the only novel, The Space Merchants, that told the truth about their industry and what it wanted the world to be. (Kornbluth added characteristically that of course, for all these thanks and testimonials, the novel had not changed its target medium to the slightest degree: advertising was exactly what it had been and so, to be sure, was Cyril Kornbluth.)

One has to continue, however, by discussing what kind of work was being done to occupy the space that the publishers in their enthusiasm or simple greed had created. Say this at the outset: there has only been a trickle of novels through the fifty-five-year history of science fiction that have been consensually accepted as masterpieces, absolute examples of what the field can be at its best. With no exception that I can glimpse, all of them were published in the fifties. The jury on the seventies is, by definition, still out (it looks as if Dying Inside, The Dispossessed, perhaps 334 and Shadrach in the Furnace and The Ocean of Night may make it), but there is virtually no novel of the sixties, however acclaimed in its time, which does not have a substantial and influential claque in opposition, as it did then.8 Forties novels of significance: Slan, Final Blackout, Sixth Column, World/Players of Null-A, Fury look archaic now: primitive and unfulfilled. They have fallen out of print; the most recently reissued of them, the Kuttner's Fury, has not appeared since 1973. (That non-novel, The Martian Chronicles, does have a good in-print record, but Bradbury has had for decades access to the audience outside the genre and the television production has been a spur.)

Consider, though, the fifties. A Canticle for Leibowitz, More Than Human, Double Star, Rogue Moon, The Space Merchants, Gladiator-at-Law, The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, A Case of Conscience, Bring the Jubilee. (All are currently in print except for Gladiator-at-Law.) Rogue Moon won no awards; Canticle was published in its year. Kornbluth's The Syndic copped no honors; More Than Human in that year. To consider that The Demolished Man, The Space Merchants, and Baby Is Three (the central section of More Than Human from which the fore and aft of the novel were flung) all appeared in Galaxy within a nine-month period in 1952 is to be awed.

Novels, of course, collect the attention, the reissues and occasionally the money (The Space Merchants, despite recent enormous advances to Silverberg, Heinlein, and Gregory Benford, may still be, over its twenty-nine-year life, the most remunerative of all genre science fiction novels) but science fiction, unlike any other category of literature, lives in the short forms. The short story or novelette seem perfectly available to the articulation and enactment of a single speculative conceit which, one could insist, is the task for which science fiction itself is most suited. The level of short-story writing during the decade in technical expertise and inventiveness has never been equaled nor have any short stories published within the last fifteen years had the impact upon the field and its audience of what was appearing routinely in the best-of-the-year anthologies or magazine anthologies. Until the advent of John Varley in 1975, no short story writer in two decades sprang upon science fiction as did Mark Clifton through Astounding.

There is probably no way in which to teach a young audience (eighty percent of science fiction readers are under twenty) that Mark Clifton, dead a long time and virtually out of print, was for a period of four years the most controversial and influential writer in the magazines. No way to teach them that Floyd L. Wallace, Galaxy's Clifton who published novelettes of increasing inventiveness and technical clarity, also virtually unreprinted although alive, taught at least one writer what the conceptual limits of the science fiction novelette might be. No way to teach them that the short stories of Damon Knight and Alfred Bester, in their technical ease and ambition, struck not only readers but professionals of their own and the previous generation as miraculous—miraculous that such work could be both recognizably genre science fiction and of indisputable artistic quality. (Knight and Bester collections are available; between them, however, they have not published a dozen new stories in as many years.)

One of the hazards, not to say horrors, of age is the reconsideration of our youthful selves, the vision of subsequent heartbreak superimposed, the memory of what we became shading inexorably what we took ourselves to be. The conclusion must come that we were fools and it is this, perhaps, which has left the fifties almost bereft of significant critical reevaluation and comment. Those suited lived through the time and still feel the pain. They were naive. They wrote themselves a bill of goods and hawked it and bought it, every rotten, self-delusory item. Sure they know it now. They knew it by 1959 and it destroyed some of them. But the bill of goods seemed reasonable.

It really did. It appeared possible to remake the field. By the end of the forties, Campbell and his contributors had put the technical equipment of the modern short story, the rigors of scientific extrapolation into the hands of those ready to begin where the rest, through struggle, had finally peaked. Hiroshima and television, the cold war and the mass market had delivered unto the new writers and editors what appeared to be an enormous audience for a kind of fiction that would truly come to terms with the potential changes in lives caused by new and virtually controllable technology.

Horace Gold earnestly believed that Galaxy could eventually appeal to as many people as The Saturday Evening Post. Boucher and McComas, world-weary types, had less evangelistic obsession and more cynicism, but saw no reason why the audience for literate science fiction should be any smaller than that for fiction itself.9 These major editors and John W. Campbell who was, at his worst, not impervious to good writing (a story would not, at least, be rejected for literary quality if it did not lack more immediate Campbellian virtues) gathered about them fifty to a hundred writers who, demoniacally inspired, were willing to try to take the field to the limit of their abilities, knowing that whatever they did they would not be rejected for trying too hard. These writers could not, of course, sell the major editors everything, but they could write passionately and often and the overflow, much of high quality, was being laid off to those thirty or forty magazines which appeared and disappeared like Flying Dutchmen.

(A few magazines such as Infinity or Venture or, at the beginning of the decade, Worlds Beyond, were created for the specific purpose of publishing a more literate and stylistically ambitious, thematically uncomfortable kind of science fiction, and these magazines were not publishing rejects so much as working on direct commission. They all failed, and except for Infinity failed quickly, but who in 1960 or 1981 would consider for the mass market a magazine devoted to the publication of non-mass-market fiction?)

It was a period which had never before occurred in mass-market fiction, perhaps in fiction of any kind. There was a wide market and one of exceeding range; work of quality was as readily acceptable within the confines of the genre as less ambitious science fiction. Black Mask and some of the other detective pulp magazines of the thirties had had no prejudice against art and had published Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, but there were many more science fiction magazines and (pace Pronzini) more genuinely gifted science fiction writers in the fifties than mystery writers in the thirties. But almost any writer who had a decent reading knowledge of the genre and could reproduce it to minimum standard could find a market. Thirty magazines times eight stories a month times twelve meant close to three thousand science fiction stories published a year, to say nothing of the original anthologies: Star Science Fiction, Star Short Novels, and New Tales of Space and Time. (Today magazines and original anthologies together accommodate perhaps three hundred new stories a year.) In 1955 there were in the United States and England perhaps two or three hundred writers who had managed some degree of professionalism. (Today there are over a thousand.) And the book market was not negligible. Wollheim was at Ace, Doubleday had begun a small program, Simon & Schuster were committed to a dozen titles a year, Signet, Avon and Pocket Books were toe in the water and Ballantine, beginning a flourishing program in 1953 with The Space Merchants, started by offering advances of five thousand dollars.

Magazine rates were about what they are now. The top magazines paid three to five cents a word, the middle range one and a half to two, the bottom rarely less than a penny. In New York (or anywhere) at that time it was possible for a family to live with passable adequacy on five thousand dollars a year, comfortably on twelve. One without a family could get by on half that. It was not at all difficult to make five hundred dollars a month writing science fiction.

Five hundred dollars a month was, perhaps figuring in the rejects and aborted stories, twenty-eight thousand words for a professional, and twenty-eight thousand words a month is a thousand a day with most Sundays off. A thousand words a day fall on three typewritten pages: some bleed more than others, of course, but three pages are nevertheless three pages (and no true professional will ever admit to an editor or even his peers how very quickly they can be done, particularly under pressure). There was more than enough time for bull sessions conspiring on plans for the field, drinking sessions ditto, club meetings, travel, conferences, parties and the exchanging of wives. (These were not wife swappers, the male writers, they were wife exchangers. They would divorce and remarry. Members of this generation were perhaps the last to bend to the so-called new morality; they would rather marry than burn.)

The feeling in this rather insulated and socially peripheral circle of writers and their editors was that piece by piece they were remaking not so much the world (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dresden, Hiroshima, Joseph McCarthy had proved exactly what effect the seers and poets would have on the political and social reality of their time) but the field, that science fiction was being at last reconstructed toward that idealized form it might have attained a long time ago if Hugo Gernsback had not, for cynical publishers' reasons, slammed it into a format of bizarre adventures or marvelous inventions for kids and potential engineers.

Certainly the best of the magazine work was equal technically to the best of American fiction.10 Kornbluth's "The Altar at Midnight," Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," "Fondly Fahrenheit," "Hobson's Choice," "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To," Wallace's "Delay in Transit," Clifton's "Clerical Error," Pohl's "The Knights of Arthur" or "The Tunnel Under the World" and Sheckley's "Warm" (these titles are plucked virtually at random, sheer stream-of-consciousness; there are hundreds at this level, many by writers less well-known) were as accomplished and moving as "The Country Husband," "For Esme with Love and Squalor," "In the Zoo," "Among the Dangs," "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time" or "The Man Who Studied Yoga."11

There was, however, a tiny little problem.

Neither these stories nor the novels were recognized outside of the field at all. They made no impression. Outside of genre science fiction they did not, in fact, exist.

This failure of science fiction to reach outside its immediate audience was not of itself among the factors which blew away the false spring, but it might have been the factor that underlay everything. Science fiction remained small. It remained a small field. The audience upon which it could draw was perhaps half a million souls who were being asked to support their forty magazines and three hundred books, and with all their dedication they were too limited in numbers and too strapped for funds to do it. Most of them, after all, were kids. On allowances.

This core audience which perceives science fiction as important and to some degree necessary to their lives has never really increased from this half a million since the late forties. This is the central reason for the boom and bust phenomenon, as overextension inevitably hit the wall imposed by a readership which would not expand. The only difference between the fifties and the present, perhaps, is that the fringe audience—those who can be induced to buy two or three given titles a year through word of mouth, movie publicity or intense promotion—has expanded to several million. No science fiction novel in the fifties sold more than a hundred thousand paperback copies. Science fiction itself was regarded with disinterest or contempt outside the walls. Its very audience was an unorganized constituency; they were not in the main evangelical (in fact, like many of the academics, they were secretive), and those who were simply fed the popular perception of science fiction as a strange field: bizarre, endlessly incestuous and utterly defensive.

The genre made no impression upon the academic-literary nexus which controls critical perception (and eventually for serious writers may even create a large audience) in this country. Only two stories from the decade were reprinted in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories annual: Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea" and Judith Merril's "Dead Center." (Both from Fantasy and Science Fiction.) None ever appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories. Not a story from Galaxy, Astounding, Worlds of If, Worlds Beyond, Venture, or Infinity achieved even the thin gruel of the Foley roll of honor. (Some writers at the fringes of the field who published work in the quarterlies did make the Foley or O. Henry volumes, increasing the sense of injustice for the committed science fiction writers.)

No science fiction writer other than Ray Bradbury, that non-science fiction writer, appeared in textbooks. No science fiction novels other than Bradbury's were reviewed outside the genre departments of the press, gray caverns of brief notation. Most were ignored. The Demolished Man was published in hardcover by Shasta, a semiprofessional house operated by thieves, presumably because no reputable publisher wanted it.12 The Space Merchants stayed in print but Gladiator-at-Law and Wolfbane did not.

By 1958, death and divestiture rolled around; the genre had been gutted. Many of its best writers were burnt-out cases. Aware of the anonymity of their work and lives outside of the small enclosure, aware of the necessity to go on and on just as they had simply to make an ever more difficult living, most either could or would write no longer. Probably if ANS had not been torn apart or Horace Gold had stayed together the field would have collapsed anyway. An entire generation of writers had been used up in the struggle to make science fiction a reputable literary medium. They had won—the evidence is there—and they had learned that for all the world cared they might not have bothered at all. They had made a living but an equivalent effort in insurance or the universities would have paid more and extracted less and the money was all gone anyway. Some of these writers have done no work for decades now. Others have done no good work. A couple have reemerged as if from behind barricades, hurled a couple of stories into the editorial mills and run for their lives again (often cut down by flying rejections).

A very, very few, Pohl, Bester and Budrys being the best examples, have returned to do outstanding work but only after a sabbatical of many years, and then at a slow rate. Between Rogue Moon (1959) and Michaelmas (1978) Budrys published one minor novel and a couple of short stories. He might have been the best of them; he certainly had the most profound, subtle mind, the best insight, the darkest perspective.

Gone, then. All gone away. After the energy of the late sixties to early seventies there came another slack period, a return to traditional themes and approaches, editorial hostility toward or bewilderment at stylistic or thematic innovation.

Not to complain particularly: Varley has gotten through and Benford and Tiptree did or are doing major work. One can postulate that things will turn around eventually: new writers, new publishers, new editors . . . maybe a different politic and of course a new audience.

But virtually all the great innovators of the decade will carry on their work, careers, and lives as if the fifties generation had never written. They will not know the work. That work may live in the undertext of the field, influence piled atop work influenced by the canon, but these writers will not know to whom they owe what. That decade, already done for for more than twenty years, will for most intents and purposes appear to have been for naught.

Was it?

Each generation, Donald Wollheim once said, has its own tragedy, must learn again on its own what every generation had had to learn and can never teach. Betrayal, circumstance, defeat. The Loyalists, the Cold War. Vietnam. And end broken in silence. There is no answer to any of this.

But pace, Gertrude, we may take up the question. Yes. I think it was for naught.

—1977/1980: New Jersey

The Fifties: Recapitulation and Coda

Philip Klass's savage "The Liberation of Earth" appeared in Robert Lowndes' Future Science Fiction. Any history of the decade in science fiction must draw attention to this; if nothing else it will work against undue sentiment or self-delusion. Future was one of the longer-lived of the thirty or forty magazines that were born to perish within the decade; it paid a penny a word (less to unknown writers) around or after publication and had a circulation of, at the most optimistic estimate, thirty thousand as opposed to the one hundred that Galaxy or Astounding achieved at least intermittently. (And to keep all of this in perspective, let us recall that The Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of seven million and Playboy, starting from Hefner's garage in 1953, had exceeded two million by 1957. Science fiction then as now was a small field.)

"The Liberation of Earth," perhaps the most sophisticated antiwar story ever to appear in science fiction (my own late-sixties "Final War" and Effinger's "All the Last Wars at Once" from that period were little more than filigrees or variations; Haldeman's 1970s The Forever War harked back further than that), and a story which has subsequently been reprinted often enough to be Klass's best-known story after "Child's Play," this story appeared, in other words, in a bottom-line pulp magazine of negligible budget, circulation, or influence, presumably—this is the safest of blind guesses—because none of the higher-paying markets wanted any part of it whatsoever and because magazine editors outside of science fiction could not even take it seriously. All those aliens and tentacles and sucking air you know. Really weird stuff, Edmund. Kids say the darndest things.

There are many similar cases. Here are just a few: Blish's "Work of Art" and "Common Time," Kornbluth's "The Last Man Left in the Bar" and "Notes Leading Down to the Disaster," Knight's "Anachron," Margaret St. Clair's "Short in the Chest." All of these stories appeared in second and third line magazines. It is well understood that as the doomed Kornbluth became better and better, his work drifted from the three most important magazines. His last appearance in Campbell's magazine was in 1952 with a novelette, "That Share of Glory," and the Gunner Cade novel collaboration with Judith Merril ("The Quaker Cannon," a collaboration with Pohl, appeared in 1961 but Kornbluth was quite dead by that time) and although Pohl collaborations appeared in Galaxy well into the 1960s, his single byline was absent after the 1952 Altar at Midnight. The Syndic, perhaps Kornbluth's best novel, was barely rescued for serial publication by Harry Harrison for the last issues of Science Fiction Adventures. Theodore Sturgeon appeared frequently in Galaxy through 1958 but not nearly so frequently in F & SF and with a single exception ("Won't You Walk?" in January 1956) not at all in Astounding. And Mark Clifton, who had been Campbell's most renowned contributor between 1952 and 1955 sold only one novelette, "How Allied," and a 500-word humorous essay to Astounding after that latter year. Clifton's last short stories and novel, Pawn of the Black Fleet, appeared in Amazing.

The point of this grim, pointilistic subhistory is that although the fifties were indeed a period of growth, optimism, and experimentation for science fiction writers and readers, they were also characterized by the caution and terror which prevailed elsewhere. As the decade wandered in its sad and predictable way through the shores of political repression and public indifference, science fiction, no less than popular music or the products of General Motors, began to initiate decadence. (Defined most satisfactorily as being the elevation of form over function.) In a 1972 article by Gerald Jonas in The New Yorker, Robert Silverberg remembered why in 1959 he abandoned science fiction for several years. The magazine collapse of the late fifties had left few markets. Silverberg observed, "One of them would let you say only cheerful things about science. Another would only let you say downbeat things about science. And the others wouldn't let you say anything at all."

The fifties was a festival—historians are yet to uncover its riches but they will—but it is important to note that in the festival's wake was left (carnival people know exactly what I mean) an empty landscape, much litter, a few lives not undamaged, a lot of bills not paid and heavy recriminations for those who had tried their luck at the wheel or with the fat lady or had carried their convictions too high for the dazzling night. The editors who lasted out the decade, Gold and Campbell, had become locked into parodies of their original editorial personas (paranoia and psionics) and Anthony Boucher had departed. Campbell pitched the tents of transcendence but by 1959 only the freak show seemed to draw his attention; Gold's shell game was rigorous but he had turned into a simple cheat. Cynical contributors knew by 1957 that they could sell Gold by toying deliberately with his agoraphobia and contributors equally cynical (there was some overlap) knew that the way into ASF was to make John Campbell himself the hero of a narrative. Meanwhile, F & SF had started a sexed-up companion, Venture (Kornbluth's last great story, "Two Dooms," was published there as was Walter Miller's strong "Vengeance for Nikolai," but the magazine nonetheless folded quickly), magazines were expiring in clumps and Philip Klass and A. J. Budrys had decided that the universities or the editorial desk were steadier and less humiliating than attempting to do serious work for editors who did not want it or readers who could not tell the difference. Many writers plain broke down; others were incapable of selling in a rapidly diminished market and were driven out. The fifties ended dismally for most science fiction writers. There is no other way to put this.

Still the work remains and is beginning to be looked over again. In the extreme long run^13 it will probably be ascertained that science fiction became both an art and contributed most of its best examples during the decade. The quality of even the top 20 percent was very high, higher than it had been before, higher than it is now.

What do not remain are the writers.

Very few of the major figures of the decade can be said to have had significant careers after 1960, and the few that have, significantly, stopped writing for quite a while. Pohl and Budrys became editors and only began to write science fiction in quantity again in the seventies, Alfred Bester became an editor at Holiday and was flat out from 1962 to 1975. Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon were little heard from in the sixties; Gordon Dickson and Poul Anderson carried on but Dickson had only begun to achieve prominence at the very end of the decade (Dorsai! in 1959 was his first noncollaborative novel), and Anderson, a persistent, stubborn professional, must be commended as the sole exception to prove the rule.

The decade itself burned out these writers, one might speculate. On the other hand—to be judicious—decades burn writers out simply by being decades; the working span of a creative literary career seems for most of us to be around ten years. One does not want to make the sociologist's error of retrospectively constructing a system that simply was not perceived at the time. There are, as has been pointed out, no literary movements, merely a bunch of writers sometimes hanging out together and trying to do their work.

And yet—ambivalence is the currency here—science fiction writers and editors are an incestuous bunch. Historically this is a close field. In this paradigm individual assent to circumstance was multiplied.

So let us not idealize. It offered much but was a bad time. Golden ages, all of them, look like brass from the inside; only the survivors call them golden and then because retrospective falsification is not only the sociologist's but the human condition. It was a hard time. It was a hard time, folks: good work got rejected, careers got broken, writers lost their way, marriages lost their way, editors lost their way, the country lost its way. The fifties set us up for disaster; by the end almost any breath of energy would have felt good even if it was to lead us to the fire. For my children the fifties are the Fonz and Grease, a loveable time; to me they are Francis E. Walters and McCarthy, the Rosenbergs and Jenner, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Richard M. Nixon. Still, Presley blew them open and Bester wrote like the divine. It is a mystery.

—1979/1980: New Jersey

Ah Tempora! Ah Portions! Ah Mores! Ah Outlines!

Typically—since the late nineteen-fifties when book publishers began to dominate the science fiction market—the science fiction novel has been written on portion and outline. The writer produces the first two or three chapters and a fairly detailed outline of the remainder of a novel (established writers may get away with less than that) and either directly or through an agent offers the material around. If it is sold, the writer gets a contract giving him the first half of the advance on signature of the contract, the remainder on delivery of the completed manuscript. (Some publishers cut the amount into thirds, the last due on publication, and others delay delivery payment until publication, but these are the exceptions and most professionals do not have to stand for it.)

One can theorize that this system is the single important factor underlying the science fiction of the last decades and may explain why almost all science fiction novels fail on a literary, artistic, or structural level (if not all three).

Consider the writer. Consider his condition. He has produced, perhaps, ten thousand words on the basis of which he has been paid half the total amount due. Maybe he is modestly famous or knows the editor well; call it four thousand words on paper. These words were typed months or even years before the contract. He is now faced with the necessity to write in effect an entire book for half an advance (one tends to consider spent the signature advance upon its receipt—never existed). He has not thought of his book in months or years; it is already detached; he has only the vaguest recollection of characters, incident, and plot and yet—ah, here it is—the book is due in not more than six months and nothing to be done but to write it for exactly half the money that the publisher knows it to be worth. The alternative is to return the advance (unthinkable) or simply not deliver and wait out the publisher, but although respectable careers in this field have been built upon nondelivery, there are only a few available at any given time and even these have a cutoff point. Publishers have a stuffy tendency to go to court. Sooner or later even the weariest of us, the most venal or duplicitous must either write or get a job. (Well, one could farm out the manuscript to a struggling or unknown writer to ghost it under one's name for the delivery money and it's been done. But usually you need the money yourself and there is always the problem of exposure, that is if the delivery is at all publishable. There have been horrifying examples of the opposite.)

Here is the writer. He is thirty-two or twenty-seven or perhaps forty-six years old; his being groans with resentment, his skull is drained of last year's ideas. He hates the bastards for exploiting him and well he should because they are and do. Here too is the portion and outline. Particularly the outline.

It is, as such things usually are, chock-a-block with incident, color, character, motivation, conflict, metaphor, pizzazz, and fire. Give them anything may be the trade secret, but promise them a partridge in a pear tree. By the twelfth day of Christmas. In fact, promise it by the tenth. What will the stupid bastards remember by the time the chips are down and the advance is paid?

Here as well are the opening chapters. Carefully, patiently worked out they glint with promise, tumble with plot, glow with the dark and richly hued colors of invention. The time machine has jeweled dials, it has never before run so smoothly: automatic levers, brakes, and protectors to guide against temporal paradox. The protagonist's lady friend is blonde and promising, but in her quieter moods the stranger aspects of her history emerge. The first scene between them reeks with implication and then there is that underground working to create the forces of paradox and brooding over this a somber, rigorous God . . .

God, the writer says. Sometimes he drinks. Often he proceeds to write. Sometimes he continues to write. Every now and then he simply writes and writes to get the thing over with; like Mark Twain's laziest preacher in the world who gave such long sermons because he got started and was too lazy to stop, it is often easier simply to get through the whole thing. Drop the blonde by the side, jettison her for good in Chapter 8, make the temporal paradox underground a figment of the protagonist's paranoia by Chapter 12. Move those levers, spin those dials, get the damned thing back to 2214 and write the final confrontation. But get it out of the house. It is forty-five thousand words, not the contracted sixty thousand, but with all the dialogue and wide margins who the hell will know the difference? Anyway, the word from the agent is that the commissioning editor, the gullible fool, was thrown out three months ago and his contract novels are now going directly to the copy editor, who will place The Time Wizards of Lucidar between a gothic and historical. She knows nothing about science fiction; why the hell should she? No one in the house except for the commissioning editor knew anything about science fiction and he's been fired, and replacements are being screened ever so carefully. Meanwhile, Noble Paperbacks is overinventoried with novels owed out on contract all over so why worry about it? Next year they'll get an editor.

It is possible by employing this fantasy to explain every defect in every science fiction novel published since, say, 1958 (when the magazine market collapsed and the magazines, through their somewhat more knowledgeable and rigorous editors, were the cutting edge of science fiction)—every truncated plot, rushed conclusion, unpredictable denouement, scientific error, sterile love scene, failed resolution. It is possible to understand all of it and to suggest that the few good novels of this era were not written on portion and outline, but this is a fantasy and may be disregarded. And by most of the readers (leave us not mention the writers) it certainly is.

* * *

Footnote to a fantasy: most of the important novels of the fifties originally appeared in the magazines whose editors commissioned them (like Space Merchants or Demolished Man) or worked them over pretty carefully (like Dorsai!). Most of science fiction's few acknowledged masterpieces in the novel appeared in the early to middle years of that decade. But then the distributors collapsed and so did plenty of magazine editors.

—1980: New Jersey

Science Fiction and the Academy:

Some Notes

According to late statistics compiled by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), over a thousand colleges, junior colleges, and universities throughout the land have courses devoted solely to science fiction. This is twice the number extant in the mid-seventies, almost ten times that of a decade ago and, when one considers that in 1960 there were perhaps two such courses in the United States (one of them taught at City College in New York on an adjunct basis by Sam Moskowitz), imposing. Part of this growth has to do with simple consumer economics: science fiction is something that they're reading, let's register them and grant credit to keep up the enrollment. (Most college catalogues are testimony to this philosophy of desperation.) Part has to do with the agonizingly slow but continuing legitimization of the field: some science fiction writers have broken through to critical recognition in other fields, and Leslie Fiedler did none of us any harm by declaring in the early seventies that he had always loved Phil Farmer (and now admired Norman Spinrad), but could not admit this until he became, at last, a tenured Distinguished Professor.

All of this is supposed to be good for science fiction, if not for science fiction writers, who are, with occasional exceptions, unable to teach courses for credit in their own field, made self-conscious by textual analyses and often photocopied and distributed without their knowledge or permission. The statement of the late sixties has already passed into the liturgy of the field (and has been claimed by a few): "It's time to get science fiction out of the academy and back in the gutter where it belongs." Analyzed out of existence, drained of mystery, codified to the final decree, science fiction, some of its writers fear, is on the way to becoming the Henry James or George Eliot of the twenty-first century.

Still, the academicization of the field, if only marginally helpful to the writers (and the students), can hardly be portrayed as an evil: it does not seem to have done much damage. The questions are a little more basic than those above but by their definition cannot be raised at the yearly conferences of the SFRA, the association of science-fiction teaching college academics (two of which I have attended with great glee). They can, however, be raised here, at least a couple of them.

The pervasive question is whether the field is worth teaching, whether there is sufficient text and insight to support a full-term college-level course. Oddly, I heard this point raised not by a crusty Chaucer scholar, Dean of Student Affairs or member of the department of antiquities (in many places in many universities the academicization of "popular culture" is regarded as loathsome) but by one of the most experienced and sophisticated editors in the field, a credit to the genre to say nothing of a certified member of First Fandom. "What the hell is it?" he said, "a couple of lectures on the historical stuff, Wells and Verne and Chaucer and that crap which doesn't apply, has nothing to do with American science fiction and then the thirties and Heinlein and Campbell and when it got dirty in the sixties, but really, there just isn't that much to it. A few ideas, a few basic treatments and all of the variations; it's just a bunch of crap. Crap, crap," the editor mused and finished his whiskey sour and went onto other matters more pressing, although I cannot recall which.

A few writers, a few ideas, the same old variations? Not exactly, but the point is not superficial (nor is this editor a superficial man); is there enough about science fiction as distinguished from literature itself to justify it as a separate course unit, a heady three credits toward a baccalaureate? To the editor's point of view it would be as if a Bachelor of Music accepted in partial fulfillment a three-credit course on Khachaturian or the viole da gamba. Isn't it part of the continuing isolation of science fiction, another aspect of literary ghettoization, to render it a separate course within a Department of English (or Sociology) as something discrete, special, impenetrable? Why can't it simply be taught—for example, the works of Heinlein, Kuttner, Ballard, Kornbluth, Le Guin, Silverberg—as part of contemporary American literature?

Well, for once it might throw a lot of currently employed nontenured personnel out of work and reduce tuition input into the English Department. That is not a contemptible consideration. Then too, my perception at the SFWA conferences was, appositely, that instructors of science fiction were regarded by their academic colleagues almost exactly as editors of science fiction (even unto this day) are regarded by senior trade editors in the publishing houses. With few exceptions, the only way a science fiction editor can have a major editorial career^14 is to get out of science fiction and into something else (writers too). Anything will do for the shift. Science fiction academics, already functioning at the margins of their profession, will do anything to consolidate their position, and although a few might be able to move crosswise most will use their courses and enrollments to build up small power bases . . . which they hope to carry over to other universities should the need arise. There are very practical reasons why the SFRA catalogue a decade hence may double the number of colleges again; by 1990 every college and university in this country and most of the junior colleges as well may have a course in science fiction catalogued as routinely as Intermediate Algebra first . . . and will then seek someone to teach it.

What does it all mean? To appropriate my friend the editor's line, perhaps not very much. Some writers have expressed an amazing amount of (righteous) hostility toward this academicization because indeed the last person to teach science fiction in most of these places would be a science fiction writer. With tightening budgets and cuts in discretionary funding most courses now can administer their three credits without the students even meeting, for one session, a science fiction writer. Recrimination has always been the underside of these people; not inappropriately most science fiction writers have known in their hearts for years that they were generating a good deal of money for some people, very little of which ever got to them. The Harvards of the future perceived as the Bouregy Books of yesterday. Too—and although this is last it is in deference only to its simple truth—many of the academics are appallingly ill-informed. Their courses are superficial and filled with inaccuracies; they rarely diverge from the accepted canon, and they get much of that canon wrong. Students in many courses would be better informed had they been sent off to read a dozen books and Aldiss's Billion-Year Spree with the Nicholls' Science Fiction Encyclopedia as backup.15 The rendering of three academic credits for many of these courses is, if not an insult to the field (the field can take anything; it always has) then to the universities.

Ambivalence, then. Again. But somewhat less than expected: a hesitant vote after all for the academy. I was at one time quite hostile; credit Brian Aldiss for giving me the first quick turnaround of my life when, after I had mumbled some imprecations on a panel in 1975, he said, "No art can be taken seriously without a body of criticism; the universities with all of their flaws are beginning to work us toward that body of criticism; we cannot reject them and aspire to be taken seriously."

"The man is right," I said on the instant. "The man is right and I am wrong. I see that now."

A year later, in different circumstances about a different matter, I said it again, not on a panel.

At the Divining Edge

Occasionally (less frequently all the time) I am called upon as the Town Science Fiction Writer (a role not dissimilar to that of Village Idiot) to speak to classes in the high school of my suburb in northeastern New Jersey. Genial in middle age and with my persona at reflex I can romp mindlessly through a fifteen-minute set piece on the joys and perils of the writing life, the custom of ambition and the habituation of form, and then throw the floor open to questions, which, after a grudging pause and a few glares from the English teacher, do come forth:

"What do you think of Star Wars? Do you think the sequel is better?"

"How about Stranger in a Strange Land?"

"Do you know Isaac Asimov? What is he really like?"

"The meaning of the end of 2001, I never got it. What does it say? What do you think of Planet of the Apes, by the way?"

"Is Ray Bradbury any good?"

"Did you like Star Trek: The Movie?"

Well. Did I? Not sure. A little—ah—attenuated, I thought. Never saw the series, not ever, so can't compare. Bradbury? Ray Bradbury has appeared in a science fiction magazine exactly once in the last two decades and has not published a new story or book in ten years. I don't think too much of Stranger in a Strange Land (pretty good writer on balance, though) and haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back (loved the mysteriously truncated bar scene in Star Wars, though; why did they cut it so quickly?). The ending of 2001 is metaphysical or mystic, a dream of transcendence, and Asimov is a splendidly ebullient man, an example to us all. So what? (I would like to continue but do not.) Is that all that the general public, at least as represented in the high schools, thinks of science fiction? A couple of movies, a few writers, most of whom have published very little within the confines of the field since the 1950s? Doesn't anybody know or care what's really going on? The stylistic innovations of the last decade and a half, the enormous growth of audience for all kinds of science fiction, the ten to twenty modern science fiction writers who by any literary standard are first-rate? How about them, kids? Don't you care?

Someday, if I am invited back, I'll probably put these questions after all.

In the meantime, the questions resonate, which is a fancy, literary way of saying that they will not go away. Science fiction prospered in the 1970s; in a largely debased form it became big business for the media, but in a different fashion it also flourished as literature. There are in this country over a thousand people writing science fiction of publishable quality (a decade ago there were half that number), over twelve hundred books labeled "science fiction" were published in 1979 (again, it was half that number a decade ago), and one of our middle-range professionals can now expect an advance of $15,000-$20,000 for a novel that might have brought (and glad to have it) $5,000 in 1970. Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle received a $127,500 hardcover advance, Heinlein's The Number of the Beast over $500,000 for paperback; ten years ago the highest advance ever paid for a genre science fiction novel was $12,500 for the paperback rights to Silverberg's The World Inside. The level of ambition, the dazzling achievement of our best writers, the complexity and sophistication of a form that in the memory of some of its older writers like Williamson or Simak did not even exist when they began to write . . . quite wondrous. The universities will sort this out for a century.

But for the general public, the 95 percent whose reading is of the most marginal level or less, science fiction is a couple of television series, a handful of films and four or five writers who were established well before 1950. Awareness of the category seems to be concentrated around a limited part of it: the rest of it is undiscovered.

This is depressing, but then so is the human condition. No particular reason to complain. How many high school students could name five living American novelists, three living serious composers? How many have even heard of, say, the Hudson Review, let alone have ever seen a copy? What percentage of that classroom has ever voluntarily gone to a symphony or a museum, opened Ulysses or The Great Gatsby? It is a hard time for us sensitive types in the so-called arts; if the students can name as many as five living science fiction writers they are, whether I like it or not, paying a kind of tribute to the field.

No, this is not what truly dismays. Rather it is a perception long after the fact; Buster Keaton would know how to do the take. I think that science fiction may be in severe trouble because not only the mass media but its best practitioners themselves have a clear interest in the category being known by and identified in the public consciousness with Star Wars, "Mork and Mindy," twenty-year-old novels by a couple of writers, and all that stuff floating around the cabin in Alien.

Why this is so—or at least why I perceive it to be so—would make for a complex argument extended over many a wearying and wavering paragraph, but I will try to be concise:

Science fiction, from its inception as a subcategory of American literature in 1926, until very recently was a small and largely ignored pursuit for its readers and writers. It was regarded with contempt by the academic literary nexus and ignored by the vast audience for popular culture. It had neither intellectual cachet nor, like television drama, the weight of attention.

This was unfair, to be sure, but it gave readers and writers (and editors and publishers too) the feeling that they were all collaborating on something vaguely disreputable, usually contemptible. When extrinsic events—Hiroshima, television, Sputnik, the assassinations, NASA, Apollo, Star Trek, Star Wars—caught up to or seized the science fiction vision of transcendence, when those events forced the public to grudgingly accept the field as serious business after all, most of its creators were still caught by feelings of exclusion. The enormously successful science fiction of the last decades is known by serious followers to be poor, often dreadful, exemplification of the genre . . . but better popularity and acceptance than a return to the forties and fifties when it was impossible for anyone within the field to be taken seriously by anyone without.

So science fiction may eventually dominate the eighties on the basis of its worst or at least weaker possibilities.

Too bad. Too bad indeed. No proper focus for the anger, but I know the feeling . . . to dwell in a bad marriage . . . to sacrifice passion for the sake of peace . . . to sacrifice dignity in flight of pain.

—1979/1980: New Jersey

Some Notes Toward the True and the Terrible

I first made reference to the true and terrible unwritten history of science fiction in a review of James Gunn's Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction in 1975, but did not begin to develop the concept until I spoke at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Standing at the podium, shaking with fever, ampicillin, dread and wonder that any stranger would pay $3.75 cash on the barrelhead to listen to me,16 I said that the history of science fiction must, by definition, exist truly in the interstices, that by definition the field could be explained only by material which would be by turns libelous, private, intuitive, or paranoid and that even the most rigorous and lucid of scholarly works could deal only with symptomatic representations of the great underside of the field.

Surely I must have been anticipating that May the publication, a year and a half later, of the dense, scholarly, and invaluable Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls (the best reference work on our field which has appeared to date), because the Nicholls work manages through one intricate, brilliantly cross-referenced and almost impishly accurate volume to make clear to insiders and outsiders alike practically everything about science fiction that they would need to know to get through doctoral orals except for two factors: (a) How it got this way and (b) why it has its peculiar and binding effect upon a readership, a larger proportion of which are emotionally involved with the literature than the readers of any other genre.

The Encyclopedia reminds me of the one-line criticism of Shaw's plays: that a literate alien could, from them alone, deduce everything about humanity except that it possessed genitals. Nicholls and his staff make everything about science fiction comprehensible except the existence of a 700,000-word trade paperback about it which can expect to sell eventually well over a million copies. Try that in quality lit, mystery, or romance. The Gothic Encyclopedia? The Illustrated History of Literary Writing? Barlow's Book of Flannery O'Connor?

The true unwritten history is where the answers lie and the unwritten history cannot—by definition, he pointed out laboriously—be composed. In a spirit of scholarship and sacrifice, however, I would like to offer a few notes, leads as it were toward what it would contain and with what it would have to deal. Perhaps by the end of the twenty-first century when all of us now reading, writing, and propitiating the category are all safely dead and with the evolution of low-feed, multiplex stereophonic videotape cassette recall, the abolition of the written, that is to say, the true unwritten history might be retrieved.

To the unborn and penitent, hence, a few suggestions:

1) "Modern" science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloomsbury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and the editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other's material, married each other's wives and so on. For a field which was conceptually based upon expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular. One could fairly speculate that this insularity and parochialism were the understandable attempts of frightened human beings faced with terra incognita to hold on to one another and to make their personal lives as limited and interconnected as possible. It could be speculated further that this parochialism shut off an entire alternative science fiction. (Alexei Panshin has intimated this possibility but not this particular set of reasons.) Who is to know what writers and manuscripts not connected in any way to the Central Fifty languished in slush piles or in stamped, self-addressed envelopes? Science fiction simply was not for them; it was being cooked up in offices and bars and bedrooms and apartment houses; people would stream from Central to write it all up in their own way and send it back in (and then write up next month's issue taking up the stuff already laid down in print), but the field was based on personal access and very few writers and stories were getting into the magazines without personal acquaintance with other writers and with the editors. The first thing that Damon Knight did in the forties as a science fiction writer manque was to accept Fred Pohl's invitation to come out from Oregon to Brooklyn and live with the Futurian Club; the young Asimov was introduced to present contributors by Campbell before Asimov had sold a word; Malcolm Jameson, pensioned off by the Navy for medical reasons, began to write science fiction (and became, briefly, an Astounding regular in the mid-forties) at the urgings of his old friend and fellow Navy officer Robert A. Heinlein.

2) One of the clear symptoms of editorial decline (this ties, in a way, to the point above but only by suggestion; hear me out) is the increasing proportion of material in a magazine or book line written by a decreasing number of contributors; venery, laziness, exhaustion, or friendship seem to make almost any long-term editorship vulnerable to this condition. (I am not saying that science fiction in this case is any different from any other genre.) The Astounding of the late nineteen-fifties had narrowed to four or five regular contributors in between whom a few asteroids squeezed the short stories: Silverberg, Anvil, Garrett, Janifer/Harris, and Reynolds must have accounted for seventy percent of the magazine's contents in the period—1958 to 1962. Over at Galaxy Fred Pohl, Robert Sheckley, and Philip M. Klass must have contributed more than half the contents in the last three years of Horace Gold's editorship (1957—1960). This is not to dispute that this core group might have overtaken the magazines simply because they were the best, at least in terms of meeting the editorial vision (and there is no disputing that the Galaxy group at least includes three of the finest writers of science fiction thus far), but the consequences of such narrowing are obvious; the medium becomes insular and ambitious potential contributors become discouraged. There is, needless to say, a fine line an editor must tread between gathering the best writers he can and encouraging them . . . and buying from friends and familiars, but there is such a line of clear demarcation: Campbell in the early forties was on one side of it and in the late fifties on the other, and the quality of work and its persistence today (little of the late fifties Astounding is now reprinted) constitute judgment.

3) The clearest signal of Campbell's loosened grip and influence on the field from 1960 (the time at which his obsessive pursuit of pseudoscientific chicanery became his editorial obsession rather than weakness) is to compile a list of those writers who arose to prominence in that decade who never published in his magazine. Once for my amusement a long time ago (in the last couple of years of his life, for I hoped that he would see it) I did so and published it in Science Fiction Review. Here is a partial (I am sure to miss someone) list of science fiction writers who did not appear in Analog from the issue of January 1960 until the last issue assembled by Campbell dated December 1971: J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock, R. A. Lafferty, George Alec Effinger, Gardner R. Dozois, A. J. Budrys, Terry Carr, Kate Wilhelm, George Zebrowski, Norman Kagan, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, Roger Zelazny.

Silverberg almost makes the list; his last story was in the February 1960 issue (sold, of course, in the fifties). Tiptree's first story and one other appeared in Analog; Niven's first piece, published at last in 1972, was apparently Campbell's last purchase.

And yet. And yet when I heard of Campbell's sudden death on July 11, 1971, and informed Larry Janifer, I trembled at Janifer's response and knew that it was so: "The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there's no one to get mad at us anymore."

—1980: New Jersey

Wrong Rabbit

And here is A. J. Budrys, who should know better, in a fairly recent (May 1979) issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction discussing 1940s science fiction: "Modern science fiction as you know^17 was marked by a verve we do not often see these days, fueled by a pervading technological optimism and a set of ethical assumptions slightly to the right of the John Birch credo. Might was not only right, it was moral . . . technological action—exploring the physical possibilities and applying deft means of conveying maximum comfort to the maximum number of individuals—offers the best hope . . ."

It may do all of that—in the world which technology has bequeathed, only technological action can accomplish change—but Budrys is wrong about the science fiction of Campbell's first decade, and before shibboleth passes all the way into law and the forties ASF is forever characterized as being packed by the Happy Engineer, I would like to, as the man said to the committee, try to set the record straight.

The Happy Engineer is one of the great uninvestigated myths of contemporary science fiction. (Another is that Astounding/Analog was/is devoted to stories whose background is "hard science" requiring "heavy tech," but that is next Sunday's text.) The truth, as any fresh confrontation of the material would certainly make clear, is that the forties ASF is filled with darkness, that the majority of its most successful and reprinted stories dealt with the bleakest implications of technology and that "modern" science fiction (defined by Budrys as that which originated with Campbell's editorship of Astounding given him in October 1937) rather than being a problem-solving literature was a literature of despair.

Only in the fifties as Campbell's vision locked and dystopia was encouraged by Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher did Astounding begin indeed to invite in the Happy Engineer: the complexities of Heinlein became the reflexive optimism of G. Harry Stine, Christopher Anvil, Eric Frank Russell (some of the time) and the somewhat more ambivalent optimism of Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, or Randall Garrett. It would not be difficult to argue that this represented a drift from the periphery of the forties ASF: the Venus Equilateral stories of George O. Smith, say, or the Bullard series of Malcolm Jameson.

But consider the text entire. The Kuttners from the outset of their career were publishing stories of complexity and pessimism: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "Shock" and "What You Need" and "When the Bough Breaks"18 and the (superficially humorous) "Gallegher" series in which a drunken inventor's drunken inventions went crazy. "Jesting Pilot" and "Private Eye" and "The Prisoner in the Skull" were grim and desperate visions of the (failed) efforts to maintain autonomy and compassion in the shining, uncontrollable future. Heinlein's "Universe" is one of the grimmest visions in the history of the field; a centuries-long starflight gone astray, a civilization of the descendants of the original crew stripped of memory and reduced to barbarism.

Asimov's "Nightfall," not the best but certainly the best-known story Campbell ever published, describes the collapse of a civilization into anarchy and madness; L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a freehand template of World War II cast into an ambiguous future, depicts—as does Heinlein's Sixth Column—the use of the machineries of destruction to destroy linear cultural evolution. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" is a solipsistic nightmare cast as a time paradox story in which the protagonist cannot escape the simple and repeated loop of his life (and has for friendship only versions of himself). Van Vogt's work, from his first story "Black Destroyer" (a murderous alien loose on a spaceship kills most of the crew; the alien is in terrible emotional distress), put vision after horrid vision of the future into ASF, paranoid reaction toward militancy ("The Weapon Shops" series), the hopelessness of human evolution ("The Seesaw"), the collapse of causality (The World/The Players of Null-A).

In the wake of Hiroshima, Campbell published a series of apocalyptic stories (Kuttner's Tomorrow and Tomorrow & The Fairy Chessmen, Chan Davis's "The Nightmare," Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses") and post-apocalyptic speculations (Russell's "Metamorphosite," Kuttner's "Fury") in such profusion that at the world science fiction convention of 1947, at which he was guest of honor, he begged for the fans' indulgence at the profusion of despair, claiming that he could only publish what the writers were delivering . . . but he was sending out pleas to cease and desist. (The writers got the message, finally, and fled to Gold and Boucher as soon as they opened shop.)

It could be said that by making good on this pledge, shutting down certain themes and approaches rather than (as before) encouraging the writers to get the best version of their ideas, Campbell was taking the first steps in the decline of his editorship and that the fifties Astounding can be seen as the product of a man who, having faced the abyss, had decided that he wanted no part of it. Through the fifties the other major editors accommodated the underside . . . but it must be noted that Godwin's "The Cold Equations," the best-known ASF story of the fifties, as "Nightfall" was the best-known of the forties, was a stunning and despairing enactment (a little girl stows away in a one-man rocket that does not have sufficient fuel to carry her and is jettisoned) of the limitations of technology, the implacability of the universal condition.

Seeing "modern" science fiction as cheerful and brave, upstanding and problem-solving—and Budrys is only the best of the critics to have taken this line; only John Clute seems to have disdained it thus far—makes for easy history of course: the primitive twenties, wondrous and colorful thirties, systematized and optimistic forties, quiet and despairing fifties, fragmented and chaotic sixties, expressionless seventies . . . and history, as has been noted, is an inherently comforting study, demonstrating, if nothing else, a retrospective order to what was chaotic. A proof that, at least, we got through.

But the price we are paying for this misapprehension is too high. It makes us consider science fiction as one thing when from the very beginning it surely was another.

Which makes us the inheritors of what we can never know, adopted children, scurrying obsessively through the closed or closing files of headquarters, seeking evidence that even if retrieved will be meaningless.

—1980: New Jersey

John W. Campbell:

June 8,1910 to July 11, 1971

Campbell. When I began to read science fiction in the fifties, he was the field, an autocratic figure synonymous with the genre and as inaccessible to a twelve-year-old as—well, as Heinlein, Asimov, or Duke Snider. I wrote him a couple of letters (I wrote the Duke a letter too) but received no reply (as with the Duke). Much later in the sixties when I started to write seriously in the field, he was already the living symbol of everything that I had to overcome to make a contribution. Nonetheless, my early stories went to him first and the rejection slips became a personal repudiation, stoking my rage. In the seventies I won the first award given in his name and the cries of pain resonated in his magazine for months thereafter. Still resonate. The point seemed to be that Beyond Apollo, a despairing novel about the collapse into madness of the first Venus Expedition, was not exactly the kind of material Campbell would have published. Full of sex and dirty words too. An insult to his memory.

Everything that supersedes the dead must be an insult to their memory. The only real tribute—I know what I am talking about—would be for the world to end with them, and in a certain sense, with the large figures, it might. Beyond Apollo was, to me, a logical extension of John Campbell's editorial vision of the forties: if his magazine had continued to move past 1950 as it had in the previous decade, my novel would have fit almost indistinguishably into the pages of the 1972 Analog. Nonetheless, if there is no real tribute to the dead, there is no arguing with them either; one can rave at them in the spaces of the night, prove one's father a fool, demonstrate to an uncle that it never could have worked his way after 1963 . . . but the dead have no comment, the arguments rebound to the damaged self, there is no answer, Lear, never, never, never, never, never. To accept the idea of one's death is at last to accept all the others and then after a long time the recrimination may end . . . but we never accept the idea of our own death, do we now, doctor? What do you think?

I have only one Campbell story but I think it is a fairly good one and worth entering in the ephemeral permanence of these pages; I told it for the first time in Chicago in April 1973 when accepting the Campbell award, but I don't think that anyone there got the point, least of all myself because it was many years later and in a different land before I understood, and now the wench is dead. (At least for me, alas. Generalizations are dangerous.) I met Campbell on June 18, 1969, a month and two days before the Apollo landing. As the newly installed volunteer editor of the SFWA Bulletin I had an excuse at last; I wanted to discuss "market trends," I said to him over the phone. "All right," he said, "same as ever though." What I intended to do, of course, was to finally, after two decades, meet the man who had changed my life. I knew the stories, the sacred texts and the apocrypha; I certainly knew what had happened to him since the fifties but intellection is not to feeling formed . . . regardless of my shaky professionalism I came to that desk with awe. Trying not to show it, of course. I was there to go the full fifteen or die. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I am the greatest / Just you wait / Big John Campbell/ Will fall in eight I might have gibbered if I had had a Bundini.

I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant^19 sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes and trying hard not to smile. A young man's intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under the real ones.

Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive, right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn't Campbell care what all of the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him? "You've got to understand the human element here," the young man said, "it's not machinery, it's people, people being consumed at the heart of these machines, onrushing technology, the loss of individuality, the loss of control, these are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty years. It's got to explore the question of victimization."

"I'm not interested in victims," Campbell said, "I'm interested in heroes. I have to be; science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."

"But not everyone is a hero. Not everyone can solve problems—"

"Those people aren't the stuff of science fiction," Campbell said. "If science fiction doesn't deal with success or the road to success, then it isn't science fiction at all."

Much later—after his death—it occurred to me that he must have been lonely in those last years. Many things had changed in and out of science fiction in the late sixties, the writers were spread all over the country and didn't come up to the office much anymore, the old guard had very little to do with him, the new writers were with Carr and Knight, Ellison and Ernsberger. Fred Pohl was responsible for buying the first stories of most of the writers who in the sixties were to go on to careers; Campbell's discoveries—he was still hospitable to unknowns—tended to stay in the magazine. If, like Norman Spinrad, they began to write a different kind of fiction and publish elsewhere, they were not welcomed back. At the time this seemed to be arrogance and editorial autocracy, but seen from Campbell's side it could only have been reaction to ingratitude and perversity. Why weren't his writers selling in the book markets and why did those who he broke in, so many of them, stop listening? It was very hard to handle and his sinusitis had turned to emphysema. Gout made him limp. Some fanzines were venomous.

"Mainstream literature is about failure," Campbell said, "a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery. We're going to land on the moon in a month and it was science fiction which made all of that possible." His face was alight. "Isn't it wonderful?" he said. "Thank God I'm going to live to see it." (He must have been thinking of Willy Ley, who had died just a few weeks before. Ley, the science columnist of Galaxy, had been with the German Rocketry Society in the thirties, had dedicated his working life to the vision of space travel. The timing of his death was cruel; even though they had been at odds for almost twenty years Campbell had gone to the funeral and been shattered.)

"The moon landing isn't science fiction. It comes from technological advance—"

"There's going to be a moon landing because of science fiction," Campbell said. "There's no argument."

Probably there wasn't. (Most of the engineers and scientists on Apollo had credited their early interest in science to the reading of science fiction, which meant, for almost all of them, Astounding.) Still, the young man's intensity had turned at last to wrath. Here was the living archetype of science fiction, right here, and he wasn't reasonable.

No, he was just a stubborn, close-minded, bigoted sixty-year-old who had endorsed Wallace in 1968, had said that the Chicago police hadn't hit long or hard enough and was now pursuing dowsing as a legitimate research method. I lunged at him verbally. Engaged he lunged back. We argued civilization. The electoral process (Campbell thought most were too dumb to deserve the vote). The fall of cities, the collapse of postindustrial democracy because of the pervading effect of ideologies like Campbell's. ("Good," Campbell said, "we'll find something better.") The editor would not budge. Neither would the soon-to-be-editor emeritus of the SFWA Bulletin. It became, at great length, one o'clock. The young man twitched like an elongated White Rabbit. "Better go," he said, "better go, it's late. I'm late." For nothing. But I would not presume on Campbell's time further. Besides, it was time for his lunch. Besides, arguing with him had made me sick.

"All right," Campbell said. Much later too I realized that he might have wanted me to go out with him, but in light of the argument knew no way to ask. "Nice talking to you."

"Nice talking to you," I said. "An honor." I stood shakily, took his hand, shook it, nodded at Catherine Tarrant and stumbled down the corridor. Later I stood by the elevator bank at 420 Lexington Avenue and waited.

For quite a long time. While I stood there, briefcase clutched, trying to straighten my tie with one hand (I was a self-important young fella) the fuller sense of the morning came over me. The schism between us, the irreparable distance, the sheer unreason of this man from whom I had learned so much, expected so much more. There were, if you considered it in one way, aspects of tragedy here.

It should not have come to this; it was terribly sad. I began to shake with recrimination. It was wrong. This was not the way Campbell should have ended, the way it should have been the only time I met him—

Still no elevator.

Around a corner loomed suddenly the figure of John Campbell on his way either to or from—I surmised—the lavatory. He regarded me for a while. I looked back at him, shook my head, sighed, felt myself shaking as a sound of despair oinked out. A twinkle came into the Campbell eye as he surveyed it all.

"Don't worry about it, son," he said judiciously. And kindly after a little pause. "I just like to shake 'em up."

So he did.

And so do I try. Still.

—1980: New Jersey

The Science Fiction of Science Fiction

Robert Silverberg's two 1970s stories, "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" (1972) and "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" (1973), are central to any analysis of the form; they are extremely important as works of literary criticism and may in that regard transcend their value as fiction (which is not to say that as fiction they are contemptible). Neither has received a great deal of attention; short stories in this category rarely do. Neither in my opinion has been properly understood, because to properly grasp these stories is, perhaps, to cease reading and writing science fiction. It is astonishing, a tribute to professionalism and the contradictory nature of the writers' persona that Silverberg continued to write past these stories, and after a three-year pause seems to stand on the verge of yet another major career, his third in this field.

(But this is not to single out Silverberg. My own 1973 Herovit's World reads like the last will and testament of a bitterly exhausted writer about to quit science fiction; that posture did become mine for a time but only three years later. Between Herovit's World and my public scream of pain I wrote more than fifteen additional science fiction novels and a hundred short stories. Persistence or the beckonings of the market, culture lag or most likely of all proof of Robert Sheckley's aphorism: It is very hard to learn from something that we already know.)

To jump the argument herein right to the end and to anticipate my conclusion (a habit quite common among writers who fear the point may otherwise wriggle off like a fish and evade them forever), what Silverberg is clearly saying in both "Schwartz" and "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" is that science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature. It can never aspire to the effects of the first rate, which are to break the reader (and writer) through to new levels of perception, to a reorganization of the materials of his life. It cannot do this because the purposes of science fiction, at the base, must work against this kind of heightening of insight, confrontation of self.

Yet at the same time that both of these stories drive through to the point conclusively, they are themselves very close to first-rate work. "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" is not science fiction (it is a literary story which incorporates the genre as a metaphor for the protagonist-narrator's condition), but "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" is, and the fact that the latter at least can take the reader to a conclusion which the existence of the story denies is one of those large or little paradoxes not uncharacteristic of the field. The tension between what is said and what is meant—what is indicated and what is done. It is all of a mystery.

"The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" was published in Infinity Three, a long-departed volume of an extinct original anthology series (it reached five volumes; a sixth was compiled but never published) edited by Robert Hoskins. It is less a work of fiction than what the French might call a meditation: the nameless protagonist, employed in an unstated executive job in an anonymous corporation, discusses the role that his obsession with reading and collecting science fiction has imposed upon him. He is ambivalent about science fiction: on the one hand he feels that it is a carryover of adolescent escapism and fantasizing which, shamefully, he has not been able to put away; on the other he feels that the transcendent and predictive qualities of the genre grant him broader perspective than most of his friends in the corporate lower middle class. (But he feels vaguely embarrassed defending the genre to his friends and conceals his library.) He fornicates with a lady friend while watching the Apollo landing; the moment of orgasm colliding with the first steps on the moon (a coincidence which would not work with ninety writers out of a hundred but which Silverberg makes appealing through dry understatement), yields only a sense of blankness, the same blankness which he feels at this culmination of the science-fictional vision. Old magazine covers and paragraphs from the classic stories drift through the protagonist's mind toward sleep; he can chant the names of the greats and of their oeuvre. The story comes to no conclusion whatsoever but it is fair to say that if it had appeared in The New Yorker (where it would have fit in stylistically without a tremor) instead of Infinity it would have been taken as a perfectly turned template of late-century urban angst and loss as portrayed through the metaphor of escapist fiction. The story, one of Silverberg's finest, has attracted virtually no attention, probably because it is not science fiction and its true audience (whatever that audience might be) has never found it.

"Schwartz" has attracted some attention and is science fiction; it appeared in the first issue of the Judy-Lynn del Rey occasional original anthology, Stellar Science Fiction, and was until late 1980 (when "Our Lady of the Stegosaurs" appeared in Omni, to be followed by several others) Silverberg's apparent last short story. Schwartz, a 22nd-century physicist with psychological and emotional problems of minor crippling nature, is a science fiction fan; on a star flight he sinks further and further into the fantasies of pulp magazines while the technologized, metallic present recedes; barely able to cope with his environment Schwartz appears to sink toward clinical depression as the rocket approaches its destination and not a moment too soon.

Silverberg is reiterating the vision of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" but with less ambivalence here, possibly with less moral complexity;20 here is the speculation, quite naked, that science fiction in any era will be a junk medium. The science fiction of the science fiction future will partake then as ever of the elements of fantasy and escape, will serve the reader's need for the dreamlike, will shift him (with his active collaboration) off reality.

The very purposes of science fiction in short must render it contemptible in absolute literary (or psychological) terms. Literature deals with life, the story would suggest; science fiction sends us messages of its warpage or denial. Schwartz tumbling through the black holes of the ninth millennium would yet meander through pulp imaginings, dreaming perhaps of brave astronauts making moon landings or inventing holographic television transmitters.

Like "Science Fiction Hall of Fame," "Schwartz" is therefore less a work of fiction than of literary criticism. (Silverberg has stated that he thinks it is one of his five best; I think that a reasonably close reader would not take it that high, but it is close and detailed work and both better conceived and adventurous, if not as emotionally affecting, as "Science Fiction Hall of Fame.") It is, in fact, a castigation of the genre which perpetrated it and in which it appears, and as such it is devastating, a demolition of the genre so compelling that one surmises that if Judy-Lynn del Rey had truly understood what Silverberg was saying she would have refused to publish the story. (This may be too harsh; Silverberg recounts that del Rey was not too happy with it on delivery, calling it something that she had not expected, but it would be more than possible for her to publish it as a politic gesture to a major career without having much use for it at all.) Certainly it is easy to see why it was Silverberg's last short story for seven years and why after two more relatively unambitious novels (The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace) Silverberg backed away from science fiction for several years. There is no place a serious science fiction writer can go from "Schwartz" other than to consciously cut back on the range and implication of the material. ("Lord Valentine's Castle" and "Our Lady of the Stegosaurs," published at the time of this writing, clearly indicate that this is, for now at least, so.)

"Schwartz" and "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" (along with a few of my own works, particularly Herovit's World and Galaxies) are close to the final position statement but they have interesting antecedent in Samuel R. Delany's well-known "Aye, and Gomorrah," which appeared in Dangerous Visions in 1967 and won a Nebula Award; Delany tosses away in subtext what Silverberg brought up front but the clues are there. In his story the science fiction of today has become the cheap adventure fiction of the century following and is read (among others) by perverts who are sexually aroused by (desexualized) astronauts: science fiction has become tomorrow's pornography. In one shattering throwaway description of the cheap magazines and paperbacks kept by one of the frelks (astronaut-lovers) in his apartment Delany opened a crack on Silverberg's devastating insight: Science fiction is junk. Junk by definition misrepresents, lies, cheapens, manipulates—junk may even be said to destroy (but only if one is already open to destruction), but ultimately junk can serve only the debased purposes of those who consume it: they are not seeking enlightenment but comfort. Delany has other, and perhaps less profound, matters on his mind in this story but he foreshadows what Silverberg in the best tradition was able to explore at greater length many years later.

(Any discussion of this subgenre's subgenre must fairly make reference as well to the late Edmond Hamilton's 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction story "The Pro," in which an old pulp science fiction writer, father of an astronaut, returns from a view of the launching to look at the dead colored magazines and books on his shelf, "lined up like little paper corpses," and understands that not only in relation to his son's career but to all of life his work has meant absolutely nothing, has borne no relation to any reality except the brief purposes to which his fiction was conceived and published, now of no value whatsoever. He could not get the curious reporters, looking for a human interest angle, to understand that and he could barely accept it himself but now, as The Pro stares at the collected and forgotten works, the tears come. The story was reprinted only once in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and this paragraph is, to my knowledge, the first printed notice it has ever received. Hamilton died in early 1977 at the age of seventy-three. All of his work is now out of print. Much of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back appear to be based upon a close reading of his work. At least his wife, Leigh Brackett, who herself died only a year later, was commissioned to do the original script for The Empire Strikes Back.)

What does all of this mean? What is the question? as Gertrude Stein is reputed to have finally said. The Silverberg stories—and Delany's and Hamilton's too in a different way—lead to brooding if not awfully complex speculation on the nature of the field to which I have dedicated a large proportion of my working life and most of my best creative energies. And two and a half million words of fiction. The questions are by their nature irresolute but at least they can be posed, no small step for a middle-aged genre writer. Is science fiction doomed indeed to be a second-rate literature? Does its very nature demand that?

Or is this too bleak? Might the genre be shaped or at least left open to the possibility that it could lead toward an explanation of the better rather than worse possibilities? Might science fiction become, somehow, not a literature of escape but (as Alexei Panshin has suggested) one of education for survival? Might science fiction, in short, somehow be worked around as the Futurians of the late thirties were sure it could be, to save the world?

Science fiction to save the world is a catechism which predates even the Futurians. The earliest practitioners of the form as defined by Gernsback believed by the early thirties in nothing less. The history of organized fandom according to the concordance of Moskowitz (footnotes by Harry Warner, Jr.) can be understood as the history of a group splitting early between those who loved science fiction for its own sake and those who saw it as a political-social instrument of change; the schism became ugly, and even uglier were some of the effects of the decades on those who believed that it could matter. As late as the nineteen-fifties, most of the field's best writers—Kornbluth, Clifton, Budrys, Heinlein—and certainly almost all of its important editors, believed that the literature had the power within itself to change society, to genuinely alter institutions and personal lives. (Hubbard's Dianetics, an invention which emerged wholly from science fiction, was an attempt to codify the personality and therapy in terms which could have been those of Astounding's engineer-readers; perform the proper rituals and remove the engram, schematize the psyche and quantify the Bad Charge.)

Most science fiction writers no longer believe this. Some do but have resorted to mystical rather than practical rationalization. Panshin in his nineteen-seventies critical works Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow and SF in Dimension posits a science fiction which will deliver universe, possibility, and transcendence. Robert Heinlein's most recent enormous novels use the devices of science fiction as mystical extrapolation. (Stranger in a Strange Land, the first and best of them, found an enormous audience, a few of whom did not interpret Heinlein's vision in exactly that way.) There is to this time a strong undercurrent in science fiction toward the use of the genre as a positive, engaging, didactic, useful medium for its readers. Science fiction as self-improvement; a kind of complicated Couéism for the last quarter of the century. Getting better with science fiction; Valentine Smith as another version of Bruce Barton's Jesus who, whatever else He might have been, was surely one of the boys. And a hell of a salesman.

But "Schwartz" and "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" will simply not go away. Once read—and anyone who would consider himself a student of this genre will eventually read them—they render a statement which must be taken into account. Science fiction will always offer easier alternatives. Science fiction will always be slanted, by definition, to taking its readers out of the world. Only weak people, however—pat Freudianism and the great cult psychology movements of the seventies have taught us—want out of the world. Strong people want in. Strong people want to, must, deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction is a literature for the weak, the defenseless, the handicapped, and the scorned. Panacea and pap—I have presented the poles of the argument. I have no conclusion. Here is the ambivalence locked not only into the field but in me (and perhaps, although I hesitate to generalize, in every writer who ever attempted to do a serious body of work in science fiction or even took it seriously enough to start). It would be nice to conclude positively, satisfying a large portion of the readership; it would be satisfying to end negatively if only to carry through the integrity of one's vision, but I can do neither. I have no answer nor can I even recommend where it may be sought. Science fiction is an ambivalent genre.

It is an ambivalent genre and I have been, perhaps, its most ambivalent writer. The career and Collected Works, the life itself, have been monument or mausoleum to schism. The field is one thing and yet it may be the other. I am one thing and yet the other. I, the field, may be both but somehow I doubt it. One cannot embrace multitudes; one can barely (and only then if life is lived well) embrace oneself. There is simply no conclusion.

This genre, this thing, this science fiction, may make us better, it may make us worse. It may make us anything and then again, pace Hamilton, it may make us nothing at all, be entirely useless, a bunch of futuristic or bizarre stories. That's all folks, take them or leave them as you will, and most of you will leave them. It is everything and nothing, better and worse. It is intolerably—and finally—merely human.

And that is what drew me toward it. A path not of illumination but of thrall. To become at last what one beholds—and dare not know the difference.

—1979/1980: New Jersey

I Don't Want Her You Can Have Her—

The fans with their acronyms have the name for it all right: GAFIATE, getting away from it all. In the active form, to gafiate. The reaction is well known. Exhaustion, loathing, and overwhelming futility attack the actifan. Enmeshed in a hardly seamless network of conventions, fanzines, correspondence, feuds, history, and obligation, he feels a poetic faintness. He ceases to respond to letters; he is seen at conventions no more. Feuds and lovers must find other objects. The fan has gafiated. Sometimes he makes an announcement to this effect. More often—gafiation by definition is silence—he allows inferences. He returns to school full time. He gets married out of the field or files for divorce within it. He runs for congress or becomes employed by a distinguished graduate division.

Sometimes the gafiation is permanent (there are figures who will not even admit their participation in fan activity; will rip up the texts of Warner or Moskowitz undetected in bookstores). Quite often it is not. The fan, after a period of recuperation, degafiates. Once again he is seen at conventions, begins to query contributors for his reborn fanzine. APAs bristle with fresh reminiscence. Of course, in another few months or years the revulsion like malaria may set in once more: once more the pain. There are people whose lives can be defined in terms of successive involvement and flight from organized science fiction.

The same thing happens to writers and, for that matter, casual readers. The writer will deal with science fiction no more. He cannot write power fantasies for a juvenile audience, he is restricted by the editors, enchained by taboo, he will seek a wider audience and artistic freedom in the mainstream. Suitable announcements are made. The casual reader—for that matter, the heavy reader—has lost a sense of wonder. Eyes glaze, sensibility clouds; science fiction, like the booze in the second act of The Iceman Cometh, no longer has that old kick. He will read real novels about real people. The reader and writer turn their energies to another focus—the reader, usually adolescent, at first gafiation begins to entertain a social life—but they will be back. You can count on it. Unless, of course, they are not. Permanent gafiates appear to be the rule in only one class, those who in early adolescence, for a brief period of time, read great quantities of science fiction in a brief lacuna between childhood and the onset of a purposeful sex drive. (Decades later these people will not even remember reading science fiction in quantity and they will not be lying or self-deluded—science fiction was indeed an extension of a persona that the glands' development demolished.) All of the others, in one fashion or the other, are heard from again. They can be said to have ungafiated and the terminology and the literature have categorized that syndrome as well.

This central ambivalence in the science fiction reader and writer—an ambivalence not common among those involved in any other kind of literature although quite familiar (in other areas) to students of abnormal psychology or those involved with the great religious institutions—is perhaps the central fact of the category, the lever to mix a metaphor into any profound understanding of this dark and troubled literature. The ambivalence comes from the conflicting perceptions of the form: Is it a true literature of the future, a forward-looking, transcendent, mind-boggling, mind-stretching form which renders its readers superior to the population, or is it just a bunch of crazy power fantasies and speculations (admittedly some of them better written than others) for the sublimation of powerless adolescents? Is it a literature whose roots are contemptible or exalting? Every one of us has felt strongly in one way and then the other through the course of our involvement and very few of us have managed to resolve the schism. Gafiation is an expression of one perception when pushed to the extreme but gafiation may itself be an act of collaboration . . . one has taken science fiction seriously enough, been moved by it to sufficient degree, to need to put an official imprimatur upon one's rejection. Surely the millions who have read one or two science fiction stories, have not liked them particularly, and have not looked at science fiction since have not gafiated. They were never in a circumstance from which they could gafiate at all.

The ambivalence is not only at the center of everyone's relationship to the form but probably at the center of the genre itself. Almost all of our strong works—and a good many of the weaker ones in the bargain—have derived much of their power from the evident struggles of the writers to fuse elaborate and often bizarre speculation with character and situation which will give the speculation emotional force. "The disparate and technological, the desperate and human," Samuel R. Delany said many years ago, this is the definition of science fiction. The desperate and the disparate, the technological and the human do not link up easily; however, the fusion can be made—Rogue Moon, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Delany's own "Aye, and Gomorrah," to which his remarks were afterword, indicate that it can be done—but the psychic costs for writers and readers are severe. It is, after all, what started out as a crazy literature about aliens and robots, rocket ships and planetary destruction; it was deliberately published in the most debased form and slanted to appeal to a juvenile audience. As the consequence of the decades and of the perversity of its writers and editors, the pain and implication began to be put in . . . but there is a point at which even an excellent writer, a sophisticated reader begins to question the very nature of the material to which he is devoting so much time and thought. Surely there must be a better occupation for a grown human being than to define the world in deliberately removed form. It is better to deal with the world directly. Have an affair, get a degree in computer science, write a historical novel about events which did occur.

Spend some time with the kids, sell off the magazine collection.

Hence, gafiation. But there is nothing approaching a real cure for the seriously afflicted; one may amputate the limb but must henceforth live in apprehension of its loss, limp around. Sometimes it is simply easier to accept one's condition, go back to it. Up to a point of course. And then at a lower level, satiation is reached once again and one begins to toy with the idea of gafiation, which the second or third time is hardly such a major step. After all, one has already lived through it. . . .

There is really no solution to any of this; science fiction, as Delany hints, is the literature of irresolution. Its readers and writers will inevitably feel pulled out at some point and some will feel that way always even though few can forsake it utterly. No creators or audience for any branch of popular entertainment love and hate their form as do those involved in science fiction. (There is almost no organized fandom for westerns and mysteries; quality lit fandom is oxymoronic and there are no situation comedy conventions. There are soap opera fan luncheons and comics conventions but they appear to be commerce, not seduction.) No creators or audience hate and love one another as do science fiction people. No creators or audience can be said to hate or love themselves as do—

Why? Because it is a crazy escapist literature and yet contains the central truth of this slaughterhouse of a century. We know this and cannot at times bear the thought of it. Nor, considering the record of the century and the horrors which the millennium hurtles toward us, is there reason why we should.

But one cannot—except in a few dramatic and pitiful instances in science fiction—voluntarily gafiate from the century.

—1980: New Jersey

Onward and Upward with the Arts,

Part II

Even a modestly successful science fiction writer—say, a dozen short stories in the magazines and a paperback original—can get on the convention circuit, and some of them never get out. There is in this land at least one science fiction convention every weekend of the year (excepting perhaps Christmas and New Year's), and on many weekends the aspirant has his choice of two or three. The conventions take place in large cities and small, they range in attendance from one hundred or less^21 to seven thousand,22 some are longstanding and traditional (the world convention is approaching the end of its fourth decade, the Cincinnati convention its third); others are fly-by-nights or just beginning to build. One some years ago took place on trains which racketed back and forth between Washington and New York while fans trooped lively through the corridors. It is difficult to speculate the effect on nonconventioneers. (The train was not a charter.)

The conventions are of all size and location but the programs are much the same. Fans attend, as do casual readers who live in the area (depending upon the degree of publicity), and editors and writers, and, of course, the press. There are panels on all aspects of the field, a guest of honor who delivers a guest-of-honor speech, discussion groups, movies, meet-the-pros parties. (At larger conventions many of these events occur simultaneously.) There is a costume party, a grand masquerade. Private parties are held through the premises celebrating various regions, interests, or friendships and sometimes celebrating nothing at all. The hotel bar is filled with professionals and their editors. (Fans themselves, because of age and disposition, tend to be a nondrinking crowd.) There is a good deal of fornication, not all of it indiscriminate. Old rivalries and hatreds are renewed, reworked, or broadened. Although the faces of the fans may change from region to region, those of the writers, editors, and the serious fans do not: Denver is very much like Minneapolis; Boston is Cincinnati redux.

Science fiction—as I have written elsewhere in a different voice a long time ago—for all of its claims to being a mind-expanding, venturesome field is much like the dog-show circuit, the same handlers and judges appearing in different combinations everywhere. The world of the convention like the world of Nabokov's Lolita is an endless series of rooms in different places, all of which look the same. Only through the souvenir shops could one tell the difference.

For a new writer—and many an older one—it is all very heady stuff indeed. There are panels, autographs to be signed, nametags to display, new fornicatrices or drinking partners to be gained; the winds of Seattle's heath may howl, the gales of Philadelphia may blow, but inside the hotel it is comfortable and familiar and it is unnecessary to go out at all. Most attendees do not; always one plans to sightsee but things keep on getting in the way. A science fiction writer who, like all American writers but five or six, lives in anonymity and discontent, can find at the conventions what no other writer outside the province can: recognition and an audience. The panels are attended, the guest-of-honor speeches are heard, the books are there to be autographed and every smile is a winner. It is possible for the duration of a convention—and beyond—to believe that science fiction is the world.

It is not, of course, and in his heart the professional probably knows this, but that requires thought, and conventions work against the activity. Of the 500,000 who can be said to read as many as three science fiction books a year (this already less than a quarter of a percent of the population), only a tenth of them could be identified as serious, devoted readers, and perhaps a fifth of that tenth, or 10,000, compose that pool from which all^23 convention attendees can be said to be drawn. The total convention-going population would at the best fail to fill Madison Square Garden. Early season with the Warriors in town.

Still, at the large conventions they all seem to be there, including many beautiful women (there were almost no women at conventions until the nineteen-sixties). The drinks flow, the professionals hang out in a community of misery, the speeches draw applause, and there is always the possibility that the next request for an autograph may bring a "serious relationship." Editors are always impressed by writers receiving adulation, so there is no mystery to science fiction writers getting on the circuit—all have been powerfully tempted; the circuit is also the reason why so many promising careers have hung at promise for years, or collapsed; still the illusion of audience is better for a writer (and more pleasant by far) than the anonymous, grinding work which is the lot of the commercial fictioneer. It is possible to combine the two—grinding work, weekend conventions—but this can bring real burnout; only a few remarkable cases have been able to work them together, and one will never know the price extracted from celebrated livers and bowels.

The existence of the circuit is probably the central reason for a well-known phenomenon: science fiction is an art medium in which one can go from quite promising to washed up without having paused for even a day at a point between. But the last word should be that of an ex-science fictioneer (who fled both the field and the circuit a long time ago) who said, "You know, you can get a great deal of attention, real reverence at these conventions for sure. But you know when the trouble begins? It starts when you ask who in hell you're getting this attention from."

—1980: New Jersey

Tell Me Doctor If You Can That It's Not All Happening Again

Replication is the stuff of marriage, middle age, and science fiction; the portents are heavy and the air is foul. In late 1959—as in late 1937 on a less cosmic scale—the market for science fiction was in a state of collapse. The magazines, the deaths, the distributors, the book publishers. A well-known American fan and editor, Earl Kemp, passed around the Detroit World Science Fiction Convention with a questionnaire asking responses to the question, Who killed science fiction? and he had enough speculations and rumblings to publish a book (which won an unprecedented Hugo Award in the fan magazine category a couple of years later). Dismal clumps of editors and writers gathered in bars and bedrooms to ask one another whether the field could even be said to exist anymore. There was one fairly viable magazine (Astounding), a couple of others obviously in distress, and a scattering of paperback book publishers, none of whom expressed much interest in paying more than small advances to writers whose work they had already published. Detroit was a terrible time; a convention which lives on in the memory of the assembled as surely postfunereal but without even the wistful gaiety of the wake.24

Many of Earl Kemp's respondents confessed their feeling that science fiction had indeed been murdered, that its existence as an independent, functioning subgenre of American literature had reached its end just as had the sports pulp, the air war stories, combat fiction, jungle stories, and the like. (In the great pulp era of the nineteen-thirties there had been several magazines devoted to such arcana as railroad fiction or espionage. The war and paper shortages had put an end to almost all of these magazines and television in the postwar era guaranteed that they would never be revived; truly almost all of the pulp-era readers seemed to prefer television, and readers who would have come into the market after the war, of course, had no choice.) To this time, those science fiction writers who were active at the end of the era are able to talk of the late nineteen-fifties only with loathing. Most of them gave up their careers—by choice, circumstance, or a fortuitous blending of the two—and most of them never returned. The markets revived but this generation of writers was gone.

More than two decades later we know that American science fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack, it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned (although there have been little murmurs and seizures, flutters of panic). Over a thousand titles labeled "science fiction" have been published every year since 1978, no less than fifty writers can be said to be making a substantial-to-extravagant living through the writing of science fiction alone, and although the magazines have been pushed steadily to the borders of the market—only Analog, Amazing, and Fantasy and Science Fiction survive from the fifties; only Isaac Asimov's and Omni have persisted from their birth in the late seventies to join them, though Omni publishes very little fiction—the science fiction short story lives on in the original anthology form and is the basis for many expansions to novel length. The science fiction novel has become the most reliable single category in American mass-market publishing; 15 percent of all fiction titles published are now science fiction, and most of these books are at least marginally profitable for their publisher.

Nonetheless, the dystopian undercurrent flows in science fiction; it has from the genre's inception. (Letters in the Astounding of the mid-thirties were already asking where all the good stuff had gone; correspondents to Astounding in the late forties were expressing the hope that with the war over Campbell could now get some of the decent kind of fiction that he had been publishing before Pearl Harbor.) Perhaps it has to do with the psychic defensiveness of the science fiction reader, but it also is based upon extrinsic and verifiable realities. The writers, the more experienced editors, and the older-generation fans often wake up screaming, in minor versions of the combat flashback syndrome, from dreams that it has all happened again. "Is it happening again?" they ask themselves, and not only in their individual cubicles of the night. Every retrenchment in a publisher's line, every transfer of a magazine ownership, every significant editor fired brings up the question: the late fifties again? Regardless of the changes in the field, expansion of at least the fringe audience, security of backlist, and the essentially benign commercial history of the last decade . . . is science fiction due nonetheless for another collapse?

The cyclical history of the field, the omens and the portents might so indicate, but science fiction writers and readers are supposed to be rationalists, and some factors which applied in 1959 do not apply now. It is no longer a magazine medium hooked to the whims of distributors and a transient audience but instead is tied into the media by conglomerate ownership and by the fact that the most successful movies of recent years—Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Alien—have all been science fiction and have funneled new readers steadily into the field. (Most of them, alas, dropping out soon.) We all like to think too that we are older and wiser, that like Anouilh's priest in The Lark we have seen it all before and thus do not need to see it again. The most powerful delusion of a career in the writing of any fiction is that one's work grows and improves, that things need ultimately not be the same but in changing will get better . . . that there is a difference.

Still, even with the safeguards and delusions, not unlike those "safeguards" and "brakes" which economists remind us over and over again in their newspaper columns make a recurrence of the depression impossible, one cannot really be sure. There are no certainties in show biz. Conglomerate publishing can be merciless to a losing proposition (the same people who kill television series after two episodes or refuse to proceed with a pilot in the face of negative advertiser reaction are now the people who ultimately control publishing), producing fear among the writers and editors alike. At a recent world convention^25 the editors were on short expense accounts and mostly in hiding; the writers entertained one another with tales of editorial treachery and incompetence, publisher stupidity and retrenchment.

Make this point: what most readers of science fiction do not know and have little reason to suspect is the degree to which the very quality of fear can be said to control the acquisition, production, marketing, and selling of science fiction in this country and how all of these subsidiary fears refract back to the first, that of the writer trying to survive by the medium who, professionally, must engage in self-censorship, must understand that there are certain stories he cannot write. The writer—the experienced writer in any event—knows that most editors acquire and publish not in an effort to be successful so much as to avoid failure.26 Defensive driving. They seek, then, that which they consider safe, and the writers who are at the mercy of these editors^27 function from the same motivation. (It can be presumed that those who feel or function differently find it almost impossible to get their work into the mass market.) They must produce that which will not offend, which will not cause an editor to question the commercial viability of a book, a process leading quickly to rejection. Science fiction, like all commercial fiction (and quality lit too although in a slightly different way), can perhaps be best understood in terms of what is not written rather than what is. Self-censorship controls. Any writer who understands this at all will know what not to try. As good a definition of professionalism as any other.

What is unsaleable then? What are the taboos and limitations which have been imposed upon the field? No list can be inclusive, of course (new circumstances lead to new taboos; Larry Janifer recalls a sex book publisher of the early sixties who, keeping close eye through lawyers on the courts, would have a new list of do's and don'ts issued every week; quite difficult if one had a novel-in-progress), but for general edification a partial list can be prepared. It must be made clear that the list is not immutable; it is only the fact of taboo which is constant. Buggery may come and pinko liberalism may go; old terrors will become cuddly rabbits and new beasts with rotten teeth will ease in through the windows. Even so, there will always be in this field (as in all others) certain subjects which can on only extraordinary occasions be discussed, certain approaches which can only be taken at the highest risk.

Some decades after Detroit, here is a small Common Book:

ONE: Bleak, dystopian, depressing material which implies that the present cultural fix is insane or transient and will self-destruct . . . that the very ethos and materials of the society, without the introduction of hungry invaders or Venusian outrage, will bring it down.

(The key here is self-destruction; there is no essential taboo against an extrapolation of the present culture which will be destroyed by the envious or by the righteous underground. The problem is an extrapolated present that without the slightest shove goes merrily to extinction. E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," published in 1902 in another country and anthologized endlessly in this field, strikes me as the kind of story which would be unpublishable in any contemporary science fiction magazine.)

TWO: Material which is highly internalized. That is, science fiction written from the point of view of a meditative and introspective central character whose perceptions are the central facet of the work, whose reactions to the events of the story are more important than the story itself. Goodbye Henry James, so long Herman Melville, get lost Saul Bellow; The Demolished Man would have a hell of a time getting sold by an unknown Alfred Bester in this market.

THREE: Science fiction which implies that contemporary accepted mores of sexuality, socioeconomics, or familial patterning might be corrupting, dangerous, or destructive. This appears to be a corollary to Dangerous Plot ONE but must be distinguished from it because while the first taboo would merely be against self-destructiveness, the third shuts off the possibility of serious investigation of alternatives. There has never been—as a now aged but still angry Will Sykora, chairman of the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, pointed out to me scant months ago—a communistic science fiction; that is, there has never been a body of work in science fiction done seriously analyzing the way a Marxian society might work (or fail to work) in the future or on any other planet. There similarly has never been a science fiction in which homosexuality or polymorphous perversity were considered as cultural norms (Charles Beaumont's 1955 "The Crooked Man" evokes a homosexual society but only in a surprise ending which is supposed to make the story horrible and, for that time and Playboy's audience, probably succeeded); there has never been a science fiction in which alternatives to the nuclear family were perceived as anything other than horrible (as they were in Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai! with its Warrior Creche, or Damon Knight's "Ask Me Anything" with its kidnapped infants' brains put into cyborgs). In the late seventies John Varley published a few short stories in which sex change was seen as a cultural norm, but then again as in Wyman Guin's 1951 "Beyond Bedlam," where schizophrenia was seen as the norm, the stories settled for a schematization without interposing in the narrative any character who as a surrogate reader might have raised questions on the system with which the characters—and hence the writer—were compelled to deal.

FOUR: Science fiction which owes less to classical, Aristotelian notions of "plot"—the logical, progressive ordering of events as a protagonist attempts to solve a serious and personally significant problem—than "mood" . . . that is, the events for their own sake, perceived in chiaroscuro fashion without the superficial ordering imposed by a central point of view or a problem-solving format. (This would render not only Ulysses-Finnegan's Wake influences taboo in science fiction but would mean that even more modest experiments in form, such as those of Donald Barthelme, Tillie Olsen, or Grace Paley, would be unacceptable . . . indeed the bewildered reaction of science fiction editors to work of this sort is to ask, "Where's the story?" and in terms of classical perception of plot they are, to be sure, quite right.)

FIVE: Science fiction truly at the hard edge of contemporary scientific investigation . . . science fiction which denies Einsteinian theory, the speed of light as an absolute limitation upon speed itself, science fiction which looks at Darwinism in light of recent studies which indicate that the whole question of natural selection must be reevaluated.

Editors tend to blame not themselves but the writers for this, and there is a small amount of truth in this; writers, particularly commercial writers, are lazy and superficial by economic and psychic necessity. "All the science I ever needed to know I got out of a bottle of scotch," James Blish quotes an unnamed science fiction writer in The Issue at Hand, and John W. Campbell in his last years complained of the reluctance or inability of new writers and old to work at the frontier of scientific investigation. Still, truly original or heretic approaches to scientific thought would unsettle the preconceived reader and editorial notions of the category. There has not been—this is an extreme generalization but I will stand by it and take objections c/o the publisher, with promise to apologize in the Second Edition if necessary—a truly original scientific extrapolation in science fiction in at least ten years. Perhaps Poul Anderson's Tau Zero ("To Outlive Eternity") played with notions of relativity which had been commonly accepted up until then; perhaps Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days" offered in his slow glass an entirely new, scientifically rationalized and rigorously imagined technological imposition upon the culture. Perhaps Pamela Sargent's 1971 "The Other Perceiver," which questioned the perception of waste and the life cycle might qualify. They are the most recent examples of science fiction which can even be proposed as at the harder edge of scientific investigation, pursued with the hard edge of rigor.

SIX: Science fiction which questions science fiction; work which questions the assumptions of the category and speculates on the effect it might have upon its readership. Silverberg's two short stories and my own Galaxies (all cited elsewhere) are the last examples of work of this form; the most recent was published more than half a decade ago.

SEVEN: Genuinely feminist science fiction; that is, science fiction in which women are perceived to react to events and internalize in a way which is neither a culturally received stereotype (the bulk of science fiction before 1970) nor a merely male stereotype projected onto female characters. (Most of the female-protagonist work of the post-1970 period.) The women of contemporary "feminist" science fiction are not women but male characters with female names, genitalia, and secondary sexual characteristics; most of the advance into the era of liberation has only been in terms of new labels for an old constituency. I have absolutely no conception of what a true feminist science fiction would be, and I am more than half-convinced that I could not write it (although ideally male writers could do it as well as female), but it would be like nothing we have seen before and would bear little relation to the gender-changed 1940s pulp envisionings which are passed off as feminist science fiction today. (The only truly feminist science fiction story I can bring to mind—which is not to say that there might not be others—is James Tiptree's [Alice Sheldon's] 1973 "The Women Men Don't See," which shows a degree of submission, subtlety, and converted rage in its two female characters absolutely not glimpsed elsewhere in science fiction.)

This dismal listing—and there is no way to characterize it other than as dismal; give it to an aspirant science fiction writer and show the aspirant how to sink a career—in no way is meant to imply my own endorsement of the tabooed viewpoints. (Some are close to my gnarled little heart and others are my own anathema. Some I could write and more than a couple do not, to me, seem worth writing at all.) What I am merely suggesting is that a science fiction novel (and almost any science fiction short story other than by an important writer) flouting one or more of the taboos listed would be very unlikely to find a publisher. (It goes without saying that more than one taboo could be assaulted in a work. Bester's The Demolished Man, which would probably be unpublishable today, took on at least three of them; Sturgeon's long-promised novel of which the novella "When You Care/When You Love" published in 1962 is the supposed opening section might well cut through all seven.) It is what they call in Las Vegas or Atlantic City an out bet to suggest that no more than a hundred thousand words of science fiction published throughout the ensuing decade will take on any of these strictures.

And so the decade is launched. It is in fact well launched; the patterns of the eighties are well set: the conglomerates will dominate, fewer titles will receive more publicity, the magazines will drift away, the ambitious new writers will have a tough time. (When except for the brief glimmering between 1952 and 1955 did they not?) It would be easy to conclude with the clarion call for the ending of such taboos: liberation, ladies and gents, to the barricades, take on the stereotypes, muscle away the poltroons and the elitists, throw a flying fuck in the case of the Queen. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! as Lear pointed out (hopelessly) on the heath. If not such fervid cries, at least an ironic suggestion with a moue of the features that it might have been the very taboo-laden atmosphere of the late fifties which contributed to the near collapse of the field. A similar atmosphere prevailing today might replicate the disaster unless editors become adventurous, writers daring, readers insistent and so on. Onward! Onward with liberated science fiction!

It would be nice to round it off that way but I am distinctly middle-aged and have been a professional science fiction writer for a long time. I have been reading in the field for three decades. I do not believe that I could sustain the call to barricades without collapsing into self-loathing chuckles and ironic gasps, the kind of laughter with which attendants in mental institutions and bartenders in writers' heavens all over the country are so familiar. I cannot sustain that voice because I do not believe that science fiction will ever become liberated^28 (what is liberation?) or that if the ragged old form did that it would be to its advantage.

To the contrary. A true science fiction might destroy the field commercially, sending the majority of its readership away in confusion or horror. They do not read science fiction, most of them, to be disturbed but to be pacified. Science fiction indeed may be flourishing now precisely to the degree that it is saying less and saying it worse than ever before. The period of greatest economic and readership growth in the history of the field has coincided with the post-1975 shutdown of experimentation or ideological quibble. Science fiction has become big business; it intersects with the media which are feeding it and which it has fed so well, and the field is being run with negligible exceptions amongst the minor book publishers and the magazines by the very same people. Gulf & Western and Rocket Industries. The Music Corporation of Speculation. International Telephone & Terrestrials.

And brave, brave new decade to the inheritors of the mantle of Kornbluth and Kuttner and Campbell. Could the twenty-seven-year-old John W. Campbell get a job today anywhere in the industry? Would they let Horace stay in his apartment while the galleys were slipped underneath the door?

—1979/1980: New Jersey

The Richard Nixon John B. Mitchell Spiro Agnew Blues

Science fiction is not necessarily a cultural microcosm (and then again perhaps it is; the boys in the back room of the fifties indeed felt they were building a better world), but confluence in the political life of the Republic and the market news was striking in the mid-seventies. The collapse of the market for "experimental," "literary," "avant-garde," "downbeat," "technophobic," or "depressing" science fiction can be placed within virtually a month of Nixon's speedy and insufficiently dramatic eviction from high office; by the end of 1974 the editorial doors had closed. Writers and work embodying the cutting edge of the field through the seventies were not having their calls returned, editors who had become identified with those writers and work were either losing their jobs or frantically changing policy. Gerald Ford and the era of Lucas seemed to descend upon the Republic simultaneously; we know that this was not true (Ford was gone when Star Wars opened in the spring of 1977), but it feels true. Post-Watergate was when Lucas was raising the money, anyway.

This, to be sure, is a perilous statement . . . retrospection seeks order that the ongoing reality had no time to set . . . but this matter of perceiving science fiction as a microcosm of the nation's tumultuous, self-deluded, and ultimately disastrous politics must be briefly pursued. I have felt for a while that the eviction of Nixon was the last gasp of the contemporary left; after fifteen years of assassinations, demonstrations, murmurings, rumbles, and license, a President had actually been thrown out of office legally and the left wing recoiled as if in horror: they had, like the child in tantrum who burns down the place, never really expected that they could get away with it. Simultaneously, the right wing and great center regarded the detenancy as the last concession that the left wing would exact. "We gave you the son of a bitch," seemed to be the implicit statement, "you made such an all-fired nuisance of yourselves that we let him go but I'm telling you for your own good: this is the last time. You kids have pulled your last prank; now it's time to go out and get a job."

All the kids seemed to get the message. By 1976 Eugene McCarthy was a ghost candidate, the left wing of the Democratic party (as "represented" by the pusillanimous and disgraced Humphrey) could not even go through the motions of a primary fight, and the "liberal" Republicans had assented to the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the vice presidency without protest. The antiwar movement had long since fragmented and collapsed and the war itself if not over was over for us. The sixties radicals were dead, in hiding, on the underside or taking up permanent rights via squatting in the middle class.

And in science fiction, simil.

In science fiction, the speed and force of the counterrevolution was so abrupt that many of the younger writers for years thereafter were still writing short stories and novels for a market which no longer existed. The bottom of the original anthology market fell out. Ballantine Science Fiction became Del Rey Books and proceeded in both theory and reissued fact to reconstruct the childhood of Lester del Rey. Random House quit science fiction and Pyramid quit everything and those publishers which continued were letting the word out explicitly that traditional themes and handling would be appreciated. Aldiss and Ballard fell out of the American market; Ellison, Silverberg, and the undersigned announced within a fortnight of one another in late 1975^29 that we would write science fiction no more, and new writers began to have more trouble finding publishers than at any time since the early sixties. Certain kinds of writing were almost unsaleable.

It is easy—almost seductively easy one might say—by pursuing this line of confluence to say that science fiction was merely reacting to or reenacting on its own level the political climate of its time. I am not quite sure that this is so; science fiction has been a fairly self-contained circumstance since its inception whose development often moved at odds with the larger culture. (The first half of the forties, that decade of unspeakable horror, will always be known in science fiction as the "Golden Age.") Rather, serendipity seems to be the issue; for different reasons both America and science fiction found itself in retreat from the shocks and terrors of the sixties, which as they brought the very existence of institutions into question, opened the windows on a future which was unacceptable.

The assassinations, the war, the corruption of all political life, the decline of religion, the rise of divorce, and sexual libertarianism had opened up the same trap doors that the post-technological visions of Ballard and Aldiss, the psychological horrors of Tiptree, and the demented idealism of Lafferty had opened in science fiction, and both America (its corporate structure and institutions) and science fiction (through editors and publishers) were in fear of falling. In both cases, the forces of counterrevolution had the same desperate, unspoken assent; no one really wanted to see the country or this great escape fiction fall apart. That the President of the United States could be revealed as a simple crook, that the literature of technological transcendence should become imbued with images of how the machines were killing us was simply too much for the audience to handle. Blame them not. Their confusion became hostility and finally outrage: Nixon might be thrown out and the visions of Ballard scribbled like graffiti all over the holy gates, but now things were going to get back to normal, as quickly as possible. And they were going to stay normal for a hell of a long time. There were big plans to put everything on hold once the temple was resecured.

It may turn around again. It may not. Years ago, the theory of cycles would apply in politics and science fiction alike and one could make reference to the metaphor of the pendulum. A society and economy controlled by conglomerates, however, a literature which is a minor subdivision of a subdivision of these conglomerates, can be manipulated to stay frozen in position (until or unless the whole thing falls apart), and in this totalitarian possibility science fiction and American life can be seen at last to become indistinguishable, to become facets of one another in the last fifth of the last century of the last millennium in which the theory of causality can be seen (or may be needed) at all to apply.

—1980: New Jersey

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich:

December 1903 to September 1968

At the end, in the last year, he looked three decades older. The booze had wrecked him, the markets had wrecked him, he had wrecked him; by the time that friends dragged him out in April to St. Clare's Hospital where they took off the gangrenous leg, he had the stunned aspect of the very old. Where there had been edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound.

Nonetheless, if the booze had stripped all but bone it had left his eyes moist and open, childlike and vulnerable. That September in the open coffin, surrounded by flowers sent by the Chase Manhattan Bank, he looked young; he looked like the man who in his late twenties had loafed around the ballrooms and written of the debutantes.

There were five names in the guest book, Leo and Cylvia Margulies of Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine leading off. Leo died in December 1975 and Cylvia divested herself of the publication about two years later.

He died in print. The April 1968 Escapade had a story, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine had taken his stunning "New York Blues" to publish it two years later; that novelette had been written in late 1967. Ace Books had embarked upon an ambitious program of reissue which brought The Bride Wore Black, Rendezvous in Black, Phantom Lady, and others back into the mass market. Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black was in production. The Ellery Queen hardcover mystery annual had a story. Now, more than a decade later, he is out of print; an item for the specialty and university presses, an occasional republication in an Ellery Queen annual. Ace let the books go a long time past: poor sales. There are no other paperbacks. The hardcovers—what few copies remain—are for the collectors.

"It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? . . . I really loved to write."

His mother Claire died in 1956. Shortly thereafter his own work virtually ceased. A novel—never published—found with his effects; it had been rejected all over New York in the early sixties. A few short stories for Ellery Queen and The Saint Mystery Magazine. His relationship with his mother had been the central—it is theorized that it was the only—relationship of his life; they had lived together continuously for her last fourteen years. When she died, he lived alone in one room on the second floor of the Sheraton-Russell Hotel in Manhattan surrounded by cases and cases of beer cans and bottles of whiskey, and invited the staff to come up and drink with him and watch television. Sometimes he would sit in the lobby; more occasionally he would take a cab to McSorley's Tavern in the village. The gangrene which came from an ill-fitting shoe and which untreated turned his left leg to charcoal, slowly, from early 1967 to April 1968, ended all that; he would stay in his room and drink almost all the time and stare at the television looking for a film from one of his novels or short stories which came on often enough and usually after 2 A.M.; between the movies and the alcohol he was finally able to find sleep. For a few hours. Until ten or eleven in the morning, when it would all start again. At the end he had almost none of his books left in the room: he had given them all away to casual visitors. Bellboys. Maids. The night manager. An employee of his literary agent. He could not bear to have his work around him anymore.

"I got six hundred dollars from Alfred Hitchcock for the movie rights to 'Rear Window.' That's all that I got; it was one story in a collection of eight that was sold in the forties by the agent H. N. Swanson for five thousand dollars; he sold everything for five thousand dollars; that's why we all called him five grand Swannie. But that didn't bother me really; what bothered me was that Hitchcock wouldn't even send me a ticket to the premiere in New York. He knew where I lived. He wouldn't even send me a ticket."

The novels were curiously cold for all of their effects and mercilessly driven, but the characters, particularly the female characters, who were the protagonists of many of them, were rendered with great sensitivity and were always in enormous pain. That was one of the mysteries of Woolrich's work for the editors and writers who knew him: how could a man who could not relate to women at all, who had had a brief and terrible marriage annulled when he was twenty-five, who had lived only alone or with his mother since . . . how could such a man have had such insight into women, write of them with such compassion, make these creatures of death and love dance and crumple on the page? Some theorized that the writer could identify with these women because that was the terrible and essential part of him which could never be otherwise acknowledged. Others simply called it a miracle: a miracle that a lonely man in a hotel room could somehow create, populate, and justify the world.

"I tried to move out. In 1942 I lived alone in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and said, 'I can't live without you, I must live with you, I need you,' and I put down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place and for the rest of her life I never spent a night away from her, not one. I know what they thought of me, what they said about me, but I just didn't care. I don't regret it and I'll never regret it as long as I live."

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work and stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to Black Mask and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibilities, but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimaxes to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple Chandler had verged toward this more than a little; there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature, but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations. Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it, but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death, but the novels and short stories of Woolrich were death—in all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.

Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract Truffaut, whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre and the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. Nothing at all . . . but the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

"I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried."

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out-of-control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. Rendezvous in Black, The Bride Wore Black, Nightmare are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession, and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer, was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent; the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. The Bride Wore Black is science fiction. Phantom Lady is a gothic. Rendezvous in Black was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.

"I'm glad you liked Phantom Lady but I can't help you, you see. I can't accept your praise. The man who wrote that novel died a long, long time ago. He died a long, long time ago."

At the end, amidst the cases and the bottles and the empty glasses as the great black leg became turgid and began to stink, there was nothing at all. The television did not help, the whiskey left no stain, the bellhops could not bring distraction. They carried him out to St. Clare's and cut off the leg in April and sent him back in June with a prosthesis; the doctors were cheerful. "He has a chance," they said. "It all depends upon his will to live." At the Sheraton-Russell they came to his doors with trays, food, bottles, advice. They took good care of him. They helped him on his crutches to the lobby and put him in the plush chair at the near door so that he could see lobby traffic. They were unfailingly kind. They brought him into the dining room and brought him out. They took him upstairs. They took him downstairs. They stayed with him. They created a network of concern: the Woolrich network in the Sheraton-Russell.

In September, like Delmore Schwartz, he had a stroke in a hotel corridor; in September, like Schwartz in an earlier August, he died instantly. He lay in the Campbell funeral parlor in a business suit for three days surrounded by flowers from Chase Manhattan.

His will left $850,000 to Columbia University (he had inherited money; the markets didn't leave him much) to establish a graduate creative writing program in memory of Claire. He had been a writer of popular fiction, had never had a serious review in the United States, had struggled from cheap pulp magazines to genre hardcover and paperback. Sure he wanted respectability; a university cachet. Sure. Why not? Who wouldn't?

"Life is death. Death is in life. To hold your own true love in your arms and see the skeleton she will be; to know that your love leads to death, that death is all there is, that is what I know and what I do not want to know and what I cannot bear. Don't leave me. Don't leave me.

"Don't leave me now, Barry."

—1980: New Jersey

A Few Hard Truths for the Troops

ONE: There is no substitute for personal editorial contact in this business, particularly at the outset of a career. It is easy enough to sell short stories by mail, but in order to sell them in any quantity the editors should be met; it is ten times easier to sell a first novel to an editor who knows you. Shortly after the initial sales, therefore, it is imperative for a new writer to come to New York (wherein work almost all the editors), or, better yet, to attend the science fiction conventions. The editors go to them. There are at least five conventions a year—the world convention, the West Coast convention on the July 4 weekend, the New York convention in the spring, the Philadelphia and Cincinnati conventions—at which half the editors or more are present. Although a new writer should not become obsessed with convention attendance, at least six should be attended in the year after the first sale (assuming any professional ambitions and spare funds at all), and at least three a year thereafter.

It is possible to run a career from a post office box—James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is the most notable recent example as Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) was of the past—but only a couple of such careers exist during any given writing generation (which according to van Vogt, and I agree, is just about ten years). The rest of you—the rest of us—are like it or not going to have to make the changes, work the scenery. Ten years ago or more a young writer would be best advised to come to New York to live for a while, but New York is now such an expensive and (for many) fundamentally untenable place that it is no longer necessary. With writers scattered throughout the countryside, editors have a good excuse to spend expense account money to go to conventions to see them and editors have no objection to this.

TWO: Reviews have almost no effect upon the sale of a science fiction book. Prepublication reviews in the trade journals are meaningless; reviews in the professional and amateur magazines appear so long after publication that the fate of a book has long been decided by the time they appear. The only factor affecting the sale of a science fiction novel from the point of view of the publisher is print order; a book that prints more will sell more, assuming a certain rough fixed percentage of copies printed as sales, and therefore the destiny of a book has been resolved before it is even out of manuscript. Print order is in itself determined by the amount of the advance—the more a publisher has paid the more he must print in order to retrieve the advance—and the advance depends upon the reputation of the writer, editorial caprice, the editorial-book interface, the general state of the market and so on. (Merit except for a rare case or two has no effect upon the advance.) There have been cases in which books for which large advances have been paid have had small print orders and failed dismally; this is either because the editor has, in the interim, lost his job or because others in the hierarchy are out to sink him. There are even fewer cases in which books with small advances have had large print orders, but here venery and caprice are the only applicable factors and it is impossible to do anything about them.

THREE: Although matters have changed somewhat in the last half decade, science fiction is still regarded by the nonspecialist publishers as a minor category and the science fiction editor is low in relative standing; this means for all intents and purposes that if a writer's editor is fired or quits his job, the writer is finished with the publisher . . . the writer simply has no individual cachet for the publisher; he is an anonymous part of someone's "science fiction list." Accordingly one does not cultivate publishers but editors, and if one is fortunate, one's editor will remain at a post for a long time acquiring autonomy and prestige, or will go onto other publishers at an increasing level of responsibility, finally achieving a position of full autonomy.

FOUR: There is no point in trying to construct a saleable novel by studying and then reproducing material which (even if recently published) is already on the stands or in the bookstores; the reality of publishing, because of the nature of the production and editorial processes, is at least two years ahead of books being published today (and the books two years behind). Attempts to reproduce the mood, subject, or style of freshly successful writers is only to remind the editors of what naïfs they were a couple of years ago, and besides, they already have published stuff like that. You are far better off trying to reproduce the sense, subject, and style of much older work, the forties and fifties novels; that is where the field reposes and probably always will. (You are almost certainly doomed if you attempt at the beginning of your career to do truly innovative, original work. You will not sell it. You may scatter a few such short stories here and there but the novel market is blocked to you. The time to do innovative work if you are fool enough to want to is after you have sold a few novels, have some kind of cachet in the field, and have enabled the publishers to presume that you have an audience which is looking for your work and which you can take along with you. The publishers are wrong in this judgment, but they are wrong in most of their judgments, and simple, vulnerable, hapless creatures are not necessarily to be condemned for that.)

FIVE: Never try to sell a novel to a publisher on the basis that although another publisher has rejected it, it has done so with a "good," i.e., glowing, letter of rejection extolling the merits of the proposal and regretting only its inappropriateness for the particular list. Publishers tend to believe one another (otherwise why would they hire the same editors, publish the same writers, work from the same pool of freelance artists and copy editors), and a letter of rejection in any guise is nothing more than that. The only way to sell a novel in early (and usually in late) career is to represent it as new work, never offered to the marketplace before.

SIX: On balance, and taking everything into account, including the residual rights, the small notoriety, the sexual prerogatives occasionally available at conventions, the shelf of collected works, and the feeling of accomplishment, not disregarding all of this but putting it in the balance, you would be better off going to law school . . . or if that is not your thing, becoming a temporary typist.

—1980: New Jersey

Onward and Upward with the Arts,

Part III

When I started off in this field in 1967, just a plucky lad with a sack over my shoulder, off to Ferman and Wollheim to seek my fortune, it all seemed very reasonable. The fact that no one had ever done it did not occur to me at the time or for several years thereafter: what I would do would be to write science fiction of such imposing quality and quantity that sooner or later it would seep into The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Hudson Review, not the fiction you understand (later for the Hudson), but the recognition. "My," I conceived of Phillip Rahv saying, breathing hard, brandishing Lancer Book X3418-B ISBN 0075, "this isn't your ordinary science fiction full of monsters and stuff, this is quality lit. Let's give this boy the push." Soon thereafter there would be "At Home with Malzberg" sidebars accompanying the review of the new novel (surely from Farrar, Straus now), "Oh, I don't know," I would say with a fetching little laugh, tossing my head and inserting yet another cigarette into my elegant black holder, "I don't know if I'm all that good; you have to understand that I'm just one of many. Many, many fine writers.

"Why this field is filled with people who are doing literature, you might never be able to guess it from the magazine and paperback covers in which they're forced to appear because of the economics of the paperback original market . . . but they're quite as good as anybody writing in America today. Why, just for openers there's A and B and then there's C, terrific kindly old fellow who has quietly been doing wonderful work for the penny-a-word market for decades, and let's not forget D, who has been underrated for so long and whose new serial in Worlds of If is really terrific, and then as long as I'm making a list, you ought to investigate E and F and G—"

I had resolved to be generous, you understand. I knew of all the sullen, recriminative successes embittered by years of struggle and anonymity who held onto their recognition like spoiled children and would not share even a bite of it. I had been impressed by the stories of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, determined to be unlike the former, who would not say a good word for any living poet, just like the latter, who told his Parisian publisher that if the choice was between doing The Wasteland or his own new volume, the Eliot work should be done. What must be understood about that twenty-eight-year-old version of myself is that although I was a fool, I was a fool of the kindliest nature. I really did not want to persevere or succeed at the cost of others, and if I did it was my intention to pass around at least a little bit of the success. (My first Ace paperback of short stories paid tribute in its introduction to several science fiction writers who I felt were superior to me.)

I was a fool of course. An idiot stick has been described as pointing toward nowhere on one end, attached to an idiot on the other, and the stick was science fiction. In 1967 no science fiction writer who stayed within the confines of the genre had ever received critical recognition or significant commercial success. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had published with some frequency in the field in the fifties of course (and knew as much about it as, say, Robert Sheckley), but he had begun in the middle of the decade to disassociate himself from science fiction as vocally and persistently as he could; his denials that he was a science fiction writer and his refusal to publish his books under category imprint or his stories in the genre magazines had, along with good acquaintanceship, put him in the position finally in 1968 with the publication of Slaughterhouse Five to find recognition and enormous audience as a "serious" writer. Richard McKenna's first publications were all science fiction short stories (and several of them were outstanding), but his first novel, The Sand Pebbles, was of course a near-date historical and was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and picked up by the book clubs without even the knowledge that he had published in the field. Ray Bradbury had at least started off within the genre but soon enough his stories, all rejected (but one) by John W. Campbell, were appearing in the bottom-line pulp magazines and Weird Tales, and then in one postwar burst in the mass-circulation magazines; The Martian Chronicles was regarded as the work of a fantasist who had had only glancing acquaintance with science fiction, and Bradbury's ascent came via the best-of-the-year short story collections, script work, and Playboy magazine. No other writer who had published in quantity in the genre had, as of 1967, had even a whiff of serious attention from the academic critics or the quarterlies.

The question arises soon enough—it always has when I have discussed this issue in public or even in small, clamorous trysts in restaurants or bars—as to exactly why I wanted critical recognition and what that critical recognition, then or now, would have been worth in terms of audience, income, or general karmic peace. The answer is one I would prefer to table within this context; the question is not contemptible and the answer may have to do more with my own personal conflicts and difficulties than it does with market realities. For the moment it is sufficient to say that no serious writer can be taken seriously in his time (and usually for all time) unless the academic critics pay him some attention, and I felt then (I am not nearly so sure now) that I was a serious writer. With the general trade imprints, the O. Henry Awards collection or the college anthologies closed to my science fiction, there was no chance of achieving reputation for the work that I had elected to do . . . I could have, in somewhat Vonnegut-fashion, ceased to write science fiction and come at the academies from a different direction, but I did not think that was quite fair . . . I would have had to partly repudiate and totally abandon the work that I cared to do and was doing well. So simple equity and justice were one motivation, and the other was that if I had achieved critical attention, I might have had at least the option of finding a university teaching position, a cachet absolutely unavailable to a science fiction writer at that time. (Matters have changed since then but not too greatly.)

Whether my ambitions were totally self-deluded or otherwise, it has been interesting (if that is the word) to survive this subsequent decade and a half as an identifiably science fiction writer and observe what has happened, to see if anyone (I obviously did not and probably never will) did break through. Over these years more than a few science fiction writers—Heinlein, Silverberg, Haldeman, Benford, Pournelle, Niven, to name less than half—have obtained huge (by late-sixties standards) advances and large or at least larger audiences, but although science fiction has clearly proven itself to be at least an intermittently commercially viable medium for a mass-market book, the question of critical recognition seems to be in the same place, relative to the field, that it was long before Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, or The Empire Strikes Back. Only two science fiction writers in the last decade did attract widespread attention from critics and editors not already close to the form and neither of them obtained that from work done within the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin won the 1972 National Book Award in children's literature for a fantasy series; Stanislaw Lem, a Pole, attracted the attention of Theodore Solataroff for a series of novels reissued by Avon, the most recent of which was (at the time the 1977 front page New York Times Book Review article appeared) almost a decade old. Le Guin, a winner of the National Book Award, and Lem, an Eastern European fantasist struggling to do a body of work between the interstices of official repression, were hardly examples of the crowd bellying around in Analog or Doubleday Science Fiction or even the small science fiction lists of Random House or Harper & Row at the time.30

The truism seems to hold right through the eighties: no science fiction writer will ever be recognized as a writer of literary stature for work done within the confines of the genre.31 There are reasons for this; Gregory Benford has summarized them quite neatly: the critics have nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying that they like science fiction. Taking a position in favor of the unfamiliar would involve risk. Also—and less abstractedly—the majority of advertising revenue for the book reviews, the book pages, and the quarterlies comes from publishers and titles which are not science fiction. There is none of the implied economic lever which the category's editors or publishers could bring against the review media such as what a literarily oriented publisher such as Farrar, Straus, or Knopf could bring against the Times or The New York Review of Books.

For a good many reasons, it is probably always going to be this way. A lot of talent—not all of it; many science fiction writers do not have my mindset but some do—is going to get broken in the process, but why the hell should the critics or their media give a damn about talent? The publishers do not; the editors, most of them, can hardly under a clear light understand the difference . . . and writers who are not self-deluded fools learn in the medium long run not to care.

—1980: New Jersey

Science Fiction As Picasso

Consider: perhaps not five hundred careers or a thousand but one; not all the myriad voices but one voice, not the individual struggles and destinies but the single arc of a single creator now in the middle of its sixth decade. All of the voices mingling, murmuring into one, overtones in a great chord. Science fiction as one artist. Science fiction—if you will—as Picasso.

It is not the artifacts but the vision, not the material but the theme which dominates. This has been pointed out before: it is not an original insight. Science fiction, Fred Pohl has said, is the only genre in which collaboration is commonplace, in which collaborative works of quality are prevalent because science fiction is a pool of ideas, a manner of approach; writers function less from their idiosyncratic vision (as is the case in "serious" literature) or their ability to recombine elements of the form (the mystery and western) than from their immersion in the approach. Science fiction, as Pohl said, as was recollected much earlier here, is a way of thinking about things. And that way was the subtext of the form from the beginning. We or they were going to get ourselves. But good. But awfully good.

Science fiction as a single, demented, multi-tentacled artist singing and painting and transcribing in fashion clumsy and elegant, errant and imitative, innovative and repetitious, the way the future would feel. Science fiction, born in 1926, dreaming through its childhood in the 1930s, achieving change of voice and the beginning of adult features in 1939, shooting through adolescence in the forties with all of the misdirected energy and hints of promise, arriving at a shaky legal maturity at the end of that decade with the expansion of the market and the full incorporation of a range of style and technique. Young adult in the sixties with the knowledge turned loose in a hundred ways, some toward no consequence, others foreshadowing maturity. Science fiction at thirty-five, eligible to be President! Productive of fluency. Science fiction at forty in the mid-sixties with all the hints of mid-life panic . . . chaos, fragmentation, the replication of childhood, the donning of new masks.

Science fiction, settling from its decade of panic in the mid-seventies to pursue what it had passed over when young, reworking the familiar in thoroughgoing fashion. Science fiction now at the threshold of old age, the faint whiff of alcohol and decadence as it trudges toward the millennium. Science fiction, that demented artist of which we are all but cells and cilia. Blood and bone.

Picasso went on and on, from blue period to rose, from the cubist to the surreal to the classical to the querulous serenity of old age, interrupted by flashes of self-loathing and mockery. He was not the greatest of artists but had the greatest of careers; he might have been the only painter of the first rank who was able to articulate his vision to its fullest range and implication through all of the chronology that he could have expected, able to move his career in embrace with his life until the two of them, not disjointed, could end together. Science fiction will live longer than Picasso—barring the apocalypse, our little category is going to survive 2019—and it remains to be seen how the Ticketron holders and curators of the third millennia, as they poke around our own museum, will take our works, but this much is clear.

This much is clear: we may be less than the sum of our parts but we are far, far more in the aggregate than individually we ever took ourselves to be. None of us can build science fiction, none of us can destroy it. Science fiction gave us voice and the voice, however directed, must be toward its perpetuation. The Picasso of the late nineteen-sixties savagely drawing blood from Les Demoiselles D'Avignon caused only his own veins to sing while the painting, cool and beyond caring, hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art for all the crowd to see, to pity the twisted but beckoning harlots.

—1980: New Jersey

Mark Clifton: 1906-1963

Kuttner died of a heart attack in his sleep, Kornbluth died of either a massive cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack (depending upon whose version you accept), Clifton had had a bad heart for a long time. It drove him out of industry and undid him at a relatively young age. But I think that the death certificates of all three should have listed science fiction under cause of death. H. Beam Piper, our only suicide, blew out his brains with a shotgun in the fall of 1964, but it did not appear to be the field itself that had done it to him: the sudden death of his agent, monies tied up, depression, a big gun collection. Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Clifton took it straight.

Cause of death: science fiction. You bet, Mark.

* * *

Kuttner and Kornbluth remain fairly prominent more than two decades after their passage (Kornbluth largely through the collaborations with Frederik Pohl and Pohl's devoted effort to keep his collaborations and collaborator in print; Kuttner because enough contemporary writers and editors remember his ten best stories enough to constantly anthologize them), but Clifton is a lost figure and it is he who needs an amicus curiae, court of last resort or not. His 1956 novelette "Clerical Error" was reprinted in Neglected Visions (and I should say they were and are; the book did not do well but the title was self-fulfilling prophecy), a Doubleday anthology coedited with Martin H. Greenberg, and under Greenberg's aegis and my own his first collection of short stories in his own language has recently been published by Southern Illinois University Press, but these frail attempts at restoration are absolutely on the margin. Clifton is unknown not only to the contemporary science fiction audience but to its writers and editors; most editors under thirty have never heard of him, most writers under forty have never read him. This is unpleasant—who of us could find this a reasonable outcome? Even Amazing's mid-fifties stable of space-typists had their pride and reasonable ambitions and some fulfilled them—but it becomes genuinely wrenching when it is stated flatly (and the old-timers will verify) that for a period of four years Mark Clifton was perhaps the most prominent and controversial science fiction writer through the entire range of the magazines . . . and the early fifties for science fiction was a magazine market.

Clifton retired in 1951 after two decades as a practicing industrial psychologist (he did employment interviews and did interviews of recalcitrant workers as part of management's attempt, apparently, to control unionism), partly because of precarious health after an early heart attack and partly out of a genuine desire to not only be a writer but a science fiction writer. Between May 1952 and his death Clifton published three novels and about twenty-five short stories in the science fiction magazines, nearly a third of them written in collaboration with Frank Rylovich and Alex Apostolides. (There is some question as to how much input the collaborators really had; Rylovich published a few stories in Worlds of If, one of which was in a best-of-the-year collection, but Apostolides, at least under that name, published nothing elsewhere before or since.) The first of the novels, They'd Rather Be Right (published later by Gnome Press as The Forever Machine) in collaboration with Rylovich, won the second science fiction novel Hugo awarded in 1955 at the Cleveland World Convention; the other two, When They Came from Space (1962) and Eight Keys to Eden (1960), were hardly as successful.

Most of the short stories upon which his reputation was based were published in the first four years of Clifton's career. Over his last six years only a few stories saw print (none in Astounding, his major market), along with the unsuccessful later novels. Well before his death, in other words, Clifton had ceased to be a major figure. Diminished output was certainly the reason but whether the output was truly diminished or whether Clifton was merely being heavily rejected is speculative. It is possible (I have no direct evidence but private correspondence to another writer which I have seen may indicate) that as with Cyril M. Kornbluth, Clifton's increasing ambition and sophistication caused him to write himself clear out of the magazine markets of his time . . . which were in the later fifties in a period of attrition and eventually collapsed anyway.

Long divorced and with a daughter who is (to this day) unlocatable, Mark Clifton died intestate. This made it impossible for publishers or anthology editors to negotiate for his work for years, and by the time that the newly formed SFWA and Forrest J. Ackerman had gotten some hold on the situation by the late sixties many years had passed and Clifton's time was lost. "What Have I Done?" in the Harrison-Aldiss Astounding/Analog Reader and "Clerical Error" in Neglected Visions are two of the very few reprintings of his work in the seventies and although the Donning Company, a small publisher, has announced its intention to republish The Forever Machine, that novel has, at this writing, been out of print in this country for at least two decades.

This litany, a Yizkor chant, which with minor revisions could be said over the graves of most of us (and in due course, I can assure, will be said over all of us), is what the writing of popular fiction is all about, to be sure. It would be easy to reel off the names of twenty science fiction writers almost as prominent as Clifton in his decade who are similarly unknown today. But what makes Clifton's topple from the center so painful is that within the context of the field in his time he had far to fall and it must have been extremely painful for him because it all happened during his lifetime. By the end of the fifties, barely able to write, hardly able to sell, he had already lost the entire sense of his career.

And he was good.

He was, in fact, in a particular way the best of them all. Clifton knew what technology was going to do to people; he spotted the fifties as the decade when those effects would become institutionalized, and he wrote about angst, the alienation effect, and the seepage of the human spirit through the machines with detachment, precision, and a good deal of control. Never better than an adequate stylist, he painfully improved his technique through the years and by the mid-fifties was writing quite well, far above the range of most contributors to Astounding. It was at that point that he began to get into sales trouble.

What the private correspondence indicates is that Clifton, a pained and sophisticated man who came into science fiction as an artistic naïf seeing it as the medium which would change the world, and who went out of it a decade later bitterly convinced that the nature of its editors and its audience forever delimited the field and made it beneath contempt as a serious means of social or political thought . . . what this correspondence indicates is that Clifton, whose career paralleled the decade in its collapse from optimism to despair, understood everything that had happened to him and would not have been surprised at all by his subsequent obscurity. What comes off in those letters is a powerful sense of disgust and self-loathing—Clifton hated himself for ever having invested science fiction with expectation. In the early fifties he saw it as mutant literature for mutant, special types who bound together would order the cosmos, and by the mid-fifties he was railing about the parasitic behavior of the West Coast fans who attached themselves to a notably immature and unsophisticated literary agent, all of them calling for the return of science fiction to the creed of adventure.

The letters are extraordinarily interesting in their portrait of a first-rate mind of mature wisdom proceeding very rapidly from self-delusion to existential despair. It is a sad thing—but in honoring the dead also, perhaps, an act of great compassion—that they must never be published.

Like virtually every science fiction writer of his time—The Science Fiction Encyclopedia points this out in an alert essay on Cyril Kornbluth—Clifton showed a curious inability to do his best work at novel length. This may have had to do with the exigencies of the magazine market or with the fact that virtually all of the science fiction of the fifties was conceived and written for magazine publication and subsequently pushed and pulled, manipulated into novel length; it may have had to do with the fact that science fiction at that time was a medium most adaptable to the short story, the single extrapolation worked to a single point. Whatever the reasons, they applied in Clifton's case. His first novel (with Riley), The Forever Machine, an outright padding of thin material, was based upon short story characters and situations which had run in 1953 in Astounding. Even by the less than rigorous standards of those times, this work must be recognized as seriously attenuated. The short stories on the other hand were thoughtful and controlled; the later ones quite poised and graceful and at least "Clerical Error," "What Have I Done," and "What Now, Little Man?" must be regarded as central to the literature. They were endlessly influential and imitated; they live on even as do "Vintage Season" or "All You Zombies" as the basis of further work by writers less original.

* * *

Despite the understated and occasionally clumsy style, Clifton was as innovative as Cyril Kornbluth or Alfred Bester in what he did for the field: he used the common themes—alien invasion, encroaching technology, revolution against impenetrable bureaucracy—but he brought to them the full range of psychological insight available to a trained and sophisticated mind. His view of how individuals would deal with the institutions and devices of the technological night was never optimistic (his very first story, "What Have I Done?" depicts humanity as inalterably vile) but became steadily blacker as the decade and his own career progressed, and "Hang Head, Vandal!" his last published story, is a vision of appalling bleakness. The vandals who wrecked Mars were all of us and Clifton, putting his last two novels on the market shortly thereafter, proceeded, it would seem, not to write. He died less than two years later. The correspondence to which I have referred ceased . . . his correspondent stopped answering his letters.

There is more to be said of Clifton and someday someone will say it (those letters might be published), but here is the last to be said of him here: Mark Clifton, a major writer of his time, protege of Campbell, Hugo winner, master of psionics, envy of the fans and colleagues for his shotgun career . . . Mark Clifton, that innovator and man of wisdom, earned for all of his science fiction in his lifetime something considerably less than twenty thousand dollars.

—1980: New Jersey

September 1973:

What I Did Last Summer

What I did last summer. I did many things last summer. I wrote three novels in the Berkley Lone Wolf series. I did some short stories. I did a novelization of the Lindsay Anderson film O Lucky Man! but it's never going to be published, unfortunately, because Lindsay Anderson wants to do his own version with stills from the picture. Boy was I mad! Not as mad as Warner Books, though, who are out twenty-five-hundred dollars. I'm not giving it back, Jack. Those are some of the things I did last summer. I went to Saratoga with my family and lost three hundred dollars. I got a new Calais Coupe and drove it all over Bergen and Rockland counties looking for a way out. (No luck.) But the important and memorable thing I did last summer was to write a science fiction novel.

It is called Tactics of Conquest and Pyramid Books will publish it in January. I have already seen it in galleys; it is what they call a rush job. A copy editor called me last week to check a certain term and to ask if I had ever heard of Bobby Fischer, adding, "By the way this is a very good novel, not at all like science fiction." Was it exciting to hear that! But of course it is just like science fiction. I wrote it in four days for a four-thousand-dollar advance. It is fifty-five-thousand words.

Here is how I got to write the novel: an editor named Roger Elwood got a contract with Pyramid Books to deliver twelve science fiction novels and he called on me to do one. Whew! Before I had even said yes he handed me a contract and it called for two thousand dollars right then. I didn't even have to offer any material. Or a plot outline or synopsis or anything. Just sign the contracts in June promising to deliver the novel by August 1 because Roger Elwood needed to deliver his first book fast. I was proud. Two thousand dollars for signing your name makes you proud. But then I knew that I had to write a whole novel in less than a month by the time the two thousand dollars came into my hands and I got scared. I never write anything until the money gets into my hands. That is the smart and shrewd way to deal when you are mostly working in paperback original.

It sure is scary writing a novel on a one-month deadline. But I knew what to do. Even though it is only six and a half years since my first sale to Galaxy, I am an experienced science fiction writer with a lot of novels to my credit and the first thing you need is to write a novel fast, particularly in science fiction, where you can't fill up the pages with fornication like in the other stuff, is to have something to base it on. It is always easier to rework something already written. For one thing it reminds you that you got the thing done once somehow and can do it again, and for another it gives you something to hang on to.

So I decided to expand a twenty-six-hundred-word short story I had written last November called "Closed Sicilian," which I sold to Fantasy and Science Fiction for eighty dollars. It was a chess story describing a fool's mate in four moves from the point of view of the fool, who is so arrogant that he doesn't know what has happened to him, even at the end. I based the story on the world chess championship matches during the summer of 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Bobby Fischer, who beat poor Boris Spassky, struck me as being an interesting character for a short story narrator since he had no insight at the same time that he was megalomaniacal. Also I had spent all this time staring at the television where they got the moves in from Iceland one by one and had experts talking about them. I had to do something to justify all of that staring, right? Because science fiction is the only thing I know how to sell (other than mysteries and pornography and novelizations that Lindsay Anderson won't let go through), I framed it as a science fiction story, so I had my narrator and opponent playing for the fate of the universe with the aliens as referees. I have done this kind of thing before and dealing with aliens controlling the fate of the universe gave me a warm, comfortable feeling as I sat down at the typewriter on Tuesday afternoon, August 2 or 3 it must have been. "What are you going to do now?" a neighbor had asked me a few minutes before while I was standing outside looking at the trees as if for the last time. "I'm going to write a novel in four days," I said. "You don't mean that," the neighbor said and giggled. I could tell that she thought I was crazy but that didn't bother me. Everyone here where I live who has heard that I am a science fiction writer thinks that I am crazy, except those who think I am really a criminal or dirty movie distributor. After all, none of them have ever seen my books. I mentioned the story length.

Now you may think that you would have trouble expanding a twenty-six-hundred-word story into a fifty-five-thousand-word novel. You would be right. My oh my did I pad and overload! Sentences became pages, paragraphs became chapters. Megalomania became grandiosity with lots of examples. Whole flashback chapters were devoted to his life as a chess champion: scenes in Berne and Moscow and Philadelphia, the traveling life of the chess master. Also some sex scenes, but within good taste because this is the science fiction market. It turns out that the narrator has really had a secret homosexual relationship with his opponent for years but it is said in a subtle way.

Roger Elwood, when I delivered the novel, wanted the narrator and his opponent to be the same person but I said nothing doing. I have my integrity. I did write the epilogue he wanted, though, where the world gets destroyed. For four thousand dollars you don't get sticky. It is the biggest advance I ever got in my life.

I wrote the novel in four days filling in all of the background and details that the short story implied. I smoked many cigarettes—I know this is bad and I'll cut down soon—and drank ten ounces of scotch a day, five before lunch and five before dinner. Also beer. It helped me not to vomit when I ate and did I eat! When I finished the novel, it was late Friday; I said to myself, you've worked four days and made four thousand dollars. That is smart. That is good. Who makes a thousand dollars a day in Bergen County? Not even shrinks or crime bosses make a thousand a day. At least, not consistently.

I was so proud. I had shown the world what a fine writer I was and Roger Elwood and Pyramid Books how quick. I knew they would appreciate it. I mailed the novel to Roger and he called me and said he liked it so much he would like me to do another Pyramid novel. So now I am thinking of what I can do. I think I will expand my story "A Galaxy Called Rome," which I also wrote last summer. I can fill in on that too, and this story is nine thousand words, not twenty-six hundred, which makes it easier to bloat. Roger only wants to pay me thirty-five-hundred dollars for this one though because Tactics of Conquest and the new program at Pyramid have to prove themselves in the market. I think I'll take it. That is still almost nine hundred dollars a day and who in Bergen County is making nine hundred dollars a day? I am smart and shrewd and doing better than almost any thirty-four-year-old in Bergen County. That is what I did last summer and what I will do this fall, and next summer too until I make so much money that I can stop doing all of this and really enjoy my life. I know that I will enjoy my life once I can relax but first I have to do this "Galaxy Called Rome" thing, and then I will get back to the Lone Wolf stuff. I am going to end this composition now because I am very tired and you only asked for fourteen hundred words on what I did last summer and here they are and I hope my fourteen-dollar check will be payable on receipt because I really need the money. I really do. I always will. I'll make sure of it.

—1980: New Jersey

The Cutting Edge

Everyone plays with ten-best lists; science fictioneers are no exception,32 but here is a modest proposal: the ten best science fiction stories of all time. Whether it is possible to define a ten (or even a hundred) "best" is arguable; the qualifications and criteria of the compiler are pressed every step of the way but that the job should be done for the short story too is non disputandum.

Science fiction, at the cutting edge, has always flourished in the short story. Perhaps the genre by definition will sustain its best work in that form; here a speculative premise and a protagonist upon whose life that premise is brought to bear can be dramatically fused with intensity. Novels tend to be episodic or bloated; even novellas tend to say too much or too little, but the short story—traditionally defined as a work of prose fiction of less than fifteen thousand words—has from the outset comprised as a body most of the best work in this field. While science fiction in its modern inception has produced possibly ten novels that might be called masterpieces, it has given no less than several hundred short stories that would justify that difficult and presumptuous label. Henry James defined the short story as in its purest state being about one person and one thing and it is within that compass that science fiction achieves rigor and its proper form. (It should be noted that almost all of the disputed masterpieces that would appear on most of the ten-best-novel lists were expanded or assembled from short stories . . . Budrys's Rogue Moon, Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Sturgeon's More Than Human, for instance. Although one is dangerously surmising author intention, it would be a fair guess that these were originally conceived as short stories and only worked obiter dicta into novels, lending further justification to the view of science fiction as a short story form.)

Too, it is in America in the twentieth century that the short story has reached its apotheosis; our one great contribution to world culture might be the American short story, which has become a wondrous and sophisticated medium. The confluence of the American short story and that uniquely American form modern science fiction would result in a ten-best list with which anyone would reckon.

Herewith this list with the usual qualifications and cautions: The stories themselves are not ranked in order of descending merit (it is foolish enough to find a top ten without going on to arrange them); the judgment is based upon literary excellence (seminal stories such as Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" as influences upon the genre have had far greater effect than most of the stories on this list, but the work is being judged sui generis) and, of course, as a single informed opinion it is liable to provoke challenge and dispute, not least of all from the list-maker himself, who a year or two from now might want to change three quarters of it . . . or ten years from now might agree that work yet to be written has displaced several of these stories. Whether or not our best work is ahead of us, a lot of good work is still ahead:

1) "Vintage Season," by C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1946). Published as by "Lawrence O'Donnell," the second most important (after "Lewis Padgett") of the Kuttners' pseudonyms, this story is now known to have been one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone. The vision of future cultural decadence imposed (through time-traveling researchers who specialize in attending plagues, torment, and disasters of history) upon an earlier (undefined) period that in its own decadence foreshadows this version of the future, its languorous pace, concealed but artful, and manipulated erotic subtext and stylistic control probably distinguish it as the single best short story to emerge from the decade. It has been rewritten endlessly and has directly influenced hundreds of short stories and at least two dozen novels, but none of its descendants have improved upon the basic text. Its only flaw—as Damon Knight pointed out twenty years ago—is a denouement that carries on too long between the revelation and the flat, deadly last line; it is bathetic and overextended and for the sake of good form should have been severely cut. It is not a serious flaw because it enables the reader only to marvel at the spareness of this eighteen-thousand-word story to that point; it has the density and emotional impact of a novel.

2) "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) (Final Stage, 1974). The judge must plead his own problem at the outset and throw himself on the mercy of a higher court: I commissioned this story for an original anthology co-edited with Edward L. Ferman and published it first. Final Stage was a written-to-order anthology in which various writers were asked to write a story on one of the great themes of science fiction, Tiptree (Sheldon) was asked for an End of the World story and delivered one of the very few masterpieces that did not originate with the writer. (Editorial involvement or the assignment of theme often results in good stories and sometimes improves good stories to better-than-good, but masterpieces almost necessarily have to self-generate and will themselves through.)

This postapocalypse story in which the end of the world becomes a metaphor for the shocks and injuries of existence which prefigure and replicate death (and make the state of death their eternal reenactment) is almost unknown today; it appears only in the out-of-print Final Stage in hardcover and paperback and an out-of-print Tiptree collection, Star Songs of an Old Primate. It will reward the most careful study, and Tiptree's afterword to the story—also commissioned, as were all of the afterwords in the collection—is a brief but beautifully written essay on the real meaning of science fiction on whose ideas I have based the title essay of this book.

3) "Particle Theory," by Edward Bryant (Analog, 1977). The protagonist, a physicist, is dying of cancer, his emotional life is in decay and the astronomical phenomena which he observes clearly foreshadow the end of the world . . . all three levels of destruction here fuse, echo one another, are bound together in a story of astonishing excellence which fully meets the criteria of a great science fiction story: its science and scientific premise are locked into the text and grant the emotional force; without the scientific element the story would collapse, yet it is this speculation's shift into individual pain and consequence which clarify it scientifically. The seventies were science fiction's richest decade in the short story; although more good stories were published in the fifties, the top 1 or 2 percent of the latter decade's output far exceeded the equivalent top percent of the fifties, and in this decade Bryant's story might have been the best.

4) "The Terminal Beach," by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds, 1965). Rejected by every American market of its time as eventless, internalized, and depressing, this mysterious and beautiful work was the key story of its decade, the pivot for science fiction; its importance lay not only in its depiction of "inner space," the complex and tormented vistas of the human spirit in the post-technological age, but in its use of science fiction technique to convert its ambiguous landscape, and by implication our century, to "science fiction."

5) "Private Eye," by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1949). A puzzle story, a futuristic mystery (how can the protagonist make a premeditated murder look accidental when the forensic pathologists and the prosecution have time-scanning devices that can follow him from birth and put him on stage all the time?) that in its horrid denouement indicates exactly where the Kuttners thought the paraphernalia and technological wonders of the future would take us and why; cleanly written, paced to within an inch of its life, and although still anthologized, it is nonetheless always underrated as the masterpiece that it is.

6) "Sundance," by Robert Silverberg (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1969). A complex, multiply voiced, shifting point of view (employing among other technical devices, second-person narration for a time), the story would have been self-conscious, a display of virtuosity for its own sake, were it not for the pain of the American Indian protagonist attached to a genocidal mission and the clarity of its plot development, which not only justify but incorporate all of the stylistic trickeries and make them implicit in the theme. It is the most brilliant of many Silverberg excellences in the short story form between 1968 and 1975, and in its subtle fashion is one of the most powerful anti-Vietnam, antiwar stories of the period.

7) "Anachron," by Damon Knight (Worlds of If, 1954). A story which, because it did not sell the top magazines of the period, fell into obscurity, although it does appear in the recent The Best of Damon Knight. A time-paradox story of the most elegant construction, it sets up and explodes its desperate conclusion with a remorselessness and rigor characteristic of the very best of the Galaxy school of science fiction, of which Knight in turn was the best and most rigorous example. Naturally Horace Gold rejected it, but "Anachron" was only one of many distinguished stories published by James Quinn in Worlds of If. Quinn was an editor who—by the standards of science fiction perhaps rather foolishly—asked first that a story be literate and readable and only second that it be suited for the nebulous "science fiction audience."

8) "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954). Bester is best known for his two fifties novels which appeared first in Galaxy, The Demolished Man (1952) and The Stars My Destination (1956), but in that period he published no more than a dozen stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction which are generally thought to be the finest and most consistently brilliant body of shorter work by any writer in the history of the form; here is Bester using the device of the time paradox to destroy the time paradox and some of the shibboleths of science fiction itself ("you are your past . . . each of us lives alone and returns alone"); the many-voiced, restless, surgically probing style is beyond the level of the best "literary" writers of Bester's time. (It was the late nineteen-sixties before the so-called mainstream in the persons of Robert Coover, a latter-day Norman Mailer, Donald Barthelme, Robert Stone caught up to Bester by finally evolving a style which crystallized the fragmented, tormented, transected voices of the age.)

9) "Fondly Fahrenheit," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954). Silverberg has called this perhaps the single finest short story ever to come from science fiction; it may be. It certainly is, with due respect to "Sundance" (which was written a full decade and a half later!), the most technically brilliant: an alternating first and third person, a maddened protagonist and the crazed robot who has become his alter ego and doppelganger, perfect demented control and a trapdoor ending. There has been nothing like this story in modern American literature; that it was published over a quarter of a century ago and is still unknown outside of science fiction is an indictment of the academic-literary nexus, which in the very long run, if there is any future for scholarship at all, will pay heavily.

10) "E for Effort," by T. L. Sherred (Astounding Science Fiction, 1947). A. J. Budrys writes that Campbell published Sherred's first story on its astonishing merit, spent the next ten years thinking about it and decided that he didn't like what it really meant at all. A viewer which enables its possessor to see anyone at any time in history, once seized (as it would inevitably be) by the government, will be so obviously dangerous to all other governments that war will be started as soon as the word gets out; technology in its purest form will always be appropriated for the purposes of destruction. Sherred has published only a scattering of short stories and a forgotten novel (Alien Island, 1968) over succeeding decades; his reputation on the basis of this story remains as secure as that of any writer in the history of the genre.

The second ten, all close runners up to be sure, are listed again in no order and with the understanding that any or all could be traded in for any or all of the top ten:

"Baby Is Three," by Theodore Sturgeon (Galaxy, 1952); "Live at Berchtesgarden," by George Alec Effinger (Orbit, 1970); "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1961); "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs," by Carter Scholz (Universe, 1977); "The Eve of the Last Apollo," by Carter Scholz (Orbit, 1977); "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats," by James Tiptree, Jr. (New Dimensions, 1976); "The Children's Hour," by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding, 1944); "Timetipping," by Jack M. Dann (Epoch, 1975); "The Big Flash," by Norman Spinrad (Orbit, 1969); and "Party of the Two Parts," by William Tenn (Philip Klass) (Galaxy, 1955).

—1980: New Jersey

Son of the True and Terrible

There is no way in which a contemporary audience—even the contemporary audience for "serious" fiction—can understand the degree of humiliation and self-revulsion many science fiction writers suffered until at least the mid-nineteen-sixties. Philip K. Dick in a recent introduction to his collection The Golden Man, has written movingly of this; all through his first decade it was impossible for a science fiction writer to be regarded by writers in other fields or in the universities as a writer at all. College professors of English regarded the genre as subliterate; the timeless man on the street thought it crazy. Word rates were low, the readership was limited, and one operated from the outset with the conviction that work of even modest ambition would live and die within the same room that the debased did. Dick remembers meeting Herbert Gold at a party in the fifties and asking for his autograph; Gold gave him a card inscribed "to my colleague, Philip K. Dick," and Dick carried this around for years. It was the first acknowledgement from a person of literature that his work existed.

Philip Klass has an even grimmer anecdote in his essay "Jazz Then, Musicology Now" published in a 1972 Fantasy and Science Fiction "college issue." (At that time courses on science fiction at the universities were in the first flush; a little innocent capitalization never sent any of us to jail. Nor should it.) In 1945, Klass and a graduate student in English of his acquaintance met Theodore Sturgeon in an automat; Sturgeon (whose "Killdozer!" had just about then been published in Astounding) talked passionately and at length of the artistic problems of science fiction, the particular challenges of the genre, and the demands of a medium in which expository matter was of central importance to a story yet could not be permitted to overbalance it. After Sturgeon left them, Klass's friend said with an amused laugh, "These science fiction writers, they really think of themselves as writers, don't they? I mean he's talking about this stuff seriously as if he were writing literature!"

A writer who came into this field after 1965 cannot really know what it must have been like for Sturgeon and Dick, Kornbluth and Sheckley. At no time has it ever been easy to attempt serious work in this form, but after 1965 science fiction's audience had increased: there was some crossover of that audience and the audiences for literature of other sorts, and because of Sputnik, the assassinations, the Apollo Project, and the employment of the clichés of the form by certain successful commercial novelists—Drury, Wallace, Levin all had bestsellers which were thematic science fiction—the form had a certain grudging cachet; people might not know what you were writing (or care about it) but at least they had heard of it. In the nineteen-fifties the only people other than crazy kids who would even admit to knowledge of the form were a few engineering or scientific types and they kept the magazines well hidden.

There must have been a lot of rage in these fifties writers, rage and recrimination, and (most commonly) self-loathing for even being involved in the form and, after a while (because you fell into the habits and also because you became labeled), being unable to write anything else unless one was willing to repudiate the totality of one's career, adopt a pseudonym, and start all over again. That rage was fueled by low advances, capricious editors, predatory publishers, policies in the book markets which consigned any science fiction novel to a defined audience, printed or overprinted a given number of copies, and after throwing them into the market, out-of-printed the book (and then cheated on the royalty statements). It was fueled yet further by the perception that most of these writers had of the disparity between their work—galaxies, world-conquering, heroes, superheroes, galactic drives, the hounds of heaven—and their lives, which were limited, entrapped, penurious, and often drenched with alcohol. Even a moderately intelligent writer could see the disjunction and its irony; some dealt with it by writing witty and highly ironic science fiction, but others went deeper into megalomania and fantasy and their promise was lost. And none of these writers were helped by the fact that television and the movies were appropriating their work to make cheap, mass-market pap of it; sometimes they paid low rights fees (Campbell got five hundred dollars for the movie rights to "Who Goes There?"), but most often they simply plagiarized. The fifties science fiction writer was a true van Vogt protagonist: surrounded by vast, inimical, malevolent powers who regarded him without compassion, struggling to reach some kind of goal which he could not define. But unlike the Gosseyns the fifties science fiction writer had no weapon shops of Isher, no Korzybskian logic, no seesaw, no secret plans, no occasionally helpful Overlords. He had only his colleagues to help him along and they were in as much trouble as he. Under these circumstances, the body of work turned out by the twenty or thirty best is a monument to the human spirit (or its perversity) unparalleled in the history of the so-called arts.

* * *

"What you have to do with this stuff," a science fiction editor said a long time ago, "is to sit down with the outline and crank it; reel it out like porn. Otherwise it doesn't pay, if you really get involved with it, try to have original conceptions or at least work them out originally you'll slow down and can't make any money. If you're going to write science fiction for a living or even as part of a living, you have to do it fast."

Without evaluating these remarks (they are true for most of us; even in the decade of five-figure advances the average return for a science fiction novel in all its editions is still about five thousand dollars), they function as partial explanation as to why no science fiction writer has published more than two or three books of the first rank.

In 1960, in fact, reviewing A. J. Budrys's Rogue Moon, James Blish stated that no science fiction writer had ever written more than one masterpiece (he concluded his review by suggesting that if Budrys were able to come back to the field and get work done, he might be the first to break the pattern), and even two decades later there is not much evidence in contradiction; Silverberg has done five or six novels which are very strong, and so has Philip K. Dick, but even now as we regard the Le Guins or Delanys or Wolfes, even James Blish himself (who was a strong writer), who can be said to have published more than two?

The economics of this business may change. Other exigencies will not. Science fiction is a difficult, rigorous, exhausting form demanding at the top the concentration and precision of the chess master and the skills of the first-rate litterateur. How often do these qualities intersect in any of us? How often can they be reproduced?

Fortunately, for most, science fiction on the scene-by-scene level can be cranked, can fill space, can be mechanically conceived and rapidly written . . . it is a genre, it does have recourse to devices and a handy stock of the familiar. But here too the schism at the center is manifest: there has never been a science fiction novel so bad that breathing in its center was not an idea which once had merit; there has never been one so good that it could not be seen at the bottom to be based upon the clichés and clutter of the form.

No, there ain't nothing so good that we cannot get a glimpse of the worst, ain't nothing so bad that it doesn't demonstrate a little of the good . . . there's the best in the worst of us, worst in the best, all of us dummies of varying workmanship and attractiveness in the service of the Great Ventriloquist who do, he surely do, give voice to us all.

—1980: New Jersey

The All-Time, Prime-Time, Take-Me-to-Your-Leader Science Fiction Plot

Earlier I offer the continuing dialogue a number of plots or conceptions which would be—at least from my perspective, and perspective I have—unsaleable. Truthful as this material is, it is anything but helpful; if there is any audience for this book (in truth, there is no other) it is one comprised of aspirant writers, and I would not want them to regard science fiction as an endless series of Thou Shalt Nots.

Science fiction, to the contrary, represents perhaps the last open and relatively accessible market in America (if one can write to format one can still, although just barely, sell without personal acquaintance) and needs all the new material that it can acquire; the old writers are beginning to perish (if not mortally at least productively) by the scores now and the middle-agers like myself are retreating to despair, editing books of ruminant essays, or continuations of the Albderan Raiders on the Moon series.

Accordingly and generously I would like to contribute to the gene pool a number of plots, all of which, granted that you are a writer of routine proficiency, fluency, and dedication (a drinking acquaintance with the editors in all cases would not hurt), almost certainly will sell. Why shouldn't they? They have been good enough for the markets for decades; they should be good until at least the millennium. Perhaps even the next millennium. Too much of a good thing is not nearly enough is the motto of science fiction; we want more of what we've got could be in Latin on the seal of Science Fiction University, good old Ess Eff You, weak major sports but good javelin and outstanding in track, water polo, and wrestling. The aspirant writers are welcome to them in full measure, and I seek neither thanks, praise, blame, a share of the advance, or a collaboration credit—only honor.

* * *

"The Underground": Henry Walker Smith is a youth in the future, let us make it 2312 and be done; this particular extrapolation is based upon some mad extension of present-day circumstance that has overtaken the society.

Okay, let's get some use out of the things and use automobiles. In 2312 in Henry's world (it is America but let us be futuristic and call it, say, "Occidentalia") automobiles are banned. The ownership of an automobile, driving it, even concealing knowledge of anyone who owns or drives are criminal offenses. Citizens move around Occidentalia via tramways, chutes, corridors, and the like. Most live and work within the same Domicile and only the elite are in need of far conveyance, which is fast jet. Henry has little to do with the elite, accepting his position as a subclerk in the Bureau of Fabrication and Design with the feeling that it is all he could deserve, and to travel more than a very few kilometers from Domicile would be self-indulgent.

We know that Henry is agoraphobic and terrified and can write some amusing scenes in which he reveals this tendency while justifying it to himself as "loving Domicile." That will be one of the key phrases of the book—"loving Domicile"—and perhaps will catch the eye of the fans who will make it part of their lore.

Henry is twenty-three. He enjoys his culture and aspires to be nothing other than a Senior Overclerk in Fabrication & Design, but shortly after the story opens, of course, in Chapter Two, things begin to rapidly change. He falls in because his girlfriend's father is a crook (Marge confesses this tearfully to him the night that he tells her he would like to Co-Domicile) who works with a rowdy bunch keeping forbidden automobiles on a private estate dozens of kilometers from Domicile. "That's horrible," Henry says as the full implication bursts upon him, "something has to be done for his own sake; I'll turn him in to the Overlords."

"You can't," Marge says, "I love him and besides if you turn him in the Driverists will know exactly who did it and will run you over in a corridor with one of their miniatures." She caresses him soothingly. "Besides," she adds, "cars aren't that bad, they're kind of fun. In the old days before Daddy got seedy and turned into a Narcotics Degenerate he used to take all of us out to the estate for drives and let us crash things and watch the great races and it was kind of fun." Her eyes twinkle madly. "You might like it yourself, Henry, not that I'm asking you of course."

"I'd hate it," Henry says, "are you saying that part of our Co-Domicile is the condition that I become a Felon? I won't do it," and he decides that he must look at Marge in a new light. Perhaps she is not quite the woman with whom he wants to Co-Domicile. He is awfully young to get into a permanent arrangement anyway, although the Overlords encourage early pair-bonding for their own sinister reasons.

It is, however, too late for Henry; Marge's father, a bumbling but fearful sort, has kept an eye on her relationship and comes to know almost immediately that she has told him about his double life. Before he can go to Headquarters and report the situation, Henry is abducted by the rowdies, spirited from Domicile, and taken to their crude and automobile-ringed estate far from there. His struggles during the abduction scene are quickly subdued, his protests are met with laughter, his pleas that he will be thrown out of Fabrication & Design are met with contempt. "Please forgive me, Henry," a tear-streaked Marge says to him when he recovers consciousness (they have finally had to Overnarcotic him so valiantly did he protest) on the estate, "I didn't think that they would do this to you but they're desperate men. Anyway, why don't you just listen to them and try to learn about the situation? You may find that you like automobiles. I know that I did."

Henry shakes his head, bitterly retreats to silence, resolves that he will have nothing further to do with her. He may be enchained by desperadoes but he does not have to lose his integrity even though Marge appears every evening after her own shift in Reconstruction & Reminiscence to plead with him to be reasonable. He finally begins to change his attitude when Marge tells him that her father has been imprisoned by the Overlords for circulating a Pro-Automobile petition in a tramway and is now being beaten by them daily. "That's a little excessive," Henry says, breaking his silence. "I mean, they're not even giving an old man a hearing. And besides, those cars outside that I can see through the bars are kind of attractive; they glisten in the sun, which is much brighter here than back in Domicile. They said it was all poisoned here but it isn't. Hey, if they lied to us about that one thing they could lie about a lot of things? Am I right? Marge, do I have a point there? Not that I'm ready to question the authorities to the point of defying them. At least not yet."

"But someday, Henry, you will," Marge says, and the first (and last) scene of gentle sexual foreplay is written as Henry and Marge make love Oldstyle (but the scene terminates long before do their thrashings and moanings).

A new and chastened Henry is then educated by the rowdies—who all turn out to have degrees in Traffic Control & Reconstruction; they have been falsely portrayed as ruffians when actually they are scientists whose search for personal freedoms as transmuted into their love for automobiles have become threatening to the Overlords—into the realities of the situation. What he comes to realize is that in the name of "energy survival" and "cleaning up the environment" the Overlords have managed to erode virtually all personal freedoms. The first encroachments via restriction of automobiles were seen in the last third of the twentieth century; hundreds of years later the Overlords' control is virtually complete except that the scientists have managed to set up the underground kilometers from Domicile and with the use of the retrieved, sacred, reconstructed automobiles are ready to mass an attack upon the oppressors. They need, however, someone who knows everything about the Department of Fabrication & Design for it is deep in that department that the machinery which controls is hidden, and would Henry like to help them?

"I don't know," Henry says, and he is truly uncertain until word reaches them that Marge has been abducted by Overlords who have gotten wind of the situation and are torturing her for information. "I can't save her," her father says, "but I'm going to try, by Cadillac I will. I did this to my only daughter and I'll die to get her back."

Looking at the old man Henry hears the thunder of his own heart. "You won't go alone, old man," he says. "I'm going to go with you. They lied to us from the beginning but now we know the truth. Don't we?" The scientists nod. "Now we know the truth," Henry says.

He takes driving lessons—there are some comic scenes here—on a replicated 1962 Cadillac Calais Coupe in brown with red leather interior and autotronic eye; at length he is at the head of an invading driving corps of the scientists who in seventy automobiles roar through the barriers of Domicile and descend upon Fabrication & Design. Marge's father unfortunately dies in the second wave, being chased by the Overlords' distracting robots, who dazzle him with mirrors and cause him to crash into a retaining wall, impaling himself on the steering hub of a replicated 1955 Chevrolet. Henry barely has time to weep at the spectacle before he is plunged into the sweeping combat scenes of the last chapters; he overcomes the Overlords' defenses, fights his way to the heart of the bureau, and confronts the Chief Overlord. "You're dead, Henry Walker Smith," the cowardly Overlord says from behind his shield, but Henry (still in his car) uses the autotronic beam to dazzle the knave and then does away with him by backing the car with its protuberant, deadly tail fins into his belly. The Overlord expires with a gush.

Henry, breathing hard, is barely able to enjoy the triumph before he remembers that Marge is unaccounted for. She falls, however, from behind one of the walls of the Overlord's Chamber in deshabille; she had been tied up for subterranean sexual purposes but, fortunately, not yet ill-used. "You did it, Henry," she says, "now we can Domicile together forever."

"Not so soon," Henry says grimly, holding her. "Marge, not so soon." His face has the look of eagles; a spare and haunting cast. He has matured greatly within these months as who, granted his experiences and insight, would not? "It isn't that easy and it isn't over."

"Oh Henry—"

"We must return to the countryside, find more automobiles and continue the liberation. There are other Domiciles."

"You're magnificent, Henry."

"But at the end of all of it," he says, holding her lightly, "a little peace and the reconstruction of the internal combustion engine, the turbomatic transmission, dual radials with sidebar kit and the luxury package with two-tone strips and soft-ride finish."

Marge kisses him lightly. "We'll get there," he says.

* * *

"Remembering the Old Man": The Old Man, let us call him Lothar, is a beggar on Mule IV in the Vegan system; very old and dirty he lives at the virtual bottom of the corrupt, feudal, technologically oppressive society of the 87th Century Human. "There is a better time for all of us coming," he chants as he pleads for coins and sweetmeats from the occasional tourists who comprise the only element of the economy of this picturesque but poverty-stricken backwater planet. "We have had a great history and our time will come again." The tourists think that he is crazy but harmless; the governmental forces on Mule IV are too sparse and corrupt to pay any attention to Lothar at all. This is a good thing since Lothar is the last representative of a fallen hierarchy which was obliterated before the memory of all presently in power, to say nothing of the tourists who admire the views, pick up their illegal drugs, and return to the rockets as quickly as possible.

Lothar finds a baby abandoned in a nest of concrete pilings. He takes pity upon the child, the government tending to make waste products of humanity, as he thinks, and the poor thing's mother being desperate, and takes him into his humble dwelling where he gives him a name and raises him as his own. Corear goes on the streets with him at an early age, showing intelligence by ingeniously adding some tricks to the nuances of begging.

A great bond of affection unites Corear and Lothar, and although their surroundings can hardly be said to improve, their relationship is magnificent. When Corear is eighteen, Lothar dies, passing on as his legacy in an extended and touching deathbed scene a coin to he who is as his son. "For you are my son and were always of my flesh," he says mysteriously as he expires. This leaves open-ended as is only proper the question of paternity and imparts ambiguity to the novel. Ambiguity is not to be scorned, particularly when it can be managed with a device as simple as this, one which will not need constant further reference or tie up the progression with dull explanation.

The coin invests Corear with vast psychic powers. He can perceive the thoughts of anyone on whom he focuses, traverse thousands of light years by taking a deep breath and concentrating, move planets in their orbits, and cause any human being to submit to his desires. He discovers these powers one by one and slowly over a period of many months, trying to ascertain what might be the best use to which they can be put. (He is sure from the outset that he does not want to take advantage of women to obtain sexual favors.) Through this period he lives in obscurity. However when he sees Lothar's memory being sullied on Mule IV—the old man, for reasons he cannot understand, becomes the object of virulent attacks by the government—he decides that he can stand mute no longer. LOTHAR IS ALL EVIL he sees inscribed on public squares; LOTHAR WAS A BAD MAN is the title of a column in the weekly journal in which scurrilous (and untrue) tales of the old man are told. Corear becomes angry.

He uses the magic coin to quickly dethrone the government and achieve power. Having done so he discovers that Lothar was the deposed ruler of Mule IV thrown out of office decades ago because he had discovered that the planet was merely a front for an enormous, intergalactic drug trade. (Drugs were used then to wipe his memory from the minds of his subjects; no one remembered who he was.) His death had, by preordainment by Lothar himself, caused old holograms to stalk the palace waving accusing fingers and hence the repudiatory measures. They came out of guilt. Corear is saddened to learn all of this but at the least he feels that he has redeemed the good name of Lothar, who in a final revelation—he goes through the palace documents slowly—turns out to be his father who had sired him unthinking in a final night of lust before he was deposed and who had found him in the streets when his mother had come to him nine months later to report that the government had seized her child upon birth and taken him from the Great Creche.

Corear is moved by all of this and wishes that it had been different, wishes too that at least he had been able to share with Lothar a filial love. Still, it is too late, isn't it? He assumes the throne and rules justly and wisely for thirty-seven years using the coin when necessary to get him out of scrapes. He continues to refuse its possibilities for sexual submission, however, and hence never marries. Or has a relationship with a woman. Although from time to time there might have been opportunities.

* * *

"Vigilante": The brawling and lusty crew of North Carolina Tarheel, a medium-sized space surveyor, lands upon a subsidiary planet in the Antares Cluster for a shore leave. There they find themselves—the canny Scot, the redheaded naive kid eager to learn, the shrewd old engineer, Sparks the Communicator, Lila the Mysterious Captain—in the midst of a planetary revolution.

A corrupt system based upon slavery is being attacked by a disorganized group of vigilantes who have driven them to their plantations but have then run out of weaponry, energies, and ideas. The vigilantes plead with the Survey Team their first day on the planet to use their technology and wits to help them, and although Lila feels that the crew should be detached, she does not interfere when the others decide to take part in the revolution. "After all," as Sparks says, "we have to take a position sometime as representatives of a decent galaxy."

The bumbling redheaded kid gets into amusing difficulties in constructing the world-wrecker and is captured by the oppressors, but they are otherwise no match for the Team, who bloodlessly unseat them when the Team persuades that resistance would be hopeless against a world-wrecker. The world-wrecker of course turns out to be papier-mache and the scheme a bluff but too late for the oppressors. The slaves are freed.

Sparks is asked by the grateful freedom-loving slaves to be King but declines in favor of Lila, who he has always known had as her secret wish a planet to rule. She takes charge of matters—calling herself not King but Queen—while the Team fuels up matter-of-factly and prepares for further adventures. The redheaded kid is taken at one point for a renegade oppressor but just in the nick of time his identity is revealed and he is saved; on this note of comic and joyous relief the Team sails away under command of Sparks, who has always wanted to command a Survey Team, and why not? He gets all of the credit and none of the responsibilities.

(Special note: If the regime being overthrown is antislavery and this is cleverly masked, it might be possible to get a magazine sale on this. The regime corruptly wants to give the barbarians the freedom for which they are not prepared and so on and so forth. Whether one wants the better distribution but somewhat lower word rates and ephemeral aspect of the magazines is an individual decision to be sure. It would be difficult to get both. Keep in mind that foreign sales can be an important proportion of the eventual income on a book, whereas the magazine publishers purchase world serial rights.)

* * *

"Come and Get It": Jones is an old, sickly, half-blind Terrestrial Scout; he is about to be pensioned off after this, his final expedition. Congestive heart failure, failing gall bladder. Unluckily—he has never had extreme luck but in the end gets through, he thinks—he is abducted by a fleet battalion of Rigelians seeping through the stars in search of Terrans who might be able to give them information that can be used in the continuing great war. Jones uses his two pieces of wood in confinement to construct a solar generator, no small feat considering that the two weak suns overlooking this Rigelian outpost are dwarf stars in the last moments of their celestial lifetime.

Nonetheless, a lifetime as a hobbyist engineer is converted to use as Jones stupefies the Rigelians during interrogative sessions with threats of apocalypse; he then brings about a simulated solar eclipse which panics them as myth has informed that darkness portends ten thousand years of nightfall. Oh boy. "Help us," the senior Rigelian begs Jones, "I speak in telepathic hookup for all the millions of us when I beg you most sincerely to let the sun shine again. We can't really deal with this. How much of this do you think we can take?"

"You must surrender," Jones says shrewdly, "and turn over all of your treasure, to say nothing of the prisoners you've taken to Earth."

"Absolutely," the panicked Rigelian says, "just get us out of this!" Jones nods and causes the illusory eclipse to dissolve. The Rigelian babbles gratitude and as a gesture of thanks cures Jones' congestive heart failure (he cannot do much with that gall bladder) and installs him as ruler of the Rigelians, who become a subrace of the Rigelian outpost of Empire Earth.

* * *

"Amazing Grace": A prophetess appears amidst the superstitious and primitive peoples of a prehistoric Earth and forecasts the wonders to come: Pyramids, Sphinx, television, radar, automobiles, time travel, and guns. The primitives, awed, commit her to death by fire shockingly reminiscent of the death of Joan of Arc. In fact it is the death of Joan of Arc.

In an epilogue-flashback the prophetess is seen as an ordinary time-traveling citizen of the fourth millennium about to try an amusing experiment. In going to prehistory she knows she flouts canon, and in planning to tell the natives of the future she lurches into Temporal Apostasy, but she is a stubborn lass. In a further epilogue it is disclosed that none of the events described occurred since, of course, her death by fire would render impossible those events which brought her to it, but in a final final epilogue the first paragraph of the story is repeated, indicating that Temporal Paradox is nothing to be trifled with by anyone.

* * *

"Hold That Tiger": A child in the American Midwest of the early twentieth century is escorted by his father through a marvelous circus in which he sees—

A green beast, a three-horned beast, a magician with taloned hands, a spider with golden web, a polar bear who plays cello (but only in the first position), and a camel who plays violin (but without vibrato and shaky intonation; the duets are dreadful). And similar marvels. "This is wonderful, daddy," the child says, "who made it up?"

"You did," the father says, and would say more except that the polar bear cellist puts down his instrument with determination and whisks the child away. The child is terrified but his roistering screams are thought by the sparse audience to be merely part of a Wonder Screaming Child Presentation, and he obtains little satisfaction. The polar bear places him in a tent and waits for the camel, who appears carrying both instruments. The two then play (execrably) the third movement of the Brahms Double Concerto in A Major for Violin and Violincello. The carnival attractions mass to listen and the child sees the magician become a marvelous flower, the flower opening to speed him from dream to the reality of his deathbed at the turn of the millennium.

(Please note: If the intent is the young adult market, the child does not awaken on his deathbed but in his father's arms outside the circus. "Would you rather see this stuff or save a few dollars and go right home?" the father asks. "I'd just as soon take you home now but it's up to you. Everything's up to you. You have to be responsible, you're a young adult now."

("I go home, dada. I go home right now. I go home from this rotten place and I never come back again."

("That's a mature and responsible decision. After all, it's all phony anyway."

("I hope so, dada. I really do.")

* * *

I cannot guarantee a sale on any of these plots. There are no guarantees in our complex, painful, and competitive business. On the other hand I have done the best that I can and I assure you that if you use them you are on the right track. I can in fact promise—assuming as always that you have friends among the editors, and every one of you, as Damon Knight once said, had better make them where you can—a swift and sympathetic reading, a concerned and passionate response, a delayed but viable contract, and some time beyond that an advance to speed you through the writing of all these novels and all of their sequels through all the eight to twelve to (if you are a saint) twenty-five years of your productive and creative, your artistic and dedicated, your daring and soul-testing writing career.

—1979/1980: New Jersey

Grandson of the True and the Terrible

The most important science fiction writer of the forties was probably Theodore Sturgeon. He was not the best nor the most significant nor did he make the most fundamental impression; even as a stylist (the basis of his reputation) he might have fallen behind the Kuttners in top form, but what Sturgeon did was to keep open the possibility for a kind of science fiction that eventually many others came to do.

That possibility was style-oriented, science fiction built upon configuration and mood. No other writer was doing this. Heinlein was certainly the most important figure of the decade, Asimov probably the most imaginative, van Vogt the most characteristic and crazily inventive, the Kuttners the most polished and adroit . . . but all of these writers were replaceable. There were others who were doing what Heinlein was doing if not nearly so well, similarly Asimov. Their style, their approach to science fiction as an extrapolative medium impressing circumstance upon character, was expression of Campbell's vision. The Kuttners were better than good but their depth exceeded breadth and The New Yorker, for instance, was full of fine writers (some of whom, like John Collier and Robert Coates, had clearly influenced them). Van Vogt was more sui generis, but L. Ron Hubbard knew a few things about the paranoid plot.

If any of these writers had been lifted out of the science fiction of the forties, the forties would have been an inestimably poorer decade . . . but the history of modern science fiction, less their own contribution, would be essentially the same. Even Heinlein's work, hardly as skillfully, would have been done eventually.

But Sturgeon's contribution was unique. In his use of style, internalization, and quirky characterization he was keeping the door open for everything that happened after 1950 when the Gold, Boucher, and fifties perspective became the alternative that dominated the field. If Sturgeon had not been around through his decade to hold the flag for this kind of science fiction, had not established that the literature could be style-oriented, it is possible that the fifties perspective would not have developed; the editors and potential audience might have been there but no basis would have existed upon which writers within the field could build.

Science fiction without Sturgeon might have been a science fiction without Galaxy, Walter Miller, Jr., Brian Aldiss, Damon Knight, the original anthology market or Dying Inside. And other things. Without Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, Hubbard, or de Camp the medium would have been the poorer, but without Sturgeon it might by the middle of the fifties have played itself out in extrapolative gimmickry and arcana and not have existed at all.

At least it is something to think about, just as it is to think about what might have happened if Campbell had not been persuaded that Theodore Sturgeon wrote science fiction at all. Just as it is to think about what might have been if Sturgeon—who had serious literary ambitions and wanted to publish in the quarterlies and mass magazines—had not failed in his field of first intention and had had to settle for science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey never wanted to write anything else. Sturgeon found his text after the fact. What he wrote reflected this. It made the field first attractive and then possible for many of us.

* * *

The fiction writer, locked up with the sound of his own voice, the science fiction writer locked up with the sound of his own voice propagating megalomaniacal or solipsistic visions imposed upon his persona, the full-time science fiction writer who professionally does little else . . . contrast these visions with the alienation, isolation, anonymity and impotence which constitute the condition of the American writer—

Taking it all on balance it can be well understood why alcoholism, divorce, depression, fragmentation, and a rich history of lunacy characterize science fiction writers and why it was Alfred Bester's considered opinion in the early fifties, after meeting the crowd for the first time, that all of them were brilliant and all of them had a screw loose someplace. (Bester, who wrote radio and television scripts at the time, considered himself at least nominally representative of the Outside World.)

But one does not want to prejudice the case. There is another side and another opinion. John W. Campbell, who must have thought about this too in his time, put it this way to one of his writers in the forties: "People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction editors, well—"

A long Campbellian sigh.

Silence.

—1980: New Jersey

Give Me That Old-Time Religion

Science fiction does not—perhaps it cannot—depict the future. What it does, as A. J. Budrys pointed out back in 1969, is to offer sentimentalized versions of the past or brutalized versions of the present transmuted into a template of the familiar. The future cannot by definition be portrayed; it will require a terminology and ethos which do not exist. Perhaps true science fiction, an accurate foreshadowing of the future if such a thing were at all possible, would be incomprehensible. It is important to point out, however, that as futurologists not only our devices but our credentials are miserable.

It is true—a notorious example—that as late as 1967, no science fiction writer had understood that the landing on the moon would be tied into the media and that it would be observed by several hundred million people including that long-distance station-to-station caller, Richard M. Nixon. None of us. The closest any came was Richard Wilson in a short-short story, "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer," in a 1965 issue of Galaxy, which speculated that the first landing on Mars, witnessed by most of the population of this planet on Intermedia, would expose the astronauts to the hypnotic and mind-shattering powers of the Secret Martians, who would turn the minds of most of us to jelly.

Not such bad thinking for fifteen hundred words, this story, and handled with Wilson's customary lucidity and elan (he is a charter member of the science fiction club larger than Hydra and even more filled with bitterness: Underrated Writers, Inc.), but it had very little to do with the conditions that NASA and the networks were jointly evolving, and the question of mass audience was strictly for the subplot, a means of setting up the satiric point. Wilson takes the NASA-CBS I Saw It Coming Award but only by default, and since the award pays only in honor (of which NASA and CBS have offered us little), Wilson will have to be content with his membership in the club and 1969 Nebula for "Mother to the World."

For the rest of us—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, and the sixties visionaries too, the movers and shakers who were attempting to write Street (as opposed to Street & Smith) Science Fiction—no honor whatsoever and no excuse. That a genre built upon visionary format whose claim to public attention through the early decades had been based upon its precognitive value should have utterly failed to glimpse the second or third most significant social event of the decade is—one puts on one's tattered prophet's robes—quite disgraceful.

Pointless to blame the readership. The readership may not be interested in the visionary, the dangerous, the threatening, or the difficult, that is true, but their expectations have been formed by what has been given them. Great writers make great audiences. The solemn truth is that as NASA and the networks conspired to reduce the most awesome events of the twentieth century to pap between advertisements and other divertissements, most of us were in the boondocks, slaving away on our portions and outlines and our little short stories, trying to figure out what new variation of Eric Frank Russell we could sneak by Campbell, what turn on a 1947 plot by van Vogt out of a 1956 novel by Phil Dick might work this one last time for Fred Pohl's Galaxy. While we slogged on through the mud of the sixties, bombs bursting in air, recycling the recyclable for one thousand dollars in front money, the liars and technicians were working ably to convert the holy into garbage and a damned good job they (and we) made of it too. The liars and the technicians put the space program out of business by the mid-seventies. Perhaps it might have been different if we had stayed on the job . . . but then again we all know that science fiction has almost nothing to do with the future so why feel guilty? I don't. And "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer" is still around somewhere for proof that we had a handle on it, so there.

No guilt at all. I was just one of the boys.

—1980: New Jersey

SF Forever

I have little idea what the science fiction of the eighties will be like—as we live through, it will seem to be very much like the science fiction of the year just before—but I have a pretty good grasp of the somber nineties. Here is how it will be: mass-market science fiction will edge toward fantasy. Fully 75 percent of novels published under the label will be what we would have defined five years ago as fantastic; some of these books will do extraordinarily well and others will not but there will be little to choose qualitatively. The books that will do well simply will have larger print orders and publicity, which may in certain cases go to television or movie theaters. Series books or novels set against a common background will predominate and writers will (with one another's consent and cooperation) use one another's backgrounds freely. Some series will originate with publishers who will farm them out to various writers and pay flat fees, hold the copyrights. "Hard" or technologically rigorous work will occupy the same small corner of the market that "literary" science fiction does now.

"Literary" science fiction and many backlists will be in the hands of the specialty publishers whose present-day precursors will in the nineties be as influential as medium-sized paperback firms are now. The specialty publishers will range from one-person operations not unreminiscent of the Gnome or Shasta of the fifties to large and well-staffed organizations that will be subdivisions of conglomerate divisions; the arm for "serious" literature. These specialty publishers in the aggregate will be responsible for hundreds of books a year—the major publishers, amongst them, will do only forty or fifty—and sales will range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. All of the larger specialties will have experimented with trade and mass-market paperbacks and will now and then do well enough to bring a title to the attention of the majors, who will do a big edition.

The audience for written science fiction—a hard base of half a million with another two or three million who can be brought in for an occasional title—will remain stubbornly, inflexibly unchanged. This constant will be the barrier against which the specialists will time and again collide and which will cause the weaker publishers to fail since the audience will, once again, be unable to expand with expanded titles.

There will be about as much work of quality as always but none of it will come from the mass-market publishers.

The magazines and the science fiction short story will have little role in the market. The few magazines will serialize some mass-market novels and give some new writers a marginal audience for their first attempts. These two or three magazines will all be owned by the same conglomerate, will be under the same editorship, and will pay approximately the word rates which prevailed in the nineteen-fifties.

—1980: New Jersey

What I Won't Do Next Summer, I Guess

Here are a selection of plot ideas guaranteed unsaleable in the science fiction market of yesterday, today, and any variant of tomorrow. Sorry to bring this up again, folks, but the end is nigh and one must have a unity of vision:

An intelligent culture on a far planet is not carbon-based but perhaps silicone- or silver-based. There is no "organic" deterioration after death and therefore these creatures make no distinction between the living and the dead. The dead remain in residence, are fornicated with, talked to, manipulated, used as the subjects of advertisements, given responsibilities (obviously met poorly; they are shiftless) for work, child care, and so on.

The dead are obviously less efficient at most of these tasks than the living but they are humored and tolerated as the senile or extremely aged are in our own culture, and because they do not register organic collapse, their presence is not actively unpleasant. In fact, it is kind of reassuring. As well as possible the inhabitants of this culture put a good self-denying face on the inadequacies of the dead just as Victorians would cover up for batty, incontinent relatives on their premises.

A group of missionaries from a carbon-based culture land on this planet, survey the situation, and are of course horrified. Gently but very firmly they teach the natives the difference between the "dead" and the "living" and the necessity to "bury" and "put away the memory of the dead.

Slowly their message works its way through the culture and slowly the natives reach an understanding of the difference between "life" and "death."

Needless to say they are filled with spiritual terror when they realize that the dead are quite different from them and that this difference has to do with the extinction of consciousness. The culture in the face of death's apprehension goes mad, becomes dysfunctional, the natives turn upon the missionaries and kill them and then begin to slaughter one another. The only way to control death, they surmise, is to administer it themselves. (If "death" is a conscious, perpetrated condition rather than an unhappy inevitability, it can be manipulated, threatened, offered, or denied.) The culture becomes a charnel house; it becomes centered around the rituals and ordeals of murder.

It does not last much longer.

* * *

A Messianic figure in an alternate or future civilization is homosexual and preaches that only through conversion to homosexuality can the present human condition change and the time of Revelation and Reconstruction begin.

The reason for this is practical: universal homosexuality will cancel procreation and bring the ongoing generations to a halt, ending humanity within about a century. This Messiah has prophetic conviction and textual justification; he overcomes all of the manifold social resistance and brings about that era which soon enough will bring to fruition all of the prophecies mysteriously locked within the Book of Daniel.

* * *

A science fiction editor who hates the field and is incapable of understanding it rejects every promising writer and idea which is presented, preferring to deal with a tight circle of friends, who in return for the editor's contracting for debased material, offer kickbacks. The relative success of the line and the kickbacks enable the editor to amass a sufficient amount of money to become a publisher, where he continues his policies successfully until his house sets the standard for all science fiction. He is finally undone by his success: expansion means that he must hire staff editors, the editors merrily interpose themselves between the publisher and the writers and they conduct their business exactly as the publisher does, which is to say that they buy from friends and take kickbacks. Unfortunately, several of the manuscripts that slip through are of sufficient originality and technical facility to sell badly. The publisher loses his commanding edge in the market; by the time he fires his staff and seizes control, it is too late, his imprint has lost its reliability and predictability for the audience, and before he can sell to a conglomerate he goes bankrupt. His third wife takes their remaining assets and leaves him. He contracts boils.

(It is the template which is the problem here. Make the product matter transmitters rather than novels and you might sell this. To a friend. For a consideration.)

—1980: New Jersey

Come Fool, Follify

The editor and I were talking about large science fiction conventions. Editors and writers, fans and mistresses who have hated one another, some of them for forty years, come by the thousands and dwell in the same space for three days. Old passions, old griefs; it must be understood that envy and recrimination in science fiction are higher per capita than anywhere except, possibly, the reform wing of the New York Democratic Party. "It doesn't mean anything, though," the editor said calmly, "if these people were really serious, they'd kill each other."

The capsulization of science fiction. In print and behind one another's backs we^33 will revile, condemn, curse, and whisper scurrilities of the most urgent sort: face to face we are mild and reasonable individuals. Old enemies buy one another fresh drinks; new lovers and old whisper confidences in the corners. Publishers of venomous fanzines will ask writers for autographs. As the editor said, if we were serious, we would almost certainly kill but the key to science fiction—perhaps for all I know the key to the Ultimate Mystery—is that it is not a serious field at all. In its gnarled little heart it is, in fact, frivolous.

The nature of the form counsels frivolity. Consider the reader's slack-jawed wonder: faster-than-light travel, haunting sea beasts on the Jovian plain, mutiny on the Antares bypass, alternate and mysterious worlds in which dragons can fly and understand Elizabethan English . . . and then it is time for dinner, the chemistry assignment or the subway transfer. Escape reading, you know. If the reader were to really deal with this material on the level apparently offered, he would be quite unable to make the changes: how can one carry on even the gestures of one's life if one is rocketing over Jupiter astride a sea beast? One reads science fiction—even at the age of eight one had better read it this way—in contract; just kidding you know. Not to be taken straight. The same failsafe factor seems to operate within the science fiction reader^34 as within the American consumer; no one really believes all those ads, you know. One could go quite insane if one accepted the vision of America squeezed through the interstices of automobile, deodorant, or cosmetic commercials. Everyone over the age of two (might it be one?) in the United States knows that ads are . . . well, just ads. As science fiction is just science fiction.

Simil, the writer. Four cents a word, maybe five, portions and outlines, magazine rates, editors, special intergalactic issues, put an 8 1/2 X 11 in the machine and let it go. Whoops! and a flight to Mars. Whee! and an invasion of the capitol by the hired assassins of Merm. Whap! and a parallel universe in which time runs contrawise rather than causally. And how much of this can I get done before dinner, and is New Dimensions paying on acceptance these days? The first fine exhilaration of youth becomes, with any kind of persistence at all, the routine of middle age; if it did not, if one began to dwell in these universes, take the Merm seriously, incur a deep sense of obligation to imbue the imagined circumstance with the consequence that one knows in the real—35

The effects of writing science fiction in quantity and over a period of time have been amply discussed, the carryover is not insignificant and the damages are evident. One does, as a science fiction writer, tend to hate a little more richly, cleave a little more tightly, recriminate somewhat more sensationally . . . but only up to a point and quickly beyond that lassitude sets in. It is one thing to despise the old colleague who stole your plot idea from a forgotten Ace Double and got it into hardcover; it is another thing to plot against the wretched editor who bought that book and rejected your own while also making love to your ex-mistress and blackening your name around town; it is another to come up against the swine in the hotel bar^36 and deal with the situation. A handclasp will suffice and a word of cheer; after all, the son of a bitch may be back in the market someday. Your old colleague who is somewhere upstairs drunkenly fornicating with your ex-wife has been doing this kind of thing since 1953 and you are only one of his victims—he's done more to others, and besides if you recall, you did the same thing to him when you swiped that Worlds of If short story idea, a really lovely pivot for your own 1964 Pyramid novel. Who knows what he might be saying about you? Besides, the old bastard is consultant now for a medium-sized paperback firm and your agent has some portions and outlines on offer; he might even buy them. Then again, he might not. It depends upon who is on his good side in the next month or so and this convention is certainly no time to throw down the gauntlet. Is it? Let's be reasonable now. Besides, a scene would only make the future more difficult; there's no end to this, you see, for a lifetime he and you and the editor (at least until the editor is fired) are going to be showing up at these things and a Philadelphia riot would only lead to a coda in Boston, a recapitulation in St. Louis, a scherzo and variations in London two years from now.

Better to take your losses and live with them. You do—one does, after all—have to deal with these people for the duration; they have been around. All of you have been around since 1953; why should anything change now? Or next week? You take your losses, you stick the editor with the bill, you look for a new mistress or a now unembittered older one. You go through the weekend and you go home, wherever that may be. If you were serious, yes, you might kill the bastards but then again, if they were serious, they would kill you, right? Every loss a gain; every action a reaction, the great mid-century vision of the middle class and science fiction is nothing—anyone who ponders this for five minutes will see it clearly—if it is not a middle-class phenomenon.

—1980: New Jersey

The Engines of the Night

Science fiction is the only branch of literature whose poorer examples are almost invariably used by critics outside the form to attack all of it. A lousy western is a lousy western, a seriously intentioned novel that falls apart is a disaster . . . but a science fiction novel that fails illuminates the inadequacy of the genre, the hollowness of the fantastic vision, the banality of the sci-fi writer . . . this phenomenon is as old as the American genre itself (in fact for the first quarter century post-Gernsback, outside media would not even review science fiction), and as fresh as the latest rotten book.

Not so long ago, a weak and overextended bildungsroman by a newer writer was attacked spitefully in a publication called The Soho Weekly News; Jonathan Rosenbaum used the first two-thirds of the review to vilify and the rest to conclude that sci-fi writers could not deal with contemporary reality because they apotheosized machinery over mortality, stripped humanity in their fiction of dignity and drained it of the capacity to feel. In so saying, Rosenbaum was not only indicating complete ignorance of most of the serious work done in science fiction since the early 1950s but was patently using a novel by a young writer of indifferent reputation (and no particular standing within the field) to vilify the genre.

The unhappy case is typical. Kingsley Amis wrote a quatrain about it once upon a time. In a 1972 book of literary essays, Rediscoveries, devoted to the favorite lost novels of writers of reputation, Walker Percy, in cautiously praising Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (a novel which has never been "lost" to science fiction but which has been continuously in print since its first appearance in 1959), took the most elaborate pains to point out that although the novel had the trappings of "pop sci-fi" it had a more serious undercurrent, that elements of mysticism and religious ambivalence verging on apostasy (subjects close to Percy's own artistic sensibility) were handled in a fashion more complex than was usually the case in science fiction . . . and that the novel might actually reward study by serious readers who would otherwise find science fiction of little interest. It was almost as if Percy had to balance off his enthrallment with Canticle against a real fear that unrestricted praise, read in the wrong quarters, could threaten his credentials as a "serious" writer. Never has so trembling a testimony been given a novel. (Reminiscent of the eulogy hesitantly offered for the Meanest Man in Town, "well," the minister said after a long, awkward pause, "he never missed a spittoon.") And in a review of my own Guernica Night some years back Joyce Carol Gates took pains to make clear that the novel's concerns were, um, spiritual and metaphysical and that its virtues came from it being unlike the science fiction to which she was accustomed.

Science fiction, as I say, stands alone in literature as being forced to judgment by its weaker examples, denied in praise of its best. Outside of literature there are other examples: the question of racial prejudice, for instance, parallels the member of the minority must "be a good example of his race" and in so doing exhibits virtues which make him "not really like the rest of them at all" and the bad example sets the standard—"they're all like that." Modern music is like this: infrequent performances of it by the major orchestras as part of the subscription program often lead to venomous critical attacks upon the entire specter of the dissonant or atonal (Pierre Boulez might have been pressed off the podium of the New York Philharmonic for programming so much of that crazy modern junk), and contemporary painters, sculptors, or avant-garde directors of stage or film know exactly what I mean. Every weak example of the form is there to be used to pillory all of it. "Modern music," "modern art," "modern dance" become as indistinguishable for the infuriated critic (and by implication his audience) as does, pity its shriveled heart, "science fiction."

Is it because the genre is dangerous and threatening, implies a statement and view of the world which is unbearable for the unaccustomed? Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) theorizes so in an essay—afterword to her story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" some years ago; postwar science fiction raised the possibility that our fate was uncontrollable and the machines were going to blow us out of existence, and the middle class as represented by the critics fled this insight, Oh please, oh please tell us that it is our swimming pools and martinis and mistresses and angst which make us so unhappy, not radioactive dust or the mad engines. After one brief, terrified look at genre science fiction in the early postwar period, the middle class flung it into furthest darkness and dived into the swimming pools of O'Hara's or Cheever's suburbs, the forests of Truman Capote or Eudora Welty's night: they wanted no part of the possibility that technology had appropriated the sense or the control within their lives. But still within is that fear of the nihilistic aspect of science fiction to which they were briefly exposed, a nihilism—which like that of modern art, modern music, street theater or mime—suggests that none of the devices of preventative maintenance (adultery, alcohol, industry, prayer) really matter much at all.

Which means that our worst examples (or even our mediocrities) will be used over and again as a club to beat away the form; that our best will be ignored and that all of it will be denied.

Ah but still. Still, oh still. Still Kazin, Broyard, Epstein, Podhoretz, and Howe: grinding away slowly in the center of all purpose, taking us to the millennium: the engines of the night.

—1980: New Jersey

Con Sordino

I don't know if science fiction was ever the literature of revelation and deliverance they promised us (that is another essay in another time), but the cutting edge of the eighties is action-packed as they say and without a detectable position. Lords and Snow Queens voyage in pursuit of the lost castle, while on the other side of the planet sexes and social roles are surgically implanted; the hotline keeps communications with the universe at a low-key level while the voyagers can stop in Callahan's franchises along the way, swap a few drinks and lies; out there on the further world snake charmers practice a romantic kind of medicine and so on. It is a distance from the drowned landscapes and bombed-out craters of the late sixties, the gleaming machines and obliterated souls; even the Asimovian protagonists of a decade ago had nervous tics and a sullen intimation that matters, despite technological access, were not working terribly well, but the Snow Queen and Valentine have no such problem. Matters still work, sexes can be traded in like wardrobes and time and again the Magic Snake, rising, enacts its will. "The cutting edge of the future is reasonable, not despairing," I wrote about a year ago, but that does not quite make the case either. "The cutting edge of the future is the non-voting electorate," might have been a little better or like one of those voters swooped upon outside the polls who, even for the sake of television, will make no statement whatsoever. "Secret ballot, chief," these voters say, pushing the equipment aside, "none of your goddamned business. Leave me alone."

Not necessarily without merit. Two decades of opinion have, after all, led us to the edge of the pit where, blinking, we decided we did not like the contents very much at all; it may indeed be time, as a certain uncommunicative voter told us a while ago, to lower our voices a little. All of us. In the forties, the cutting edge of science fiction indicated that either technology would take over the world or do it in; the fifties had the same opinion of the technicians, the sixties did not, for the most part, want to have much to do with technology altogether^37 and the seventies reacted to the quarreling voice of history by declaring a pox on all of them. Generalizations all, but consolidation is the key; the eighties of Lords and Queens, Hotlines and Snakes prefer to assume that the argument is settled, the landscape itself being evidence of how it was won, and to deal with the materiel itself. "He's published half a million words," someone I know said of a major figure of the late seventies, "and I don't know how he feels about a single thing; I don't know what his position is. This is not good writing or important writing."

I am not sure of this. J. D. Salinger, for instance, has published upward (barely) of half a million words and is a major figure still and might well take the same comment (we know how his characters feel but not he); one of the definitions of a certain kind of art might be that it is refractive or expressive, not demonstrative. The more interesting question—or at least the one that I would like to raise in this context—is as to how much the Unvoicing of the eighties might be ascribed to evolution (or devolution) of the genre itself; how much could be said to be imposed from without by sheer editorial or market forces.

Certainly forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties H. L. Gold, Fred Pohl, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and of doom, and in the sixties Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it. Ponderous, detached social forces, the apparent inevitability of history, can be seen in another context as coming from the cynical, short-term decisions of a small, powerful cabal; this is what Emma Rothschild wrote (of the auto industry, suburban sprawl, and the death of the cities) in Paradise Lost. Science fiction is an insular field; there has never been a point in its history in America where one powerfully placed editor could not, within a short time and for the short term, wreak change simply through using his power to buy one kind of story and reject another. The group of editors who have moved to the center of science fiction publishing in the period beginning in 1975 (science fiction is no longer a magazine field, a point which I trust does not have to be argued here) have imposed, collectively and individually, their vision upon science fiction, and the eighties cutting edge may be sheer reaction. Writers—more now than ever—must go where the market is or they go nowhere at all.

Who are these editors? Most of them (not all) have little reading background in science fiction prior to their assumption of their posts, none of them have ever written it. (The central editors of previous decades were all writers or people who had at least attempted to write in the field.) They have a scant background in the field and for many of them (again, not all) science fiction editing is a way station, an apprentice position on the way to editing something, anything, other than science fiction. Many regard the field if they regard it at all as a kind of minor league of American literature; the players may be trapped on the buses and in unhealed locker rooms, most of them, but the coaches and managers whose future is not as closely linked to their skills can hope to move on. One way to move on is to win the pennant of course but that is risky and often impossible on a low team budget; a more assured way is not to make trouble.

Not to make trouble. Conglomeratization, the fact that these editors work for minor implements of publishing companies which are in themselves merely minor, if highly visible, parts of the conglomerates is a point that has been made often and by others than myself; the Conglomeratization of publishing has had and will probably continue to have a numbing effect upon most work that does not fit neatly into the balance sheet, "literary" work, that is to say, or work of political or social controversy. But it is less a question here of censorship than of self-censorship; given only a marginal understanding of science fiction and only a superficial grasp of its history (to most contemporary science fiction editors "modern" science fiction began with Harlan Ellison, and they have only the most superficial acquaintance with the work of the forties, fifties, and even nineteen-sixties), these editors tend to publish what looks like science fiction and their view is necessarily parochial and, granted the nature of Conglomeratization, not without fear. "Most science fiction editors seem mostly to seek the assurance that they are doing nothing wrong," Samuel R. Delany writes in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, "and since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."

The nature of professionalism is adaptation and there is no gainsaying that a clever and talented writer can produce work of consequence even under the greatest of strictures. (One need only to reflect for a moment upon the career of Gogol or Günter Grass.) Still it is all very wearying and energy that might be expended in other directions is simply to be applied more lucratively in the detail work; Castles and Queens and Hotlines can be depicted lovingly; snakes (outside of the Book of Genesis) are not political. One must go where the market is; in previous decades it was possible for a certain kind of science fiction writer to create a market but science fiction was then something of an outlaw. Now it is a minor subdivision of Pillage & Homogenize, Inc., presided over in almost all cases by the same group of people.

One could find all of this reasonably discouraging and perhaps I do but Queens and Castles are reaching an audience much larger than all of the work of the previous thirty years in toto and audiences are not contemptible to any of us; never were. That all of the Queens and Castles reek of fantasy, that the lines between science fiction and fantasy are being rapidly obliterated and that the cutting edge is moving away from science fiction as it evolved for half a century is more distressing, but that is the topic for another screed in a different time; it is the fibrillating heart of science fiction itself to which I would like to administer CPR had I but the wit, the cunning, and the cool refusal to panic.

—1981: New Jersey

Corridors

Ruthven used to have plans. Big plans: turn the category around, arrest the decline of science fiction into stereotype and cant, open up the category to new vistas and so on. So forth. Now, however, he is at fifty-four merely trying to hold on; he takes this retraction of ambition, understanding of his condition as the only significant change in his inner life over two decades. The rest of it—inner and outer too—has been replication, disaster, pain, recrimination, self-pity, and the like: Ruthven thinks of these old partners of the law firm of his life as brothers. At least, thanks to Replication & Disaster, he has a brief for the game. He knows what he is and what has to be done, and most of the time he can sleep through the night, unlike that period during his forties when 4 A.M. more often than not would see him awake and drinking whiskey, staring at his out-of-print editions in many languages.

The series has helped. Ruthven has at last achieved a modicum of fame in science fiction and for the first time—he would not have believed this ever possible—some financial security. Based originally upon a short novel written for Astounding in late 1963, which he padded for quick paperback the next year, The Sorcerer has proven the capstone of his career. Five or six novels written subsequently at low advances for the same firm went nowhere but: the editor was fired, the firm collapsed, releasing all rights, the editor got divorced, married a subsidiary rights director, got a consultant job with her firm, divorced her, went to a major paperback house as science fiction chief and through a continuing series of coincidences known to those who (unlike Ruthven) always seemed to come out a little ahead commissioned three new Sorcerers from Ruthven on fast deadline to build up cachet with the salesmen. They all had hung out at the Hydra Club together, anyway. Contracts were signed, the first of the three new Sorcerers (written, all of them in ten weeks) sold 150,000 copies, the second was picked up as an alternate by a demented Literary Guild, and the third was leased to hardcover. Ruthven's new, high-priced agent negotiated a contract for five more Sorcerers for $100,000.

Within the recent half decade, Ruthven has at last made money from science fiction. One of the novels was a Hugo finalist, another was filmed. He has been twice final balloted for a Gandalf. Some of his older novels have been reprinted. Ruthven is now one of the ten most successful science fiction writers: he paid taxes on $79,000 last year. In his first two decades in this field, writing frantically and passing through a succession of dead-end jobs, Ruthven did not make $79,000.

It would be easier for him, he thinks, if he could take his success seriously or at least obtain some peace, but of this he has none. Part of it has to do with his recent insight that he is merely hanging on, that the ultimate outcome of ultimate struggle for any writer in America not hopelessly self-deluded is to hang on; another part has to do with what Ruthven likes to think of as the accumulated damages and injuries sustained by the writing of seventy-three novels. Like a fighter long gone from the ring, the forgotten left hooks taken under the lights in all of the quick-money bouts have caught up with him and stunned his brain. Ruthven hears the music of combat as he never did when it was going on. He has lost the contents of most of these books and even some of their titles but the pain lingers. This is self-dramatization, of course, and Ruthven has enough ironic distance to know it. No writer was ever killed by a book.

Nonetheless, he hears the music, feels the dull knives in his kidneys and occipital regions at night; Ruthven also knows that he has done nothing of worth in a long time. The Sorcerer is a fraud; he is far below the aspirations and intent of his earlier work, no matter how flawed that was. Most of these new books have been written reflexively under the purposeful influence of scotch and none of them possesses real quality. Even literacy. He has never been interested in these books. Ruthven is too far beyond self-delusion to think that the decline of his artistic gifts, the collapse of his promise, means anything either. Nothing means anything except holding on as he now knows. Nonetheless, he used to feel that the quality of work made some difference. Didn't he? Like the old damages of the forgotten books he feels the pain at odd hours.

He is not disgraced, of this he is fairly sure, but he is disappointed. If he had known that it would end this way, perhaps he would not have expended quite so much on those earlier books. The Sorcerer might have had a little more energy; at least he could have put some color in the backgrounds.

Ruthven is married to Sandra, his first and only wife. The marriage has lasted through thirty-one years and two daughters, one divorced, one divorced and remarried, both far from his home in the Southeast. At times Ruthven considers his marriage with astonishment: he does not quite know how he has been able to stay married so long granted the damages of his career, the distractions, the deadening, the slow and terrible resentment which has built within him over almost three decades of commercial writing. At other times, however, he feels that his marriage is the only aspect of his life (aside from science fiction itself) which has a unifying consistency. And only death will end it.

He accepts that now. Ruthven is aware of the lives of all his colleagues: the divorces, multiple marriages, disastrous affairs, two- and three-timing, bed-hopping at conventions; the few continuing marriages seem to be cover or mausoleum . . . but after considering his few alternatives Ruthven has nonetheless stayed married and the more active outrage of the earlier decades has receded. It all comes back to his insight: nothing matters. Hang on. If nothing makes any difference, then it is easier to stay with Sandra by far. Also, she has a position of her own; it cannot have been marriage to a science fiction writer which enticed her when they met so long ago. She has taken that and its outcome with moderate good cheer and has given him less trouble, he supposes, than she might. He has not shoved the adulteries and recrimination in her face but surely she knows of them; she is not stupid. And she is now married to $79,000 a year, which is not inconsiderable. At least this is all Ruthven's way of rationalizing the fact that he has had (he knows now) so much less from this marriage than he might have, the fact that being a writer has done irreparable damage to both of them. And the children. He dwells on this less than previously. His marriage, Ruthven thinks, is like science fiction writing itself: if there was a time to get out, that time is past and now he would be worse off anywhere else. Who would read him? Where would he sell? What else could he do?

Unlike many of his colleagues, Ruthven had never had ambitions outside the field. Most of them had had literary pretensions, at least had wanted to reach wider audiences, but Ruthven had never wanted anything else. To reproduce, first for his own pleasure and then for money, the stories of the forties Astounding which moved him seemed to be a sensible ambition. Later of course he did get serious about the category, wanting to make it anew and etc. . . . but that was later. Much later. It seemed a noble thing in the fifties to want to be a science fiction writer and his career has given him all that he could have hoped for at fourteen. Or twenty-four.

He has seen what their larger hopes have done to so many of his peers who started out with him in the fifties, men of large gifts who in many cases had been blocked in every way in their attempts to leave science fiction, some becoming quite embittered, even dying for grief or spite, others accepting their condition at last only at the cost of self-hatred. Ruthven knows their despair, their self-loathing. The effects of his own seventy-three novels have set in, and of course there was a time when he took science fiction almost as seriously as the most serious . . . but that was later, he keeps on reminding himself, after breaking in, after publication in the better magazines, after dealing with the audience directly and learning (as he should have always known) that they were mostly a bunch of kids. His problems had come later but his colleagues, so many of them, had been ambitious from the start, which made matters more difficult for them.

But then, of course, others had come in without any designs at all and had stayed that way. And they too—those who were still checking into Analog or the Westercon—were just as miserable and filled with self-hatred as the ambitious, or as Ruthven himself had been a few years back. So perhaps it was the medium of science fiction itself that did this to you. He is not sure.

He thinks about things like this still . . . the manner in which the field seems to break down almost all of its writers. At one time he had started a book about this, called it The Lies of Science Fiction, and in that bad period around his fiftieth birthday had done three or four chapters, but he was more than enough of a professional to know that he could not sell it, was more than ready to put it away when The Sorcerer was revived. That had been a bad time to be sure; ten thousand words on The Lies of Science Fiction had been his output for almost two full years. If it had not been for a little residual income on his novels, a few anthology sales, the freelance work he had picked up at the correspondence school and Sandra's occasional substitute teaching, things might have bottomed. At that it was a near thing, and his daughters' lives, although they were already out of the house, gave Sandra anguish.

Ruthven still shudders, thinking of the images of flight which overcame him, images so palpable that often they would put him in his old Ford Galaxie, which he would drive sometimes almost a hundred miles to the state border before taking the U-turn and heading back. He had, after all, absolutely nowhere to go. He did not think that anyone who had ever known him except Sandra would put him up for more than two nights (Felicia and Carole lived with men in odd arrangements), and he had never lived alone in his life. His parents were dead.

Now, however, things are better. He is able to produce a steady two thousand words a day almost without alcohol, his drinking is now a ritualized half a pint of scotch before dinner and there are rumors of a larger movie deal pending if the purchaser of the first movie can be bought off a clause stupidly left in his contract giving him series rights. Ruthven will be guest of honor at the Cincinnati convention three years hence if the committee putting together the bid is successful. That would be a nice crown to his career at fifty-seven, he thinks, and if there is some bitterness in this—Ruthven is hardly self-deluded—there is satisfaction as well. He has survived three decades as a writer in this country, and a science fiction writer at that, and when he thinks of his colleagues and the condition of so many with whom he started he can find at least a little self-respect. He is writing badly, The Sorcerer is hackwork, but he is still producing and making pretty big money and (the litany with which he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night) nothing matters. Nothing matters at all. Survival is the coin of the realm. Time is a river with banks.

Now and then, usually during the late afternoon naps which are his custom (to pass the time quicker before the drinking, which is the center of his day), Ruthven is assaulted by old possibilities, old ambitions, old dread, visions of what he wanted to be and what science fiction did to him, but these are, as he reminds himself when he takes his first heavy one at five, only characteristic of middle age. Everyone feels this way. Architects shake with regret, doctors flee the reservation, men's hearts could break with desire and the mockery of circumstance. What has happened is not symptomatic of science fiction but of his age, his country. His condition. Ruthven tells that to himself, and on six ounces of scotch he is convinced, convinced that it is so, but as Sandra comes into the room to tell him that dinner is seven minutes away, he thinks that someday he will have to get The Lies of Science Fiction out of his desk and look at it again. Maybe there was something in these pages beyond climacteric. Maybe he had better reconsider.

But for now the smells of roast fill the house, he must drink quickly to get down the half-pint in seven minutes, the fumes of scotch fill his breath, the scents and sounds of home fill all of the corridors and no introspection is worth it. None of it is worth the trouble. Because, Ruthven tells himself for the thirty-second time that day (although it is not he who is doing the counting), nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing matters.

* * *

Back in the period of his depression when he was attempting to write The Lies of Science Fiction but mostly trying to space out his days around alcohol, enraged (and unanswerable) letters to his publishers about his out-of-print books and drives in his bald-tired Galaxie . . . back in that gray period as he drove furiously from supermarket to the state border to the liquor store, Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition. To surmise was not to conquer, of course; he was as helpless as ever but there was a dim liberation in seeing how he had been lied to, and he felt that at least he could take one thing from the terrible years through which he had come: he was free of self-delusion.

Ruthven thought often of the decay of his colleagues, of the psychic and emotional fraying which seemed to set in between their fifth and fifteenth years of professional writing and reduced their personal lives and minds to rubble. Most were drunks, many lived in chaos, all of them in their work and persona seemed to show distress close to panic. One did not have to meet them at the conventions or hang out with them at the SFWA parties in New York to see that these were people whose lives were askew; the work showed it. Those who were not simply reconstructing or revising their old stories were working in new areas in which the old control had gone, the characters were merely filters for events or possessed of a central obsession, the plots lacked motivation or causality and seemed to deal with an ever more elaborate and less comprehended technology. Whether the ideas were old or new, they were half-baked, the novels were padded with irrelevant events and syntax, characters internalized purposelessly, false leads were pursued for thousands of words. The decay seemed to cut across all of the writers and their work, those that had been good seemed to suffer no less than the mediocre or worse, and there was hardly a science fiction writer of experience who was not—at least to Ruthven's antennae—displaying signs of mental illness.

That decay, Ruthven came to think, had to do with the very nature of the genre: the megalomaniacal, expansive visions being generated by writers who increasingly saw the disparity between Spaceways and their own hopeless condition. While the characters flourished and the science gleamed the writers themselves were exposed to all of the abuses known to the litterateurs in America and—intelligent, even the dumbest of them, to a fault—they were no longer able to reconcile their personal lives with their vision: the vision became pale or demented. At a particularly bleak time, Ruthven even came to speculate that science fiction writing was a form of illness which, like syphilis, might swim undetected in the blood for years but would eventually, untreated, strike to kill. The only treatment would be retirement, but most science fiction writers were incapable of writing anything else after a while and the form itself was addictive: it was as if every potential sexual partner carried venereal disease. You could stop fucking but only at enormous psychic or emotional cost, and then what? Regardless, that virus killed.

Later, as he began to emerge from this, Ruthven felt a little more sanguine about the genre. It might not necessarily destroy you to write it if you could find a little personal dignity and, more importantly, satisfactions outside of the field. But the counsel of depression seemed to be the real truth:

science fiction was aberrant and dangerous, seductive but particularly ill-suited to the maladjusted who were drawn to it, and if you stayed with it long enough, the warpage was permanent.

After all, wasn't science fiction for most of its audience an aspect of childhood they would outgrow?

This disparity between megalomania and anonymity had been one of the causes of the decay in his colleagues, he decided. Another was the factor of truncation. Science fiction dealt with the sweep of time and space, the enormity of technological consequence in all eras, but as a practical necessity and for the sake of their editors all science fiction writers had to limit the genre and themselves as they wrote it. True science fiction as the intelligent editors knew (and the rest followed the smart ones) would not only be dangerous and threatening, it would be incomprehensible. How could twenty-fourth-century life in the Antares system be depicted? How could the readership for an escape genre be led to understand what a black hole would be?

The writers could not understand any of this, let alone a young and gullible readership interested in marvels that were to be made accessible. (Malzberg had been into aspects of this in his work but Ruthven felt that the man had missed the point: lurking behind Malzberg's schematics was the conviction that science fiction should be able to find a language for its design, but any penny-a-word stable hack for Amazing in the fifties knew better and Malzberg would have known better too if he had written science fiction before he went out to smash it.) So twenty-fourth-century aliens in the Antares system would speak a colloquial Brooklynese, commanders of the Black Hole Explorer would long for their Ganymede Lady. The terrific would be made manageable, the awesome shaped by the exigencies of pulp fiction into the nearby. The universe would become Brooklyn with remote dangerous sections out in Bushwick or Greenpoint but plenty of familiar stops and safer neighborhoods.

The writers, awash in the market and struggling to live by their skills, would follow the editors and map out a universe to scale . . . but Ruthven speculated that the knowledge that they had drained their vision, grayed it for the sake of publication, had filled them first with disappointment and finally self-hatred: like Ruthven they had been caught early by the idea of science fiction; transcendence and complexity and however far they had gone from there, they still felt at the base that this was a wondrous and expansive genre. Deliberately setting themselves against all for which the field had once stood could not have been easy for them. Rationalization would take the form of self-abuse: drink, divorce, obesity, sadism, in extreme cases penury, drugs, or the outright cultivation of death. (Only H. Beam Piper had actually pulled the trigger on himself but that made him an honest man and a gun collector.) That was your science fiction writer, then, an ecclesiastic who had been first summoned from the high places and then dumped in the mud of Calvary to cast lots with the soldiers. All for a small advance.

That had been some of Ruthven's thinking, but then he had been very depressed. He had done a lot of reading and thinking about the male mid-life crisis. Sandra and he were barely dealing with one another; they lived within the form of marriage but not its substance (didn't everyone long married end that way?). His sexual panic, drinking, terror of death, and sense of futility were more characteristic, perhaps, of the climacteric than of science fiction. The poor old field had taken a lot of blame over its lifetime (a lifetime, incidentally, exactly as long as Ruthven's: he had been born on April 12, 1926) for matters not of its own making, and once again was being blamed for pain it had not created. Maybe.

It wasn't science fiction alone which had put him in the ditch at late mid-life, Ruthven thought, any more than science fiction had been responsible for Hiroshima, Sputnik, the collapse of Apollo, or the rotten movies of the nineteen-fifties which had first enticed and then driven the public away. The field had been innocent witness to much of these and the target of some but it was unfair to blame the genre for what seemed (at least according to the books he read) an inevitability in middle-class, middle-aged, male America.

It was this ambivalence—the inability to fuse his more recondite perspective with the visceral, hateful feeling that science fiction had destroyed all of their lives—which stopped The Lies of Science Fiction. Ruthven does not kid himself: even if the contracts for The Sorcerer had not come in and his career turned around, he probably would have walked away from the book. Its unsaleability was a problem but he knew that he might have sold it somewhere, an amateur press, and he had enough cachet in the field to place sections here and there in the fan magazines. It wouldn't have been much but it would have been more per diem than what Sandra was making or he from the correspondence school.

But he had not wanted to go on. His commitment, if anything, had been to stop. Ruthven, from the modest perspective of almost four years, can now admit that he was afraid to continue. He could not bear to follow it through to the places it might have taken him. At the worst, it might have demonstrated that his life, that all of their lives in science fiction, had been as the title said: a lie . . . a lie which would lead to nothing but its replications by younger writers, who in turn would learn the truth. The book might have done more than that: it could have made his personal life impossible. Under no circumstance would he have been able to write that book and live with Sandra . . . but the drives on the Interstate had made it coldly evident that he had nowhere else to go. If he were not a middle-aged, married science fiction writer, then what was he?

Oh, it was a good thing that The Sorcerer had come through and that he had gotten back to fiction. The novels were rotten but that was no problem: he didn't want to be good anymore, he just wanted to survive. Now and then Ruthven still drives the Interstate in his new Impala; now and then he is still driven from sleep to stare at the foreign editions . . . but he no longer stares in anguish or drives in fury; everything seems to have bottomed out. Science fiction can still do many things to him but it no longer has the capacity to deliver exquisite pain, and for this he is grateful.

Eventually someone else, perhaps one of the younger writers, will do The Lies of Science Fiction or something similar, but of this in his heart is Henry Martin Ruthven convinced: he will never read it. He may be dead. If not, he will stay clear. Science fiction now is only that means by which he is trying to hang on in the pointless universe and that which asks that he make anything more of it (what is there to make of it?) will have to check the next bar because Henry Martin Ruthven is finished. He knows the lies of science fiction, all right. But above all and just in time, he knows the truths of it too.

* * *

Ruthven attends the Cincinnati World Convention as guest of honor. At a party the first night in the aseptic and terrifying hotel he is surrounded by fans and committee, editors and colleagues, and it occurs to him that most of the people in these crowded rooms were not born when he sold his first story, "The Hawker," to Worlds of If on August 18, 1952. This realization fills him with terror: it is one thing to apprehend in isolation how long he has been around in this field and how far the field in its mad branching and expansion has gone from all of them who started in the fifties, but it is quite another to be confronted in terms that he cannot evade. Because his career has turned around in the decade, most of these people have a good knowledge of his work, he is guest of honor, he is hardly ignored, but still—

Here and there in the packed three-room suite he sees people he knows, editors and writers and fans with whom he has been at conventions for years, but he cannot break out of his curious sense of isolation and his conversations are distracted. Gossip about the business, congratulations on having survived to be a guest of honor, that sort of thing. Ruthven would almost prefer to be alone in his room or drinking quietly at the bar but that is obviously impossible. How can a guest of honor be alone on the first night of his convention?

It would be, among other things, a commentary on science fiction itself and no one, least of all he, wants to face it.

None of his family are here. Felicia is no surprise: she is starting her second year of law school in Virginia and could not possibly miss the important early classes; besides, they have had no relationship for years. Maybe never. Carole had said that she might be in from Oakland, would do what she could, but he has heard that kind of thing from Carole before and does not expect her. The second marriage is falling apart, he knows, Sandra will tell him that much, and Carole is hanging on desperately (he surmises) much as Ruthven himself hung on years ago when, however bad it might be, there was nothing else. He wishes that he could share this with Carole but of course it would be the finish of him. There are hundreds of sentences which said to the wrong people would end his marriage on the spot and that is another of them.

Sandra did want to be here but she is not. She has been feeling weak all year and now at last they have a diagnosis: she will have a hysterectomy soon. Knowing what being guest of honor meant to him Sandra had offered to go regardless, stay in the room if she could not socialize, but Ruthven had told her not to. He knew that she did not want to come, was afraid of the crowds and the hysteric pulse and was for the first time in her life truly afraid of dying. She is an innocent. She considers her own death only when she feels very ill.

Not so many years ago, being alone at a large convention, let alone as guest of honor, would have inflamed Ruthven. He would have manipulated his life desperately to get even a night away alone, a Labor Day weekend would have been redemption . . . but now he feels depressed. He can take no pleasure from the situation and how it occurred. He is afraid for Sandra and misses her a little too, wishes that his daughters, who have never understood him or his work, could have seen him just this once celebrated. But he is alone and he is beginning to feel that it is simply too late for adultery. He has had his opportunities now and then, made his luck, but well past fifty and into what he thinks of as leveling out, Ruthven has become resigned to feeling that what he should have done can be done no more—take the losses, the time is gone. There are women of all ages, appearance, and potential here, many are alone, others in casual attachments, many—even more than he might imagine he suspects—available. But he will probably sleep alone all the nights of this convention, either sleep alone or end up standing in the hotel bar past four with old friends drinking and remembering the fifties. The desperation and necessity are gone: Sandra is not much, he accepts this, but she has given him all of which she is capable, which makes her flaws in this marriage less serious than Ruthven's because he could have given more. His failure comes from the decision, consciously, to deny. Perhaps it was the science fiction that shut him down. He just does not know.

Ruthven stands in the center of the large welcoming party, sipping scotch and conversing. He feels detached from the situation and from his own condition; he feels that if he were to close his eyes, other voices would overwhelm him . . . the voices of all the other conventions. Increasingly he finds that he has more to hear from—and more to say to—the dead than to the living. Now with his eyes closed, rocking, it is as if Mark Clifton, Edmond Hamilton, Kuttner and Kornbluth are standing by him glasses in hand, looking at one another in commiseration and silence. There is really no need for any of them to speak. For a while none of them do.

Finally, Ruthven says as he has before, "It hurts, doesn't it? It hurts." Kuttner nods, Kornbluth raises a sardonic eyebrow. Mark Clifton shrugs. "It hurts," Clifton says, "oh it hurts all right, Henry. Look at the record." There seems nothing more to say. A woman in red who looks vaguely like Felicia touches his arm. Her eyes are solemn and intense. She has always wanted to meet him, she says; she loves his work. She tells Ruthven her name and that she is a high school English teacher in Boston.

"Thank you," he says, "I'm glad you like the books." Everybody nods. Hamilton smiles. "You might as well," Kornbluth says with a shrug. "I can't anymore and there's really nothing else." Ruthven shrugs. He tells the woman that the next scotch is on him or more properly the committee. He walks her over to the bar. Her hand is in his. Quickly, oh so quickly, her hand is in his.

* * *

At eight-fifteen the next evening Ruthven delivers his guest-of-honor speech. There are about three thousand in the large auditorium; convention attendance is just over ten thousand but 30 percent is not bad. Most attendees of modern world conventions are not serious readers now; they are movie fans or television fans or looking for a good time. Ruthven has thought for months about this speech and has worked on it painfully.

Once he thought—this was, of course, years ago—that if he were ever guest of honor at a major convention, he would deliver a speech denunciatory of science fiction and what it did to its writers. Later, when he began to feel as implicated as anyone, the speech became less an attack than an elegy for the power and mystery that had been drained by bad writing and editing, debased by a juvenile audience. But after The Lies of Science Fiction had been put away and the edge of terror blunted, the very idea of the speech seemed childish. He was never going to be guest of honor and if he were, what right did he have to tell anyone anything? Science fiction was a private circumstance, individually perceived.

Nonetheless he had, when the time came to plan, considered the speech at length. What he decided to do, finally, was review his career in nostalgic terms, dropping in just enough humor to distract the audience from the thrust of his intention because after bringing his career up to date he wanted to share with them his conviction that it did not matter. Nothing mattered except that it had kept him around until the coincidence of The Sorcerer, and The Sorcerer meant nothing except that Ruthven would not worry about money until he was dead. "Can't you see the overwhelming futility of it?" he would ask. "The Lies of Science Fiction" seemed a good title except that it would be printed in the convention book and be taken as a slap at the committee and indeed the very field which was doing him honor. Better to memorialize his book through the speech itself. Anyway, the title would have alerted the audience to the bitterness of his conclusion. He wanted to spring it on them.

So he had called it "Me and the Cosmos and Science Fiction," harmless enough, and Ruthven delivers the first thirty-two minutes of his thirty-five-minute address from the text and pretty much as he had imagined. Laughter is frequent; his anecdotes of Campbell, Gold, and Roger Elwood are much appreciated. There is applause when he speaks of the small triumph of the science fiction writer the day Apollo landed. "We did that," he remembers telling a friend, "at three cents a word." The audience applauds. They probably understand. This much, anyway.

Then, to his astonishment and disgust, Ruthven comes off the text and loses control. He has never hated himself so. Just as he is about to lift his head and explain coldly that none of it matters his voice falters and breaks. It has happened in the terrible arguments with Sandra in the old days and in the dreams with Kornbluth, Hamilton, Kuttner, and Clifton, but never before in public, and Ruthven delivers the last paragraphs of his speech in a voice and from a mood he has never before known:

"We tried," he says. "I want you to know that, that even the worst of us, the most debased hack, the one-shot writer, the fifty-book series, all the hundreds and thousands of us who ever wrote a line of this stuff for publication: we tried. We tried desperately to say something because we were the only ones who could, and however halting our language, tuneless the song, it was ours.

"We wanted to celebrate, don't you see? We wanted to celebrate the insistent, circumstantial fact of the spirit itself, that wherever and in whatever form the spirit could yet sing amidst the engines of the night, that the engines could extinguish our lives but never our light, and that in the spaces between we could still thread our colors of substantiation. In childhood nights we felt it, later we lost it, but retrieval was always the goal, to get back there, to make it work, to justify ourselves to ourselves, to give the light against the light. We tried and failed; in a billion words we failed and failed again, but throughout was our prayer and somewhere in its center lived something else, the mystery and power of what might have been flickering.

"In these spaces, in all the partitions, hear our song. Let it be known that while given breath we sang until it drew the very breath from us and extinguished our light forever."

And then, in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries.

—1980: New Jersey

L'Envoi

MALZBERG, BARRY N. Science fiction writer; references: The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Contemporary Authors, Bibliography of Modern Science Fiction Writers, Who's Who in the East, 1975-1977 edition. Second violin section, North Jersey Symphony Orchestra since 1976. Vice-Chairman, Program Committee.

Son of L'envoi

This book won the highly predictive Locus poll in the spring of 1983 (for best nonfiction of the field published in the previous year) and was on the Hugo final ballot; I came to Baltimore with the feeling that I was the logical favorite for the prized gonfalon. Engines of the Night, consistent to the last, however, lost.

It finished fourth to Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, by James E. Gunn. Also ahead of it were The World of the Dark Crystal, a nice book of photographs, by Brian Froud, and Reference Guide to the Fantastic, edited by Baird Searles. Engines, however, did narrowly beat out Fear Itself: The Fiction of Stephen King and No Award.

I also quit the North Jersey Symphony Orchestra. I may, at this writing, be found at the first stand second violins Glen Rock Pops but this condition, hopefully, will not last.

Grandson of L'envoi

I soon quit—as predicted—the Glen Rock Pops Orchestra and have—a great gift to music this—not played violin in public in almost exactly twenty years. In April 1981, a few years earlier, I had returned to fulltime employment at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (see "Tripping With The Alchemist" in Volume Two) which seemed the only rational course of action for me to take predicated upon the assumptions and conclusions from which Engines of the Night reels. I lasted at the Agency more than eight years past Scott Meredith's death in February, of 1993 but a course of disaffiliation, commencing in 1998 under the successor ownership, became complete in July 2005. If the arc of my career as science fiction writing mimicked in crucial ways the arc of a certain kind of science fiction over the decades, so did the arc of the Scott Meredith Agency refract powerfully the course of American publishing through the 47 years between the end of World War II and the death of its founder. Engines of the Night is clearly the work of a man who had had enough; I was grateful to Scott Meredith for permitting the prodigal's return, I was grateful to hide out there for a long time. I did not, of course, stop writing. Breakfast In The Ruins is in evidence and there are more than 150 short stories since 1981. In 1985 there was one more novel, The Remaking Of Sigmund Freud and then I had really had enough.

Engines still looks okay to me all these years later. A collection of sf criticism published by Scarecrow Press last year contains three short essays and I read them without much embarrassment. "On the whole," I thought, "pretty sensible stuff, reasoned and temperate." I am surprised how controlled and temperate most of the work is; I certainly did not feel that way in its composition.

I think Blish and Knight as critics and visionaries did it better and Budrys sure had his moments early on but my book is still around, kind of, and may have taken its place with those progenitors. Good for me but—more importantly—good for science fiction, the Onlie Begetter.

December 2005

Footnotes

1Asimov reports that as of December 1949 he had received a total of slightly less than $12,000 for his entire output. Considering what Asimov had done and what his stature in the field was already by that time, there may be no need to say anything else about the forties in science fiction.

2And their due.

3It takes a writer of real literary background and ambition to make a major contribution like this.

4Neither writers nor stories are machinery, of course, and it can be presumed that Amazing preempted in certain cases some of the markets on the list, but certainly I was seeing nothing on first submission.

5You know the perversity of editors—or at least I do.

6The others, for the record, were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and L. Sprague de Camp.

7Asimov continued to appear in the magazines with diminishing frequency through the first half of the decade, but even the five or six serialized novels and fifty short stories represented a sharp cutback and the stunning expansion of the market diffused his proportionate impact. "Editors missed me a bit," he wrote laconically about the period.

8Bug Jack Barron, Stand on Zanzibar, Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Black Easter, Thorns, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Camp Concentration; case rests.

9The payoff which Boucher, perhaps fortunately, did not live to see is that there is now in mass-market terms almost no audience for quality fiction at all, a fact not unnoted by science fiction editors—not, on balance, a dumb group.

10And it is important to point out that science fiction in the fifties was a magazine field: almost everything originated there. The book publishers fed off what had been and was running in the periodicals, and only the bottom-line houses, like Monarch, published much nonmagazine material and that simply because these books were too weak to have achieved serial sale. The fifties novels mentioned earlier had all appeared originally in the magazines and most of them were commissioned and directed by the editors.

11This is not quite fair. Although "Among the Dangs" appeared first in Esquire, it was a science fiction story which was reprinted in Fantasy and Science Fiction and several genre anthologies. But if it had appeared first in F & SF it surely would not have won second (or even 980th) prize in the 1959 O. Henry Awards.

12Bester confirms this speculation in a 1980 essay for Galaxy: 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction, published by Playboy Press.

13Lord Keynes early had the late word on this.

14This has changed in the last few years . . . a major sf editor can be a major editor at some places now. But he has to stay in the field, just like the writers, again.

15Since I might be asked then I might as well put it here to refer to forevermore—the science fiction reading list limited to that dozen books: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Healy and McComas; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I, II, and IIA, edited by Silverberg and Bova; The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction, edited by Greenberg and Silverberg; The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, edited by John W. Campbell; The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin; Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison; The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester; More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon; A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and The Best of Damon Knight.

16There were actually about forty such misguided souls in the audience, added to about 150 who had registered for a ten-session course called "The Writers Speak." Or mumble. Or drink. But never simultaneously if you want to be invited back.

17Say what, boss?

18This giggler was about infanticide.

19She was the only assistant Campbell ever had, joining him in 1938 and staying with the magazine until 1973—Catherine Tarrant died in Hoboken, New Jersey, in March 1980, unnoticed and unmourned at the time (the obituary appeared in the sf publications months later) by anyone in the science fiction community. Campbell let it be known many times that in his mind she edited the magazine, he only chose the stories.

20I say this because Schwartz is so clearly a loser; the narrator of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" is in conventional societal terms at least holding his own.

21Hexacon, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

22The 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston.

23This was a perfect summation of the situation just prior to the early seventies; now a good proportion of convention attendees are not readers at all but have been funneled in by Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on. Whether this is better or worse is for the writer to figure out; it's every man for himself in this game.

24Detroit and Chicago were competing bidders in 1980 for the 1982 world convention; no fools they—the fans went for Chicago. Or perhaps, fandom being self-renewing and ahistorical, the current bunch simply liked Chicago.

25Boston in 1980. Come on, Malzberg, bite the bullet.

26In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany writes that the primary motivation of science fiction editors is to be assured that they are not doing anything wrong. "Since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."

27Of course writers at the top are at the mercy of no one. They write what they wish. The point is that they got to the top by writing, deliberately or from cunning, that which intersected closely with what was perceived as safe and they are not now capable of writing otherwise, if they ever wanted to. Most, to their increase, never did.

28Liberation would take down the walls. No more science fiction. No more Analog, world sf conventions, First Fandom, portions and outlines, or editorial lunches. Just a bunch of writers among a larger bunch of writers, none of them being read by anyone. For God's sake, up the walls of the world!

29We've all reneged—Silverberg published a long novel, Lord Valentine's Castle in early 1980 and is at work on others; Ellison has published several stories in the genre and contracted out a few novels; I've done enough short stories to make up another book . . . but editors and publishers know what lying swine writers are, anyway, so no harm done.

30Harper & Row is Ursula Le Guin's publisher.

31Thomas M. Disch at this writing (September 1980) seems to have a small chance of being the significant exception . . . Disch has published much work in the prestige quarterlies (Paris Review, etc.), however, and it is this that has granted cachet to the science fiction, not the other way around.

32I have a best novel list footnoted elsewhere, and Harlan Ellison dared to name the ten best living writers in the field in a book review column for Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1974. In fact, Ellison, who could never be accused of backing off a big fight to find a little one, ranked the writers.

33There is no way around this. One must face the truth at whatever age; to be born a fool is not to be mandated to stay a fool: a liberating discovery at forty-one. Anyway, of what use is unimplicated testimony?

34Robert Lindner, the late psychiatrist, in The Fifty-Minute Hour wrote memorably of a young science fiction reader who did not appear to have the fail-safe mechanism and it is for this reason alone that the chapter has become famous in science fiction, often referred to, occasionally anthologized. This is what happens to someone who really believes this shit is the word to the wise.

35Truth in packaging: Several science fiction writers have fallen apart and spent time in mental institutions . . . they all come out in pretty good shape, though, and the proportion of admissions in the field is probably less than amongst the general population.

36Everyone at a convention is in the hotel bar, usually simultaneously.

37Pace Niven, Pournelle and all the rest, I am talking about the cutting edge; that which came into the field which was not there before. Replication and reinforcement have always been the staple of any genre.

Interregnum: Preface to an Essay

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction was one of my early declarations of departure from science fiction writing; it was also the most florid. My departure became a sabbatical and a short one; within two months of its publication I was attempting again to sell short stories and since publication of this essay there have been perhaps 150. And there were two more novels, Cross of Fire (1982) and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.

In short, the essay was specious, the anger and disillusion were genuine but the unmasked cry for attention and reader regret which marked the truer purpose of the work do me little credit in retrospect. A bad idea altogether and although the essay was collected as an afterword in the 1976 Doubleday Down Here in the Dream Quarter I really wanted after that second appearance for it to go away. Certainly, this rather callow and self-serving plea had no place in The Engines of the Night as it was being assembled in the light of greater understanding at the beginning of the 1980s.

But Jim Baen, the publisher of this book and David Drake who is effectively its editor requested inclusion nonetheless. So here it is and since it falls well outside any literary or criminal statute of limitations (it was written more than 30 years ago) I feel that neither blushes nor recriminative outpouring are necessary. The publishing situation which gave justification to this essay hasn't, after all, changed much: a few serious science fiction writers who originated in the genre have achieved a kind of condescending authentication from that academic-critical nexus (cf: Phil Dick, Ballard, Le Guin) but usually for the wrong reasons. If I had 1975 to relive I certainly would not have perpetrated this essay but there's a lot in 1975 which I wouldn't want to perpetrate now.

The outrage which follows is, at least, genuine, it is not posturing. I hope. Then again, one critic noted that this essay constituted "Malzberg hanging around the coffin, waiting for mourners" which wasn't a nice thing to say. Truth, that bitch, is only nice on alternate Thursdays in the Winters of even-numbered years.

—November 2005

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction

The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz. Sheed & Ward, $12.95; New York, 1974; 434 pp. plus bibliography and index.

Kostelanetz's basic theory, articulated over several chapters and with an occasional awesome specificity, is that a small cabal of (mostly Jewish) intellectuals now in their fifties and sixties seized control of the major publishing/critical/review outlets shortly after World War II, exert something approaching complete control over those who would have a major career in American letters and won't let anyone new in. Most specifically, Kostelanetz (himself now thirty-six) claims that almost no American writer under forty has been able to achieve a wide audience for serious work much less critical acknowledgement; with the exceptions of Renata Adler, Joyce Carol Gates and Thomas Pynchon (two women and an enigma) the youngest American writers of high reputation are Phillip Roth and Susan Sontag, both over forty.

The cabal, Kostelanetz states, has erased almost all competing schools—the southern agrarian, the old New England Protestant—by taking over the careers of a few of its more noted members and ignoring or suppressing the work of others. The most devastating weapon available to this cabal—which stretches from the offices of Random House to those of the Partisan Review to the editorships of many of the mass magazines like Harper's to the offices of certain literary agents to the New York Review of Books and the Sunday Times Book Review—is not to attack but to ignore, and its hold upon the small, tempestuous world which controls access to the observable literary media is so complete that it can virtually create, suspend or deny reputations as effortlessly as it can convene a cocktail party . . . at which most of the real business is contracted anyway.

The book was rather guiltily and prominently reviewed in most of the media which Kostelanetz attacks in a kind of unanimity of two-pronged response: 1) Mr. Kostelanetz is just jealous and envious of those who have succeeded; there is no cabal, just a bunch of nice, mutually helpful people some with common roots who are always looking for good new writers and good new work, just can't find enough of it but we're so fair-minded that we're reviewing this book right here, and 2) anyway, all those mostly unknown writers who Kostelanetz cites as being starved out of the markets aren't any good anyway, judging from the excerpts of their work he quotes. He just wants to promote his coterie which is less talented than those coteries which have made it, not that there are any coteries at all, of course. We're all just good friends here.

The book then disappeared into the basements of libraries (which is where I picked up my copy a year after publication) and to the remainder tables; it has never been paperbacked to my knowledge and has had no visible influence upon the course of the markets to say nothing of the people most concerned with it, those cited in The End of Intelligent Writing as being denied a future. The unknowns are still unknown, the unpublished still unpublished, the critically ignored and forgotten (Cecil Dawkins, Leon Rook) not yet selected for the Modern Library.

I came to this book late because of my almost automatic hostility toward what I took to be its central thesis (that the author's friends were being denied, but that if this situation were to reverse itself they would deny others; in short there was no objection to the system, merely its misapplication in the author's case) and my own suspicion that, since I am a commercial "pop" writer, Kostelanetz would regard me as being even a step further down the rung from the nexus and their excluded; as someone simply not worth mentioning or campaigning for at all. I was partially right but mostly wrong on both of these rather knee-jerk reactions, and I wish that I had come to this book a long time ago and I recommend it fervently to each and every one of you who buy this magazine for any reason other than to get through the next hour or so (not an objectionable reason at all; these are the readers who have kept science fiction alive) because it has a heart of darkness and a true message: we, meaning those who toil in the wilted vineyards of commercial fiction, may soon enough be the only ones left to perpetuate the form. If there are any left at all.

This is not quite what I wanted to say here however—nor did I want to spend much time investigating Kostelanetz, who seems to be essentially right although wrong-headed in many ways and in shocking ignorance of science fiction in particular. (For instance he says, "Of the periodicals founded in the late sixties by paperback publishers, the best of the lot, Delany and Hacker's Quark died much too soon after auspiciously introducing not only several good young writers but a valid new development in s-f that combines modernist literary values with speculative intelligence," an incredible hash of misstatement since Quark was not the best of the original anthologies but very likely the worst, was in a part a coterie publication for friends of the editors and collapsed while leaving the market for original anthologies as viable as it ever has been. He also includes several s-f writers in his list of four hundred writers born after 1937 to "watch" but manages to ignore Norman Spinrad while putting in Lawrence Yep, put in Panshin while neglecting Effinger, put in Terry Champagne while ignoring Dozois. Not critical judgment; ignorance is operating here.) No, in truth and upon the occasion of the publication in the same magazine that published my story "Final War" eight years ago to the day and gave me my career of what will be my last science-fiction story . . . actually I wanted to talk about myself.

Bet you never thought I'd get there.

"Seeking Assistance" will not be the last s-f story I will ever publish, I fear; several written earlier remain in the inventories of editors like Silverberg and Elwood. It is, however, in point of chronology the last I will ever write, and publishing it here in the magazine which has been central to my career, under the editorship of the man who, along with his late father Joseph Wolfe has been instrumental in keeping me psychically above ground seems the proper thing to do. I would have it no other way.

Reading The End of Intelligent Writing took me back ten years in time. It took me back past my decision in January of 1975 to cease writing science fiction; it took me past 1973 when I won the Campbell Award and was able for a brief period to sell as much s-f as I wanted at higher advances; it took me back twenty-two novels and a hundred and fifty short stories and the struggle to achieve what I am now deserting, to 1965 when my misguided and somewhat tragic career in science fiction began as the result of conscious decision.

Exposed in the early sixties in sub-acute form to the reality which Kostelanetz chapter, by angry chapter documents, I realized by June of 1965 that it would be impossible for me to make a career in what was my field of choice: as a literary writer. The quarterlies were impenetrable, the coteries omnipresent, the competition murderous, the stultifying control of the publishing houses' literary editors absolute. If I was ever going to achieve outlet as a writer of fiction, I saw I would have to go to the commercial markets, the mass or genre markets that is to say, and while partially converting myself to the strictures of category fiction sneak in my literary intentions.

Science fiction was what I chose because from the outset science fiction seemed to be that field in which one could sell stories of modest literary intention with the least amount of slanting: one could, if one touched the base of stricture, be paid a living wage for somewhat ambitious work. Historically the field has been open to new writers and approaches in a way that, say, the mystery never has been. Almost from the beginning I was a "success," that is in terms of my original ambition. As a writer who could write a little in a field where almost no one could write at all, as enough of a cynical hack to purposefully manipulate my work and as one who had an excellent understanding of the field by virtue of childhood reading (indispensable to any who would write a lot of this stuff) I was able, I say in all due modesty, to produce a body of work which is without parallel, quantitatively, in the history of the field. In less than seven years I sold the aforementioned number of works, about two million words in all, I won a major award, I even, for a brief period in 1973/4 had the exhilarating experience of almost making a living from the writing of s-f alone. (Only almost. And more than half of my published output has been out of the field from the outset.)

But, I discovered, I was invisible outside of the confines of the s-f market itself. Of course that was what I had wanted, what had attracted me to the field. Kostelanetz's academic/literary nexus either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids; in any case they leave us alone and enable us to be probably the only medium (but less so than in years past) for dangerous, ambitious work. But if you win, you lose; my ambition had turned upon itself. I had beaten the system by getting out of the system, but the system wouldn't be beaten after all because it would not acknowledge that I existed and that made my work meaningless. Also I was getting knifed up pretty good inside s-f. Ambitious writers always do; historically the field has silenced or reduced to ineffectiveness its best writers. There is not a single American s-f writer over the age of forty-five whose work is the equal of what it was a decade ago, if it even exists.

So there I was: devil and the deep blue sea.

Denied as a literary writer, loathed and largely isolated within s-f. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. Let us shed one tear and no more. Have mercy, friends, I suffered.

But I also decided to get out. Where yet I am not sure; perhaps to the field of the commercial novel, perhaps into something else, perhaps into light manufacturing or the processing of ceramic mix. Who is to say? One way or the other I will work my way through; I always have, this is my problem and not that of my audience (which, although small by s-f standards has been huge by literary standards and surprisingly loyal. Thank you all very much.) I am not to burden you. I come not to discomfit.

I come, folks, only to say, that this is for the last time: I am getting out. Kostelanetz, like all the rest of humanity, is a mixture of the good and the bad; he is right and he is wrong, he is dull and he is brilliant but the argument holds and so does mine. No future here. Perhaps no future for writing in our time. But thank you all very much.

Afterword

December 6, 1975: On this date, the first copies of my 38-story, 160,000 word Pocket Books collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg are available and in my hands and having them forces, in all fairness, a postscript to this bitter essay.

It is true that I must leave science fiction. As the vise of the seventies comes down upon all of us in every field of the so-called arts, there is almost no room left for the kind of work which I try to do. But it is also true that this collection—which is a major effort of at least intermittent literary intention and execution—would not even exist, nor would the career it capsules, have come to be had it not been for science fiction, which gave me a market, an audience, and a receptivity to my work that I would never have found elsewhere. In this sense I owe my career and large pieces of my personal life as well to science fiction. (Such a career as it has been.)

Where else could an unknown writer whose only virtues (other than a modicum of talent) were energy, prolificity and a gathering professionalism be able to write and sell twenty-three novels and five collections of some literary intention in a period of less than eight years? Even if I had satisfied my original ambitions I would have been dealing with a market which held me back, not only quantitatively but in terms of "artistic" growth. The only limits which sf imposed upon me (until 8/74 when the bottom fell out) were those framed by my willingness or unwillingness to turn out work of such pretension for what was, inevitably, an audience not intersecting with the academic/literary nexus. That is not a very large sin on the scale of things. Not at all.

I want to make it clear on December 6, 1975: I love this field. My debt to it is incalculable. What has happened to writers like myself, Silverberg, Ballard, Disch, is not the fault of the category itself (which allowed us to go as far as we wanted artistically for a while) or necessarily even the audience. The fault, as in most other aspects of America, is in what has happened to squeeze diversity from our culture in the last five years. I was either twenty years too late or twenty years too early for this kind of work: even so—didn't I?—I got the work done.

And some of it, dammit, will live.

Part Two Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millenium

Part I: Meditations

Introduction to Part One: Meditations

In the twenty-five years since the delivery of Engines of the Night there was a fair amount of commentary scattered through the markets. Columns for Pulphouse Magazine in the 1990s, two essays for Amazing Stories, an essay on Freud & Fantasy for the Baltimore Jewish Times of all places, an essay on J.G. Ballard probably comprise the best of this work. In the essays on Freud and Ballard, in the Pulphouse essay on PITFCS (the last of my columns for this market) the writer can clearly be seen writing over his head; many of the essays in Engines had more clarity but those late 1980s and 1990s essays came closer than anything I ever wrote to approximating in their completion what I had hoped at inception . . . I was writing to 90% of my intention there, an unusual state for any of us. (There are a few short stories in the 1990s of which I would say the same.)

In 1992 I had, with the exception of a few introductions and a couple book review columns, done no critical writing since publication by Doubleday of Engines of the Night in 1982. it was my feeling that that epiphanic work derived much if not all of its power from a contract implicit at the heart of darkness: there would be no Sons of the Engines of the Night. The book was terminal in its vision and statement; it was the finality infusing those essays which gave the work credibility, I felt, and I resisted for many years both vagrant requests and my own compulsions to attempt new critical work. "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," said Mallarme, as quoted by Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself. (I know almost nothing of the decadent Mallarme, a contemporary and countryman of Claude Debussy; he was the author of the poem upon which Debussy's famous Afternoon of a Faun was based and I somehow connect him to the libretto of Pelleas and Melisande but in the tradition of science fiction writers from the dear old field's inception, I am reluctant to take the tottering steps to the bookcase or record shelf and verify this) and that seemed a reasonable position. In the decade intervening I did not abandon fiction, even at the bottom of inspiration, and there were for or five short stories a year and through this bleak time I did in fact accumulate perhaps fifty or sixty short stories and the 1985 novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.

I abandoned critical essays and reviewing not because I felt I had nothing to say—I had plenty to say, at least to myself, and there is absolutely no silencing that raving, chattering internal voice, that thread of consciousness and disputation which rambles on and on and turns some writers into alcoholics and almost all of them into obsessives of one sort or the other—but because I felt that I had said enough and the integrity of Engines of the Night seemed to hinge upon reasonable silence. I changed my mind after all that time, but only tentatively and cautiously; a lot has happened in the '80s and there were many things to say but it was possible that this was no longer my métier or that I had, all unbeknownst to myself, lost contemporaneity and was no longer riding the high curve. I decided that the editor would, if that were the case, make his reaction known and so would that fraction of the readership which followed this stuff; in the interim, and with even more humility than that which I cited in the introduction to Engines, I was going to find out if I had anything still useful to say and, conversely, if the field was still addressing my own concerns. My Pulphouse essays were a careful, troubled exercise, then. If writing science fiction for publication for a quarter of a century will not induce humility, nothing will.

(Well, this is not quite so. My problem with hyperbole persists. I can think of several activities which might similarly induce a great deal of humility. Playing second violin in a bad community orchestra, for instance. If Heinlein had played bad second violin, he, I once wrote to Kirk Polking, he would have been incapable of his last five novels. Being a non-fraternity student at the Syracuse University of the 1950s while carrying around a large and formless, an inexpressible and a gigantic pained lust for the maedchen of Sigma Delta Tau or Iota Alpha Pi sororities will induce humility. Being a liberal Democrat in the nineties will induce humility. Going into a barbershop anywhere and asking for a haircut and a trim will induce more than that; Jason would have tossed the Golden Fleece before undergoing such an experience. We will try not to blame all of our failings on science fiction or vice-versa.)

If, after the collapse of Pulphouse in 1993 I had found another regular platform there might have been a few more at this level but no regrets; these essays said what I wanted and on the matter of science fiction at least, there is very little to be said beyond that essay on PITFCS.

Science fiction like Marx' conception of history: that dream from which we cannot awaken. Well, Marx defined history as nightmare. I wouldn't be that melodramatic.

On Engines Again

This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:

Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.

Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.

Postscript: 6/22/92: Well, we'll see, Bruce. We'll keep an eye on the situation. The obvious Yogi Berraism—It's not over until it's over—is not the one I'd bring out, though.

It sure do get late early around here, doesn't it?

* * *

Thomas M. Disch (b. Groundhog Day, 1940) didn't like Engines of the Night (Doubleday, 1982) at all, and his review of the book in the 3/82 issue of Twilight Zone, powerfully unpleasant and contemptuous, made me feel like Dempsey must have when Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, lurched across the ring and knocked him down with the first punch, then went on within a span of less than two minutes, to knock the champ, the Manassa Mauler hisself, clear out of the ring. Where did this come from? What's going on here? I sure wasn't set for that. A year and a half later, at Omni's fifth anniversary party, Disch—whose Camp Concentration, Asian Shore and 334, I note for the record, I revere; surely Camp Concentration is the best novel to come out of genre science fiction in the 1960s—took the time and trouble to explain his problems with the book of essays. "You look for defeat, you look for disaster," he said, "You come to the subject of science fiction with a burden of despair and cynicism and then you scout around for confirming examples, load the evidence so that you can make the same point over and again. First the verdict, then the trial. It's a harrowing, self-destructive exercise, a closed loop, and it's as repetitious as hell, utterly reductive."

I suppose so. I suppose I regarded science fiction reductively, noted examples of what I took to be its small or larger damages or disasters, often confused the issues of transcendence and banality, got hung up on process and found the space angels, the true quill, the echoes of transubstantiation harder and harder to find. But it was for me, as I came to think I understood our genre in the late seventies, the stink of defeat, of penury, isolation, alienation and hopelessness which seemed to cling to the lives of most science fiction writers and their outcome. One could of course cite the middle-class, clean-living exceptions, the sensible citizens who had managed to make some kind of career writing for the field full or part-time with lives no more disastrous or disgusting than those of insurance agents or middle level civil servants, but these people seemed atypical. Surveying the lives of most of the science fiction crowd throughout the arc of the field up until about 1977 (when I was busily or not so busily framing my world view) one could intimate the swamp of those lives: the furnished rooms, stick furniture, shattered marriages, abandoned children, brutalized relationships, all of it brought to greater intensity by the grandiosity of the writings and the convention circuit—the rotating mind- and body-fuck which seemed to be the paradigm of so many of these lives and connections, most of it grubby, all of it inimical to that very issue of transcendence which was supposed to have brought people into the room to begin.

Disch attacked me in the review as well for failing to name anyone in the negative. Talking in vast, gasping generalities about the swamp and the pity of it all, I would save specificities for praise, he complained, single out no one for anything other than approbation, condemn the regrettable and disastrous to synoptic generalization. Not a bad point, but what would have been the use? I might have felt that X's work was contemptible, that Y, a wretched charlatan, had been working on reputation and adulterous lurches for years, that Z was perhaps certifiably insane and certainly out of control in debased work (and ever more successful because the comic books of that sprawl ignited lust in the hearts of fans). I might have felt strongly about the fraudulence of A's career, the sexual connivance and manipulativeness of B who would risk all, it was said, for the sake of love, but would never take a check; I might have had plenty to say about D who had started out promisingly but had turned into a writer of dreadful series books, twenty or thirty of them indistinguishable and refractory of a self-contempt as embracing as it was intimidating. But to what end? What would it have gotten me? It seemed that if the essential point was made, albeit through generalizations, that specifics could only appear to be a kind of brutal score-settling and besides no one, least of all your tremulous correspondent at the age of forty and facing the apparent end of his career, wants or needs to be hated. So I let it go, brought out names only for positive citation, assaulted the anonymous or the agglomerate with the sins of science fiction, with the damages of a weird and eviscerated promise. I did not particularly spare myself but that of course does not count. (As Dr. Johnson noted that words spoken in eulogy or in the throes of love should never make a man accountable.) Faced for the second time with the issue, with the choices, perhaps I would not have done the book at all or then again perhaps I would have gone what we used to call in Watson Dormitory in Syracuse University in 1957 (what a splendid undergraduate career!) "All the Way." Who, ultimately, is to say?

But the perception—names cited or otherwise—seemed reasonable, this had been from the start a disreputable kind of writing perpetrated by people, many of whom felt themselves already on the borders of the literary if not the socioeconomic mean and who were then pushed ever further by the nature of the literature and by the social structure which, because of the ineffable, essentially undefinable nature of the genre (again, I refer to the third essay in this series), came between them and what, perhaps, they had wanted to do.

* * *

This intimation, that science fiction if not fantasy (which was a different genre eventually welded to science fiction by the exigencies of the market beginning in the mid-sixties and rendering the writers and the work interchangeable in the mass-market outlets and in the social interstices of the community) was founded upon penury, isolation, damage and failure was not purged by Engines of the Night but remained, even as I tried to make some adjustments or accommodations which would enable me to recognize this yet not discredit the best work which had been done and was continually being done if only occasionally, and my own attempts to contribute the best of which I was capable. The splice, eventually, seemed impossible, the grandiosity, even megalomania of science fiction and the personal disasters of most of its practitioners would yield to no systems theory. "My problems are irresolute, there is no peace," the protagonist of some novel I had read in the early sixties (and have now forgotten, this was the one about the guy who had decided he would give himself a year to experience life and if he felt no better at the end would kill himself, he went off to Europe and had lots of sex which in the early sixties certainly seemed the solution to anything for a lot of us, and as I recall did not kill himself but became a happily humping expatriate) and this became my mantra, recited here and there in the anterooms of science fiction conventions or commuting in an otherwise empty Chevrolet on the West Side highway. "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter," I mumbled like Ruthven, "everything is irresolute, there is no solution." If it did not work, it didn't exactly fail to work either, it was a means of getting from there to here. The Michael Ashley/Marshal Tym History of the Science Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1985) was further input to the mantra.

This remarkable work—Silverberg said it was the finest piece of scholarship ever to have been done on the field and I agreed with him from the outset—contains essays on every science fiction magazine and original anthology series in the English language since the inception of the form; it also takes in (although not as inclusively) foreign-language publications and the semi-professional press. Long essays on the magazines, even the one- or four-issue productions like the original Cosmos or Vanguard are completed by detailed bibliographical data and what emerges from this astonishing book, as valuable now as it was then because it offers the impression of closure which scholarship of quality always must, is how much the history of our little genre is a history of failure, it is failure which has humped us from here to now and into the future . . . most of those magazines the detritus of little publishers with small ideas and negligible budgets, even the more substantial magazines victimized by the exigencies of distribution and a shallow audience and forced to pull back, change their names, change from monthly to bimonthly to quarterlies, shift editors, shift format, go toward flying saucers or to a sexed-up format. Astounding/Analog was, after Street & Smith started it anew after Clayton, always backed by substantial publishers (and to this day) and Fantasy & Science Fiction was conservatively but carefully funded but of the other magazines there was nothing comparable . . . most of them staggered along, paid what they could, strung along the contributors when they couldn't and all of them—except for Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's on whom the books remained open in 1985, eight years after inception—died. (Amazing did not to this day die but endured decades of spasms and throes and was on the borders of extinction almost continuously since the early 1950s.) Galaxy's Cheyne-Stokes lasted a full horrible decade after the acquisition by UPD, Vanguard went in a glimmering, Rocket and Space Stories hung on for four issues or six or eight but all of these magazines were essentially going South from the time they were born and they gasped or scuttled their way from the marginal to the failure with only occasional glimpses of light. Meanwhile, exceptional work was being done. Even the soundly based magazines, and there were at any given time through all the decades only three or four of them, had to exist in a gray abscess of whimsical distribution and the endured and hoped-for patience of the publishers and what was being published, remarkable as some of it was, became only a means of moving from one failure, crisis or circulatory threat to the next; there were odd remissions now and then and periods of optimism but always Vertex and Venture and Vanguard and Cosmos (in both versions from two publishers a quarter of a century apart) and Gamma and Imagination and Planet Stories staggered along, paying at the most four cents a word and surviving on the same indulgence and whim which soon enough or later were going to do them in. Science fiction was a magazine field all the way through the late sixties, it was the magazines which originated most of the important material and almost all of the writers and were the paradigm of the genre, and the magazines were marginal at best, desperate at the worst. The narrow market, the penury, the instability and uncertainty of the enterprise must have refracted powerfully into the penurious, unstable and uncertain lives of the writers; if this did not create those lives, it certainly shaped them and most of the time not for the better. Like Judaism or sex (it would take a Maimonides to offer the thesis that they were interchangeable and to then prove it; come to think of it Mark Chagall and Sigmund Freud have already tested the validity of that insight) science fiction becomes the accumulation of all forces within and without which come to bear upon its practitioners.

This being the case, then, and in conclusion, Disch: does God dictate which Jew may or may not be part of the minyan?

Does a gentleman give names and details?

You'll be 50 in 2003, Bruce. We'll discuss matters then.

Atomic Power

Years ago—between the time I delivered Engines of the Night and wrote seven "From the Heart's Basement" columns for Pulphouse—my mind was full of odd and original ideas; throbbed and pulsated like one of A. E. van Vogt's Weapon Makers, with paradox and possibility. Science fiction as the middle class revenge on working class fascism, science fiction not as sexual sublimation but as sexual archetype, science fiction as profoundly anti-technological at its heart, Horace Gold as a figurehead for anti-Freudians trying to prove the Master's obsessions ridiculous, and so on. Some of those ideas I attempted to develop, others I repressed, some were the focus of obsession, some (like shattering the divisions amongst all genres everywhere) caused me to pulse, however occasionally, with Zionist zeal.

Ideas, like little animals, clawed at me, ideas like termites in the mind's decaying mansion scuttled away. I had, perhaps, forgotten Jack Woodford's important dictum, which I paraphrase: "Early in his career, the new writer is seized by odd and interesting ideas which he has never seen in print and which he therefore thinks will find a ready and eager market. Unfortunately, the newcomer has not yet understood that these ideas are not absent from print because they are original. They are absent because they are taboo." Also, I confused the public interest in the convolutions of obsession with my own, not a rare error among Sacristans, censors, or the B'nai Brith's Anti-Defamation League but a dangerous one for me.

Fortunately enough, Engines of the Night fell out of print in both of its editions, Pulphouse decided that death probably was, as Jesus said, laden with more possibilities than life and I embraced the medical and emotional distractions of middle-age ever more fervently. My mind, once so occupied by so much, seemed to be reduced to the binary—yes/no, in/out, up/down, life/death, cough/release, done/undone—and contracted, when it considered issues of speculation at all, to one idea which was perhaps the frozen, miniaturized summation of them all: the field of speculative fiction as wholly atomized. No more center, no common language, no shared history or lexicon. Once, single-track convention programming and paperback publishing programs of four titles a month had created a concentration of dialogue, reference, and understanding; now Star Trek and Star Wars and the Internet, costume fandom and masquerade fandom and weapons fandom have all become symptomatology of a field which has been blown apart. No real backlist, no accessibility of shared history, no interest in fact in that history. Clifford D. Simak out of print, Theodore Sturgeon (almost entirely) out of print, Frank Belknap Long, van Vogt, Winston K. Marks, Wyman Guin, Judith Merrill anthologies, almost all of it gone. Frontlist has become 80% fantasy and/or media-related science fiction. The raft of awards—Tiptree, Nebula, Hugo; Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, Compton Crook; John W. Campbell, John W. Campbell Memorial, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial; British Science Fiction, Ditmar, Aurora; First Fandom Hall of Fame, Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart, Homer—all signifying not so much judgment as confusion, a series of attempts to impose a new set of standards because the old standards failed to work for this group or that. Science fiction taught in universities, 750 science fiction conventions a year, Millennial Women, Callahan's Saloon, Isaac's World, Isaac's Robots, and an audience, 50% of whom could not name a short story or novel by John W. Campbell and might be pressed to say who the hell Campbell was. I realize that I am, perhaps, raving.

I also realize that the concept of atomization, of fragmentation, of utter separation from any kind of common history (assuming that there is a real common history as opposed to a series of jokes, references—Courtney's Boat, Degler's Tour, Fans are Slans, Room 770—which in the tradition of catch-phrases obliterate rather than encourage communication) is hardly confined to science fiction; everything is atomized: post-expansion baseball, the international trading markets, singles bars of all persuasions, film festivals. So much of this may be thinking which simulates thinking, the substitution of one definition or perception for another, the reinvestigation of the familiar through another lens. It's an old trick—"turn things upside down, let's look at wealth as poverty for instance," Galaxy editor Horace Gold said in 1953, trying to get any one of a bunch of writers to attempt what eventually became Frederik Pohl's poisonous classic story, "The Midas Plague" (April 1954, Galaxy)—and when applied mechanically leads only to the glib extinguishment of real consideration.

Still, think of The Truman Show. If the community and history of science fiction were not scattered through a thousand Tolkien retreads, a hundred and fifty Star Trek and X-Files knockoffs, would this cold and hermetic little film based upon a familiar and traditional science fiction idea (Robert Sheckley's Prize of Peril, Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint, Michaelmas by A. J. Budrys, Fred Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World") have had its apparent impact? We are perhaps in a circumstance now where not only 98% of the audience for this film is unaware that it is science fiction, more than 90% of people claiming knowledge of the genre might not be aware of this either.

All right: let's imagine a circumstance in which The Truman Show is generally perceived as science fiction and is the subject of a large panel at the Bucconeer World SF Convention in Baltimore in August 1998. Here are Budrys, Pohl and Sheckley modestly accepting their Big Heart Forrest Ackerman Awards for prescience and contribution to derivative outcome. Better? Worse? All the same? In the heart's basement it is always the same, of course, but decor was supposed to count.

Or another of those odd and wonderful ideas of old times: perhaps poor old science fiction was created to engage the very process which took it apart.

Born to fall apart, born to run. Born to gleaming peril in the asepsis of this new and shining time.

Tripping with the Alchemist

As we began so must we end. As we die with the living, deep tip of the Hatlo Hat to Thomas Stearns Eliot and a wink to our own honorable Robert Silverberg, so we are born with the dead. (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, by the way: April 1974 issue.) Let us see if we can manage that ever-interesting phenomenon.

They speak, and as we age, their voices are ever more convincing, signatory than those of the living. Eventually, as one prepares to join the majority, they become the entire population.

Their voices are insistent; they carry truths which are, perhaps, not really understood for a long time. I scuttle through small and sudden land mines of understanding now, and every day I step on one which I had not known was there. It ignites.

This is, fortunately, a metaphor so far. Nonetheless, here are some results of that continuing ignition.

I have been in publishing for thirty-eight years now and mark the entrance into publishing as the onset of the real world. Almost everything I know today I learned there because almost everything I thought I knew to that point was wrong. So bid farewell for just a little while to the living and let us venture into that other and more richly populated land from which at least we travelers will for a time emerge.

I began work and adult life there on June 2, 1965. "There" was the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, then, according to the brochure it sent to all prospective fee clients and, in fact, to almost everyone else, the largest, most famous, and most successful literary agency in the country. Millions of copies of this brochure circulated from late 1967 after the agency had abandoned its twenty-year full-page ad in Writer's Digest. The brochure continued to circulate for a while after the death in February 1993 of Scott Meredith, a death which right up to the end had seemed impossible to him and was therefore utterly surprising. Death was by no means even remotely in his Directory, of Operations. Would have been in the worst taste, you know.

I was then just short of twenty-six, six-feet-four-and-a-half inches then as now, a sullen and recriminative two hundred pounds with the foundation of a really promising practicing alcoholism (sixteen happy years of that lay ahead of me) and was, I thought, a fetchingly and romantically bitter, altogether enterprising lad. What I did not know and had to learn was that my bitterness was callow and although I thought I understood the situation, I did not. Now I do. Then I would have said that the bitterness could be allayed and the situation fixed; now I know that nothing could have truly changed the situation. Get the editors to pay attention to me, make a few decent sales, get work into the O. Henry Prize Stories, win the National Book Award. Like Phillip Roth had at twenty-six. Phillip Roth was happy, wasn't he? So why wouldn't this work for me? Editors had been miserable to me, their indifference was shocking, but this was only because I didn't have the right connections. Maybe Scott Meredith would give me the connections. He was selling Norman Mailer, wasn't he? If Scott could sell Norman Mailer for a million dollars, then he could certainly sell me for a few hundred and get me going. Of course I had been hired as a fee reader, not as Norman Mailer-manqué. But why couldn't I be both? In my last months on the graduate fellowship at Syracuse University I had queried Scott Meredith and had received a pitch for the fee department.

Twenty-five dollars to read and evaluate the novella I had described, The Barracks Rage. "You sound like just the kind of promising and ambitious writer in whom we are most interested," Scott Meredith wrote, "And I would be happy to work with you. Unfortunately and until you prove you can earn your keep on commission through steady sales, we must charge a modest fee to defray our expenses while we evaluate your work and, we hope, groom you for the major markets." Seemed reasonable to me. If I had had twenty-five dollars for such merriment I would have disbursed them and The Barracks Rage at once to Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, my assets at that time, in March 1965, were a little less than $500, the fellowship about to expire with the academic year paid $200 a month, and my wife, a CCNY graduate, had been deemed unemployable all around town "because she is married to a student and they quit all the time."

We were going to run out of money, we had determined in October 1964, by June of 1965 unless something in the way of money intervened. Nothing intervened and this proved to be one of the more accurate of my early opinions . . . far more accurate in any ease than my evaluation of maiden claimers, three years old and up at six furlongs had been at Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park somewhat earlier that year. I had had to pass on the agency's offer but I wondered if I would not live to regret that. Would I allow twenty-five dollars to stand between me and Norman Mailer's agent? The harder fact is that I did not have twenty-five dollars' worth of faith in my work by then. I had, in fact, no faith at all. (Somewhat transmogrified, this remains the case.)

Ah those offices! The Scott Meredith Literary Agency might have been the largest and most famous of all successful literary agencies but its quarters, a loftlike sprawl, were unimposing and the room air conditioners barely worked. The place became utterly fetid in the July afternoons. Those offices were in the second building the agency had occupied, this in 1949, three years after its founding. In that summer of Summer Knowledge, they were at 580 Fifth Avenue, at 47th Street in Manhattan's diamond district. That district was magnificently if most malevolently described by that one-time employee in a very short story, "None So Blind," which was published in the pages of this magazine about forty years ago. Blind beggars and their dogs, keening voices, Orthodox Jews in full raiment staggering, their pockets bulging with diamonds. Huddled, hurried conferences on the sidewalk or in the street, the furtive exchange of jewels for money, the barking of the dogs, scuttle of tragic. The diamond district conflated greed and piety, fast commerce and duplicity, singular prayer and loss in a noisomely abrupt and jangled fashion.

Years later, a friend who had worked in the area confided that there had been a cathouse on the second floor of a building just west of Fifth Avenue where the dealers could clamber upstairs to jump the bones, their pockets atwinkle with diamonds. James Blish would surely have included that if he had known. For subsequent publication, he went to what was probably the original title, "Who's in Charge Here?" His answer, as mine in my own context was clear: not me, boss. The aliens disguised as blind beggars? Their dogs who were perhaps Masters of it all? Scott Meredith? Sidney Meredith? Pick a number as long as it wasn't mine. Sure wasn't mine.

All these years later, well more than half a lifetime, those early, stunned weeks at what I came to think of as the slaughterhouse are as vivid in recall as they were staggering through that brilliant, hard summer. Whatever had brought me for a walk-in role that turned into a spectacular if intermittent run as a supernumerary, it was an even richer and more variegated time in the life of the agency.

In fact, it was that summer which we know was pivotal for the nation, the end of the Great Society and the true launching of Vietnam, and it was a significant summer for the agency as well. Dynastic shifts were attempted, working methods became ever more empiric. In the hallway outside the office stood, somewhat sullenly, two agents from the FBI. The FBI was eager to meet with Scott, to have a discussion about his supply service. The agency, under another corporate name, had been an underground railroad for manuscript pornography published by Greenleaf Publications in California and Hoover's boys were determinedly on the case, dedicated to preserving the union from graphic (not too graphic, however) descriptions of the act of generation.

Unfortunately for Hoover, although certainly good if temporary news to Greenleaf's eventually indicted publisher and editor-in-chief, no photograph of Scott Meredith had ever been published. Therefore, he was able to whisk through the less public of the agency's two entrances (PACKAGE DELIVERY ONLY) without notice. Staff were instructed to say, "Mr. Meredith is on a very extended selling tour through the capitals of Europe and we have no idea when he will return." After a couple of months of this form of unaudited Home Relief, Hoover's men were withdrawn and the inquiry refocused upon demand rather than supply . . . much like, come to think of it, the War on Drugs so many decades later.

Meanwhile, Scott and his brother, known to all as Sidney although there were rumors that this was not his name, were engaged in a continuing series of negotiations to sell the agency to someone, anyone, please. At the right price, please. Scott had at that time been in business for nineteen years, was forty-two years old, perhaps felt that the parade was passing him by although he engaged not at all in the more conventional acting-out of the bored or entrapped middle-aged male.

The brothers, always it seemed deeply engaged in anguished conversation, would stalk from the office somewhere toward midday with expressions of expectancy; they always returned looking sullen. Some wit, on one afternoon of extended absence, drew a crude picture of an ocean liner, the sea to the top of its smokestacks, the caption GOOD SHIP SMLA. The ship be sinking.

But that simply wasn't so. The ship wasn't sinking, regardless of Hoover's machinations; heedless of Scott's boredom, indifferent to the morale of its interchangeable employees, the agency then and for several years had been a consequence which ran well on magic, reflex, and iron ritual, whatever the state of employee morale. Kemelman was on the bestseller list, Hunter's "87th precinct" was flourishing, Mailer was turning to nonfiction. And fee business was excellent, about ninety scripts a week for a two-man fee department which very quickly became three, then four, and by 1968 had reached five. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were as many as eight full-time fee men, each accountable for about thirty scripts a week. The scripts ran the full range of fiction and nonfiction, long and short, ambitious and cowardly, proficient to laughably inept (inept dominated). It was vox populi in its purest yet most variegate form and each of those scripts was accompanied with a check: ten dollars then for the magazine pieces, thirty-five dollars for the novels. At the time, submissions of short stories and articles ran at a ratio of five to one to books; later, of course, as the market shifted, that ratio shifted and by the early 1980s five to one was in favor of the novels.

The people who wrote the reports (Scott Meredith always signed them, the reports bore no other signature until the day after his death: continuity, repression of identity, no fee writer would ever be given the kind of exposure which might lead him to set up a competitive business) received roughly twenty percent of the take. "Capitalism in its purest, most open form," one fee writer noted quizzically. "You know what they are paying, you see what you are getting. They send thirty-five dollars with a novel, you get ten dollars for doing all of the work. Pay seventy percent of your income for desk space and a letterhead. And quit or stay, you are swamped by the system."

Very early in my employment, the later-day fetidity of the offices neatly externalizing my mental state and the state of the manuscripts I was evaluating, I came to the irresistible notion of a novel based on the fee department. Probably in epistolary format, back-and-forth between a range of fee clients and the wretches responding to them, my novel would partake of the collision of gullibility and indifference, intensity and disdain, all of it as systematized as an assembly line, the authors of the responses as indifferent to the meaning and central absurdity of the situation as swallows in a cathedral. All that human need, ten- and thirty-five-dollar checks tremblingly enclosed, the rage, power fantasies, sexual speculations, unified gravity theories, and texts on the Apocalypse skimmed by the underpaid Youth of America, the reports synchronically indulgent and dismissive. Ah, that slaughterhouse! The purity and folly of pseudo-gemeinschaft in a country whose devices were far overtaking the capacity of most people to deal with them.

"So why don't you write it?" Victor Levine, the other fee guy, said when I told him of my own human need. "I bet there would be a lot of people interested."

"I'll tell you why I can't," I said. "Because every time I think of writing that novel, I see another novel sitting like a big rock in the middle of the road: Nathanael West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. And I can't drive around it."

The protagonist of Miss Lonelyhearts is a newspaper reporter detailed to the advice column; the queries from the lonely, the mad, the deformed, drive him crazy. "The letters weren't funny. They weren't funny any more." Miss Lonelyhearts—we never know him by any other name—finally driven crazy by the letters and by his own helplessness, assaults his ungiving editor Shrike and disappears into the vessel of his own need just as the fee reader, juxtaposed against the shattered, the unsculptured, the desperate voices, could, were contempt and self-mockery to fail, himself fall into the abyss of his contempt. Many did.

I might have also mentioned West's other famous novel, The Day of the Locust, in which the dispossessed, the anonymous, and infuriated who had come to California to die, knowing that they could go no further, that they had run out of Continent, riot at a Hollywood movie premiere and bring to life the dream-canvas of its protagonist, "the Burning of Los Angeles."

But I did not think of The Day of the Locust then; Miss Lonelyhearts was just about as far as I could go in that first post-graduate summer. And although I found a few objective-correlatives for the fee department (most notably in my epistolary short story "Agony Column" where the guy, an outraged resident of Manhattan's West Side, cannot get the politicians or magazine editors to send him in response to his outrage or his creation anything other than form rejections getting his name wrong). I never wrote the novel.

Others did; at least their own version. Marc David Chapman and John Hinckley, in what we (and they) laughingly call "real-life" did enact manuscript submission with a bullet as the writing and a gun as the delivery system: Lennon down in the courtyard, Reagan in the ambulance, now that was getting the editors' attention. So, complete with the alleged assassin's diary, a fee script if ever one existed, did Arthur Bremer, nemesis of George Wallace. The novel itself was written by that ex-employee Norman Spinrad in 1967 but The Children of Hamelin, after running serially in The Los Angeles Free Press, failed to find a book publisher. Only in 1993 did the novel obtain some limited visibility: a lone publishing entrepreneur in Texas sent out a scanty small press edition.

Donald Westlake's savage novel, Adios Scheherezade, based on the Greenleaf underground railroad, was, when you thought about it, a paradigm of the fee business and Westlake's riotous chapter of a fake literary agent in Dancing Aztecs is quite good but Fee, my working title for the novel which never quite worked, languished entire. Too late now and the culture has changed; it would have to be a historical novel: the Internet has completely reconfigured the situation. So this poisoned kiss and abrazzo appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction almost exactly thirty-five years after my first contribution "Final War" (4/68 as by K. M. O'Donnell), is about as close as I am likely to get in or out of this lifetime. Call the hot months of 1965 the Summer of the Fee, the alienation effect turning into swift and comedic commerce under my very eyes. "So this is the way it works," I mused, "I wonder if it's this way everywhere, if The Hudson Review or Curtis Brown are like this." Well, I learned, sometimes but probably not sufficiently; Scott Meredith's fee department was the default mode of writing itself, there was nothing so pure, nothing which so frankly exposed the situation.

But the summer embraced for the agency and the great Out There far more: it was the summer Evan Hunter's Paper Dragon, a novel of plagiarism, came in on contract (with a long internal monologue which owed a little more to Molly Bloom than perhaps it should) the summer that Mailer was struggling with Why We Are in Vietnam?, a novel he hated, but which he owed contractually to Putnam, written in three or four weeks to get Walter Minton to go away. (In another summer twenty years later, Mailer would perform the same stunt with Tough Guys Don't Dance, this time to escape from a commitment to Little Brown.) It was the summer that Harry Kemelman's Friday, The Rabbi Slept Late, a thousand dollar first mystery novel published by a virtually unknown fifty-seven-year-old mystery short story writer and essayist on Orthodox Judaism, went in its paperback edition to the top of the bestseller lists, certainly not the agency's first bestseller but maybe its most successful commercial work to that time: Mailer's An American Dream had had the press, but Mailer never sold to his reputation, a conclusion which publisher after publisher grimly came to understand in the decades to follow.

It was the summer that George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and chief officer of the. Nazi Party of America, was gunned to death in a Virginia parking lot by a disgruntled party member who felt that Rockwell was insufficiently committed to the cause. It was the second and last summer for the extravagantly disastrous and underattended New York World's Fair, brought to the city through the special courtesy of Robert Moses, and a bankruptcy petition like most of Moses's bigger ideas. In 1964, the Fair had run as a double feature with the Harlem riots, of which in its conclusive, public demonstration of the soaring indifference of the city's politicians to the real lives of more than half New York's population, it had been partially the cause.

And it was notably the summer—this was early July and it came live from the White House—in which Lyndon Baines Johnson announced the first massive increase in troops, the expansion of the draft calls while at the same time speaking of his reluctance to have "the flower of American youth" wasted in Vietnam. He'd find the courage, however. Nothing too difficult for this President. Found in time for the Tet offensive and the New Hampshire primary, too.

It was the summer that Scott went international, big plans for an agency whose rolling concourse would someday embrace Editions Gallimard and the ruins of Athens. He and Sidney, his faithful companion, four years older but known by all as the water-carrier, flew to London to open the new branch. Tomorrow the world. It was the summer that Scott and Sidney, en famille, traveled to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas where, according to the literature mailed prospective fee clients, Scott, that big player, gambled all again and again on a roll of the dice.

It was not meant to be an eventful summer. My gambling days were over, I insisted, excluding the racetrack which was metaphysical. The Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow at Syracuse University had given it up after an exciting year of unceasing rejection and encroaching poverty; at the end, the Playwriting Fellow and his spouse had $200 in savings and a 1960 Dodge worth approximately the same and $750 worth of debt to the New York State Student Loan Fund. Drowning in rejection and overwhelmed by self-pity, or at least an absence of self-regard, the Playwriting Fellow declined an even larger Fellowship which would have given him another academic year, $3500 plus tuition and the opportunity to receive many more teasing letters of rejection from C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly, and with his spouse (who reclaimed her old job) returned to New York City. "You say you like to read and write," the lady at Career Blazers said. "Well, here is a job at a literary agency where you read all the time. You should like that." Ninety dollars a week. And an employment agency's fee of $290, deducted over the first seven weeks, from my salary. Blaze that career!

So I reported to 580 Fifth Avenue, 13th Floor, Suite 706. There I was handed the famous "Rattlesnake Cave" test paper. This was an appalling Western short story of that title by one "Ray D. Lester," the name of the author an ancient agency in-joke; the story had been written in the late 1940s by Milton Lesser (who later became the mystery writer Stephen Marlowe) and given the byline as a jab at his coworker, Lester del Rey. The story mirthlessly described courtship hijinks narrated in dialect by an old-timer, and I aced it. ("The bosses really liked what you did," Richard Curtis said. Finnegans Wake, Hamlet, Macbeth, Pale Fire have nothing on "Rattlesnake Cave," which for forty-seven years acted as a kind of keeper of all the keys. The finest minds of several generations were brought to notes and commentary: Dialect doesn't work well in the contemporary markets, Mr. Lester, and the frame device is also not much liked by contemporary editors. You should approach your material directly. Not in dialect. Find a sympathetic lead character. Present that sympathetic lead with an insuperable problem. Find a meaningful resolution which comes inevitably from the character's efforts to solve that problem. Make sure that the lead solves the problem unless you are writing that graduate student quality lit stuff but if you are, remember that it's not going to get you into Ranch Romances or The Saturday Evening Post. Maybe once in a while Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but you better be damned careful.

Ah, tempora! Ah mores! O lost and by the wind grieved! There I was, shortly ensconced at an IBM in that large, open, poorly air-conditioned office, no partitions, the doorways of the bosses' offices shut against the madding crowd, selected to write ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT (capitals on the test sheet explaining the demands made of the prospective critic) letters to fee clients who were availing themselves of the evaluative and (they hoped) marketing services of the world's leading literary agent. ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT letters nonetheless in the defined and irreversible negative turned out to be my signal talent; like the man with the chicken, I discovered within myself predilection and abilities I could not have measured. The Playwriting Fellow could really turn out those letters. Within three weeks he was making a piecework $260 a week writing ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL letters on fifteen to twenty novels and twenty to thirty short stories and astonishing the bosses every day of the week.

There had been remarkable fee men (the job historically filled 98 out of a 100 vacancies and turnover with men; "fee women," of whom there had been one or two, simply could not or would not stand up to the brute demands of the job) in the past and there were more to come in the future but I had solved the system in a way that no one to that point had managed. I was making a living wage at a job not construed to offer a living wage. "This man is a treasure," Sidney Meredith whispered to Richard Curtis on my fourth day of employment when I had delivered seven acceptable fee reports before two P.M. Scott Meredith, an equal opportunity exploiter (as long as you were white and male) certainly knew what to do with a treasure.

In the reminiscent introduction to The Best of Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976), I referred to myself as the Golden Eagle and oh, my friends and ah, my foes, how the feathers flew!

And so flew, against all wiser counsel, against all the experience of the graduate year, that fierce and dark bird, ambition. Hello darkness, my old friend. Ambition fluttered its battered wings that summer, peeped feebly in the cage, scratched a few seeds, nibbled at the bars. Gothics weren't for me, nor Westerns, but mysteries and science fiction were possibilities. Science fiction looked particularly interesting. The agency represented an entire range of science fiction writers from Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson through the middle ranges—Reynolds, Anvil, Philip Kindred Dick, who was then struggling to make $5000 a year on small paperback advances and penny-a-word serial rights from Worlds of Tomorrow—and down to what the charitable Damon Knight had in a letter called the "dung beetles" . . . people like X or Y who had sold through the big magazine markets of the 1950s and then had mirrored the collapse of those markets but were still being carried by Scott who, that fan, was sentimental about broken-down science fiction writers in a way he never was of his mysterists, confession writers, Western writers and (just two or three here) literary writers. (There also existed a good number of prominent science fiction writers who had, through the years, been represented by or quit the agency, but this was not to concern me for a while. The agency was contemptuous of its client list.)

"These guys are selling," I thought, looking at the manuscripts of the middle-to-bottom-range. "If they can do it, maybe I can. After all, I used to read a lot of this stuff. I can start off being modest. Galaxy is paying three cents a word, Worlds of If a penny a word, Analog five cents. Not to forget the big money at Belmont or Lancer: fifteen hundred dollars for a novel. Avon and NAL might pay even more than that. This sure beats The Hudson Review, which isn't buying me anyway."

I decided to be cunning. I had indeed read a lot of this stuff. The newsstand 6/51 Astounding was the first sf publication I had encountered, and soon enough I found in Horace Gold's Galaxy of early 1952, that Year of the Jackpot, the true and the real: Demolished Man, "Command Performance," and a little later Gravy Planet, "Delay in Transit," "Baby Is Three," an astonishing run then as it would be now . . . I had been a stone science fiction fan, perhaps as fiercely devoted as any (although with no knowledge then of an organized or unorganized fandom) in those glowing years. Then came high school, however, and a sudden acquaintance with Thomas Wolfe and a sense that it was time to put away childish things, go for the gonfalon. "I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe, write furiously, get laid, drink a lot and die young," I wrote in a reminiscent piece much later of that time and thus began a cyclical course. I alternated between periods of renunciation of science fiction and furious reading; I accumulated magazines and sold them repeatedly. I was and was not a science fiction fan and finally walked away from all of it in my freshman year at Syracuse, determined as never before to be serious, to write fiercely, drink brutally, get laid, and die young.

I took care of the drinking part efficiently, showing real promise. I did not show equal gifts for the other parts, although I tried and in the Schubert Foundation year tried very hard indeed to be Philip Roth or at least Evan S. Connell, Jr. But by the time I had staggered away from Syracuse and into the odorous loft of Suite 706, I was certainly ready to try something else. Anvil and Reynolds seemed to be selling this stuff, why not me? Philip K. Dick was publishing work like "Cantata 140" and "Oh to Be a Blobel!" At two and three cents a word: why not me? It was time to remember that my very first rejection slip in 1951 had come from Amazing Stories.

Selah: I might have been detached from science fiction at this time, hadn't read it in a while, had all those quality lit ambitions (Richard Wilson had been in a play writing course with me earlier that year and it was only years later that I made the connection between that unpromising playwright and the crack science fiction writer and Futurian, so detached was I) but maybe, just maybe I could slip through some of this stuff as well. Charles Fontenay and Winston K. Marks had sold between them over a hundred short stories (Fontenay had sold a couple of Ace Doubles as well); if they could do it, why not me? "Ambition has been the undoing of better men than you and me," Bill Pronzini and I were to come to counsel one another in much later summers, but in 1965, all against my will, ambition was the only factor which stood between me and a career of HELPFUL ENCOURAGING letters, and slowly over the next year, as the Summer of Love held its; breath and came toward us, as LBJ got increasingly sullen in his recently revealed conversations with Richard Russell about those Kennedy bastards who had put him into this Vietnam thing, as Scott summoned his entire staff into his office on the night of the Great New York Blackout of 11/65 and shakily insisted that they keep him company by candlelight . . . as all of this and so much else was happening I was teaching myself in the most painful way to write salable science fiction.

Broke-down literary palace that I might have been, I was densely shrewd enough to sense that science fiction offered a market. Of my further adventures much has been recorded in Engines of the Night and various introductions and essays scattered here and there and I will relent on the catalog.

I worked at the agency continuously from 6/65 until 11/67 when I was fired for reasons never made clear ("You're obviously smarter than me but you make me uncomfortable," Scott said) and went off to become briefly Managing Editor of the doomed men's magazine, Escapade. (I had already been fired in 5/66 very late in my wife's first pregnancy but that firing was rescinded, possibly because I told Sidney when he did it that his time was abominable: surely now the brothers should have waited until my wife was in the labor room with the infant half-delivered and then drop the hammer.) After Escapade's collapse I was in and out of the agency's fee department as a not-quite member of staff until 8/27/71 when I looked at an IBM typewriter which stared back at me, the two of us saying in alternating lines, "I cannot do this any more, I cannot write another fee report, I have reached the end of the line here," and offered two weeks notice. "Don't worry about notice," I was told, "Just get the hell out of here now. Go please. Just go."

Which I did for ten years, embarking upon what I suppose could be called a full-time freelancing career ("Writing is not a full-time occupation," Big Ernie had said and Big Ernie had it right, all the way up to Big Rifle on Big Morning in Big Ketchum . . . but he had a solution for the problem). Many, many millions of words and much angst later I came to my Perfect Storm of epiphany in March of 1981: if I kept on attempting to do what I could barely do anymore it was going to destroy me and this was no metaphor, no figure of speech: "Need a fee man?" I wrote Sidney Meredith. The next day was the day that Hinckley submitted his bullet without a covering letter, sending Reagan into many weeks of considered editorial response. It was very clear that my internal chaos, reflected in the larger situation, would indeed drag me swiftly to the end of days without intervention, and a few days after that I had my reenlistment interview. "We have to know that you won't leave us in a couple of weeks," Sidney said, "That you'll be able to give us at least a year." "I'll give you a year," I said, "In fact I'll sign a statement giving you two." I figured two years would be all I needed to figure out my next move and a way back to writing's swamp.

Twelve years later, in the calamitous afterwash of Scott's death, I realized that I was still trying to figure out my next move. Eight years after that when the Agency's dwindled aftermath moved to new and tiny quarters which left me without desk space, I decided that I was just on the verge of finding my next move, just polishing it up, boss, a condition which, back at home, continues. Finding a way back, folks.

* * *

But the agency suspires in memory. While I continued to ponder my next move, the agency overtakes in memory. It had become a most remarkable, almost inimitable machine so staggeringly efficient that it could transcend its own frequent incompetence which grips. As John Campbell was Astounding and for a long time science fiction itself, so was the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, charnel house and empirical majesty Scott Feldman. Scott Feldman as Scott Meredith was among the most significant and signatory of all the jumped-up fans of his active generation, the founders, those architects of First Fandom, the Futurians, the Hydra Club, the early World Science Fiction Conventions beginning in 1939. The Futurians and their friends were a pool from which many soon prominent in science fiction were extracted, but Scott Meredith was unusual in that he became prominent outside of science fiction, detached himself from it utterly. X.J. Kennedy, the poet, and perhaps Jack Speer, the Congressman from Washington State, were the only figures comparable to have emerged from science fiction fanac to public careers . . . and had through the course of those careers suppressed the linkage to science fiction.

"I owe Scott everything," Norman Spinrad, who had worked at the agency from 1962-1964, once said to me. "He taught me what I needed to know. I hated it but it was the most valuable thing that ever happened to me as a writer. Scott taught me publishing! Scott showed me early what a cesspool it was, what shit it was, I never had to be disillusioned after that."

Of course that is the kind of insight which can be well expanded. It was not only publishing which could be regarded as a cesspool. No one who spent more than a few months at Scott Meredith was ever to be surprised by any of the revelations of Watergate. Watergate as a demonstration of the methodology of concealment, the institutionalization of lying, was the Scott Meredith Agency written much larger. And much less effective.

And no writer ever employed by that agency—Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, James Blish, Damon Knight, Phil Klass (briefly), Laurence M. Janifer, James Jerrold Mundis, Richard Curtis, Stephen Marlowe, Evan Hunter—would have said any different. From the proselytizing, ENCOURAGING HELPFUL fee department at one end to the peregrinations of Mailer or Wodehouse or Drew Pearson or Meyer Levin or Gerald Green or Arthur Clarke, Irving Shulman, and later, Carl Sagan, the triumph of Grub Street and its processes was never in question. The machinery of the agency, its institutionalization of misdirection, seemed initially complex to the uninformed, but it proclaimed itself—as Spinrad came to attest—in utter simplicity. The agency both refracted and celebrated the corruption of publishing as that corruption, thanks to conglomeratization, the marginalization of "serious" writing, the centrality of exploitative writing overtook publishing through the decades.

Over and again in the collected works of Larry Block, Donald E. Westlake, Damon Knight—fee men all—occurs what I came to identify as the Meredith Moment: the protagonist stares across a desk or over a car seat or from a barstool at his companion and senses for the first time the full and awful corruption of that other person, a corruption which until then had been concealed or misdirected but now, in a triggered incident of antagonism, reveals itself full and clear. That moment is in Westlake's first mystery, The Mercenaries, when the protégé of a mobster suddenly understands what a mobster really does. It appears many times in Larry Block's Matthew Scudder novels when his alcoholic, broken ex-cop sees evil entire and realizes that he must be as evil to vanquish that source. It is there again and again in Hunter's "87th Precinct" novels, it is there in Damon Knight's 1950s short story in the strange art machine which created freehand masterpieces: disassembled it is empty; little shafts of light cutting through its dark space. Norman Spinrad's novel, The Mind Game, is ostensibly a roman á clef on Scientology, but Spinrad's smug and obdurate guru owes more to the man for whom Spinrad had worked closely in the early 1960s than it does to L. Ron Hubbard, whom Spinrad had never met.

Was Scott really that way? Or were these miserably treated and uniformly underpaid employees magnifying Scott because their resentment itself was enormous? Great recrimination demands a large subject, will invent one if it does not exist. This is a difficult call. The real Scott Meredith was elusive. ("Who is the real Scott Meredith?" a young editor, Melinda Kaplan, asked the table at an after-hours social.

("Maybe there is no real Scott Meredith," I said. "Or maybe the 'real' Scott Meredith is exactly he who we construct." Hard to know.) This man was elusive and not only to the FBI; his first name is still in dispute. Isaac Asimov recalls him as "Scott Feldman" in In Memory Yet Green, but some fans believe that he was really named Sidney, that he took the more upscale "Scott" in early childhood and then, just as he had saddled his brother Sidney with the grubbier clerical details of the agency, so he had given his brother his own first name, pushing Sid's real first name, whatever that had been, off the deck into the briny blue. No definitive version ever emerged.

It would seem that the agency had been founded incontestably upon a paradigm of deceit. Always, from the start, those letters written in Scott's name were not of his authorship, the manuscripts allegedly read by Scott were not. (The work of the entire client list was read by Scott's editors. Scott, by the late 1950s, read the work of no client, not Hunter, not Mailer, not Kemelman who in Kemelman's fixation on Orthodox Judaism, clearly made Scott, that very secular Jew, uncomfortable. The letters were signed by him, however, and the work of the important clients was read for detailed written synopsis to be given Scott so that he could fake his way through any conversation.) A man of mystery who in his last ten years would interact only with his three senior editors and secretaries, who would pass men in the hallway who had worked for him for years and not even acknowledge them, Scott Meredith was not to be easily understood. Through the course of my own time in his employ, I recall four or five conversations, none of them longer than five minutes, and maybe fifty nods in the hallway in passing. Over all the years. And I had to have been, through sheer accumulation of years, at least dimly recognizable.

And yet all of this is only part and a lesser part of the centrality and significance of the agency. Touch it anywhere and it slips away; it is elusive, a mystery, it is one of those religious parables dealing with.the unknowable name of the True God. As with ambition, better men than I have battered themselves against the edifice in search of the unreplicatable truth—but there is here, I believe, an answer, that One True Thing which explains if not all; enough. We are getting there. We are, as Mailer would write, prowling the terrain, we have the beast in view; we are in difficult land, glimpsing the beast in odd, shuddering views; given time and the courage to continue our little patrol, we will securely trap that beast although we will never bring it home whole. It will, however, be in our possession."

But only if we observe the rules of the prowl; only in a difficult way, only in time. Here now: In 1968, a little after RFK's assassination and in the bowels of a summer which was uncompromisingly apocalyptic to we Lefties, I sent a preoccupied memo to Scott (he would communicate primarily in this way, and his notes elicited a pseudo-gemeinschaft available in person only to Mailer/Hunter/Sagan and of course senior editors) musing on the horror of it all and the effect it would have on publishing. "Forget the large picture," he wrote. "You can take care of the large picture, I just want to keep this agency going now like a big machine, right through to the end." I was reminded of a famous line of Walt Disney's in an interview toward the end of his life: What had made him proudest? "That I kept this thing together," he said, "That I was able to make it work and keep it working all the way." That Disney managed and so did Scott: the agency was a son of a bitch of a machine, had the aspect of the upper offices of a slaughterhouse: whatever unthinkable events were occurring below, only a faint smell and the bills of lading reached the penthouse.

And even as the country seemed to be coming apart, as Robert Kennedy's funeral train hit some people standing on the tracks and killed them, as George Wallace called for the elimination of all the pointy-heads, as Nixon scuttled from one airless television studio to another mumbling of his secret plan to end the Vietnam War, even then and more than ever, the agency was a big machine, felt like a big machine, get out of the way, here it comes.

Staring at or through that office in the spring and summer of 1968 when the place was perhaps at the height of its efficiency and reach, Mailer's Steps of the Pentagon running in Harper's then and Clarke/Kubrick's 2001 opening, it seemed beyond shattering, immutable, shaped for a kind of shapeless and eternal flux like the air itself. Everything worked; the stuff which wasn't working, detailed so savagely in the Mailer essays, was merely another aspect of the agency's penetration. Oh this is the place to be, I thought, this is set to Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, the "Inextinguishable," running like the blood itself. That part which can never be destroyed.

Ah Scott, ah mores! Because the agency—one way to look at this—was in an intricate and brilliant fashion the Slan Shack of a science fiction fan and abscondant treasurer, Scott Feldman. The League of whose proceeds he had been master had become the world itself.

Was that perhaps then the answer? The elusive, perhaps unbearable answer against which Westlake's and Block's tormented principals had battered themselves? The answer, the secret: the agency was Scott's revenge, the revenge of an anonymous but, like so many, arrogant and driven fan upon his distant masters by engendering and propitiating a magnificent system which in turn reduced the writers to anonymity? Surely a van Vogt ploy. "This is the race which will rule the Sevagram." The Sevagram was the balance maintained by the fee department, and Scott was the ultimate Player in the World of Null A.

What a concept! What a thought! It was to stagger the bedraggled Golden Eagle, then at the true beginning of his science fiction career, "final War" recently published in this magazine, "Death to the Keeper" scheduled to run in August. Big plans after all, the rising and furious river of ambition, an ambition not much different in kind and degree than that which might have seized Scott Feldman in 1938. The Lensmen (later the Players of Null A) take over the world or at least that part, publishing! Grab the fan club proceeds and the process! Even then vague intimation, distant rumbling: Scott had it all, the fee department, the devices which would protect and distance; he had all the money too . . . but I just might have the last word. Not only by virtue of chronology—that is an accident, living longer is not in itself the last word—but because I was, perhaps, going to become the science fiction writer Scott had wanted to be. Could such be?

It computes, Spock!

Is that the gift then? The last word on Kimball Kinnison in the canyons of New York publishing? Could it ever be that simple? If it were, if anything could be so reduced, then it was the agency and the arc of its circumstance which had to be measured.

Through the forty-seven years from its founding to Scott's death, the arc of its circumstance might be seen as paralleling, refracting the arc and accelerating corruption of publishing in this country over that period. The Lensmen aged, the magic adaptors did not, in the end, work: Roddenberry and Lucas and their highly advanced warriors took what they needed from the Lensmen and blasted out the worst, left wreckage and atomization.

That is clearly a working position. Hang an essay on it certainly. But does it credit too greatly an aging Scott Feldman who years before the end had become a retracted, a diminished figure, less a man of central mystery than a symbol of the clutter and detritus of publishing which the conglomerates, the video games, the computer had outmoded? Was Time-Warner Luke Skywalker now to Scott's Kimball Kinnison? Writing to Sell, its plot-skeleton, Scott's fee department model was clear culture lag: it refracted the pulp market and pulp requisites of the 1930s, that decade which framed Scott. Clenched-jaw heroes with insuperable problems and terrific methodology were beginning to look pretty silly even before Lucas, before Roddenberry, before Moorcock's New Wave and Lawrence Block's tortured private eyes moved in.

Surely Scott institutionalized and propounded as no one ever had before the agency scams and the pulp ethic of the 1930s, but he was as timebound a creature as A. L. Fierst, Ben Hibbs, Horace Gold: it just took longer for him to be so revealed. The agency, that savage machine, was in the end utterly disassembled. There is no last word because the only one who might speak it is Scott and Scott is gone. That remarkable, infuriating, troubled figure, infuriating and troubled in many ways like his client John W. Campbell, Scott Feldman staggered from the poverty of Brooklyn's Williamsburg a stone science fiction fan in search of the Way Out. He was only distantly pendant to the Futurians, but it was he who became richer than any of them and probably more influential too.

For here was the secret which was not so much a secret: it has been put in print by Moskowitz after Scott's death but was told me in his lifetime by Harry Harrison, who had served in the Queens Science Fiction League with Scott: Feldman had appropriated the treasury in 1940 and had fled, only to emerge after the war in sudden, vulpine business on Broadway and 57th Street in a one-room literary agency with his brother running blocking back. Out of the mists of what might have been Theodore Sturgeon's literary agency came Scott Meredith.

Out of the mists with him came Sturgeon's small client list: Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril, Sturgeon himself, Phil Klass. Out of the mists, Scott now Meredith went to the second postwar World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia (John W. Campbell, Guest of Honor) and recruited every science fiction writer he could, beginning with Lester del Rey. And his other inheritance from the mists were a bedraggled band of pulp Western writers, a scattering of pulp mysterists.

And from the start—before in fact Kimball had a Destructor Beam—there was that fee department.

In 1948, Richard Prather, twenty-five, had emerged: the fee for a novel then $25. Scott sold the first of the Shell Scott mysteries to Gold Medal Books for $2,500, an astonishing advance for an unknown writer at the time and the first of a stunningly successful series. John Farris's Harrison High came in the 1950s; later there were science fiction, Westerns, an Edgar Award-winning mystery, Bruce D. Reeves's $35 fee novel from 1965, The Night Action: $13,500 from New American Library, $75,000 from Warner Pictures. (Never made.) Those successes, the Reeves savagely publicized, filled the brochure with the pure, lofting smell of hope.

Convincing as was the brochure, an even more interesting list could be compiled of writers who sought representation through the fee department and whose works were declined or, in one case, unsuccessfully marketed: try Stephen King, Evan S. Connell, Jr., then a war veteran and Columbia undergraduate. (Connell was that singular case), John Earth, Raymond Carver, Robert Parker.

Talk of Joe Gould's never published (and as known at last unwritten) History of the Twentieth Century! The underside of the fee department represents a story more compelling than that commonly acknowledged. Prather broke not only the fee department but the agency through, however, the first truly successful client. A few years later, employee Evan Hunter, who started by scrambling (under his birth name, Salvatore Lombino) in the second-level science fiction and mystery markets, wrote The Blackboard Jungle (expansion of a short story; "To Break a Wall," first published in Discovery) and the agency sold it to Simon & Schuster, for an ordinary $1,500; shortly after its publication, The Ladies Home Journal bought second serial rights for $10,000 and MGM the movie rights for a hundred and that was the agent of transmogrification, not just for Hunter but the agency itself which was suddenly more than broker for a concatenation of pulp writers. Then Scott arrived at the behest of his cousin Cy Rembar, the agency's new attorney, and An American Dream. Oh, Scott had a good time through those decades. The best part of the day was the arrival at 10 A.M. to the mail neatly arranged on his desk and opening the envelopes with checks. He would glow, observers recall, sometimes with pure laughter.

What vindication!

So, then, if all is not certain, it can at least be speculated: the narrative of the agency is the narrative of a science fiction fan's revenge as he advanced through levels of contemporary publishing. "You can't call him 'Dr. Asimov,'" Scott said to me angrily as he threw back on his desk a letter I had drafted in Scott's name, asking a favor. "I grew up with this guy, we were practically having sex on the same bed at the same time, although not with each other. He's Isaac! Isaac! Isaac! Call him that!"

That Isaac was a landsman seemed true; years later when the agency took over the Fantastic Voyage II contractual disorder, and when Scott convinced Asimov to write a sequel to a novel he had said he would never sequelize, the two sauntered like the Brothers Karamazov from Scott's office to the exit, whisking by the fee department alcove, laughing merrily. $300,000 advance. A good score for the boys from Williamsburg and Brownsville, products both of the public education system. And a long way from the Queens Science Fiction League, from the 1947 Philadelphia Convention, from the blooming years of the plot-skeleton and the Blish/Knight fee department which produced not only "Tiger Ride" (Astounding Science Fiction, 1948), but In Search of Wonder and The Issue at Hand.

One had to consider also, I did, the corrupting effect of the fee department itself upon those employees who entertained writing ambitions. Fee work itself taught precision, taught structure but—

Some were successful, others much less so but fee work—all of that need! All of that anonymity of the fee clients! All of that crazed and glacial detachment of the fee writer which was the necessary technique, just as Miss Lonelyhearts had had to laugh at his correspondents to do his job at all . . . all of this had a certain effect, turned some (maybe to a degree all) cold, even cruel. What came from fee employment was a sense of the arbitrary and interchangeable mode of circumstance; the line between fee client and fee reader was chance: both were struggling within and serving a system and both functioned within a necessary mutual delusion one that held this: power could also be the possession of the powerless

Everything, after all, could be seen as a fee script; everyone was a fee client, "I want to write a novel," someone said in the alcove, "In which the fee clients take over the world." "Fool," David Schiller said, putting down a manuscript; "They already have. What do you think Reagan, Bush, Meese, the whole bunch of them are . . . jumped-up fee clients who got lucky and are living their fantasies." If Scott Meredith was a jumped-up fan and club treasurer, dreamer of the Lensmen, hiding behind a persona of power, then surely the same could be said of Reagan. Vox populi with a smile and grand bearing, dumped into the White House. (In fact, a former Reagan speechwriter sent in a few fee short stories in the late '90s They were just about what Schiller would have expected, even though he was gone to Book of the Month by then and they were read by me.)

Confronted by the sheer volume of vox populi's manuscripts, the seriousness, the weight, and the hopelessness, it was all too easy for a fee reader to give up his own ambition. Many did through the years; the department was a filter through which the strongest crawled in their Nietzschean way, but many blooming novelists came to grief. Turnover in the fee department—and everywhere else there—was severe; the fixtures stayed, all right, but the history of the agency is rich in new employees, both clerical and editorial, who went out for a long lunch on their first or fifth day and never returned. Or were requested not to return. Capitalism, again, in its rawest form.

So, to an ineluctable extent, then, the story of that agency is that of a science fiction fan's advance through first the underside and then the more celebrated precincts of American publishing. John Lahr saw this in his 1971 novel The Autograph Hound and Nathanael West of course in his description of that film premiere, the fan-as-assassin, the crowd of adulators turned murderers. Was this then the heart of the artichoke? Scott had turned all of them into fee clients—the big-name professionals whose manuscripts were read by the underlings, the other clients who received letters signed by him but whom he never saw and with whom he had no involvement, the fee clients who were not people at all but abstraction. Each population served the others, the professionals functioned as bait for the fee clients, the fee clients paid all the agency overhead, the employees who stayed or left endured the exploitation and carried the legend. It was, certainly from the mid-1950s onward, that gleaming, deadly machine which I had so admired in 1968; that immutable device.

Sure it faded. Most things do. The Great Society, The Roosevelt Coalition, the White Man's Burden, even the Sermon on the Mount. Why should the agency, which was, after all, founded upon recrimination and in the world to wreak a fan's revenge, be exempt from the general condition? "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair," and within months after his death, Scott's Agency had utterly atomized, its senior agents fleeing with the client list, his widow, huddled weeping with her carnivorous "advisors" and panicking to sell the remains of the agency and its backlist at what would have been a tenth of its valuation a year earlier. The finish, after the long seasons of Scott's dying, was as abrupt as an earthquake and it all went under sea level. "Scott Meredith" for those in publishing under forty evokes little association, and that which was his agency is a letterhead now and a collection box.

Still, oh the times we had! The places we went to become what one beholds and in the end, perhaps, to know of no distinction.

Dreaming, more dream than occurrence, only dream in fact like Kimball Kinnison and the Martian Odyssey, those long twilight afternoons in the late 1960s with Revolution on the office Muzak and the furious fee man doing heroin in the men's room, taking a break in mid-report to share supplies and anecdotes. Mailer and Gerald Green and Harry Kemelman prancing through the offices, Alfred Chester, not important enough to be permitted to see Scott, breaking past the receptionist in a run and scrambling into Scott's office where (when they were invited in ten minutes later) staff found the bald expatriate from Brooklyn and a sunny if very tense Scott Meredith giggling over glasses of wine.

The writer who felt G. P. Putnam had destroyed his work, calling Scott (not getting through, of course, so settling for me) to say, "Just want to tell you that I'm coming into the city with a gun to kill Walter Minton. You tell that bearded fuck he better watch out for me." The fee man who locked himself into a cubicle in the toilet, denuded himself and grimly masturbated several times a day, "because I can't stand reading this shit anymore and writing them as if they were sane. As if I were sane." As if he were sane.

Finally: in the funeral home on Long Island on Valentine's Day, 1993, I sat half an hour before the funeral in the chapel with the closed coffin. Scott's other book, George S. Kaufman and His Friends, had been published to moderate success in 1974; he had spent years on it (a semi-sequel, Louis B. Mayer and His Enemies, was contracted by Doubleday but never delivered), and it was the spirit of Kaufman which I felt in that room.

"Goddamn," I thought, echoing one of Kaufman's most famous lines, spoken about a bridge partner who had left for the men's room. "For the first time, I know exactly what the son of a bitch is doing." "I know what you're doing, finally," I said to the occupant of the box, but of course this was, properly speaking, not so. None of us ever know what the others, particularly the dead, are doing.

I had another thought looking at that box, a thought I had had looking at my Uncle Herbert on his deathbed and at a fetching sprite of a parakeet lying after long agony on the floor of her cage . . . I had never realized that they were so small. He was so much smaller in that box than I remembered, no longer subject but object, and as I looked at the impermeable service it was as if, receding, he had already gone. "He won't grow in memory, he will only diminish," I had thought in my times of fury at Scott, but now it was not anger but sadness which overtook.

Gone. All gone. Those months of swift atomization lay ahead but they already seemed in the bleak light to have occurred and it was not Scott nor his body nor his agency but only the.shriveled memory which I confronted. And soon that to be extinguished: the Queens Science Fiction League, First Fandom, the Futurians. The Great Globe Itself.

Gone. Gone as the Great Society, as Shawn's New Yorker, as the Algonquin Round Table and George S. Kaufman's Broadway. Gone as Tailgunner Joe and Joseph Welch and the hearings and Douglas MacArthur and all of the other faded old soldiers. Gone like Gernsback's Science Club and Tremaine's Thought Variants. Gone like Gnome and Shasta and FPCI.

And only I to tell the tale? Certainly not. But perhaps only I on this distant precipice at such great distance to make it worth the telling.

What say, folks? Light the pyre, hold it high, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings. The long day has closed; the Captains and the Kings depart.

But the Word and those who, living, die through it remain.

—for Ben Cheever and Gordon Van Gelder

Some Reflections on Freud, Fantasy & the Jewish Condition

1. Freud had ideas, he was ceaselessly in pursuit of himself. Up and down the corridors of retrospection and memory did Freud stomp, beard flying to and fro, cigar ("sometimes it is merely a cigar") poised at the ready, a detective of motive, seeking the endless, unreeling self concealed behind this will and that to think of him, even at this great remove of time (he has been dead as long as I have been alive) is to be seized by respect for the man, to consider with awe yet again what he was able to do. Saddled with the arc of the century, given unhappy, grumbling, overheated Viennese with whom to deal, granted his own philology and constraint, Freud had to generalize from the most unpromising material yet there he is, towering over our century just yet and dead for a considerable part of it. How winning his smile, how dashing his tact, how moving his tears! His grief is our grief and abandoned by him, we must forage—as did Freud himself—for little nuggets of insights hidden behind the arras of identity. Oh, why did thou ask such questions, Freud, only to deny us and depart? These are the fundamental questions, our ontology recapitulates your philology, we are not to be put off by easy or even intricate excuses.

2. Chagall's flying cows, flying rabbis, arched and floating houses, scheming Jews, wounded cattle reminds us of the open and wounded places of ourselves, those places toward which Freud, Sherlock Holmes of the underground has stalked. Chagall's visions are mild, Freud's are pointed. Freud makes us assassins whereas Chagall knows that we merely want a meal, a minyan, a place to put our shoes, but they emerge from the same secret places where our desires and our dreams can be said to mingle. Like Dali, like Picasso, Chagall became very old and sinister in his age, in the possession of those cells which made him an icon but he never lurched into self-parody or repetition; Chagall was parody from the outset . . . representational of that which could barely be defined and a huge laugh for anyone in the shtetl who thought that God was watching or thought that God was not watching or took God as a wounded cow. Together and at rest now, Freud and Chagall conspire against us, the one with bleak and shrouded visions, the other with a merciless abstruseness that always, always fold back but in the morning it is Chagall's village, not Freud's caverns which claims us as we go off into the mild light, seeking a gentle and perceptive cow who will fill out the minyan of our desire.

3. Chagall's murals dominate the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center; when the house opened in 1965 they were controversial, a scandal to some, large, slashed with color, naive, somehow reductive the analysts said, of the really intricate and always secular phenomena which were taking place in the house. But Chagall knew better: Berg's Lulu was on that stage and indeed it was Barber's Antony and Cleopatra which opened the Metropolitan: what matter if the Barber failed and Lulu, in its truncated state, needed the composer's widow to die so that the bitter, adulterous yearnings of its unknown third act could be revealed? Chagall's concern was never with repertoire, his grieving or elated peasants, his Cossacks twirling on the red points of silky shoes, his commissars and duchesses rushing into the central hall knew better than any of their witnesses how deeply symptomatic they were, not cause but outcome, not representation but at the center.

4. Freud and Chagall chatting about the role of fantasy in the Jewish psyche and literature, two old Jews walking together around a pond, enjoying the sunset in these last, smudged vestiges of their life before they move into their separate and ever so perfectly fitting purgatoria. "Time is a river without banks," Chagall points out, "it overflows, it catches us by surprise, it catches us with our pants down to the ankles doing unspeakable or merely embarrassing things in the chamber and it says, 'caught you out, boy, ho there!' Time is that medium in which, all fish, we swim; the aquaria itself is the universe, or don't you think that this is the case Sigmund?" Freud shrugs; he is not elfin or fey in the way that he takes Chagall to be but he is not devoid of humor himself. Largely he is confused, the century has gotten away from him, his disciples have gotten away from him, here he gave all these principles and devotions and what have they done with it? The rubble of the century is evidence of their misdirection, he thinks. "I don't really know, Marc," he says, "it's hard to understand; guilt, guilt is the medium in which we swim, though, this is what we think. And then fantasy is the means by which we try to extract ourselves from our guilt, even if we are not Jews which as a matter of fact most of us are. Jews are the paradigm of the century." Freud is an earnest man, in his school days he was the kind who always answered the questions first, reflected later if at all, tried to keep up with his studies, tried to present a solemn and devoted mask to his instructors. Asked to devolve upon fantasy and the Jewish psyche he means to stick to the subject, even if Chagall cannot. "It wasn't easy," Freud says. He points up at the sky which looks remarkably like a Chagall landscape, smokestacks in the high distance. "Do you see what I mean?"

Chagall looks up with him, looks away, skips along in a rapid hobble which meets but does not mesh with Freud's pace. "You take all of this too seriously," he says. "Think of it as a joke, as a burlesque, a giant hand reaching within and tearing things away, leaving us with the necessities which are the quotient of our existence. Quotidia? Either way, that is the only fashion to consider this; we make pictures and dance." Chagall gives Freud an idle kick in the calf, not enough to hurt him, antic resolve, really, but it is enough to infuriate Freud who has always felt that dignity was at the center of his persona and that without that dignity he would be what he most feared as a quotidian result: a defenseless Jew in an overcoat, a bearded Jew with a cigar, a clown in a shiny suit constructing parables to explain away his useless and towering pain. Freud, thus enraged, turns on Chagall to swat him, to beat him, to show this gamboling artist that his persona cannot be dealt with so cheaply, so egregiously but as he reaches toward Chagall it is as if he sees him for the first time, sees the features unfold to grant him the quivering, open heart of Marc Chagall, an artist so close to the spiritual needs of the average Jew that he can only mock them and Freud backs away then, quite flabbergast, his hand trembling. "Jewish fantasy and psychoanalysis and tradition and the Judaic promise, they are all the same," he says. "There are no differences, no barriers. The only barriers are those we erect." So saying, Freud begins to giggle, it is a relieved giggle yet one with tones of hysteria within and around it and as, with some detachment the head of the Freudian school considers himself, he begins to realize the truly ominous indications of his condition. Chagall fans himself, waves to something in the sky, beams upon Freud. They seem to have reached some kind of impasse. Or perhaps it is a breakthrough.

5. We think of Freud—"we" not being Chagall now, Chagall has gone home, he has gone away, he has gone to that place where Bracque and Picasso and lecherous little Modigliani play at banco and consider their prospects in the eternal, never-ending high stakes posterity game—at an earlier stage, Freud in the throes of his practice at the turn of the century, exposed to the hysterical anguish of superheated and lonely females. This one says she has been f- by her father, another claims to have suffered an uncle's hand upon her genitals when she was eight, a third, a fourth, a fifth report half-remembered tangled memories of illicit connections of all sorts. Thinking of Freud, considering his agony and his angst as he hears these confessions, we must feel some sympathy for him; it is not easy to face the fact that so many of these women have been misused, misused in childhood by trusted male relatives, have had their genitals and their most private thoughts violated. If this is true, and Freud's initial impulse is to accept the revelations, then humanity is unspeakable; if his mild, troubled Viennese are capable of such horrid indiscretion and calumny, then what will be said of the masses when, some three or four decades in the future, they really become inflamed?

Concerned with this, concerned with his own fantasies which for all we know might be composed of lecherous desire for these women (one thing that Freud has come to admit of his own school of therapy is that it is an interesting way to meet otherwise inaccessible women on the most riotous and glaring of terms), concerned with the proprieties of his situation and the century, Freud comes to a decision. This cannot be. The women cannot be telling the truth; their hysteria and superheated mode is indeed the product of agitation but the agitation comes not from sexual misuse or violation but from the desire for it. They must, his new patients, have inveigled this pattern of behavior to define impulses which otherwise would have been unacceptable. Accordingly, Freud recants. He recants upon his earlier testimony, his earlier apprehensions, writes his friend Fleiss a letter, several letters, pointing out the revisions in his thinking. "It is fantasy," Freud writes, "it is an aspect of their neurosis, it is a disease, a sickness." He feels great security in saying this. After all, it is a neurotic century, a century of fantasy. In the years to come, the most unspeakable desires and inner needs will be played out with smokestacks upon the canvas of the century. Like Chagall, the technicians will make the cows fly, the rivers overflow, but they will do it with machinery, with the gleaming arc of technology, not with the gentler works of pastels or oils against wood.

"It is a century of fantasy," Freud says quietly, turning to look for our assent in the small room devoted to his ponderings and writing. He has come in these recent years to imagine the presence of auditors in the room who bear witness and will comment to those outside about his condition and he considers this a dream so benign, so devoid of actual menace or dysfunctional aspect that he permits himself this dialogue without embarrassment. How pleased he would be to know that what he imagines is actually true and that we have come, decades and decades later, toward the end of the century, to consider him in exactly this way! "To understand is to forgive," Freud murmurs, "this is the core of my philosophy," and who is to say that he is wrong? Understanding nothing, knowing nothing, we have been poised for disaster for years and years, the rubble of our potential is all around us: surely we can find it within ourselves to pity Freud. Surely it was not his fault that he determined the women were engaged in fantasy; he had the advantage of firsthand interviews, contact, affect, in a way which we never will. Considering him in this way, permitting ourselves for the first time to unstop the gush of affection from our Jewish souls for our Jewish forebear, which of us is so stiff-necked as not to relent, as not to say, "You were innocent; you confronted the darkness with the innocence you had and then sprung it upon the world!" Which of us cannot say this? Not that there are so very many of us in the room, of course, there are only a very few permitted such perilous connection.

6. "I would like to add a few words about fantasy, Judaism, Freud and the human condition," Alban Berg says. He is the small man, the adulterous (in mind if not deed) composer who set the Wedekind plays to music, then died in 1935 at the age of 50, just in time to bring the Second Viennese school to a definitive, premature end. "In my opinion, my humble opinion," Berg says, making a point (as do all arrogant men) of his humility, "the three of them must be regarded as the same, as a synchronicity. It is a Jewish century, a Freudian century, a fantasy century. Consider Lulu, all of these factors take part in her single-minded arc toward the sewer and at the end she is done in by Jack the Ripper. I don't even want to talk about Wozzeck but any soldier who can drown in a pool with a foot of water is an unhappy, a disconcerting symbol, wouldn't you think?" The final act of Lulu, supposedly, contains musical anagrams and duedocacophonic statements of Berg's lust for a younger woman; the widow Berg, no musician but possibly with a keener eye than ear, suppressed the last act throughout her lifetime. None of this, however, seems to have much bearing upon Berg's demeanor which is grim. "I will tell you about fantasy," he says, "fantasy is as terrible if it is explored as if unexplored; once it exists in sufficient color to be apprehended, it will change everything whether you acknowledge it or not!" Thinking of Freud's hysterical women as we must, struck by the force of Berg's argument, we can only nod. "I tell you, in the 20th century, just as in the historical Jewish condition, if something can happen, then it has already happened, will happen, over and over again, consider the third act of that wretched opera," Berg says and laughs and laughs and begins to dissolve in front of us. Curiously insubstantial, unlike the earthy and corporeal Freud, unlike the elfin and jolly Chagall, the sullen and distracted Berg begins to disassemble before our eyes leaving us soon enough, perhaps even sooner than that, with nothing to look upon but the manuscript score of Lulu and somewhere beyond that in the smoky, lowering haze, an image of Chagall's cows, now dancing with one another above orange rooftops which leak softer steam into the grey and desperate smoke which seems to close in upon us, if only momentarily.

7. So, standing outside the Metropolitan Opera House, using the central fountain as backdrop while tourists industriously take our picture (they attended to the rumors that all of us, Berg, Freud, Chagall, and the committee to honor them would be at the performance of Lulu tonight and would assemble at the plaza for a quick photo opportunity before dispersing to our separate parts of the opera house), we feel for the first time in this long and difficult odyssey through all the 48 agonizing years since Freud left us that we may have attained a little perspective. "Replacement, it is always a matter of replacement, that is right, isn't it?" we say. Freud lifts his cigar in a pleasant wave. "We can hope to replace the sinister with the less sinister, the benign with the cheerful, that is all, right?" "Exactly," Chagall says, leaping to a perch beside the fountain, putting his hand on his heart. "Exactly, precisely that is right." Berg shrugs; he was always a moody sort and the true sense of the assemblage has, once again, left him. Nonetheless he does not protest. "Time, time, a river without banks," Chagall says merrily and flipflops into the fountain, a porpoise he emerges from the fountain whiskers agleam, flippers poised at great flight and departs from us, moving at great height, increasing velocity toward the top of the Metropolitan Opera. Freud extends a hand; we reach forward to grasp it. Some kind of accommodation seems at the offing. Freud points to Chagall, twinkling above us in the sky. "We have converted human misery into ordinary unhappiness," he says. And so, in this millennial century, will all of you.

I: Not I

This is the second opening for this essay. The first, a discarded draft which now reposes on grey carpeting somewhere to the near left, went like this:

"First person, the protagonist (or involved principal) as narrator, should be the ideal form for science fiction—since it would impart an effect of naturalness and immediacy to the alien landscape, inner and outer, which is the premise of the form—but oddly it is not, although exceptional stories written in the first person, many of which are in this book, grace the category, the main thrust of science fiction through its fifty-four years as a discrete subgenre of American literature has been carried in the more conventional third person which—"

Which what? This might play in the provinces but it will not play in this book. For the fact is that the discarded opening is a false premise; a great deal of important work, perhaps even a disproportionate amount, has been done in American science fiction in the first person. Isaac Asimov notes in his introduction that he has almost never worked in the form; "The Red Queen's Race" (his best story of the forties, for my money, just as The Dead Past—a novella—was his best of the fifties) is his only published exhibit in the form, but Isaac is the exception and an inordinate number of examples-in-proof abound of which I would cite only a few and in somewhat random order: Robert Heinlein's last three novels have been first-person, Theodore Sturgeon's Baby Is Three (the brilliant novella centering More Than Human) is first-person, Tom Sherred's "E for Effort," surely the finest story to appear in 1947, was first-person. So is Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside (1972) and Shadrach in the Furnace, my own Beyond Apollo (1972), Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo Award-winning "The Star," Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," Mark Clifton's "What Have I done?" Thomas M. Disch's novel Camp Concentration (1967), Samuel R. Delany's famous short story "Aye and Gomorrah" . . .

It is an imposing list. Proportionate to the body of first-rate work in the genre, science fiction has probably employed the first person more successfully than the American literary novel or any branch of American commercial fiction. With all due respect to Isaac Asimov—who is one of the five living writers who center this form—he is the exception; his reluctance to use or struggle with the first-person format is atypical, and this afterword cannot deplore underutilization but only celebrate plenitude . . . and venture, cautiously, into personal terrain.

I have written a great deal in the first person. The bibliographers are welcome to take a look at this, I cannot, but at a fast estimate close to fifty percent of my twenty-five science fiction novels and approximately two hundred short stories have been written in that fashion. First person has always come easily to me; my first published science fiction story ("We're Coming Through the Windows," 1967) used it (in epistolary format) and Beyond Apollo, my best-known if not best novel, is written in alternate first- and third-person by its schizoid protagonist. Tactics of Conquest (the novel which was inflated madly from the short story "Closed Sicilian") and The Men Inside are first-person; so is Revelations and my own favorite novel, Underlay. I like the form; as a failed playwright (Schubert Foundation Fellow, Syracuse University 1964/5, you could look it up) I enjoy the way it can burrow into a protagonist, get inside him, adapt his voice, work against authorial weaknesses or pomposity.

First person has another valuable function, at least, to a writer like myself, and I am about, for any would-be novelists in the gallery, to reveal for the first time ever a Trade Secret: first person enables a writer to disguise gaps in research, knowledge, experience or apprehension because he can build his own limitations into the voice of the character and make them an essential part of that persona. Never knowing a hell of a lot about hard technology, the actual appearance of the surface of Mercury, or the intricacies of the three-stage rocket, I used over and over again characters who were either similarly unfamiliar with the material or who once having been familiar were losing control, going over the edge, and their ignorance thus became—witness Beyond Apollo—a metaphor for their psychic breakdown and that of their culture. First person is a technique surely created for old maneuverers like your faithful undersigned: applied skillfully, it can convert weaknesses to strengths. Don't blame me, folks, the captain was the one going insane. I may know a hydraulic valve from a hole in the ground but the captain has gone over the edge; he can barely segregate the hawks from the handsaws. All a narrative device: take it up with the captain. (I feel safe in disclosing my trade secret now; it is many years since my period of peak efficiency, in the first place, and in the second, too many people have Caught On. I think my own major contribution to science fiction may have been to teach a flock of new writers that you can write science fiction not only without technological knowledge, but without even deference to it . . . one can wallow in one's own ignorance. Several critics have raised this point about my own work, and they may even be right. Still, it is better to wallow in ignorance than to shadow-box with knowledge, as the bishop said to the widow.)

First person—to continue this technical discussion a little—has certain built-in traps, to be sure. The voice can become too idiosyncratic; circling in upon itself, it can lose account of extrinsic circumstance or relationships (Ring Lardner, a magnificent writer, was not magnificent all of the time, and many of his first-person stories show this weakness). Characterization, particularly of the narrator, cannot be trusted because of the idiosyncratic voice; physical description of the narrator—barring the Mirror Device and similar scams—is impossible. And the fact that the narrator is himself alive to tell the tale makes the use of the first person almost impossible in a suspense format where the very life of the narrator is suggested to hang in balance. Furthermore, unless one is using a diary format (such as in Camp Concentration or the famous Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon), which is a tricky technique for all but the most sophisticated of us, true characteriological change is impossible to depict in the first person; the narrator is fully developed at the outset of the story as the result of the events of the story; he cannot be perceived to be changing during the narrative span itself, and since change is one of the key aspects of fiction the first-person writer is stripping himself of advantage at the outset.

(It is this absence of change which so many reviewers through the years have pointed out is the one flaw in the Pohl/Kornbluth Space Merchants—the narrator has presumably matured as the result of the events of the story, yet the callow fool who narrates the opening half must have that voice or there is no credible conflict-and-development.)

Still. There are two more masterpieces or near-masterpieces for the roster: The Space Merchants and Flowers for Algernon. No, science fiction has had no paucity of important material in the form. And as technology becomes more confusing, misunderstandings more complex, the failure of resolution more characteristic of the last years of this century, the first person is likely to remain a central facet of the genre, if not to literally overtake third person for those works written at the diving, at the cutting edge.

I hope to play some small part in those works and years which lie ahead, and I point out to readers faithful and unfaithful alike my sullen and stolid consistence and discipline: this afterword is itself in the first-person. Even though, more and more, ah doctor!, my own life seems to be lived in the third.

On Decadence

Self-plagiarism or appropriation not yet being listed as a crime on the ballots of any of the fifty states, a passage from a story introduction in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976):

(I am not happy with this book. It was issued with this dangerous title far too early in a career and rather than serving as a summary or a selection amounts to a compilation of the most recent, uncollected work. Some of it is all right and some of it is not but the title is presumptuous and most of the introductory matter is so callow, self-satisfied or pejorative in a loathsome and essentially unfinished manner that years and years ago I decided that if there was any real value in this work, others would have to seek it; I would have to find other markers on the tendentious little journey to oblivion. This particular story introduction however is less callow than some and serves a point)

. . . Granted that S-F and S-F writing sit upon paranoid, megalomaniacal, solipsistic visions: do these visions have literal truth or are they merely neurotic and in extreme cases psychotic? Can they be taken seriously as serious probings of possible futures . . . or adolescents at heart? Well, are they? The . . . critical spike upon which category science fiction has been impaled by literary critics (those who deign to observe us at all) has been precisely this, that we are writing grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles and thereafter are not subject to the serious questions of form and content with which realistic/surrealistic modern . . . literature can be probed.

It can and has been pointed out in reply that the question of audience motivations or psychic symbols must be less important than the question of veracity . . . that is, these plots bear the seeds of some potential and literal truth . . . but still left is that matter of literacy and technique and most science fiction falls so far from accepted standards here that the temptation to just call the whole thing neuroses is, perhaps, overwhelming. Have hardly resisted it myself.

This is the issue, the duality upon which Engines of the Night (1982) was impaled and it is of course the central conflict which energizes almost all of the fiction as well; Engines of the Night represents in retrospect an increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempt to find some fusion of these points of view. Yes, the rocket ships have a marvelously phallic and copulative appearance but this is the optimum path for space flight and we landed on the Moon. Yes, fantasies of alien invasion and torment are common psychotic or hallucinatory symptoms . . . but there are, almost by definition, aliens and the question of contact is one which must be confronted with some rigor because without a working model, a paradigm of such contact, we are as upon Vespucci's shores, awaiting the hammer of the far civilizations. Yes, dreams in three dimensions are hallucinatory or a kind of wish fulfillment but then there is the matter of the holograph. Much of this material can be objectified and all of it deals with what is perhaps the fundamental issue of the century in which technology has overtaken, how that technology, guided or unguided, directly or as unsought intention, will reshape the circumstances within which it operates, the way that we regard technology. This is serious material and it is not to be dismissed; it was dismissed by the central stream of American philosophy and political concerns for most of the decades of this century and part of the situation we face, a most explosive and dangerous situation, has come about because of that very diversion of concern. It is a central schism, a division which has always existed at the center of science fiction itself. Are we trying to objectify and mitigate a future or are we trying to sell copies of books and magazines and keep our audience—over half of which is chronologically under 18—happy and entertained? Are we trying to deal with the real consequences and patterning of technology or are we brainstorming, working out cryptograms, chess problems and table-top universe for the converted or those we are trying to convert? When we come at last quivering to the Queen of the Night on far Centaurus, address the new and stricken yearnings of our spacebound and transmogrified selves, are we really going to do it or are we considering the magazine codes and current needs of Berkley Books? These are questions which wracked the writers, the editors, the readers too; those who were cynical enough to regard the issue of patterning simply as a device of salability were perhaps better shielded, pace Garrett, pace Winston K. Marks, from the dilemma than other but none of us, even in Rocket Stories or Bouregy Books were untouched by those questions, all of us in one way or the other remained irresolute. It was a field emerging from mass market pulp entertainment which from the outset was caught by issues of the gravest kind, issues which intersected the arc of the century. Such might have been true of the mystery as well—all of those traps and puzzles, all those bearded detectives with their little gray cells, all those punctured and bloated bodies, ah that other intersection of tragedy and cryptogram subsumed so often in cleverness!—but the mystery never had the missionary impulse at its core; one reads science fiction implicitly believing that going to Venus was a good thing or at least not necessarily a bad thing, that going to Venus was a task worthiest of the highest application. That kind of ostensible valuation of murder, say, was never at the surface (and only rarely in the subtext) of the mystery.

So science fiction, that random kind of escapist tool, found itself pilloried on that arc of the century, harnessed willingly or unwillingly to a progression from the assembly line to the crematoria to the V-2 to the Apollo projects, to DNA and gene mapping, to the harvesting of cancer cells and the flyby Jupiter probes; this exercise of the cryptologist or the pulp fictioneer was tied, however unwillingly, to the remarkable and uncontrollable events and machinery which changed everything. At the time I wrote Engines of the Night I felt that it was essential that this duality, still insufficiently recognized, be examined and driven toward some kind of resolved state however equivocal, only in that way would the genre achieve its destiny. (What that "destiny" was I was not quite sure, higher rates for certain, perhaps better housing quarters, even a kind word from the Hudson Review. I was very much occupied with destiny as I turned 40; it seemed the proper place to be, the reasonable task of a forward-looking not-so-young fellow on the tremulous eve of his deterioration. Now I am far less concerned with destiny, finding it only another version of the "You've got to make some important decisions about your life" which was parental edict in my time and probably is today. "Make something of your life" becomes of course merely another value-free receptacle for a cycle of alternatives, surely Nixon and Kissinger and J.R. Haldeman made something of their lives, certainly Goering's or Himmler's relatives must have been proud. Destiny like goal-directed behavior may be far more trouble than whatever it is worth.)

That however does not seem to have happened in the interim; in the decade since Engines of the Night was published the irresolution has if anything only been exacerbated by the onrushing and increasingly complex technology balanced off by a mass market driven by seemingly inevitable late-capitalistic forces toward an ever-expanding and therefore simplistic audience and market base. Modern commercial fantasy can be interpreted as one response to the irresolution; the manner in which elves, dragons, thieves worlds and the underlords have overtaken and pushed science fiction (and in some interesting cases have been joined to it) can be considered a way of dealing with the problem simply by eluding the matter. The so-called cyberpunk movement (do not like this term; grates me almost as much as "sci-fi") is another form of response; those drugged-out, wired-up hipsters and messengers of the near-future are surrogates for a part of a generation which would find it easier to become machines than to truly apprehend them; the grunged-out world of Gibson and his imitators may be a fair approximation of times to shortly come (or times extant as lived by a crucial part of the college-age population) but they are also clear responses of those who find themselves powerless to the concept of living in a powerful and cruelly remote state . . . one can assume the wires of technology and become the state, each of us a nation in close conjunction to the boards and wires of transcendence. So the cyberpunk stories (which are already beginning to look thinly dated as the attention of the audience slips) simultaneously refract and direct response to the old Marxian alienation effect: deprived of any real connection to the consequences of our action, deprived in fact of any awareness of those consequences, we can elect in Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive to become those consequences, to utterly short-circuit the loop. Divination becomes prophecy becomes enactment becomes aftershock, all without any real necessity for crossing the boundaries, all within the closed and rocketing loop of feedback technology. If the cyberpunk movement had no other effect (and it did, consequences upon televisions, film and MTV are already notable) it made narcissism a true and functional value and managed to link that narcissism to the continuing skein of the field, find antecedents in the bulkier computer and cyborg devices of the '40s and '50s (Kuttner's terrifying Ghost in 1945 prefigures some of this) and drag the work toward a context which was found identifiable by a lot of people who were not otherwise writing science fiction. That is one form of irresolution masquerading as resolve; another would be the explosion of alternate histories, alternate worlds, alternate historical placements (Pergolesi in the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini managing the 1927 Yankees, an immoral, drowning Robert Kennedy comes to terms with Proxima Centauri) within the last half decade. The alternate history, parallel circumstance has been a stream of science fiction for a long time—Bring the Jubilee, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for heaven's sake, The Man in the High Castle, Of Time and Third Avenue, Sidewise in Time, The Other Celia and so on and on—but in the 1980s this subgenre of a subgenre multiplied wildly, the wild alternate histories of Howard Waldrop (Eisenhower as a rock performer, Elvis as a politician) became the most paradigmatic example of a form which has leached through all of the longer and shorter forms and has become the basis of a number of anthologies. From what does this "famous person story" (Ellen Datlow's term) proceed? Possibly from the modern perception of the utterly arbitrary and mechanistic nature of destiny and circumstances, possibly from late-century, post-technological futility, a sense that the scholars in their solemn pursuit of sequentiality and consequence have always misled us, possibly from an untethering from our own history. But even as the famous person story was perhaps spurred by existential angst, an utter sense of disconnection, so it serves more objective and hortatory purposes . . . for if history can be arranged and reconstructed, if time and the river can be so juggled, reversed or manipulated, what of serious refraction of modern physics, of the Heisenberg Principal, of the theories of plasma physics? The famous person story not only refracts but makes manipulable the most rarefied concepts at the far edge of science. All inadvertently, perhaps, but most of the right and wrong guesses alike in the 1940s Astounding were similarly inadvertent.

Certainly, that irresolution is at the heart of science fiction. (So the title essay in Engines of the Night at last reluctantly concluded.) But must it lurk ungainly and constant at the heart of the writer, must it knife and probe the far edges toward the dawn: is there, as Ruthven muttered looking at his foreign editions at 4 a.m., wheeling his dusty car towards the state border, no peace? Is this it forever, this constancy, this inconstancy? Oh the murmurous jungle of the heart; the unknown tangle of motive, the lunge and clot of ancient blood.

Cliftonized

Here is Mark Clifton in 1952, writing passionate letters to Judith Merril in which science fiction—he perceives—is the necessary vehicle for transcendence, a means of selling humanism to the vast and shapeless masses so that they will reach a kind of spiritual holy place. Certainly, humanity is a fairly pathetic specimen but this new literature—a literature so new that it has neither lexicon nor critical formulation—will change in a generation or two the fundamental nature of society and its consequences.

And here is Mark Clifton in 1957, the Hugo has come and gone and so has his patience and most remnants of his health; he is writing Judith Merril once again and this time it is about the fen, that is what he calls them, "the fen . . . those disgusting, gullible creatures who ran after this person at the LASFS meeting as if he were some kind of god . . . oh, Judith, I thought that so much could be asked of them and it turns out that all they want are follies and amusements," Here is Jim Baen on Freund's Pacifica radio program, Hour of the Wolf, in the early morning hours in March, 1975, the new editor of Galaxy, Worlds of If having been dropped by the publishers right down the old abyss, is saying, "Actually, I'd rather not gossip about science fiction, I'd talk instead about the things science fiction is about—the important, scientific stuff, you know." And here is Baen not an hour later, "But I don't know if I should say any more about the killing of Worlds of If. My wicked masters may be listening. Meet me at Lunacon and I'll tell you more about it then." Why then, I wondered, then and now, looking through the Clifton correspondence with Martin Greenberg so many years ago or listening to Hour of the Wolf years before that . . . why do people involved in science fiction start out, most of them, thinking about time travel and cosmology, black holes and the cosmic sink, the anarchy of the dinosaurs or the origin of the asteroid belt . . . and soon enough begin to fixate upon affairs, editors, word rates, old betrayals, convention scandals, editorial relations, the history of Big Name Fans, the outlines of Courtney's Boat and the Wollheim-Futurian split in the late 1930s? People may—at least some of them the serious people like you and me—start with the content of the literature itself, its convexity and resource but ultimately it is not science fiction with which the writers editors, fans, or even the readers grapple. It is the sociology, the network, the community or the appurtenances of science fiction. We dreamed of Black Holes, the romanticist might say, and you gave us Gilda, the Whore of Mensa. We strove for an explanation of the Big Bang and we found the Big Bang, all right, and several little ones at the legendary World Con of 195-. And so on and on, toss the professionals into a SFWA meeting and they will talk about word rates and the abomination of publishers, toss the professionals and fans into a single room and they will discuss—and sometimes commit—plunder.

Truly, the last place one would seek the true matter and content of science fiction would be a SFWA meeting or a convention. Pete Hamill had an essay in the New York Post in 1974, he had shown up at something called Empiri con for a few hours in October and went away talking about all those fine young and old people "who still paused outside the hotel to look up at the stars." Dean Koontz and I giggled about that. "Look up at the stars," Dean said, "they're looking up to see if fans are flashing from the fifteenth floor."

Why is this? Like most of the nonfiction which is linear (fiction is a different thing, it is impacted and tends to emerge sub-articulately and all at once if at all), this essay wrote itself out partway as I strolled and romped the encroaching streets of the pleasingly and increasingly naked city in early heat in June: one could make parallels of a kind between science fiction and Judaism. Temple membership, the Temple Brotherhood, that kind of thing. You join Secret Synagogue in Suburbland in the early seventies or at least I did in the wistful and vagrant hope that one might be able to come to terms with Jonah, Zephaniah, Talmud, Midrash, the legends of the 36 Just or the significance of secularization in an age when the diaspora (which had been the heart of Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple) was becoming disreputable in the light of Zionism and the Israeli laws of return. One showed up at Secret Synagogue eager or at least willing to grapple with issues of this nature and was right away taken up by the scandal of the religious school run by an incompetent, the scandal of the vituperative and homosexual-hating Rabbi, the taunting Rabbi who talked mockingly of assimilationist Jews from the podium while at the same time maneuvering his salary and expense account demands through the board. One became bemused by the quarrels amongst the laity of the Brotherhood, the succession of incompetent cantors, the various miseries associated with the building fund or the power struggles amongst the Presidency. Eventually one succumbed to the realization that all else was illusion, the fires of the temple breathed the pure screed. As T.S. Eliot put it, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life." This temple would be the last place a thinking or an unthinking Jew would want to approach in the era of the harassed and broken diaspora.

That was the essay as it unreeled and hence the conclusions: science fiction and Judaism. One might have, at least some of us, at one time been occupied with the pure writ, ultimately however it came to costume parties, the world masquerade and the depredations of publishers. Why this confluence? Could it be that neither science fiction nor Judaism had ever achieved a satisfactory definition? Could it be then that in the consequences of a lack of definition, the worldly would eventually flood in to occupy what the spirit could not? Is Judaism a sect, a religion, a cultural group, a way of life, a series of assumptions? Is "Jew" to be defined as that which an anti-Semite would hate? Can the son of one Jewish parent be a Jew? Must the decision turn upon the sex of the parent? Similarly, then, what is science fiction? (No one really knows; no one can agree. Fair enough to say that if it's published in a science fiction magazine it is science fiction unless it's fantasy of course but if it isn't it might be science fiction as well. Absence of proof is not proof of absence as the wise Charles Platt has pointed out.) If we cannot achieve, sixty-six years after Gernsback exercised his first option, any satisfactory definition of the material, then how can we stave the invasion of the fan contingent, the incursion of the costumed and the adulterous?

Like the ten lost tribes of Israel (who are variously claimed as American Indians, Indians, blacks, Muslims, Chinese, or Jews), the lost tribes of science fiction will wander on the desert, complaining about the sandstorms and the insulting digestion of camels, unable in their lack of clear origin, destination or affinity, to be occupied by their history. Or so the column unreeled along with various strands of less metaphysical woe and contemplation on the streets of the city which never sleeps, but to no clear conclusion. What then? Define Judaism so that we can restore the demolished temple? Find a consensus Jewry so that a true brotherhood may reign? Nail down some working definition of science fiction in the purposes of sercon fandom? Anywhere one turned, the collapse to banality. One can—I think that this is a summary statement—read this stuff or one can live it and sometimes one can do both but it is too much to ask for any kind of fusion. Thinking of science, we found the fiction. Becoming, as always, what we beheld.

My friend X, mentor and advisor of many years' standing and responsible for almost everything I have learned since I finished Engines of the Night almost a dozen years ago now (which is to say that thanks to the influence of X and almost never before, I have become practical and sensible) has suggested that it is time, perhaps, that I become more specific. "I mean, all this stuff you're writing about sounds very interesting, but you should get down to cases, make some definite judgments. It's time for that, don't you think?"

Well, I don't know if I really think at all, but the point is perhaps well taken and so, here are some specifics. (I had thought that the essays on Tiptree and Asimov were targeted enough but it takes no great wisdom to point out that writing about the dead not only has produced the greatest music in the Western repertoire, but it is also excitingly safe.) If publisher, magazine, and this writer last a while, I propose that there will be more:

1) Patricia Cadigan's "Dispatches from the Revolution," a novelette published in Asimov's Magazine in 1991 and in the Mike Resnick edited Alternate Presidents in January, 1992, is probably the best story to have appeared within the confines of our field in many, many years: Cadigan's visibility, praise and recognition are significantly associated with her perceived alliance to Gibson, Sterling, et. al. but I know the secret which perhaps even she does not; she is a realist and humanist who knows more than a few tricks, that is all, and as her work moves from implants and codifying devices toward simpler and more jangling terrors it will continue to evolve. "Dispatches from the Revolution" is probably the best story about the metaphysics of the 1960s in this country to date.

2) Karen Joy Fowler is an extraordinary writer, better in the short story than the novel (although Sarah Canary, an historical novel has, as they say, lots of promise and a genuine comic vision) who is so far ahead of most of the rest of us that she is still awaiting a consensus and a critical lexicon which will be able to come to terms with her work. Just as Beethoven's last quartets were literally indescribable at the time they were first performed (mid-1820s), just as Moby Dick sank in the same manner as most of Ahab's crew when first published, so Fowler's short stories, although praised and anthologized, have not been fully encountered because they are at such a distance from evolved criticism. I would envision her work prevailing but hope that this is not Emily Dickinson's way of prevailing which I discuss.

3) This period in science fiction is reminiscent of the 1950s in one significant way: we have any number of crack short story writers, really brilliant, first-rate short story and novelette writers who either cannot do novels at all or can barely approach even their weaker short work in novel form. The strange inability of almost all the acknowledged first-rank science fiction writers of four decades ago to bring their novels anywhere to the standard of their best short stories is well known and generally accepted; the only exceptions were Alfred Bester, Phil Dick, and (perhaps) Pohl & Kornbluth collaboratively (but never individually). The gap between the novels and short stories of many of these writers was appalling and many of them (William Tenn notably, his first novel appeared in 1968, years and years after he had otherwise stopped writing and was virtually the last work he published) did not attempt or at least sell novels at all. The gap is not as great nor the situation as dramatic as it was then, but the overall shape of circumstances is the same.

It wasn't true of the sixties and seventies, in the early eighties many writers such as Gibson were making their reputation as novelists and doing short stories only incidentally. It seems to be true now and the reasons for this could be explored at length but I don't think that such discussion would be valid. It's a historical anomaly, a chance-game, a quirk of the times, that's all, and there will soon enough be strong novelists and indifferent short story writers again. And many of the present short story writers may grasp at length the exigencies of the novel. But it has left us for the moment in a rather perilous condition: fantasy continues to skew the field and one of the reasons is that there has been little strong science fiction to contravene.

4) In the least graceful years of recent history 1983 and 1984, say, I would go around mumbling that the whole cyberpunk thing was a scam; old fellas like me knew the real truth, the kids were just recycling old stuff for fun and profit for an ignorant young audience. Actually, Walter Miller, Jr., in "Izzard and the Membrane" (ASF, 5/51) with its people converted into impulses in the computer and running around inside that machine, their impulses and passions turned into binary twitches, were the computer cowboys of Gibson's holograph. Nothing, nothing new. Everything old was new again. First fandom forever. But I no longer believe this and raise this only as a pennant of fallibility; my judgments should be questioned and never are so passionately as by your woe-bedraggled but ever hopeful correspondent.

Over the Waves

I read the collected proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (Advent; 12/92) and fell into a thin and riotous doze; in that unhappy slumber I dreamed that it was the 1950s again and here I was boxed within them, not the rather feckless youth I had been but a science fiction writer, contemporary of Knight and Blish and Sheckley and Gold, high and low priests of the Reconstruction, going to the parties in Stuyvesant Town, writing letters to my peers, very few of whom answered, working away on resculpting the face of the form so that it would lead us all through this post-technological, repressed, form-is-the-opposite-of-function era we called the present time toward some glittering and transcendent millennium. Crusaders we were in the fifties, we science fiction writers, and even though the pay was difficult and the outcome random we felt ourselves to be in the service of some larger if not final purpose. Oh, how we grumbled under the strictures of editorial fiat, ah how we resented the unbelieving and retrograde litterateurs who regarded us as a sub-species! But we were comforted by our design, by the surface of our work, by the assurance of our purposes, by the whispers of Judith Merril who reminded us that the world, all of the world was science fiction and would come to our tangled and sullen land with gifts and praise, by the songs and dances of Anthony Boucher and his film and theater reviewer, Arthur Jean Cox, who knew that all of it, not just the pieces of earth which Merril regarded, was science fiction. Lil Abner was a study of genetics, the Army McCarthy hearings were a Fred Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth serial on the Galloots and the Gradarians struggling in Bubble Land for advanced credits or a new monetary system. All was pale and yet fierce in this reconstructed era and somewhere on its borders, neither quite a science fiction writer (I had too much trouble with the obdurate and ideology-driven editors to sell the good magazines, too much contempt for Palmer or even Larry Shaw to be able to sell the lesser magazines, too little patience to rewrite for Gold and Campbell, too much arrogance to believe that my real place was with Raymond Scott; I was barely able to manage three or four sales a year and my was I bitter!) nor quite a distant observer (I took all of this personally and felt great implication in the struggles to raise standard, much envy for the parties in Stuyvesant Town to which I was never invited, much fear of my colleagues in the English department who if they found out my true ambitions and sullen exercises would make sure that I never received tenure) I hung around like a freelance photographer, like some Weejee of the spirit, taking little pictures and impressionistic recursions from what I could glimpse of the tumult. Which sometimes looked to me like a Breughel landscape and at others something like Prokofiev's Field of the Dead to which the soprano in Alexander Nevsky comes without hilarity.

I dreamed that it was the fifties and that, characteristically, I was neither there nor not-there but stuck in this or that frieze of ambivalent posture watching all of it unravel before me, heading toward the great newsstand crackup of 1958 and the disastrous collapse of markets which by 1959 had put not only the writers but the genre itself out of business; I dreamed that I was there when Cogswell cranked up the English department mimeo at Ball State University and sent out the first of his broadsheets, asking for commentary and enough of a monetary contribution to keep the mimeograph in ink and stencils for another issue. "The only reason you're starting all of this now," I said to Cogswell who at that time was a fetching 41, not wearing the Brigadier's uniform which he affected at conventions but an assistant professor's tweed with white buck shoes, "is that the American News Company pulled the plug and you don't think that you have any markets left so you've decided to become a commentator and make historians of the others. If you felt the thing wasn't dead you wouldn't get near this. The trouble is," I added, with a winning smile, "the only factor which seems to energize genre writers is the imminence of their genre's death, then they turn into philosophers, decide that they have nothing to lose any more and, letting out all of their resentment in small puffs and intimations of defeat which can fill the hotel rooms or the barrooms with the gaseous sounds of their disgust, alcohol, and imminence, make philosophers of us all, or haven't you noticed?" and this little onslaught of temper or introspection did not, I dreamed, so much infuriate Cogswell as it bemused him, caused his gaze to turn inward as faster and faster he cranked the mimeograph for the initial issue of PITFCS which in continuous run would last only a few years but which seemed to have that unusual capacity—latecomer to the demise of the genre, I had a standard of comparison a decade or two later—shared with Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review or Psychotic to bring out absolutely the worst in all of its correspondents; grand masters and eminences, voyeurs and critics alike would turn into babble fools in Geis's merciless exposure and so PITFCS, lurching through the chronology and the three thousand word letters of people far less bemused and even angrier than Cogswell, turned science fiction writers to and beyond themselves in ways which would have been provocative if they had not, at the center, been so calculated and so immersed now in the self-loathing which (one could come to understand) could masquerade as loathing.

But that dialogue with Cogswell was not to continue; he was too busy with his mimeograph and with his conception of a science fiction which would be best summed by the word more: more drink, more conventions, more women (who were increasingly manifest in that tender generation), more humiliation, more magazines, more rocketships, more temerity, more inflamed discussion and the self-loathing disguised as loathing and I was busy as well in this dream with what seemed quite suddenly to be an agenda: I wanted to talk to every science fiction writer of some prominence. Kuttner and Kornbluth were unavailable to me; they had died in 1958, synchronous with the newsstand disasters and a year before PITFCS, and it is doubtful that they would have wanted to get into discussion with someone as simultaneously frivolous and angry as myself; Budrys was in a sulk—it was too late, he wanted me to know, to take any kind of interest; the time to talk with him was during the period in which he had been forming his conception of a politicized science fiction which would hide diatribe within the corpus of his alienated protagonists. Marion Zimmer Bradley did not want to speak with me; she felt that my interest was both morbid and feigned, an odd concatenation of qualities; and Zenna Henderson and Mildred Clingerman were in various kinds of career crisis and could not be reached. My plan, having been dismissed by Cogswell, was to go into the world and for spite engage all of his contributors (and some who would not deal with him) in dialogue even more penetrating or self-revealing than what they had put into his magazine but this inclusivity proved early enough to be impossible; as all who engage in wanderjahr or sexual activities must learn early or late I had to make the particular do the work of the general, had to narrow the focus so that by implication I could find an enlarged focus and so, like my sullen Ruthven in a story which I was not to write for more than twenty years (and in fact in this new dream I was not a writer at all but a kind of conduit, a camera as the late John van Druten had pointed out, an uninflected observer of circumstance and persons on whom in some overarching way I had no opinion at all) I found myself in some kind of reconverted industrial area in Redondo Beach, California, discursing science fiction and affairs of the heart with that heart attack victim, Mark Clifton, who had watched his reputation and audience implode in the late fifties and who, only a few years from his death at fifty-seven, was neither glad to see me nor cheered by the landscape of Redondo Beach which he found a poor memorial to the worst instincts of the modern, classless man, seeking some kind of identity or appurtenance in a world without history. Because I thought it was a medium for social change, Mark Clifton said, because I thought perhaps it was the only medium for social change that the politicians or the bureaucrats hadn't seized or polluted, that it was possible to sneak through the kind of attitude or ideology that might actually change people, that is if you hid it inside a plot or some kind of humor.

What did I know? Mark Clifton said after the tiniest of pauses, his postcardiac's eyes flicking through time and space with that clear perception of certain cohesive forces which at any moment could vault him straight out of his skin and into something which only in his less tense moments could he think of as "eternity," I was forty-six years old, I had read a little of it, spent most of my time in industrial psychology trying to make new men out of old men who could not bear to understand their situation, who, if they had truly understood what the corporation had done to them would have lit the fires. It was my job to keep them suppressed, to fight that epiphany, to lead them to some kind of personal adjustments rather than realizing that the system itself was what had driven them into snarling corners of themselves; of course that was a rotten thing to do, why do you think I got a heart attack so young, and I thought that writing science fiction would be a good way to redress the balance as we said in our corporate reports, set people straight, set them to concentrate upon the system's corruption rather than their own inadequacies. Well, it seemed like a reasonable idea.

It all seemed like a reasonable idea, Mark Clifton said. I had not said anything at all during this monologue, latter knowledge having deserted me (or perhaps had not come to visit), the microphone extended, the spools of the old tape recorders quite a modern thing in the early sixties turning slowly and Mark Clifton looking out at the California sunset, his eyes glimmering now with hurt or it might have only been refracted sun, but how was I to know what it was really like? I had only seen it from the outside you know, reading those magazines, then I was publishing these stories and I still didn't know but when I won that Hugo, when I started going to conventions beginning with Cleveland in 1955 when I met Judith for all the good it does us, when I really began to understand what it was like it was too late, I was far gone and my work such as it is had been folded into millions of magazines consigned like Lenin's enemies to the dustbin of history; it had all been put down some kind of rathole or to use the rhetoric of the time some kind of warp drive at two and three cents a word and what had I been given? first fandom, second fandom, secret masters of fandom, grand masters of fandom, word rates, editors, masquerades, costume balls, mimeographs, Francis T. Laney, Jr., Forrest J. Ackerman, John Campbell, Horace Gold, all of them the same, all of it part of a machinery meant to turn my purposes into next month's issue, last year's mimeograph and to the rest of them which meant all of the world except for science fiction itself it was just a bunch of dumb stuff for kids, something like comics but perhaps not quite as damaging according to Dr. Wertham. But it was pretty late to learn that and too late to do anything about it, Mark Clifton said and then became silent as the two of us watched the sun slowly ink its dazzle like a hectograph into the western sky, then plunge like an APA mailing into the extinction of the sea. In the dream I waited for Mark Clifton to say more, surely if I were to only attend, wait him out, he would emerge with some aphorism, some kind of summary of his life and his period which would approach in wisdom the statements in his letters that "Galaxy was a magazine edited by a man who fears and hates science" or "Boucher and his publication emit a stink of wine and decadence" but those insights, it seemed, had all been part of an earlier, a more patient or at least a less resigned Clifton. As was the case with so many of us, knowledge had become disillusion, was in fact synonymous with disillusion and disillusion had led to silence and so, after a while, I put away the equipment and left Clifton.

In the way that dreams often manifest, perception of chronology seemed to change; instead of moving slowly through the cluttered offices at Ball State University or the hideous, multicolored playroom in which Clifton had seemingly elected to spend his post-Astounding years I now moved with speed and force, the speed and force of a bullet or perhaps a group of science fiction writers early in the morning at a convention when in search of alcohol or some kind of closure; here I was addressing a meeting of First Fandom at the world convention in Pittsburgh in 1962. "You cannot go on this way," I said to them, "you cannot make it a private place for private affairs or reference; this will lead to decadence and lunacy and when Star Trek, when Star Wars come along in just a little while now they will take it all away from you"; here I am addressing the Cleveland world convention in 1966 in those few empty moments before the Hugo ceremonies, (Isaac Asimov will be anointed author of world's best series) before the premiere of Star Trek. "It's already happened to you," I am saying to a yawning, scattered audience as secret masters pull down the hotel walls and reveal a larger space, "Lord of the Rings was published last year and before any of you have come to understand what has happened, the imitators and the elves and dwarves are going to wipe you out, leaving you competing with one another to see who will be the last to leave the room"; here I am at a variety of meetings or academic conferences which occur over a period of years or perhaps it is months which I mean to say. In some of them I am pleading, in others ranting, in a few of them I am making indecent sexual proposals or confessions but in all of them I am brandishing the latest issue of PITFCS available to me, dragged up the line and sequestered for just this moment, "Here it is," I am shouting, "here it is, an attempt to define what is going on here and the game was already over, by the time you begin to notice what you are doing or want to shape it you've already stopped doing it" and at last I am dragged from that dream or the dream taken from me, it is 1994 or whatever the hell it is and PITFCS, sprouted or doubted into the SFWA has been gone for decades, Cogswell is dead, Bretnor is dead, Clifton is dead, Merril is in Canada, Marion Zimmer Bradley is a queen of darkness and light and I am still haplessly and helplessly, no less than Ruthven or my miserable lesser principals, trying to make some sense of it. There is no sense of it. I dream that I take this declaration in its luminescence and squalor to my wife and say, "Here, here, you make something of this" and in the sacristy and suddenness of the later quiet I see borne back from her all that was mine to give, then take, then lose, then know in the sheer and sudden darkness of the counting room.

"It means something but I'm not sure what," I dream she says. "Maybe you can't say what it means."

"You've defined science fiction," I say. Or dream I say. And awaken or dive into further light; the record on this—as so much else, ah doctor!—remains unclear.

Thus Our Words Unspoken

It was always a taboo-laden category, a genre with its little mines and traps laid from end to end, the field of science fiction a difficult and potentially disastrous campaign for point man and platoon. Under the circumstances, the achievements of the editors and writers were remarkable; there were the magazine codes with which to contend from the beginning, and then Fred Wertham's assault upon the comics (Wertham the professor-psychologist who testified frequently to Congress) which brought about the Comics Code. This had implications for all kinds of mass-market fiction perceived as appealing to a significantly juvenile audience. Beyond this were the editorial whims, conscious perversities and demands; John W. Campbell would not permit aliens to be smarter than humans or allow any questioning of capitalism or virginity into Astounding; Horace L. Gold took out all sexual references which he could find (sometimes, as in Asimov's 1951 "Hostess," the writers either outsmarted or dared him) and was fond of saying in rejection notices that "I run a family magazine here," even though the pictures of Vicki, the French model on the back cover of the early 1951 issues of Galaxy, had caused vast expressions of horror from mothers of science-fiction-reading boys everywhere.

Then there is the background of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" as recalled by Robert P. Mills. In 1958 Mills and Keyes occasionally took the same train from Grand Central to the northern suburbs, and when Mills was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he asked Keyes if he would write a story. "Well, I have this story," Keyes said. "It's about this imbecile who becomes a volunteer for research into raising human intelligence and becomes a genius but then the experiment fails and he becomes an imbecile again. It's a parable of knowledge, you see."

Mills said, "That sounds interesting; let me take a look at it." So Keyes took the story out of a bottom desk drawer and gave it to Mills, and Mills said on the next shared train home, "I think you've really got something there, but I have a few suggestions."

Keyes broke into tears and seized Mills by the lapels. "Please," he said, "oh please, please don't tell me that I have to drop the part where Charlie becomes an imbecile again. Don't tell me that I have to have a happy ending and he stays a genius."

"Well, no," Mills said, "I wasn't thinking of that at all. I did think that maybe—"

"Because," Keyes said emotionally, still clutching Mills, "that's what Horace wanted. Horace said he would buy it for Galaxy only if Charlie didn't become stupid again, that he couldn't publish such a depressing story and I can't, I simply can't make myself do that—"

"Oh, no," Mills said hurriedly and went on to say that his suggestions had to do with a subplot in which maybe Charlie had a girl teacher and he and the teacher kind of fell in love after Charlie got smart. Keyes said that he certainly could understand that something like this would improve the story and in due course it was revised and published and the rest you know about.

But this is, to get back to the central and originating point here, a genre so laden with constraints, demands and prejudices of a historical nature that it is very difficult to believe that, in this present era or beyond, science fiction is not still laden and will not continue to be laden with traps, that insistent as editors are upon their liberation from those constraints, as careless as the writers might say they are of the need to slant or control their work, these problems and limitations remain to control limits and to incite within writers and editors alike that self-censor, which, it has been pointed out, is the most effective censor of all since it can cut off exposure not upon completion but upon inception; those flowers not blushing unseen in the desert air and winds and gravity of editorial response but simply not produced at all.

At a panel discussion at the undistinguished convention sponsored in 1989 by Columbia University's science fiction club, the issue was raised and Ellen Datlow of Omni said, "It's not like that any more; there are no taboos left."

Which, I said, was patently ridiculous. "Of course there are taboos," I said. "In fact, I can come up with ten story ideas in the next fifteen minutes that I know neither you nor any science fiction editor past or present will possibly consider on the basis of their content alone."

"Well," she said after a very long pause (not as long as Jack Benny's pause in that famous radio encounter with the thief in the back alley who said, "Your money or your life"*), "there are some taboos left."

Which there surely are. Here in 1992, in the free market, 66 years after the origin of genre science fiction, 47 years after the effective use of the atom bomb on people, one year short of the 40th anniversary of Playboy, and 19 years after the conclusion of our role in the festivities in Vietnam, are some story premises, conceptions or progressions which could not possibly be sold, regardless of the skill, the fame, the propinquity or the disingenuousness of the writer:

1) XENOPHOBIA. Fear and hatred of the alien being or terrain is an important survival trait; it has persisted in humanity throughout all of the millennia in the forms of prejudice, bigotry, nativism, jingoism, hatred of foreigners or persecution of the immigrant because ultimately it is a part of a species survival mechanism.

If the aliens come or if we meet them somewhere on the other side of the Centauris, they are likely to be malevolent, they will be at least as interested in oppressing us as in getting along; certainly in all the myriad possibilities of human-alien encounter there will be alien details whose plans are sheerly destructive. Under those circumstances, obviously, xenophobia will be a mechanism of survival and protection, and to breed xenophobia out of humanity by genetic manipulation or (more likely) through acculturation may be a form of species suicide. One can envision a time not too far from now or perhaps very far from now in which xenophobia and all of its manifestations will have become so repellent and shameful as to have virtually disappeared; then with alien contact either inaugurated or imminent, it may occur—perhaps before a disaster, perhaps only after—that xenophobia has gotten a bad press for all of the generations and that any hope for species survival and proper engagement outside our own planet may depend upon inculcating within the present and future generations of travelers (or those on Earth if the alien contact occurs here) all of those traits which the "progressive" elements have shown us are hateful, inhumane, anti-life or utterly destructive. Schools of bigotry? Practice lynchings of simulated aliens? Search for aliens or alien traits which may be particularly dangerous, a modus operandi for identifying difference and the propitiation of malice?

In a series of scenarios which could develop—probably best at novel length but certainly workable within the story—the achievement of xenophobic hatred through the devices of programmed bigotry (and the identification through psychological depth testing and social observation) might assume genuine urgency, might be linked with the ability of humanity to survive against aliens whose xenophobia has not been bred or acculturated in them, and the central figure in such a narrative would be one who is either educated to understand xenophobia as a necessary trait or who already knows this and must persuade the others.

There is some of this, masked, in the 1940s Astounding school of science fiction, manifest in writers such as Hubbard and Heinlein. These stories, however, elide the issue; they do not address xenophobic loathing of aliens as linked directly to (and predicted by) nativism, bigotry or prejudice on the part of the sturdy space captains and interstellar scouts who must fight bureaucrats as well as marauding aliens. A straightforward, acknowledged acceptance of these qualities as properly selecting the most sympathetic and alert character does not exist in that or any other kind of science fiction.

2) BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE. Or, as Freud said, "Biology is destiny." Women are constructed to bear and nurture infants; men and women are biologically designed to have sexual relations as a condition of procreation; reduced sexual attractiveness is a discouragement to perpetuation of the unattractive characteristics. Disease is a form of natural selection; lack of intelligence, left to its own devices, will select out stupidity as a characteristic of the race. To the degree that individuals or cultures wander from that biological imperative, deny the simple truth of Freud's dictum, they are risking the fury of natural selection and cultural breakdown,

To countenance forms of sexuality other than those which are procreation-driven, to deny the fundamental childbearing and nurturing responsibilities of women, to artificially maintain or subsidize an underclass incapable of surviving on its own—to incorporate this flaunting of the natural law, the biological imperative in the mores of a culture, is to seal, in the long run if not the short, the destruction of that culture and perhaps humanity itself.

What Freud called "civilization and its discontents" can be reviewed, in terms of all post-industrial politics, sociology and social systems as an inexorable denial of this biological imperative, granting sanction to roles and behavior which were never intended by the slow evolution of the species up to that point of post-industrialization.

In sum, then, all politics and social theory in the past few centuries has represented—in the name of "liberalism" or "expanding roles" or "revolution of possibilities"—as granting artificial sanction to that which of itself could never have survived, the propitiation of a population and behavioral roles which in the Hobbsian natural state or the Freudian archetype could never have evolved. Whether this is true or not, whether "evolution" is indeed an evolving of possibility and patterns, or whether it is a process which has only shifted circumstances further from true adaptation, certainly composes an interesting, even central series of questions; they are not, however, questions that can possibly be investigated within the framework of modern science fiction. (They are, not to isolate our genre, questions which in all probability can be articulated in no form of literature or academic explorations, for that matter, but it is necessarily science fiction itself to which this discussion must be limited.)

Stories such as "The Women Men Don't See" or "Houston Houston Do You Read?" or "When It Changed" can explore and question with some savagery the viability of certain common cultural assumptions, but those writers and those who have come after have not been able to explore—beyond the anger which the persistence of biology as destiny has caused—why none of the experiments with alternate systems or an ideology not tied intrinsically to biology have ever, or at least to this historical point, been successful.

3) RAPE AS THE PERPETUATION OF BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS WHICH COULD NOT OTHERWISE CARRY FORTH. This one I have actually seen in print; a professor of psychology from a southwestern university was able to obtain a grant of about $100,000 to study rape as a kind of cultural imperative for aggressive, brutal, unattractive males who otherwise might not be able to perpetuate themselves with socially desirable, upscale women. He produced a dull, portentous monograph.

If some of the traits of the rapist might, in the Hobbsian natural state, be construed as having value—will, self-determination, the primacy of demand, that certain fixity of purpose which conventional courtship behavior must often deny—then these are values which can perhaps only be perpetuated by acts which the culture regards as violent, despicable and utterly unacceptable.

All of this being the case, however, and aggressive rape having been condemned in all cultures for such an extended period of time . . . why, nonetheless, does rape persist? Has it perhaps even increased through the decades? One could theorize, in the kind of science-fiction story which will never be published, that a post-industrialized, increasingly stratified and compartmentalized society sets up barriers between classes which restrict social mobility, make it even less likely that wildly disparate gene stocks can meet.

If—going back to the issue of biological imperative—hybridization and disparate gene stocks may be viewed as important to the race (remember that "hybrid vigor" of which the high school biology or college genetics texts would give examples?), then is not rape—the attempt through male violence to achieve disparate conjoinment that the stratification and compartmentalization of society would otherwise make impossible—a biologically justifiable act? (If any act of forced or non-consensual intercourse can be defined as rape, how much of human history and its progeny can be seen as its product?)

I don't like any of these ideas much. It is perhaps unfortunate but nonetheless inescapable: I have to put a disclaimer on the record here. I don't like xenophobia or its manifestations in the life I lead; I don't think that destiny is completely based upon biology (because if it was most of us would be dead); and as the father of daughters I find rape even more horrifying than I would if I were the father of sons or no father at all, and I would find it plenty horrifying in those cases as well.

But all of these, I submit, are issues of some real and practical concern; a literature which among many other things proposes to be an instrument of social inquiry should be able to deal with these issues, should not face their prime facie exclusion. But these are not stories that are going to come to your local science fiction or book publisher anytime soon, nor will the comedies of Nazism or the merry, satirical investigations of the reading of science fiction or fantasy literature as surrogates for genuine social role-playing.

Eugene McCarthy said many years ago about campaigning for the Presidency, "Unfortunately, wanting the job really disqualifies you for it," and any strident insistence upon the right of writers and editors to investigate these issues will to the exact degree of its insistence finish one off within the commercial category with prematurity and finesse. Flowers blushingly all unseen: thus our words unspoken.

A Formal Feeling Comes

After great pain,

a formal feeling comes.

—Emily Dickinson

Genre. Where would we science fictioneers, mysterists and romanticists be without it, and yet at what price the sheltering storm? "Seeking to give this context, science fiction denies us context," my collaboratrice, the sullen and inestimable Kathe Koja says, and so it does.

In order to sell Camp Concentration as science fiction—and he had no other place to commission it or send it in the 1960s—Thomas Disch turned the virus which sharpened and rotted its narrator's brain into a reversible and controllable phenomenon.

In order to make Quicksand a viable commodity for the Doubleday science fiction editor who paid for it, John Brunner was compelled to drain the ambiguity from the mysterious mental patient treated by his dark and ferocious psychiatrist in the institution and make her an alien. Brunner's ambiguous set of theatrical players in his contemporaneous novel The Productions of Time (1967) were eventually defined for NAL's science Scion editor as aliens who, under their alien director, were seeking to take over our planet under the cloak of repertory theatre. Or something like that.

"It is so science fiction!" Harlan Ellison shouted at Robert Hoskins, the Lancer editor of the Infinity original anthologies when Hoskins said that "Pennies on a Dead Man's Eyes" was a good story but not science fiction. "The guy's an alien! He's an alien!" (Didn't sell with Hoskins, who rejected it anyway. Ejler Jakobssen published it in Galaxy.)

The presence of the work within the context of science fiction forces presupposition upon the audience: what is the thing doing here unless it is fantastic or extrapolative? Slack-jawed, in search of ever newer wonders, the science fiction reader (don't blame me for this characterization, take it up with the James Blish estate; that is how he described his audience in "Issue at Hand") awaits the expected wonders in the story before him; if the eventual explanation does not push or place the story within the expected definition of the genre, the story—virtually by definition—will not be in Stirring Wonder Tales or Beta Stories #26, and the writer has been deprived, because of this necessity of that range of ambivalence, possibility or implication which can be (although all too often is not) part of the full range of technical possibility allowed by the writing of fiction.

This imposed necessity wrecked more of Alice Sheldon's work, I think, than we can ever know. Sheldon, one of the most powerful, subtle American writers of her time, wrote a great deal of remarkable science fiction but she also wrote a good many short stories—"The Women Men Don't See," "Morality Meat," even "The Screwfly Solution"—which bear the imposed gimmicks and contrived extrapolative resolutions of a writer conscious of her markets and determined to sell there.

The strictures did Joanna Russ no particular good in The Female Man or its adumbrating "When It Changed"; the alienness of the backgrounds lowered the implication of the story.

In the later Orbit anthologies, of which there were twenty-one, Damon Knight did explore the limits and the possibilities, published a few stories which involved no extrapolative or technologically altered material at all, but this series of anthologies, in many ways an investigation of the ways in which expectations could be manipulated or deliberately tricked, lost sales, interest and any centrality through the last half of its issues and disappeared without attracting particular notice or regrets.

I think of Reginald Bretnor's "The Doorstop," a mysterious, ambiguous story (Astounding, November 1956; Merril's Year's Best in 1967 and reprinted in the 1956 edition of the Greenberg/Asimov retrospective best of the year anthologies for DAW) in which an unhappy, yearning, lost scientist deep in middle age discovers an artifact in his back yard strangely lit from within and possibly of alien origin. He turns it into the chemists and physicists for evaluation and finds that this thing which he calls "the doorstop" reawakens the vulnerability and depth of feeling which he had for science and for all human possibility so many years ago; the alienness of this artifact, perhaps a mysterious beacon from the stars, acquaints him with his own sense of loss and slow reawakening. If this story were not in a science fiction magazine, it would have retained its tension and resonance until the end and perhaps beyond: is the thing indeed alien and does it beckon a way to the things beyond the stars? Or does this strange object function only as a means of mocking the scientist's fallen condition and his own gullibility and terrible sense of loss? It is a story which could have gone either way or could have backed from clear explanation, but the reader of Astounding Science Fiction or Year's Best Science Fiction knows that there will have to be closure, and that closure will make explicit the alien origin of the artifact (in this case it is a signal device and rapid corrosion indicates that the aliens will be returning very soon) and the relative objectivity of the scientist's response.

This is a subtle story by a good writer (Bretnor never really got his due, but then again very few writers get what they deserve unless they get more than they deserve; and the issue of misjudgement, the follies of underestimation no longer interest me as they did a decade or two ago and perhaps they do not interest me at all) and its effects are carefully calculated but they are wasted; the provenance of the story takes away all sense of mystery, just as the fact that Tiptree's "Beam Us Home" appeared in a science fiction magazine ensures that the protagonist is an astronaut wrecked in orbit, dying, and not the kid who watched Star Trek become as child or adult utterly dislocated from reality. Again, the provenance of the story has managed to deny the central effect which it might have sought.

This is clearly a problem; it is why people like Leslie Fiedler or John Updike, Edmund Wilson or Anatole Broyard have always greeted with contempt and hollow laughter the more florid assertions of science fiction writers and readers that this is the true quill, the central literature of the age, the stuff of the post-technological era and the true myths of our golden and engineering age. Yes and no, as the literary agent said; yes in that science fiction by definition and history is better able than any other literary form to refract what is going on as human functioning and destiny has been placed at the mercy of technology but no in that science fiction, in order to retain its categorical integrity, must cut off a whole range, perhaps the greater range, of solutions and explorations.

Updike (reviewing the David Hartwell Book-of-the-Month Club science fiction anthology a couple of years ago) stated in The New Yorker that science fiction was doomed, regardless of its genius and the high caliber of some of its writers, to being a second-rate form eternally because it must of necessity lean upon the extrapolative and impossible. This is not so, it is not exactly the issue at all, but it is fair to say that the science fiction markets, the integrity and nature of the genre itself have forced those conclusions upon the writers. It might be possible to open up science fiction or for that matter fantasy and to work it through to levels of ambiguity or projective possibility barely glimpsed; but how this could be done and managed within a generic format geared wholly to audience expectation is not only beyond Updike, it is quite beyond me.

"This is a good novel and I'd love to publish it," John W. Campbell said in a note to Brunner's agent, Joseph Elder, when Productions of Time was offered to Analog in 1966. "But I see no way that I could do so; there is absolutely no science fiction, nothing at all until past the halfway point and then the science fiction seems irrelevant to the story." Who said that Campbell had lost his editorial grip by the mid-sixties? (Heaven forfend that I had.) His response showed acute insight into Brunner's problem and heroic solution; Brunner wanted to write a mainstream novel but couldn't get a contract and probably couldn't sell it, wrote half of one anyway, then backed and filled and cheated and fudged so that NAL would publish the novel as science fiction and not give him any trouble.

It is clearly a problem, not perhaps the worst which the revered old field has had but one which is signatory; it has chased that diminished form which we call modern science fiction (the encroachments of fantasy, fabulation and the spinoff televised novel have reduced genre science fiction to something of a special interest within its own categorization) toward formats of jargon and wired futures which impose from the outset a dislocation, a sense of difference so vast that generic requirements are fulfilled at the outset and the writer then feels some relative freedom to induce levels of ambiguity as shifting areas of extrapolation. Good enough, I suppose, but intensely limiting and tending to drive the work toward a kind of parochialism, a specialty of jargon and reference which keeps out the marginal reader or confuses those on the borders; impossible to theorize much beyond this, but if readership of genre science fiction (as opposed to fantasy, Star Trek and Star Wars imitations and series novels) is indeed less in absolute numbers than was the case twenty years ago, these impositions might function as part of the explanation. And then again perhaps they would not; the critic being offered a sense of ambiguity, an appreciation of ambivalence which has been denied the fictioneer.

But what, then, ultimately is left? Some radical critics and theologians, among whom I do not include myself (although it composes a vast yearning to do so), have theorized that after the Holocaust, modern assimilative institutionalized Judaism in this country was finished, there was simply no way after Hitler and the ovens and the six millions that the rabbis could sell to those parts of the middle class which still paid any attention to the synagogues the proposal that being a good, a practicing, a faithful Jew had anything at all to do with the true nature of contemporary life. As a friend of mine proposed, "After the Holocaust, there are only two kinds of Jews left: those who are atheists and those who cannot take a hint." Still, the synagogues were there, the institutions were in place, the rituals and customs and engines of this mainstream Judaism were still there and necessitous, something had to be done.

For those institutions and because true religiosity and faith had become evidently something irrelevant or to be mocked, what were left were the triune stanchions: Hitler, the Holocaust, and Israel. Israel became the engine which drove the diaspora in the United States; the spectre of Hitler, revived and sweeping across the lands, necessitated a place of exile; and of course the Holocaust as rehearsal for even greater disasters. These three factors became the machinery of modern Reform and Conservative Judaism, which in the absence of a credible, saleable religious creed or basis of belief needed all the help and all of the specters that they could get. "The spirit killeth but the letter giveth life," Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote (in one of the Four Quartets) more than half a century ago; and the letter became the Israeli bond appeal, Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat and anyone else who could be called to mind.

A cynical and despairing view of a cynical and despairing time, and perhaps not wholly true, but what else could keep the synagogues going? The faith of the Kabbalic kings, the holy orders of the shtetl, the beloved rebbe, the believing and faithful tzaddik in Talmudic garb committed to the restoration of the law? The Last of the Just had been loaded into the ovens, as Andre Schwartz-Bart's great novel noted; in his absence the idea of Justice was a very, very difficult sell indeed.

Trivializing as it may be, unjust (and perhaps blasphemous) as it might be to juxtapose, one could make something of the same call on science fiction. Something happened to science fiction at about the time of the Apollo missions, something which was the culmination of many visible technological failures and misapprehensions: Hiroshima, germ warfare, nuclear shelters, television, napalm, Vietnam, the disastrous Apollo 13. Perhaps the future was not benign, perhaps the fundamental posture of science fiction—that the future would work and humanity, by so accommodating itself to extrapolative forces and their implication was educable, could be improved, could be changed and expanded in meaningful ways—was wrong.

Perhaps genre science fiction as agonizingly developed through Amazing and Thrilling Wonder and Campbell and Gold and the literary and extrapolative adventures of the decades was in error, the fundamental assumptions were wrong, the future made no sense whatsoever, there were no causes but only causal linkages, and even Kuttner's blundering robots or Kornbluth's blasted astronauts or draftees were imprisoned by assumptions of ultimate honor which simply did not exist. Even the dystopians and bearers of alarm who had run through the streets of the city hand in hand with the prophets of different kinds had believed in the practical value of their craft and the existence of favorable alternatives (even though people and institutions were too stupid to accept them).

But what if the whole deal was wrong? What if the corrupt, blackened little heart of science fiction had at last been first seen and then removed and then in the cold, stricken, despicable light of Apollo 13, Watergate, the collapse of institutions and the abandonment of its audience to its own devices been revealed to be as much of a lie as Gernsback's promise in 1926 to educate young boys toward scientific careers? What then?

Well, what then? Star Trek of course and Star Wars and the consequences of the Tolkien rediscovery of the mid-sixties which had flung out the detritus of elves and dwarves and imitative work through the decade and which now, in the mid-seventies, began to overtake science fiction itself, lightless, heartless, corrupt, revealed old science fiction which had neither the means nor the certainty to fight back. In the empty space left by the wreckage of the 13th Apollo, in the chasm through which the splinters of the spent Challenger fell and fell and fell, what was left to take up that space but the elves, dragons, Skywalkers and Kirks which had been imported from movies, television, Tolkien or the common folk wisdom of the media and placed in those places where science fiction had been? The rabbis had no ethic for post-Holocaust Judaism; they had little explanation or rationale for the death of the Last of the Just either. What they had was the Israeli bond appeal, the travelogue of the Nazarene and the ever-available specter of Hitler now repaying some of his awful culpability by functioning as the best fund raiser the synagogue and the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith ever had.

Well, it is all very interesting and speculative. Of course science fiction and Judaism have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! Where it comes down is not my department, said Werner von Braun.

Thinking About Compulsion

The problem with the traditional mystery critics such as Edmund Wilson (Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?) have pointed out is that in order to be a satisfactory puzzle, motive and opportunity must be available to everyone; there is no particularity to murder or specificity to the murderous personality. Instead, the narrative must be contrived in such a way as to render indistinguishable the fractal culpability of the travellers in the Calais Coach.

Good writers, defenders of the mystery, have made a strong case on the other side; what Wilson sees as limitation, Barzun or Chandler see as a positive aspect. Putting murder into the streets (or leaving it in the castle) amongst the people with whom it belongs proves only that our potential is limitless and that motive is ex post facto. Certainly, the arguments are at their most pristine, show themselves most carefully opposed in what the Chicago press and District Attorney called in 1924 "The Crime of The Century."

Two brilliant (or at least highly credentialled) students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, abducted Bobby Franks, the public school classmate of Loeb's brother, suffocated him in the back of a rented car, killed him with a chisel and (possibly) sodomized him. Apprehended a week later—there had been an appalling number of mistakes, evidence left at the site, a typewriter in Leopold's possession used to write ransom notes—Loeb and Leopold made it clear that they were willing to explain the Crime of the Century to the world: There was no motive. The idea, Leopold said (he was the metaphysician of the two, a first-year law student at the University of Chicago) was to produce a pure Nietzchian gesture, the ubermensch proving his superiority by committing a crime in a vacuum. The purpose of the Franks murder was that there was no purpose, Leopold insisted and somehow, as the crime resonated through the decades and as Meyer Levin thinly fictionalized some of its aspects in his 1956 novel, the Franks murder became a foreshadowing of Nazism, of the technologizing and profusion of mass murder, of the horrors of the century to come from Speck to Oswald to Hiroshima to Cambodia . . . murder accomplished, for its own sake, devoid of personal connection, stripped of psychic necessity or predilection. A boon for those who had known all along that you had to care who killed Roger Ackroyd because even the butler could have done it; terrifying for Edmund Wilson, Leslie Fiedler or District Attorneys everywhere who needed to see a particularity of motive, a pure necessity of connection in order to isolate murder, to put its commission (and one's own vulnerability of course) at some distance.

As we know, as Levin's novel with its heavy Freudian cast and dazzling final chapters indicates, the Franks murder was apparently anything other than motiveless. Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals (Leopold the active, Loeb the passive partner), Franks served as surrogate for Loeb's hated younger brother who had displaced Loeb from his mother's embrace. Leopold's participation in the murder of a rich, assimilated Jewish version of his younger self was a symbolic suicide-and-rebirth; the burial site, the dissolution of the boy's genitals symbolic gestures replete with Freudian compression and cunning. Loeb and Leopold, rather than being ubermensch, were figures which we came to recognize all too well, surrogates for our own lunatic other selves, gone over the wall of protection, trashed in the culvert which absorbed not only Bobby Franks but themselves.

They were convicted—Clarence Darrow's eloquent plea might have saved them from hanging although Caverley, the judge, claimed that he remitted the death sentence only because of the "extreme youth" of the defendants—and imprisoned them for life plus ninety-nine years. Loeb was murdered in prison in rather muddy circumstances in 1940, stabbed to death by a fellow inmate in a shower. He might have been the victim of jealousy or a love affair, but then again he might have been indulged in a luck which had definitively run out in 1924. Leopold applied for parole again and again, finally got it in 1959 partly as a consequence of the sympathy which Compulsion in novel, play and movie form brought to him, married the woman with whom he had been in prison correspondence, became a lab technician in Puerto Rico and died in 1972. While still incarcerated he had sued Levin, not so much for misrepresenting his person as for appropriating (without compensation) Leopold's very life to write a bestselling novel. He won initially but eventually in a landmark case the judgement was overturned and Levin was found not at all liable: One cannot copyright one's life, only one's work. Leopold's own autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (which he claimed failed to become a bestseller only because Levin had stolen and published the story first) does not show a great deal of insight nor contribute much to the motivic argument. On an early page he calls Dickie Loeb the finest, most wonderful person he has ever met, someone who was tragically misunderstood and who might have committed one great mistake but who was otherwise flawless and to whom Leopold will refer to negatively not at all in these pages. Nor will he discuss the crime. Leopold keeps his promise. (He had broken an earlier one: He told the police at the beginning of his confession that "I will tell you the full meaning and nature of the crime.")

Higdon's factual work, published obscurely by Putnam's a generation after Compulsion and with no impact, actually adds useful information to a circumstance which Compulsion had seemingly exploited to the fullest. Higdon updates the material, of course (Leopold's suit and his later life fall beyond the arc of Compulsion) and also gives the fullest available account of Loeb's mysterious death. It also includes transcripts of the psychiatric testimony on the specific nature of the homosexual acts committed by Leopold and Loeb. This is material which had been suppressed at the trial (the psychiatric testimony was taken out of presence of spectators) and in the newspapers (which had full access to the stolen psychiatric transcripts, the defense having paid for an elaborate investigation of Loeb and Leopold by the best alienists they could find, but which declined to publish these accounts). In many ways—as one could have inferred from Compulsion and which becomes evident in light of traditional Freudian perspective—the nature of those homosexual acts prefigured the commission of the crime while also functioning as an inversion of the apparent relationship of Loeb and Leopold (Loeb had been depicted as the brains of the outfit and had so boasted to the psychiatrists).

The crime had an obsessive hold upon the public imagination in its time; even as it faded for the decades before Compulsion was published, even as it has faded again in the even greater span of time since the Levin novel was published, it maintains a kind of obsessive insistence, one which Ellroy notes in his introduction. From the beginning, evidently, we have been trying to ascribe motive and implication to the murder of Bobby Franks because if it cannot be found, if (as Christie or Lord Dunsany imply) anyone could have done it or not done it, then the horror of the circumstance becomes magnified. Levin gives us this explanation, a kind of easeful death: The crime was one of passion, the boys were a folie á deux, had they not come together in just this way at that time, Bobby Franks might be seventy-six years old today and a distinguished industrialist, Leopold might be a retired Federal justice. But the reassuring aspects of Compulsion give less comfort as the decades grind on; although it is difficult in the wake of Kennedy, King, Hitler, the Holocaust, Speck or Bremer, Laurie Dann or Manson to see this pathetic, dreaming, drowning scuffle in the back seat of a rented sedan as the Crime of the Century, it is impossible to reject those acts as well; somewhere between accident and destination, Leopold was caught in thrall and Franks died, the implacable Loeb called out his instructions and Levin borrowed a persona and leaned over them in that car like one of Macbeth's witches and the argument goes on. The novel, perhaps the earliest modern docudrama persists but its argument to me is shaking. Ex post facto applies: Anything in retrospect can be rationalized. Loeb, Leopold and circumstance came together, explanations came later, Wilson, an enormous pseudo-academic fraud was wrong and Christie was on the hunt of night. For if his century has taught us one lesson it is this: if something can happen, it will.

The Shores of Suitability

(Common exegesis of Killers of the Rulers

portends the interrelationship of post-Joycean rhetoric with

post-Shavian political pluralism. Relate this confluence.

Elaborate and discuss. Exemplify.

The Old Hack is having a nightmare. In it, he has returned to academia and is seeking a master's degree at Extension U., which, he hopes, will enable him to find work as an assistant instructor of English. All right, it is a long shot, but he is almost out of ideas. The markets are really hell, and foreign sales have dried up. And he is having big trouble delivering on the one outline he has sold. So the Old Hack has enrolled in English 353A: Science Fiction and the Archetype, because in the catalog it seemed to be an easy three points (no paper required). If he knows anything, he knows science fiction. Right? Well, doesn't he? Now he is taking the final examination in this graduate-level course, which appears to focus on an old Ace Double, Killers of the Rulers. He is especially qualified to deal with this book. He wrote it back in 1957 between wives at the old place on West 89th Street. Even so, the exam is giving him trouble. Big trouble.

* * *

The subtheme of colonic usurpation in its Jungian relevance creates a multileveled tension in Killers of the Rulers, which points toward the induction of three distinct archetypes. Name these archetypes. Elaborate and discuss. Discuss further how a Freudian approach would defeat consummation of the Blue Alien Incursion.

The Old Hack is not sure exactly how he got into this. It all seemed so simple when he enrolled. The reading list, which included many of his old favorites, indicated this would be a snap, to say nothing of the pleasant surprise of finding Killers of the Rulers right in there between More than Human and The Forever Machine. But he suspected that things had begun to go wrong from the start; in the first session the young instructor had begun by speaking of a Manichean influence in the birth of American science fiction, and how the great Fifties novels were an extension of the Fabian theory of Socialism as propounded by the works of G. B. Shaw. The Old Hack had briefly thought of identifying himself when his book came up in November. "I wrote that one," he could have said (it had been written, as had all of the Ace Doubles, and too much of his other stuff, under a pseudonym), but by then he was totally confused. It did not seem wise to admit writing Killers of the Rulers, particularly if he could not understand a word the young instructor was saying about it.

* * *

Produce a 1,000-word monograph interrelating the empire building of Killers of the Rulers with the more pacific vision of More Than Human. Be specific. In what way does Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" inform and influence both works as controlling response? Why does Heartbreak House not apply here?

* * *

Heartbreak House. That's what West 89th Street had been. It was there, drunk and up against a deadline, that he wrote Killers of the Rulers on the kitchen table. The Old Hack hadn't even started it until the weekend before it was due. There had been all that excitement about him and Mabel Sue, and, besides, for a $750 advance (payable in halves) why should he get all upset about churning out this stuff to their convenience rather than his? Even then the book kind of lurched along, what with Betty (wife number one) crying and coming out of the bedroom now and then only to throw another of his paperbacks at him while he sat there typing. Finally he gave up, turned to the Cutty Sark, and took down that 1952 issue of Worlds of If, which he used to bloat up his novelette.

In the end the book was not what he had promised in the outline, but what the hell? Everyone lied and cheated in the small things (he had tried desperately to explain this to Betty); the important commitment was to getting the work done, and to holding on to enough of the advance money to have a good blowout. Despite all the screaming, he had been only three days late, thanks to the Cutty Sark, but then the bastards took a month to deliver the check, by which time he was well embarked on that disastrous series of events that ended with Mabel Sue's calling him a drunken liar and throwing his typewriter and the carbon of Killers of the Rulers out the third-story window.

* * *

Neologic devices in Killers of the Rulers account for, as in Finnegans Wake, much of its subnarrative power. Present and discuss five such devices. Analyze two of them. Describe how they function as a metaphoric combine of the Blue Aliens.

In his dream, the Old Hack brings his blank essay booklet up to the proctor midway through the three hours. "I can't stand it," he says shakily. "I can't stand it anymore. Just take me away. I'll be good." The proctor stares at him mercilessly through goggles of glittering glass. "Help. Help," the Old Hack whimpers as he tumbles like a stone through various levels of his dream world.

He finds himself awake and fifty-seven in his own bleak room at dawn, his hopes for an assistant instructorship at the college destroyed, the empty pages of Grandsons of the Killers of the Rulers littering the floor beside him, and this novel—his masterpiece, he had told the editor to clinch the contract, the crown of his career—three months overdue today. And counting.

Some Notes On the Lone Wolf

By Barry N. Malzberg

Don Pendleton's Executioner series started as a one-shot idea at Pinnacle Books in 1969. By 1972 George Ernsberger, my editor at Berkley, called it "the phenomenon of the age." Eventually Pendleton wrote 70 of the books himself and the series continues today ghosted by other writers. Mack Bolan's continuing War Against the Mafia (the working title of that first book) had sold wildly from the outset and less than three years later, when Pendleton and Scott Meredith had threatened to take the series from a grim and obdurate Pinnacle, New American Library had offered $250,000 for the next four books in the series. Pendleton stayed at Pinnacle—the publisher faced a lawsuit for misappropriated royalties and essentially had to match the NAL offer to hold on—but the level established by the properties could not fail to have inflamed every mass market paperback publisher in New York.

A few imitative series had been launched by Pinnacle itself—most notably The Butcher whose premise and protagonist were a close if even more sadomasochistic version of Pendleton's Mack Bolan. It was Bolan who had gone out alone to avenge his family incinerated in a Mafia war while Bolan was fighting Commies in Southeast Asia. Dell Books launched The Inquisitor, a series of books on the redemptive odyssey of Simon Quinn (by a then-unknown William Martin Smith, who under a somewhat different name was to become famous in the next decade), Pocket Books and Avon began series the provenance of which is at the moment unrecollected and Ernsberger at Berkley, under some pressure from his publisher, Stephen Conlan, was ready to start his own series.

What he needed in January 1973 was someone who could produce 10 books within less than a year and although my credentials as a Pendleton-imitator were certainly questionable (they were in fact nonexistent), there was no question but that Ernsberger had found one of the few writers close at hand who clearly could produce at that frenetic level. In 1972 I had written nine novels, in 1971 a dozen, in 1970 fourteen; ten books that quickly were not an overwhelming assignment. What he wanted was a series about a law enforcement guy, say maybe an ex-New York City cop, thrown off the force for one or another perceived disgrace, who would declare war upon the drug trade. The cop could be a military veteran with (like Bolan) a good command of ordnance; it wouldn't hurt if he had a black sidekick either still on or just off the force so that they could get some Defiant Ones byplay going in those pre-Eddie Murphy days, and the violence was to be hyped up to Executioner level as the protagonist, after an initial festive in New York, took his mission throughout the States and maybe overseas. Ten novels, $27,500 total advance with (it is this which caught my total attention) 25% of it payable upon signature of the contract. Only a brief outline would be necessary and the tenth book was due to be delivered on or before 10/1/73.

I had never read a Pendleton novel in my life.

Hey, no problem: $6750 for a five-page outline at a time when I perceived my nascent career to be in a recession-induced collapse cleaved away scruple and, for that matter, terror. I read Executioner #7, which struck me as pretty bad, mechanical, and lifeless (like most debased category fiction it depended upon the automatic responses upon the reader, did not create characters and an ambiance of its own), wrote the usual promise-them-a-partridge-in-a-pear-tree outline, signed the contracts and began the series on 1/16/73. The third of the novels was delivered on 2/14/73.

Incontestably I could have delivered the entire series by May (the early plan was for Berkley to bring out the first three novels at once, then publish one a month thereafter) but George Ernsberger asked me to stop after Boston Avenger and wait for further word. There was a problem, it seemed. In the first place, I had given my protagonist, Wulff Conlan, a name uncomfortably close to that of the publisher whose name at the time I had not even known, and in the second place Conlan's victims, unlike Mack Bolan's, were real people with real viewpoints who seemed to undergo real pain when they were killed which was quite frequently. Would this kind of stuff—real pain as opposed to cartoon death that is to say—go in the mass market? Berkley dithered about this while I sulked, wrote a novelization (never published) of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! for Warner Books, and waited around to accept an award for a science fiction novel, which award caused me much difficulty, you bet, in the years to come. (See the letter column of the 2/74 Analog for any further information you want on this.)

Eventually, Ernsberger called—during dinnertime, in fact, on 3/16/73—to say that I could go ahead with the series and would I please change the name of the protagonist? Grumbling, fearing that I might never get back to the center of those novels, I started again and in fact did deliver the tenth book on 10/1/73 after all. (The first three were published in that month.) As is so often the case with imitative series, sales steadily declined from volume #1 which did get close to 70,000) but held above unprofitability through all of those ten, and I was allowed two sequels in 1974 and then two more in conclusion (at a cut advance). I insisted upon killing off Wulff in #14 against the argument of Ernsberger's assistant, Dale Copps, who reminded me of Professor Moriarty.

I signed off on #14: Philadelphia Blowup in 1/75. That means that I am now at a greater distance from these novels than many readers of this anthology are from their birthdates . . . and for that reason my opinion of the series is not necessarily any more valid than would be the opinion of Erika Cornell on her essays in ballet class in the mid-seventies.

The purpose and development of these novels would, in any case, be clear to anyone, even the author. It is evident to me now as it was then that Mack Bolan was insane and Pendleton's novels were a rationalization of vigilantism; it was my intent, then, to show what the real (as opposed to the mass market) enactment of madness and vigilantism might be if death were perceived as something beyond catharsis or an escape route for the bad guys. As the series went on and on and as I became more secure with the voicing and with my apparent ability to circumvent surface and not get fired, Wulff became crazier and crazier. By #13 he was driving crosscountry and killing anyone on suspicion of drug dealing; by #14: Philadelphia Blowup, he was staggering from bar to bar in the City of Brotherly Love and killing everyone because they obviously had to be drug dealers. Finally gunned down for the public safety by his one-time black sidekick, Wulff died far less bloodily than many of his victims while managing a bequest of about $50,000 to his overweight creator. The novels sold overseas intermittently—Denmark stayed around through all 14; the other Scandinavian countries bailed out earlier; the gentle Germans found it all too bloody and sadistic and after editing down the first 10 novels quit on an open-ended contract, paid off and shut it down. I haven't seen anything financially from these since 1979 but entries in various mystery reference sources and the invitation to discuss the series in this anthology suggest that it might have found a particle of an audience. (My real pride in this series, beyond its ambition and sheer, perverse looniness is that I was able to run it through the entirety of its original contract and manage four sequels as well; no Executioner imitator other than those published by Pinnacle went past four or five volumes.) The vicious Rockefeller drug laws ("drug dealers get life imprisonment") were being debated and eventually rammed through the New York State legislature at the time I was writing through the midpoint of the series. It was a propinquity of event which led to some of the more profoundly angry passages in these novels and imputed a certain timelessness as well. (The laws were horseshit and we are still living with their existence and terrible consequence.) Calling a crazy a crazy, no matter how anguished may have been the aspect of the series which was the most admired but for me the work lives in the pure rage of some of the epigraphic statements, notably Kenyatta's. Writing these brought me close to some apprehension of how Malcolm, how H. Rap Brown, how the Soledad Brothers might have felt and how right they were: The Lone Wolf was my own raised fist to a purity and a past already obliterated as they were written, rolled over by the tanks and battery of Bolan's ordnance. (Operating under Bolan's pseudonym: "U.S. Government.") Bolan killed to kill: I think Wulff killed to be free. It all works out the same, of course.

Part II

Authors And Other Culprits

Introduction To Authors And Other Culprits

Some notes, occasionally extended on (to steal Mailer's phrase) the talent in the room. Excluded are Convention program book encomia for friends ("X wields the heaviest glass and the heaviest pen in the business; what a great guy I thought as we shot geese together in the Antarctic"), blurbs for book covers or jackets ("Packed with color and excitement: a moving, terrifying experience, filled with all that wonder that Y has given us over and again starting with the Sunburst Trilogy) or reviews ("The Sunburst Trilogy, unoccupied by wonder, falls and falls like geese shot in the Antarctic"). The essay on Ballard—one of those noted earlier as showing the author clearly writing over his head—was commissioned for an anthology of critical essays on this writer's work. An anonymous reviewer for the University press to whom it was delivered targeted this essay as the worst in a bad collection "and of itself it indicates precisely why we should not publish this book." Which they did not. I am kind of proud of this but I do not know why.

The Asimov-Leonard Bernstein confluence struck me at the time and seems even spookier over the years. Both irreplaceable; I have through the madness of our millennial national adventures felt the absence of those voices as keenly as I would have responded to their presence.

Flowers for Daniel

(Daniel Keyes)

Most of us, sooner or later, come to understand the nature of the human condition . . . that slow stalk from darkness to light, from ignorance to at least a tentative understanding, from helplessness to accommodation . . . and then the slow or accelerating slide into extinction, incapacity, the darkness from which we struggled that was always our condition. For some, disaster or genetics speeds or suddenly truncates that journey, for others the slow procession toward understanding is impossible. But the traversal is generic; the greater number understand. Ecclesiastes, and so on.

That knowledge being so close to general, why does Flowers for Algernon, that encompassing story, that narrative of grief beyond metaphor, move us so? Why are the last pages of the novelette and the novel which is its expansion so shattering? "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell," Oscar Wilde said of Dickens, but no such judgment has yet been made of the extinguishing of Charlie Gordon. Unbearable and yet—as art will permit—cathartic.

Why so moving? The narrative premise, perhaps—never before evoked, I am fairly sure. The story is framed as Charlie's diary, he speaks to us directly and his voice shifts through the situation. His voice is the situation. No mute, inglorious Milton here seen externally but the living, breathing, suffering thing itself, and, somewhere around the two-thirds point of the narrative, the stunned, then poised awareness of doom; the incalculable price of that acceptance. Nothing like this, really. The novel is successful, the details of Charlie's childhood, of filial shame and rapprochement, are touching . . . but the novelette is incomparable. It needs no further detail. It is stark, yet lush in its traversal of that disaster which the philosophers instruct us is the "human condition."

Flowers for Algernon was only the fifth or sixth story published by Daniel Keyes, who gives autobiography and the link between autobiography and this story in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie, and I very well. There was only one Keyes story in the science fiction magazines after the appearance of the novelette. In 1968, three years after publication of the novel, his only other novel published in his country, The Touch, appeared, and in the early 19705 a nonfiction biography of ESP and telekinesis, The Minds of Billy Milligan. The Touch, a curiously prescient novel of breakdown in a nuclear installation and the disastrous effect fear of contamination has upon its employees, was undervalued; published a little more than a decade before Three Mile Island and the movie The China Syndrome (and a decade and a half before the film Silkwood), it is a brilliant adumbration of issues which had not until that time entered the general consciousness. Alas, for all its great merit, the novel failed to find any support from its publisher, failed then to reach its intended audience.

This is not true of Flowers for Algernon. It found its intended audience, that audience being everyone. The novelette became a novel, television adaptation, feature film, musical, other adaptations, television series in Japan, most recently a new film for television. Keyes, as he writes in Algernon, Charlie, and I, became the man who hit the lottery, made the jackpot, scored the Ultimate Tip and thus brought home the big winner, but he did so not through the exercise of chance but, one might theorize, through the avoidance of chance; there were a hundred ways in which Flowers for Algernon could have gone wrong, could have collapsed into sentiment or fakery, but craft took Keyes the right way, every time.

And the power, the beauty, the absolute effectiveness of this work also say something about science fiction, our dear old field which we often painfully, but always earnestly celebrate in these volumes.

Note this: of the five most famous and influential stories in the corpus of what we call modern science fiction* (SF published subsequent to the first issue of Amazing Stories dated April 1926), two of them are by writers who are known to the general public and largely within the field itself only by those stories, writers whose careers without those stories would, however honorable, be modest. What does this mean?

Here is what I think it means: that voice, the great voice of science fiction, the power of our medium, its resonance, vision, possibility, has created a body of literature which at its best could have been told in no other way. This great task, great burden, alchemy of spirit and machine, manages to somehow have subsumed all of its creators, has opened the way to the final mystery and its power to us all. We are made one with Algernon and Charlie Gordon before and after, yes certainly after, that great fall itself.

Falling from the Air

(Alice Sheldon)

I want to write about Alice Sheldon whose brightness fell from the air and fell and fell on May 2, 1987, and I will probably do not much better a job than John Clute, dearly science fiction's best critic and essayist, was able to manage in his introduction to the Arkham House collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974) (Clute is appalled by the power and the darkness of the work but perhaps does not see it as the clear paradigm of autobiography which it seems to be; this may be the one insight in which I have the better of Clute but otherwise there is something about Sheldon which silences everyone, she incited adoration or revulsion but probably less useful comment than any major science fiction writer of our time).

Alice Sheldon—who wrote of course as "James Tiptree, Jr." for the first years of her career, 1968-1976, and a little bit as "Racoona Sheldon" in the later years of that period and then under her own name after the revelation of her identity (essentially she exposed herself, she permitted her true persona to be known because it was time to end a deception which perhaps she felt had shaded toward mockery and then self-mockery and then, possibly, dangerously toward a real self-contempt—was perhaps the best short story writer who ever worked within this field. Her two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls From the Air (1985) do not come anywhere near her achievement at the short-story length and it is possible that there may be reserved for her that particular and painful obscurity found by writers who were indisputably better in that form or who did not write novels at all. There are exceptions—Poe, of course, and John Collier and John Cheever who did some fairly strong novels—but writers like Stanley Ellin, Borden Deal, Henry Slesar, Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth are already in that kind of trouble or drifting in that direction. (Slesar is very much alive and made a fortune writing The Edge of Night, he also won a first novel Edgar way back in 1958, he most likely does not give a damn about this judgment.) Sheldon's achievement in the short story is so significant and so exceeds recognition of her novels that she may turn out to be the central example of this kind of critical and market judgment: the short story is not particularly valued in this country and our publishing process has never been geared toward lending it permanence. Or a wide audience.

It is fairly easy to understand why Alice Sheldon was so much better in the short story. The territory which she was working, the absolute equation if not interchangeability of sex and death was one part of the answer although of course there are a fair number of novelists who have managed quite well in extending that mutuality to book length. (Almost none in science fiction, however; Silverberg's Born with the Dead may take the issue as far as it has gone in any episodic sense and it is a 30,000 word novella.) What characterizes Sheldon, however, would be the question of her structures; they are intricate, tightly interwoven and calculated to pay off within a narrow and intense compass. Early stories like "The Man Who Walked Home" (1972) show a ruptured chronology which only makes sense in retrospect and only when the last piece has been placed; later stories like "Morality Meat" (1985) and "Backward Turn Backward" (posthumously published in Crown of Stars, 1988) are even more intricate. One can find out what is happening in these works only by pursuing them to the very end and it is only in retrospect at this point that the work assembles.

Sheldon herself understood this, knew how deliberate and deliberately off-putting her narrative attack was. "Start fifty feet underground and at the end of everything," she said in a letter, "and then, don't tell them," an approach reminiscent of Beater's insistence that one tried to find the point of a story at which matters were about to reach their highest point and explode, then you went beyond that to the point at which the explosion had occurred "and then you start the story . . . attack, attack, always attack." In both cases, it is the voice of the short-story writer we hear, the writer focused upon the peripety and its awful consequences, looking for that one frozen moment of utter consequence and obtained oblivion. Bester was able to slide around this particular curse probably because he had Horace Gold watching out for him in the two great novels, probably because it was Gold who insisted that Ben Reich and Gully Foyle's obsessions were enacted repeatedly in chapter after chapter and never solved until, penultimately, these men were destroyed; Tiptree and later Sheldon had little editing at all in a different era and tended to work toward her epiphanies and then quit.

Chiaroscuro technique, then, an anatomization of narrative to assemble only in retrospect. The technique needs close analysis and sometimes tends to be self-defeating. ("Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1970) is a novella which simply fails to make sense for so long that when the rather banal and brutal denouement at last appears, it tends to flatten the story, make it trite rather than intricate) but the equation of sex and death which was the thematic obsession of this writer needs little close analysis or analysis at all, it was simply there from nearly the beginning and it reaches such a point of explicitness in The Screwfly Solution" (1977) that, as good as that story is, it seems to be close to self-parody.

In "The Screwfly Solution" that line which (barely) keeps the aggression-driven sex drive in the human male from being actively dangerous to the female is obliterated by malevolent aliens interested in depopulating the planet; the story is told in the telegraphic series of dispatches, letters, communiques and stream-of-consciousness reminiscent of Sherred's "E for Effort" (1947) and shows the males, in a kind of frozen self-awareness, killing their women again and again; the story may have begun as a feminist metaphor but passes into a concrete, graphic horror. The same theme underlies "The Milk of Paradise" (1972) showing intercourse with aliens as transcendence in death, it is what drives "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1971) in which the biological imperative within the human male to copulate ever further from the basic affinity group leads to obsessive intercourse with aliens and death. Sex is death in these stories then, usually the kind of sex practiced by the male but these are not feminist tracts (Sheldon, after her emergence in 1976 in her true identity was more or less taken up by those in the sf community identifying as feminist) as they are dreadful visions, more painful than accusatory, of biological imperative carried toward personal obliteration. The paradigmatic Sheldon story, of course, "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) to its wry title, Sheldon's conscious message and self-mockery to the community, is a dazzling, multi-leveled uninflected piece of social commentary; the levels here are so dazzling—a woman writing under a man's name in the first-person of a male protagonist who is neither the center of the story nor comprehending of anything going on here—as to be flabbergasting and the premise and conclusion of this story, like those of "Vintage Season" (1940) or "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" (1963) or "E for Effort" have been appropriated by so many writers for so many works that only a diminishing percentage of contemporary readers can trace those stories back to their source. The stark ending—the two women begging the aliens to take them away because it cannot possibly be worse for them out there than it is here—now seems inevitable and predictable but I do believe that Sheldon introduced it into science fiction and then proceeded to do it so well and with such finality that all of those other works can only be imitations, they are not extensions.

The external details of Sheldon's odyssey are probably as well known as those of any writer—those World War II years "spent in a Pentagon basement," the midlife doctorate in experimental psychology, the entrance into science fiction under the James Tiptree, Jr. persona in the late sixties when she wrote some stories as a respite from the doctoral orals, the burgeoning reputation,, the mysterious persona, the post office box in CIA territory, the rumors that this was a CIA employee, the interviews-by-mail and strange postcards cascading upon so many of us, the 1975 Ballantine collection with the Silverberg introduction insisting that despite some rumors to the contrary, "the Tiptree stories could have been written only by a man," the self-revelation in 1976, the cautious revelation of her identity and background, what is regarded by many (Clute most notably) as the slow weakening of the work after the pseudonym and anonymity have been sacrificed and the spectacular murder-and-suicide, front page of the Washington Post on 5/2/87, a suicide directly refracted and foreshadowed explicitly in several of the last stories ("Backward Turn Backward" (1988) and, horrifyingly, the posthumous "In Midst of Life" (1987)). But I suspect that these are indeed only details, only facts and scantily assembled facts at that; "facts are the enemy of truth" as the Man of La Mancha reminded his companion and the truth is something hard, terrible and rigorous. These stories were from the start, barring an occasional predilection for low comedy and pratfalls as in "Birth of a Salesman" (1968), rigorous, self-enclosed and adumbrating a vision of the human and alien condition so bleak and imposing as to defy emotional embrace and make necessary the occasion and profusion of pseudo-technological, pseudo-extrapolative jargon simply as a means of making this material bearable. Well, it is very hard to find the summation here. There is no summation, not really, every major career is ongoing, even when it is not. I knew her a little (but only by mail) and read her a lot and was floored by the posthumous collection, CROWN OF STARS (Tor, 1988) which I reached only recently (I had read "Yanqui Doodle" on publication in 7/87) and which seems to me utterly devastating. I hope this work lasts. I am not sure that it will but Kuttner's stories seem to stay around and so do Bester's in the occasional anthology and there are worse fates. Her real point may be too bleak, frightening for a general audience and she did not shield that vision in the lollipop-and-Halloween paraphernalia which characterizes Lovecraft but I don't think that her work is going to date and she provides certain satisfactions which Lovecraft, Dunsany and Bram Stoker did not. (Mary Shelley, maybe.) As Jimmy Cannon wrote in a eulogy of Hemingway in 1962, and in terms of the short story at least, she was our best writer, I think.

Dark of the Knight

An Introduction And Epilogue

(Damon Knight)

Damon Knight grew up in Hood River, Oregon, made himself first known in the science-fiction field via a classic demolition in a fan magazine (despite the fact that the magazine had a circulation of no more than two hundred, the review had significant consequences upon two careers), and, like most bright people of his generation, fled to Manhattan. He worked briefly in a literary agency (the same one I worked in almost twenty years later), collaborated with James Blish on "Tiger Ride" for Astounding—this was his first major sale—wrote a few pulp stories under various pseudonyms, became a freelance illustrator and editor, and began to publish s-f widely. His "Not with a Bang," which leads off this collection, created some talk in the fall of 1949; by the mid-1950s he had established himself at the top of his field by steadily putting out sardonic and elegantly crafted pieces for the magazines. He wrote a few novels, too, one of which—A for Anything—is probably a masterpiece.

In the mid-fifties Knight's career as a creative writer began to slow up; he became a reviewer, then a critic, and wrote for a number of publications the first body of literate criticism in the history of science fiction. (His criticism was later collected in an important book, In Search of Wonder.) Around 1960 he got tired of criticism and turned to editing the Orbit series while he got back to fiction on a modest scale. "Down There," the last story in this volume and Knight's most recent, strikes me as being the best he's written, so one can hardly say that Knight has deteriorated in his middle age; in fact, he's a better writer than ever. He lives placidly and happily now with his wife, the distinguished writer Kate Wilhelm, in a big house in Florida, and he talks of never coming to New York again.

This is a bare enough outline of a working life, yet in the interstices you can see suggestions of the dimensions of the accomplishment. I submit that a good case could be made for Damon Knight's being the most important literary figure to come out of science fiction to date. He has, in the first place, excelled in everything he's done—editing, criticism, novels, short stories, and some extraordinary dirty limericks, too. In the second place, his reputation as critic and editor has obscured to younger writers and readers the fact that the body of fiction he produced in the 1950s was superb. Of all the writers H. L. Gold developed for Galaxy, Knight was probably the most characteristic and often the best at social satire and criticism. That he was not merely a satirist but a writer of great passion and stylistic range can be seen in stories like "The Handler" and "Masks," which are included here.

Always underrated (even by himself) as a novelist, he has produced several ignored works of quality—of which the aforementioned A for Anything, temporarily and unfortunately out of print, stands to last as long as any novel of its decade. (It was published in the late fifties.) A stunning portrait of a feudal society built upon the deliberate repression of abundance, A for Anything has the veracity of a political handbook and the conciseness and inevitability of a good scatological joke. It also has a conclusion that strikes me as being the single most depressing in science-fiction novels. I recommend it to you highly, and I also think you ought to take a look at Mind Switch (1964), an extension of his novella "The Visitor in the Zoo"; it strikes me as being the only novel in the manner of Garnett's Lady into Fox that has anything new to say.

And of course I recommend In Search of Wonder. Knight's original modest proposal was simply that science fiction is a branch of literature to which one can—and has to—apply the same critical standards one would apply to any other branch of literature. Out of reasonable scholarship, a good command of the history of the modern novel, and a shattering wit, Knight produced a critical work that stands by itself and is essentially responsible for any informed criticism of science fiction coming out today.

In short, Knight is a man of stature and quality, a writer of importance, and a writer whose works will be a new and perhaps jarring experience for many people who were not around when this oeuvre was being built block by block.

At some basic level I owe almost all the critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction to Damon Knight, and I owe practically to him alone my first astonished realization in the early fifties that, by God, science fiction not only was a lot of fun . . . it could be written by its best practitioners so as to correspond to (though never duplicate) the best of work done anywhere.

—Teaneck, N.J.

September, 1975

Epilogue: After 27 Years

Pocket Books brought out eight of these science fiction "Best" collections in 1976. Adele Leone Hull (later Adele Leone the agent; she died a few years ago) commissioned me to write all of the Introductions and that to The Best of Damon Knight was the last to appear within that short compass. Oh, how your Damon and mine must have shuddered, reading this. The small illiteracies ("career as a creative writer began to slow up"), the tortured phraseology ("critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction"), tortured relationship with grammar ("the same one I worked in almost twenty years later") bring me to quivering and shamed alertness now. If they do this to me, what would they have done to the fearsome apostrophe detective, the merciless hunter and trapper of false tropes?

But Damon was in fact nice about it all. In a letter of response to the essay which had been sent in manuscript, his only objection was to the first sentence with its evocation of a "classic demolition." Damon wanted to let it go; all of that had happened a long time ago. I pointed out that his "critical demolition" in the mid-forties had been of pivotal importance to the history of science fiction: it was, perhaps, the first rigorous criticism any science fiction writer had received on the proper terms. Rigorous because it took the premise of the work as honorable and examined the degree to which the premise had been betrayed. That was quite a distance from Asimov's portrait of the pre-atomic bomb literary critics "Who thought that science fiction was just a bunch of crazy stories for kids."

Science fiction was anything but such by 1945, of course . . . but it took Damon and James Blish as the first serious critics with primary background in the field, to prove that this was so and that our potential was limitless. That criticism moved in a swift arc over a decade and a half and was collected by Advent in 1964 as In Search of Wonder. Damon by that time had moved on to the Orbit series and an editorial career which to some degree eclipsed the critical writings.

Also somewhat shrouded was the fiction, as the Introduction noted. The fiction is beyond remarkable. My considered judgment—long after his hot 1950s and more than a quarter of a century after the paperback collection which at 100,000 words was a microcosm—is that Knight produced the finest body of short fiction to emerge from the confines of the genre. There was competition from his contemporaries and predecessors—Kuttner/Moore, Pohl, Sturgeon of course, Phil Klass—and there was competition from those who came after: Silverberg, Tiptree, Avram Davidson . . . but the quality of Knight's work at the top is astonishing and almost all of the stories are at that top. It is impossible to locate a single "best" story or even ten best. There are at least forty at the highest level and through the whole body of work there are no weak stories. (Well, maybe "A Likely Story," a kind of jumped-up fan fiction which ran in Swank Magazine in 1956. To prove that Homer nodded.) "Anachron," "Country of the Kind," "What Rough Beast," "Ask Me Anything," "Ticket to Anywhere," "Four-In-One," "Man in the Jar," and on and on . . . there are maybe four or five stories in the entire run of the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories anthologies from the 1950s and 1960s which are at this level of craft. Damon was a better short story writer through the range of his work than Bernard Malamud or J.D. Salinger. I have done the research. I can defend this.

The novels are, as they say, uneven but A for Anything (also published as The People Maker) is, as I noted 27 years ago, remarkably accomplished. Unlike almost anyone, Damon's novelistic skills improved as he aged: Why Do Birds and Humpty-Dumpty: An Oval represent a new level of accomplishment. That latter novel, in fact, is comparable to the Ninth Symphony in E Minor of Ralph Vaughan-Williams which was written when the composer was 85; it is a visionary work coming from and pointing toward the undiscovered countries. No way of knowing what the Tenth Symphony or Damon Knight's next novel might have been but the clues are fascinating. These men, never old, soldiered on and on through the far lands.

Remarkable too that the short stories (of which no improvement could have been asked) held to their stunning level throughout Damon's entire working life. "Fortyday," published in Asimov's in 1994 (it appears in Nebula Awards 30 to mark Damon's Grand Master year and is the best story in that very good anthology) is flabbergasting. It appeared 45 years after "Not With a Bang," more than four decades after "The Analogues" and "Four-In-One." This is as pure an accomplishment, as miraculous a commission as Jack Williamson's Nebula and Hugo for a novella written in his 90s.

The editor of Orbit gave me much unhappiness and no encouragement; I am not the only writer to have felt that whip. But the colleague who I asked for favors in 1987 and 2000 came through at once with far more than I had asked. (I wrote Damon in 1987 that science fiction, thanks to him, had proven yet again to be the secular replacement of a Yiddishekeit in which I no longer believed.) The tumult and the shouting die, the Captain and the King departs but in recessional the exacting and irreplaceable contribution are ours.

He might even have been my friend. Enigmatic guy, Damon. I'll never know for sure. Hope so.

But friends and confessors: what a career! What a legacy! Libere me. Libere us all.

—Teaneck, New Jersey

June, 2002

On Fredric Brown

A reserved little guy, made a living on the linotype machine (read "Etaoin Shrdlu") in Wisconsin before he became a fulltime writer, drank too much, virtually every male writer (and many women too) of his time did, dealt with writer's block by riding Greyhound buses through the continent, just booking a couple of weeks, sat in the back of the bus, the shadows and night tableland whisking by, his unconscious off its leash. Offered to teach one of his two sons everything he knew about the writing of fiction, give him a full-time, exclusive course of instruction. His son declined. (A wise choice.) Said to Phil Klass around the time that What Mad Universe, that great and sour fan novel, was published, "They're taking over, Phil." This was in 1948. "The fans, they want in, they want to write it and edit it, they're going to overwhelm us, they'll own it all in twenty years. There's nothing we can do to change it." What Mad Universe, of course, dumps its protagonist into the structured fantasies of a science fiction fan, takes the lead through alien landscape and plenty of trouble. Talk about projection fantasies! But Brown was a personable and understated guy, stayed away from the conventions and the social rubric generally, didn't have much to do with anyone outside the group of Milwaukee writers from which he had emerged and later a few of the Mexican expatriates like Mack Reynolds, with whom he occasionally collaborated. Not exactly a recluse but certainly an iconoclast and among a small group of prominent science fiction writers of whom there is little personal detail.

Those are a few random facts about Fred Brown (1906-1972); he remains, interestingly, perhaps the only writer I can bring to mind of equal prominence in mystery and science fiction. Many science fiction writers have written mysteries (beginning with Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison) and many mystery writers have written science fiction (Bill Pronzini, Larry Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter) but their reputation, most significant accomplishment, level of recognition lie clearly in one field or the other. Brown is the exception. His first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won an early (1947) Edgar for best first mystery novel and he published more than a dozen in the genre, some highly regarded; What Mad Universe, "Arena," Martians Go Home (a poor movie only a couple of years ago) are important science fiction novels. Brown published stories other than "Arena" which were famous—"The Waveries," Martians Go Home in a shorter version, "Placet is a Crazy Place," "Letter to a Phoenix"—and is generally regarded as the best short-short story writer in the history of science fiction; his mastery of the vignette was absolute and there are tiny pieces like "The Weapon" or "The Solipsist" whose plots and payoff seem known to everyone, whether or not the author can be attributed. (Most famous of all, of course, that 200-word story in which the new computer addresses the question: "Is there a God?" with a bolt of lightning fusing its off-switch closed and the pronouncement, "Now there is!" Validating my statement, I don't remember the title, it's in one of these collections, of course, and I don't have to look it up in Contento to assure one and all that I've remembered this story for more than forty years . . . that story and "The Weapon" are probably the two Great Warning science fiction stories.) (Parentheses after a parenthesis: the title is "Answer.")

That Brown was equally effective, equally prominent in two genres as to be ultimately unclassifiable as a prime practitioner in one or the other is a powerfully interesting, salient fact; it makes his work and his contribution probably unduplicable, certainly incalculable. Like almost every science fiction writer of his generation, barring the five to ten most prominent, he has in the last few decades fallen almost completely out of print; his short stories have been anthologized now and again (most notably by Greenberg & Asimov in their 25-volume GREAT SF 1939-1963 series which was issued between 1979 and 1992) but the novels have not been exposed for a long time. (What Mad Universe was published by Bantam in the late 1970s, Martians Go Home by Baen in 1992, nothing since and nothing between the 70s and that Baen reissue.) Martians Go Home was filmed, unsuccessfully, in the mid-1990s in a version which appeared to have left the bitter, even savage treatment of its absurd premise somewhere at the post (thereby turning the story into another installment of Mork and Mindy) and an astonishing number of the short stories have been used for student films and short subjects in foreign countries; Brown's concepts are perhaps too sardonic and depersonalized to work as drama but this opinion has never interfered with the attraction his work has always had for young film directors and screenwriters.

Like nearly all satirists, Brown was deeply embittered, no fan of humanity or human possibility; this opinion comes through in almost all the work from "Hall of Mirrors" to "Honeymoon in Hell" to "The Weapon" ("Letter To a Phoenix" is an exception; this 1949 ASF story holds that humanity may be hopeless but it is absolutely unassailable, something like Phil Klass's cosmic cockroaches in Of Men and Monsters) and can be noted in its purest and most frightening version in the 1949 "Come and Go Mad" about a mental patient who might in a previous existence have been Napoleon, overtaken by dreams and seizures indicating the paradox of this possibility and which ends the debate in the author's voice with those remarkable lines, "But don't you see: it doesn't matter. Nothing matters!" That couplet didn't make a great deal of sense to me when a friend put the story under my nose in 1952 but it sure does now.

Does Brown's career itself make sense? Prophet of absurdity, he had a severe heart attack in the early sixties, published no more after the tiny collaboration with Carl Onspaugh in 1965, descended into silence in Taos, New Mexico: silence with exile if not cunning. As with the rest of them, his work remains to be rediscovered; brave and noble NESFA has done what it could; now it is your responsibility. If nothing matters, then everything matters. "The Weapon" gives that hard and rigorous lesson, a lesson beyond the arena, careless of the Martians, centered within that pulverized and extinguished heart.

—New Jersey: April 1999

The Stochastic Writer

(Robert Silverberg)

Here was the idea: write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique. Write it as Nabokov or Phillip Roth, Malamud or John Cheever would have written science fiction, as if Fred Pohl had come to them at a Milford Conference and had whispered, "I'll guarantee acceptance at our highest word rate, just do the best you can." As if Betty Ballantine or Lawrence Ashmead had sent an open appeal to the faculty at Iowa and Stanford Creative Writing Workshops: "I don't care how you write or what you write as long as I don't have to argue with the Board about it being science fiction." This was sometime around 1960. "I just got bored with being a hack," Robert Silverberg told me a decade later, "I just wanted to try something different." So he tried something different. Up the Line. Thorns. "The Feast of St. Dionysius." Born with the Dead. "Good News from the Vatican." Oh boy, those were different.

Well, okay. Alfred Bester, another Grand Master (1987), was trying the same thing in the 1970s, so was Theodore Sturgeon in that decade (no Grand Master for Sturgeon, he died in 1985, a few years too soon), and the Kuttners, Catherine and Henry, were lighting it up in the 1940s all the way through John Campbell's Astounding. (No Grand Master for the Kuttners either, Henry was dead in 1958 before the SFWA was born and Catherine never published a line of science fiction after his death.) Sturgeon, Bester, the Kuttners: fierce and in the fire long before our New Wave. But Silverberg's work in its grace, deliberativeness and great aggregation was not so much their successor as proof of a proposal: You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that.

A revelation! Of course there were others who started at about the same time (whereas Silverberg had already had one career) who were doing this as well. Ballard, Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and maybe the merciless Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. But no one this prolific. The man was not only at the front of a movement, he was through fecundity virtually a movement himself.

So then and not a year too soon (a few years too late in fact) a celebration. Like Wallace Shawn's Designated Mourner I perch as Designated Celebrant. This had better cajole humility, for our newest Grand Master is indeed his own celebration. He needs no sounding brass, tinkling cymbal, not from me anyway.

But let me, as Allan Tate said of an Emily Dickinson poem, consider the situation.

An essay about our Grand Master, not about me, of course. But let me nonetheless note that I wrote Silverberg's profile for the Special Issue (4/74) of Fantasy & Science Fiction dedicated to him and a year later the introduction to the Pocket Books collection The Best of Robert Silverberg. Nice rounding effect, surely. In the magazine essay I proclaimed the author's height to be five feet seven inches and his condition as the best living writer in English. Both judgments discombobulated their ever-poised subject and so in the Introduction to the collection I had another go, estimating his height at a fraction under six feet (he has subsequently informed me that he is actually five feet ten inches tall) and adding less grandiloquently that Silverberg could be termed one of the ten best living writers in the language, thus grouping him with the aforementioned Malamud, Roth, Nabokov, etc. This latter correction made him blush only a shade less brightly but I have nonetheless always regretted; my first judgment was closer to correct. Nabokov published Transparent Things that year and Malamud's Dubin's Lives lay ahead of him but neither was worth a Mass. Born with the Dead is worth a Mass. (Roth did become indisputably great but that took another twenty years.)

And another personal note: in 1984 our Grand Master introduced me in Brooklyn to his mother, Helen. She was—like my own mother, two years deceased then—a retired schoolteacher who over a period of at least twenty years had coincidentally lived less than a mile from my own dear Mom. I said to Helen in the most bemused fashion, "Your son has always been ahead of me and I don't mean just chronologically. He is in fact the Stations of my Cross. I am a science fiction writer from Brooklyn, he is the science fiction writer from Brooklyn. My first science fiction story was a 1,200-word squib in the August 1967 Galaxy, your son had the lead novella ("Hawksbill Station") in that issue. I through luck and circumstance sell a couple of novels to Random House, he sells Random House Born with the Dead. I sell a 1,000-word story to the gorgeous new Omni and two months later he sells them a novelette and then another and then another and then another. I publish a few okay science fiction novels, he publishes twenty masterpieces. I take my mother into a backdate magazine store on Nostrand Avenue in 1980 and she says to the proprietor 'My son writes science fiction' and the proprietor says, 'The mother of another science fiction writer comes in here for his magazines all the time. She is so proud of him.' (My mother was not proud of me.) I might say that this was kind of humiliating except that he gives me honor by being my friend. He is not only ahead of me, he is ahead of us all."

Certainly true in 1984 and had already been so for almost twenty years. The accomplishment is so astonishing that the Grand Master conveyed is obiter dicta. Had he not gotten his right soon, right quick, the award would have been an embarrassment to any other recipient.

The acclaimed masterpieces—Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Tower of Glass—are indisputable of course but—ah, Fast Eddie Felsen, patron saint of the circumstantially challenged!—my deepest caritas is for the Silverberg novels at least as good which, because of his sheer prolificacy, never attracted the attention they deserved. The Second Trip (Bester's Demolished Man turned another way and ignited), The Stochastic Man, probably the best of all science fiction novels of politics, and the fierce and riotous Up the Line—the time travel novel about the man who pursued, won and bedded his remote ancestress—is as stylistically poised, rococo, savagely baroque as anything by Bester and also over-the-top humorous, a comic novel to stand with Voltaire's or those of Peter de Vries. Grand Masters get their due but not necessarily all of their works.

Silverberg himself has dated the true beginning of his more intense and literary work to 1962 with the short story "To See the Invisible Man," a riff out of Borges which was the first story written for Fred Pohl's magazines under an unusual contractual arrangement which gave Silverberg, story by story, utter creative freedom. (The arrangement: Pohl would buy the story submitted although he could then terminate the agreement. Silverberg found this to be utterly liberating, he could write to stylistic or subjectual limit, absolved of rejection.) "To See the Invisible Man," a narrative of social cruelty and alienation unusual for its elegance and restraint in the penumbra of a brutal theme, was more than commendable but its skill and force are in fact well foreshadowed in some of the earlier work. What Silverberg called his yard-goods period in the 1955-1960 period was yard goods only to him. "Birds of a Feather" (carnival time in the spaceways), "Warm Man" (more alienation), "The Iron Chancellor" (a house which could have been wired by Gallegher and locked by Kuttner), are considerable. Yard goods there were also, assigned space-filler for the Ziff-Davis magazines, but the early Ace Doubles show real craft and are better than most of the work surrounding them. (In an introduction written in 1978 for a reissue of those Ace Doubles Silverberg noted without inflection how many readers there were who felt that these were his best work, work before he had gone into the valleys of pretension, and he dedicated one of those reissues to such readers.)

Conventional wisdom, an oxymoron if one ever existed, gives us an "early" (pre-1967), transcendent "middle" (1967-1978) and somewhat lesser "late" (to the present) Silverberg but conventional wisdom is like payback. Conventional wisdom with its glass eye, cane, and small, blurry features stumbles through the servants' entrance and falls down the stairs. From that "late" period came the novellas "In Another Country," "The Secret Sharer," "Sailing to Byzantium," came "Hot Sky at Midnight," came "Blindsight," which was one of the brilliant dozen stories done for Playboy, and these are not only at the level of "middle" Silverberg but in some cases ("Another Country" in the 3/89 Asimov and published by Tor the most serious culprit) perhaps beyond. Unlike so many of us our Grand Master got larger as he went on.

An early (1974) collection of mine is dedicated to "Robert Silverberg, the best one." He's the best two and three as well. All the dozens, all the variegate colors, all of the fire. I wrote when he was writing, I published in some of the places he published contemporaneously. These are my greatest accomplishment by proxy.

The Dean of Gloucester, Virginia

(William F. Jenkins)

"Murray Leinster" was the pen-name William F. Jenkins (1896-1975) used for his science fiction; his was one of the longest and most honorable careers the genre offered. The breadth of that career is astonishing; his first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper was published in Argosy magazine in 1919; seven years before the science fiction genre inaugurated in the 4/26 issue of Amazing Stories had been established. And the short novel, The Pirates of Zan, included in this volume, was one of the last serials to appear in Astounding Science Fiction (February through April 1959) before, in February 1960, just after its 30th anniversary, it changed its name to Analog. The January 1960 issue was the last one under the Astounding name, and Leinster was there with the short story Attention Saint Patrick, 30 years after his first appearance in the magazine.

This is a career and the career is only a part of Jenkins' contribution; he was also an inventor who obtained many patents. One of them, for the so-called "back-screen projector" used in movie theaters to this date, is that device which enables you or the annoying person in the row ahead of you at the Bijou to stand and leave the auditorium in mid-movie without casting a shadow on the screen. Jenkins who lived in Gloucester, Virginia, for most of his adult life, had four children, wrote much other than science fiction (appearing frequently in Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, other mass circulation magazine of the 1940s and 1950s) but it is clearly the science fiction by which he will be remembered.

He wrote and wrote to great effect and is one of the very few writers to have contributed more than one short story to the canon regarded as famous and which reach far out of the genre of science fiction. (Arthur C. Clarke, author of The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God, is another; Ray Bradbury, author of The Million Year Picnic and The Sound of Thunder would also qualify.) First Contact, the first and still best story of humanity's first intersection in deep space with an intelligent, spacefaring alien race, was publishing in Astounding in 1945, reprinted hundreds of times and is regarded as not only an extraordinarily effective work of fiction and speculation but as a blueprint, a virtual manual, for how such contact might be accomplished safely and in a way which protects the parties who are alien to one another. The other story—which appears in this volume—is A Logic Named Joe, published in Astounding in early 1946, which brilliantly and with astonishing accuracy not only predicts but maps the contemporary Internet, Google searches, dial-up remedies and all. Like Arthur C. Clarke's communications satellite (virtually blueprinted by the young Clarke in 1945) this was here before the subject was here and not only the accuracy but overlap are remarkable. It is also, as you will note, a bitterly funny story.

There is a third work, Sidewise in Time, not nearly as skillfully written, which may be equally influential: published in the 1930s it is one of the earliest treatments of the alternate/parallel-universe theme in science fiction, the branching "real" worlds which would have existed had other choices been made and which adjoin our own. There is a science-fiction award, the "Sidewise" for best annual treatment of the alternate-world concept, named in its honor.

Jenkins was always around; he was a major science fiction writer in the pre-John Campbell magazines of the 1930s, then was one of the very few writers to effortlessly manage the transition (with Campbell's installation as editor of Astounding in late 1937) to what we now call "modern science fiction." He was a constant presence in Astounding in the 1940s and 1950s, won his Hugo finally at the age of 60 with the 1956 Astounding novella Exploration Team (the Hugos were only instituted in 1953; science fiction had to catch up to Jenkins), wrote one of Astounding's last serials, as I've noted, and continued publishing through most of the 1960s, most of this latter fiction being the Med Service stories (published in another volume of this reclamation of his work by Baen Books) and certainly had by the mid-sixties earned the not at all ironic sobriquet "The Dean of Science Fiction," which phrase in fact appeared in his obituary in the New York Times.

A remarkable figure, then, one of the central figures (as so noted in the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) of "magazine science fiction"—and it was magazine science fiction which drove the category, at least until the early seventies. Until then, virtually all important and influential science fiction appeared first in the magazines, only to reach book form later, and Jenkins was one of the ten or a dozen signal figures of the 1940s Campbell Astounding who were integral to the genre, which had reached its real maturity under Campbell. There is a consensus that Jenkins' novels were not at the level of his short fiction; certainly he published none which had a fraction of the reach and force enacted by First Contact or A Logic Named Joe, and most of the novels have been out of print for many years. The best of the shorter work is, however, unimpeachable and the span of the career, almost fifty years at or near the very top of the genre, is close to unparalleled. It should be added, and not parenthetically, that Jenkins also wrote mysteries and was the editor of an important early science fiction anthology.

A writer of significant range, Jenkins published two stories in Horace Gold's sardonic early fifties Galaxy, If You Was a Moklin and The Other Now, which managed to embrace Gold's grim world-view in no less sprightly fashion than First Contact had embodied Campbell's more positive mien, and there is little doubt that a Jenkins born fifty or seventy years later could have functioned very well on the cutting edge of contemporary science fiction. Surely A Logic Named Joe was as savagely innovative in 1946 as anything published in our celebrated cyberpunk eighties.

A remarkable, irreplaceable figure. Take him out of the history and as with Campbell that history might collapse. Fortunately we do not have to so speculate; he is here and we are lucky to have him. This collection is both celebratory and as absolutely contemporary as this great writer.

Inextricable Disengagement:

The War Games Of David Drake

"Hammers Slammers" no misnomer, that is what war accomplishes, combat demands, training forces: it hammers, it slams, it breaks you down, reduces to nullity. They'll tell you that training first breaks you down "only to rebuild you" but that is snare and delusion, brochure hype, a sell because what training breaks it never replaces, cannot replenish, you become something else if you are restored at all, some foggy mountain breakdown self. War guts, eviscerates, makes all of us the same living and dead, in so doing blurs—as is training's purpose—the line between living and dead to indistinguishability. The only difference in these extreme conditions is that the living perceive themselves as dead while the dead perceive nothing at all.

Believe this: it is not only the outcome of assessment, it is taken from the pulp of experience. I settled for Basic Training at Fort Dix in the last months of Eisenhower's sleepy post-Korean Army; Drake was in the flames of Johnson's Vietnam. We appear to have reached the same conclusions however and our work is much closer than one might think. The shuffling, burnt-away assassins of my FINAL WAR are Slammer dropouts, not rejects.

Extreme conditions flatten, make us all the same, combat is among the most extreme conditions and Drake's Slammers, dead-gone mercenaries fighting in squalor for their own squalor inherit Remarque, Mailer, Heller. Only sentimentalists believe that there is a difference between mercenaries and "ideological" warriors and there are no sentimentalists in foxholes, no foxholes in sentimentalists. They grieve and gravitate these warriors and they leave ideology to the landlocked, protected homefront. Their ideology is their etiology: survival.

To live through Hammer's Slammers is to pay the piper, to understand that these blown-out functionaries are our own idealized selves no longer idealized. David Drake has through furious refusal to compromise, from refusal to special plead, has taken us into the bowels and apparatus of wartime as has no science fiction writer; he is the inheritor of the cold flare of military fiction's history and his rifle sight, his shot pattern is exact. Exact and exacting; a freezing, burning, incontestable body of work.

—New Jersey: 2005

On Isaac Asimov

Some thoughts on the life and death of Isaac Asimov: He and Leonard Bernstein lived to almost exactly the same age . . . Bernstein was seventy-two years, one month and nineteen days at death, Asimov was seventy-two years, three months and four days. Like Bernstein in many ways—his fecundity, his passion (in Ned Rorem's words) to "be the Onlie Begettor," his bemused but dead serious attempt to be all things to all of us, always—Asimov had begun to fail close to his seventieth birthday; like Bernstein he was obsessed with the fate of his father and the feeling that a sad ending would duplicate the father's demise. At his seventieth birthday celebrations in August, 1988, Bernstein recollected how Sam Bernstein had had a huge party on his own seventieth, had passed through that age only to fall apart physically almost immediately thereafter and lived a miserable, invalided, truncated old age. Asimov's father died in 1969 at seventy-two. Asimov had apparently been obsessed for a long time with the intimation that he would die at that age.

Bernstein wanted to write all the symphonies, be all the symphonies, make love to every composer, conductor, musician and listener in the world and, heedless of his condition or risks, smoked three packs a day, drove on and on, conducted Bruckner in Vienna and Bruckner in Manhattan and Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood and the student symphonists in Florida, defying all limitations . . . but when he stumbled off the stage at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, having coughed and gasped his way through the two final movements of Beethoven's Seventh, he went to the respirator, sunk into a chair while Koussevitsky's magical cloak was draped around him and, waving his hands said, "I'm canceling the tour." He had been scheduled to take the Tanglewood students to Europe in September. "I'm canceling the tour," he said and went back to his apartment, announced his retirement on a Tuesday less than two months later and died on a Sunday. Isaac Asimov, as The New York Times guy Gerald Jonas said, wanted to write the Encyclopedia Galactica and gave it a good try, but when he got to column #399 in his unbroken series of monthly essays for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he had made one try at the 400th column and quit, announced that he was incapable of going on. This man who counted publications in the way that Doctor Johnson had counted fenceposts backed off from his 400th column, announced that he had retired and spent his last months in silence. On the last afternoon of his life, Bernstein watched Live at Lincoln Center, listened to Yo Yo Ma and Emannuel Ax play the Rachmaninoff sonata for cello and piano; lying there, breathing through the respirator, listening to Rachmaninoff (who died of cancer in 1943, less than a week before Rachmaninoff's birthday), what could the conductor have been possibly feeling? In those last months, what would Asimov have felt? But this is not the issue of course; Bernstein's thousand recordings and videotapes, West Side Story and the Age of Anxiety Symphony are already in or on the verge of the canonical and scholars, common and uncommon readers will still be trying to assess the effect of Isaac Asimov a century from now. His contribution was no less extreme than Bernstein's and—in its influence upon the young, in the way that the work directed so many of them toward a lifetime of awareness and in some cases commitment, was no less resonant.

When I came into this field in the mid-sixties it was—as I have written elsewhere years ago and quite sentimentally at that time—still a one-generation field. Almost everyone who had ever written science fiction in this country, almost everyone who had defined it as a distinct genre was still alive and (in most cases) writing. The field was so much a one-generation phenomenon that those who had made signification contribution and had died were virtually a special interest themselves, a cell within the party, another division like costume fandom or First Fandom. There was Kornbluth and Kuttner and Weinbaum, there was Lovecraft (not really a science fiction writer although some of his important work had appeared in Astounding), there were marginal figures like Oscar Friend ("The Kid from Mars") but almost everyone else was alive. This was, of course, an actuarial fluke and everyone was quite aware that science fiction would soon enough join the mystery and that lurking anomaly, mainstream fiction, on the mortality tables but at the first convention I ever attended, the 1967 world convention in New York at the Statler Hilton it was possible to feel hermetic, almost smug about the buying and selling and population count of the field. It was at that convention—on Saturday night, September 5 I think at what was then and now called a "pro party" although I was no pro—that I met Isaac Asimov for the first time. Terry Carr introduced me; Asimov struck me as a splendidly ebullient man, utterly unaffected, even unaware of his fame, and as he embraced Richard Wilson in that crowded room, I did not know if it was Asimov or Wilson who I envied more. The time went on as it inevitably does (find a science fiction writer in distress and you will get a cliché every time) and the deaths of consequence began and kept on and on—Gernsback in 1968 and Campbell of course which was a shocker and so onward until the staggering late eighties when suddenly Sturgeon and Moore and Simak and Shaara and Wilson and Heinlein went in a shockingly brief span of time . . . but it still felt like a one-generation field. Ravaged, of course, doomed and haunted, forced to become worldly all against its will ("First Fandom will never die!" one of the brethren said to Harry Harrison in 1970 when Harrison had suggested, gently, that First Fandom might want to explore formally the possibility of a Successor Fandom as inheritors) but the essential containing factors were there. What were those factors? One could construct a complex metaphysical or literary paradigm to explain why science fiction, even in ever greater absence, even while beginning to sound like Haydn's Farewell Symphony still seemed self-contained but the explanation was really not at all elaborate or metaphysical.

Isaav Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the reason that it still felt like a one-generation field. Present at what the canoneers had come to regard as the creation (Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction, that 7/39 issue of the magazine and then the Foundation and the robots and later on Horace Gold and Tyrann and The Caves of Steel and right on to the big boom and the six-figure advance) he was still there all the time and tomorrow; the magazine with his name on it, the Foundation sequels as best-sellers, the Fantasy & Science Fiction essays going on and on. "He was fixed in the heavens, as immovable as the North Star," Isaac Asimov had said in a 7/71 eulogy for Locus when John Campbell had died and so seemingly was Asimov; his presence held the field together in a single, continuing line, his absence bisects it abruptly and permanently. It was said of Beethoven that he made music something that came before him and after and can be heard in no other way; art critics seem to feel the same way about Picasso. This may be the final judgment on Asimov, that his death and the end of his work marks the point at which science fiction, which has been on the verge of implosion or atomization for many years now, begins—like one of Van Vogt's great space cruisers in "Storm"—to break up.

* * *

Asimov was not the only binding figure by stature and chronologically; it is probable that he was so stylistically as well. Everyone after about 1945 either wrote like him or tried to write like him or tried to write unlike him; his was the voice which was either imitated or violently repelled but it was the reasonable, clarifying, paradigmatic voice of modern science fiction itself. (For these opinions I am indebted to John Clute who pointed it out to me in private correspondence and he is absolutely right. Everything after this parenthesis however may be seen as my own misinterpretation; from this point, Clute is a free man.) I think it was Edmund Wilson who defined Ernest Hemingway as the most important and influential American novelist; after he became famous everyone either tried to write like him or, as in the case of Faulkner and Faulkner's disciples, went out of the way to not write like him, doing everything possible to function in reaction and avoid comparison. Certainly, the reactive changes in both style and content which can be clearly perceived in the 1950s and which by the late sixties had become the cutting edge (if never the most widely read or even read at all) of science fiction came in clear reflex to that rational voice which had amassed background and plot and enabled the one to drive the other in the most logical and concise fashion, the emphasis upon clarity. There were many science fiction writers who attempted that clarity and expository force but were simply not good enough to carry it off at all, but it is Asimov driving the most familiar novels and most of the content of the magazines through the decades by inspiration and occasional example. In that sense he was, even more than Campbell (who had become quirky and then an isolated figure in his last twenty years) the fundamental influence that held matters together and he did so with an utter conviction of audience which in no way can be disputed by sales figures; he, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke are still the only science fiction writers to have had work on the best-seller lists and Clarke's work is driven by 2001 and its movie sequel, Heinlein's by the extrinsic success of Stranger in a Strange Land, but Asimov—who never had a film adaptation of any consequence at all in his lifetime and who remained locked within the perimeters of science fiction, being for the general audience synonymous with science fiction—seemed capable without any particular effort other than the work and the effortless presentation of persona to find an enormous audience for his fiction and he did so with utter consistency.

* * *

This becomes, then, the death which is a stake through the shield; that first death beyond which there is no other. Heinlein was a strange brooding, isolated figure, sick and shielded by barbed wire and an obdurate wife and his own glare of fear and contempt for the audience. Sturgeon, a great writer in his time, had shrunk to near silence and clownishness; Bester, another great writer, had never attracted much attention outside the field and had in any case vanished from it utterly between 1950 and 1973, emerging only when the job at Holiday had folded up and he had to raise some new money. Simak was a beloved figure and a writer of no mean consequence but he had been no ambassador to the masses; isolated in Minnesota he had barely been an ambassador to himself. Judy Lynn del Rey was a much more important figure than almost any of us had recognized until very close to the end, but she had come to the field only through a kind of indirection and the period of her great influence lasted less than a decade. Asimov had been the single, the controlling, the central voice of the field for fifty years.

Leonard Bernstein's death was devastating to classical music (Vienna and all of Austria had their flags at half-staff, the sense of devastation was global and absolute) but it was the immediate family, the two daughters, the son and the closest friends who felt the death not as symbol or metaphoric passing but as desperate, personal loss; the "outside world" for Isaac Asimov was composed of all those who had read the books and reacted to the public figure . . . but the immediate family in his case was science fiction itself. It is an intolerable—but irreversible—death in the family, then, and beyond that and some mumbling about atomization, one would have to be a fool to make predictions.

* * *

Isaac Asimov died on April 6, exactly nineteen years to the date after The Gods Themselves did not win the first John W. Campbell Memorial award for the best novel of the year, an award which most of the community would have felt proper (the novel did win the Hugo and the Nebula). Instead, that award was won by your undersigned, and perpetrated a series of resentments and troubles (never from Isaac Asimov) which for me will never be over. "I wonder what that means or what he would have made of that," I said to my wife that evening. "Only you would even think of something like that," she said.

Almost 100 percent but not quite, I think that Asimov, if it had been called to his attention, would have found something profound and yet hopeful to say about that as this (essentially) despairing man managed with almost everything. But we'll never know, will we?

I'll never know.

9 May 1992

The Bend at the End of the Road

(Gustav Hasford)

Just as I once theorized that David Goodis was where Cornell Woolrich went to die, that Hammett conducted his own funeral rites in The Thin Man, that Raymond Chandler's cemetery was the acreage tilled uncompromisingly by George Crumley . . . so I moved beyond these rather sophomoric equations, decided that writers did not die so much as they ran their own material and implications to extinction and then were revitalized by good writers, interred by lesser ones. But if I did still take with this theorizing I would let Crumley out on a forty-eight hour pass and say that when Raymond Chandler really went off to expire, it wasn't Byron Preiss who turned the key, it was Gustav Hasford in this, his third novel. Here is the narrator, Dowdy, the meanest book-dealing P.I. in Los Angeles meeting cute with Yvonna early:

"What are you looking for?"

"I'm a kind and considerate guy looking for a moody bitch for a love-hate relationship. I'm looking for a good woman who knows how to be bad. Women should be obscene and not heard."

"You can just check your flattery at the door, chief. I am not flattery operated."

"You know, Yvonna, I think maybe Jaws wouldn't bite you because he'd be afraid he might chip a tooth on your heart."

"I'm always cold when a man comes on to me like I'm a hot yam at a picnic . . ." (page 10)

Four pages later they are still at it; six pages later they are in bed where Yvonna is "breathing like a wounded animal," fifteen pages further on Yvonna awakens Dowdy to tell him that she is in jail and needs bond money. Dowdy does what he can but when he sees Yvonna again (having enlisted the services of a murderous bondsman and some criminal elements) it is only very briefly at his door when she staggers in and falls dead at his feet. Dowdy's quest for revenge and knowledge leads him through the studios and back lots of the movie business (which Hasford, a screenwriter on the Kubrick film of Hasford's own novel, The Short-Timers, knows very well), to one savage confrontation and then another, to a shootout and some pulped, eviscerated bodies on the freeway and finally into the dust of incoherence. Faulkner and Huston called Chandler during the filming of The Big Sleep, bewildered by the novel (Who killed the chauffeur? Chandler said after a pause that he simply didn't know) but the notoriously casual Big Sleep is riveted solid compared to this. A Gypsy Good Time uses the rhetoric and apparent form of the P.I. novel, strung out to its furthest point, but fails to make the minimal sense which lurked at the edge of Chandler and which Ross MacDonald was able to tease into some kind of baroque consequence.

I want to make my position clear on Hasford: This is neither a contemptuous nor a mocking review, properly speaking it is not a review at all, but a cry of pain. Hasford has done to the private eye novel what one mainstream novelist after another has done to science fiction over the decades, he has decided that since this stuff seems to make no sense and is probably read uncritically anyway, a "real" writer can show how it is really done. All that Hasford has demonstrated is that in the post-Spillane era, in the era of the neo-baroque and the Private Eye Writers of America it may not be possible to do it at all, lacking some real sense of connection of which Hasford, in this novel, has none.

Let me try that paragraph again: I want to make my position clear on Hasford. The Short-Timers (1975), basis of Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket, is a horrifying short novel, a novella really, not much longer than Gogol's The Nose or Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Illyitch, probably the best work of fiction to emerge from Vietnam. If that isn't, then Hasford's second novel, The Phantom Blooper (1990) would be; that sequel takes Private Joker into Viet Cong territory as a POW and then, mysterioso, back to his own forces and civilian life. I think it is the best American novel of its decade. But A Gypsy Good Time is a mistake which I think comes from a misassumption. The misassumption is that a "real" writer can do this shit and show the lifers how it really can come off. The outcome is a novel which works only in terms of its quirky individual scenes and conceptualizations (a nightmare bar populated by devastated Vietnam veterans who hang out with and cover for one another like Andrew Vachss' subway underground of losers, a down-on-the-rim used bookstore with some of the rarest editions in the world and a couple of proprietors who would just as soon kill as acquire), a novel which sways between the parodic and the pastiche and fails to make sense, fails of sequentiality. Hasford or his editor would perhaps say that this is the point: Nothing makes sense, Vietnam was the ultimate, bloody expression of angst, the narrator has been expelled into a world whose surreality he now understands has no relevance or external causality at all, and what better than a P.I. novel to absorb this post-atomic, post-technological, century-of-barbarism insight? It is an argument which can play powerfully in the graduate seminars, the University of Bowling Green popular culture collection and course list are founded upon this kind of equation. Furthermore, it has to be noted that Hasford can write wonderfully well and he must be given his time in court:

I remember the day in Vietnam when it was all over for me like a period on a sentence. I got hit. I got hit real bad. AK rounds turned my flak jacket into rags. I was drunk when I got hit, I was hammered on about forty-five bottles of Tiger Piss beer. The corpsmen stabbed me with morphine, then gave me up for dead and tagged me as KIA . . . I started singing a pornographic drinking song about Walt Disney characters having an orgy—Mickey Mouse was humping Minnie Mouse's brains out with some degree of enthusiasm when the frightened corpsmen unzipped the body bag and resurrected me to something resembling life. (page 108)

Gang kids do kill one another, but always from ambush or with drive-by shootings and then only after they've worked themselves up to it with a full night of drinking and bragging. Life's hard; it's harder when you're stupid. When you're dumb, lazy and don't have any money, being tough is all you've got left. (page 65)

But "writing well" is the curse not only of the graduate school but of the professional writer; it is possible if one is gifted enough (and Hasford is perhaps the most gifted of all) to use style to elide sense, consequence, sequentiality, implication of any sort. The P.I. novel in its post-Chandler manifestations, too, opens the way for this kind of thing; even at the top, Chandler never made a great deal of sense, the novels (all except Lady in the Lake, with its amazing coincidence which does bring it all together) worked in scenes but never as a totality. Where did Terry Lennox hang out for 300 offstage pages? Who killed that chauffeur? Why all the trouble taken to drug the poor fool in The High Window into believing that she was the killer when she could have simply been pushed the same way? Questions at the center of these novels, questions of a different sort in Hammett (we never know what the protagonist of The Glass Key's thinking or what his fix on this material is or whether in fact he is simply not mad?) reduced their authors and perhaps the genre itself to a kind of paralysis, later decadence (see Crumley) and left the door open to someone really smart, brave and accomplished like Gustav Hasford who thought that he could use the incoherence to ratify or refract his own post-apocalyptic vision. (We never learn who grabbed Yvonna or why she jumped bail, why she came back or, for that matter, why she came together with, then abandoned Dowdy; things after Vietnam, Hasford suggests, just kind of happen.) But this is dangerous, it is seductive but not the way to go; it was never the incoherence but, I think, the promise of order which was the focusing matter of the P.I. novel, the indication that there was someone deep of soul, moving toward the center who would pound some meaning from all this. The writers, the great ones and the hacks alike, failed, like the science fiction writers of Ruthven's anguished guest-of-honor speech in Corridors they failed again and again in a thousand places in millions of words but still at the dead-center there was that sense of striving, of struggle, of the arc toward the light of knowledge. It is this which chased Hammett and Chandler and when they could no longer see the light, perhaps then it was why they gave up, but it is not this which chases Hasford (or, I think, Crumley); for them it is the darkness and the dank corridors which they see the genre as inviting. But those corridors were exit ramps and cul de sacs and taking them caused Hammett and Chandler to give it up; A Gypsy Good Time for all of its skill (because of all its skill) simply is not the way to go. Back then, back toward the ascendant light. If the genre cannot struggle toward illumination, then it is not a symptom, it is the disease.

The thing itself.

The Cloud Sculptor of Terminal X

(J.G. Ballard)

The Stones of Circumstance. Ballard came from the tradition of the British disaster novel, a lexicon which perhaps predates modern science fiction as we have come to define it. The Drowned World, The Crystal World, all those sunken empires and bizarre formations are prefigured by Wyndham, Christopher, H. G. Wells . . . there is something about the ruination of the globe which has always fascinated Ballard's compatriots, perhaps it has something to do with the image of Empire being slowly disentangled, all of the rude colonies coming to storm the consulates at tea time, perhaps it has to do with their ruddy and difficult clime. In any case, the early Ballard novels, short stories too are surprisingly conventional in their background and data if not precisely in their articulation; they were more precise than The Midwich Cuckoos or Day of the Triffids, perhaps, but at the center of it was the same old stuff: it was going to become pictorially, illustratively very bad and Ballard would provide us the maps; it is nonetheless possible to conceive of a literature roughly equivalent to our own without those novels written in the early sixties.

Portents, Egalitarian Shifts. Not so the short stories which from the beginning were distinct, compressed visions of stoned disaster, an egalitarian doom visited upon the poor and rich, the sensibility and insensible alike; in those cracked swimming pools, drained bathtubs, odd, empty cities in which ruined surgical teams or demented astronauts paced out their rounds of denial and circumstance it was possible to see some refraction of the century itself; the machinery or its portents had created a democracy of doom. Still, Ballard was dealing in the apocalyptic, in various versions of games theory, closed cycles and winding down; his landscapes were encysted with the soft watches and auto-sodomized virgins of early Dali, but blinking beyond these, in the distances beyond the sightlines it was possible to grant a version of perfect peace. Like all of those bomb stories in the Astounding of the 1940s, a magazine which Ballard read on Army bases for a while until he began to feel that all the contents were the same, Ballard gave us, like Sturgeon, like Chan Davis or Bertram Chandler no clue beyond that perfect garnishment of mortality.

Interpolation. Ballard's "The Assassination of JFK Seen as a Downhill Motor Race" is a pastiche of Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion as an Uphill Foot Race"; in the Jarry an exhausted but almost debonair Jesus weaving to his outcome, in the Ballard a merry portrait of soldiers on the run, jostling a suicidal JFK who had been looking for something big enough to get him out. "If Oswald was the starter, who fired the gun?" Perhaps the first true Ballard story, the first of them which could have been written by no one else, it passed through every American market to varying reactions of incomprehension or disgust and was published, along with most of the contents of The Atrocity Exhibition, in New Worlds. Several editors questioned not only the taste but the sanity of the author. Jarry had a difficult time as well.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. But in "The Terminal Beach," "The Assassination of JFK Seen As a Downhill Motor Race," "The Drowned Giant," Ballard moved beyond his history, voyaged upon his strange and original contribution to the genres of science fiction and literature (held at this time in the 1960s, as they had been for decades before, as independent approaches to the reality problem; much would happen in the remainder of the decades to assault the barriers and Ballard was not the least of those effects but at the time of which we are obsessed, there were science fiction writers still and there were writers and they had relatively little to do with one another): consider a post-apocalyptic world Ballard said and consider that it will be as rich, as entertaining, as filled with possibility as that world which we think of as "before the disaster." More filled with possibility! For heavens, heavens, if the bomb fell, if the aliens sucked clean the planet, if we blew out the oceans and every head of state, if we fornicated ourselves into biological disaster . . . if any or all of these things happened we were freed at last of the shackles of the 20th century, we were released to a land where because anything had happened, anything could. Striding the terminal beach, peering through the wreckage, examining the detritus for signs of passage, the survivor had become, miraculously, the witness and at last the commentator. After the ooze of the soft watches, then, the imprint of chronology in the sands. The biology of the giant, his enormous hands, abscessed features, eyebrows like mountains, knees like the pilings of the Pequod . . . here was a lad, the exploration of whom could keep a platoon of scientists or research assistants cheerfully occupied for huge spans of timeless time, there was an energy and a sense of liberation to these aftershocks which the swaddling technology of the century had itself denied.

Because that was the answer, that was the essence of the Ballard insight: Technology, the evolved state of the planet, was merely a toy, a dream, a rest, a means of concealment; strip it away, get beyond it, turn that technology against itself to rend small or larger holes in the canvas and one could get a look at the true circumstance. "It is not a gloomy poem," Allen Tate says of Emily Dickinson's most famous work. "It merely takes a look at the situation." Ballard gave us a good look at the situation. Energized by disaster as they could never be by the concealments of their condition, his protagonists scampered through the ruins, glowing, learning.

The Actress's Limbs Enormous, Floating, the Planes of Her Face the Landscape of Our Regard. Past the disaster novels then and the profound investigations implied by "The Terminal Beach" came those "compressed novels" of the late sixties, compiled into The Atrocity Exhibition. The landscape had been admired and evaluated, the first scuttling procedures had been investigated, but it was left to the compressed novels to take compass and pickaxe, dig through the acknowledged, passive evidence of the disaster and slowly, slowly draw the generating lines. Tallis, Talbot, Travers, Travis, the one and several protagonists of the compressed novels, working their way through some kind constitutional maze to the purer, luminescent villages in the distance laid out the geometry for themselves carefully. Gigantic, synthesized, the torso of Marilyn Monroe floated in the discolored sky, the monumental failure of our own necessity reaching, then subsiding, plunging into the sands to form refractory commentary upon that enlarged and desperate mask of our necessity: Reagan, Kennedy, Connally, icon, all of them shadowed against the sands. Were they "real" or were they the dreams of Marilyn Monroe floating so tenderly, so wistfully beyond us? Were we ourselves "real" in our witness or had we merely been created by the apparatus of the state to mark its downfall? These were large questions, not inconsiderable at a time when questions themselves were the politics of the time. Can we live? Shall we die? Did we kill? Did we dream? Should we or should we not? the questions were killing us and in order to deal with them we gave them names and sometimes attribution, we called them "demonstrators" or "Vietnamese" or "politicians" or "hawks" or "doves" or "hippies." It is important to understand, to the degree that we can be granted any understanding of that time that it seemed to be on the verge of disassembly, everything which had seemed the constant was dripping into the pastel and liquefying colors of the Dali watches and the landscape which Ballard was articulating in those compressed novels seemed to be the one true paradigm of what was happening in what we called "reality." There is no way to describe the late sixties in America outside of The Atrocity Exhibition, it was all folding up from inside, huge masks of deceased heads of state and their assassins were unfurling in public squares from Arlington, Virginia to a certain ballroom in Los Angeles and there seemed to be no clear point of focus, certainly no point of disengagement.

Like the man with the lever, we might have moved the world if we had had a place to stand but the only such place was the Moon and we were raining debris upon it with fury, scampering hippity-hop! across its pitted and riven surfaces, the surfaces of the Terminal Beach to be sure, we had converted the Moon into only one more aspect of public policy and surely this was not the answer. 240,000 miles, nearly a quarter of a million miles from the White House, the enormous, distended form of the Actress, her limbs floating in the wake of the Apollos, the planes of her face, the landscape of our regard. Wakeup calls to space, from space, the enormous, thrusting force of the rockets carrying us to—well, where? to another enactment of Vietnam foreign policy, that was where.

Ballard was pure, clean, almost faultless; in the strange and pristine geometry of his design it was possible to see all of the juxtapositions that the liars in the temple, the Speakers of all the Houses were using their technology so desperately to force us not to see. Rip away the veil, however, and Travis could see her, could see her cool and deadly form entwined in the arms of her lover the President, the two of them banging and banging away at one another in an utter asepsis of conjoinment with an extension of three point five millimeters, the hanging gardens of their genitalia thrusting home again and again for us all.

Interpolation Two. The Atrocity Exhibition, published in England, was contracted by an American publisher, was printed and set to publish, was then pulped when the publisher himself balked at "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Arguments, reason, contracts, all or none of the above were invoked in this difficult year when Cambodia had become one of the stations of the cross and the nation had seemed to become composed only of prisoners, guards and potential prisoners and guards, detainees all. Years later, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA the book was brought out by Grove Press (a different publisher) in this country and some time after that Ronald Reagan was elected President.

His Mouth a Circle of Fire; the Anapest of Limbs. Traditional American science fiction had either ended the world ("The Nightmare," "Dawn of Nothing") or had in its rueful and sentimental way showed us that there was an even better time for those survivors (who would inevitably include us) when all of the landscape had been swept away ("Lot," "Mother to the World," "Dumb Waiter") but it had been given to the rigorous and comical Ballard to show us that there was another alternative: the post-apocalyptic could be dared and it could be mapped and it could simply keep on coming, one could experience the grinding, roaring, smashing conflagration over and again and learn to live within it, perhaps even transcend: in the laboratory of Crash, then, the fatal accident was enacted over and again with various replacements of the crucial limbs, the impact of disaster could be contracted from forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, ninety degrees, a hundred and eighty degrees while the pillows and harnesses were adjusted and the careful, detached science faculty peered into that solemn estate. Clamped to the actress then, hurtling down the road at 100 mph, the transmission flat out and screaming, the tires beginning their slow, refusing scuttle, he could feel not merely his soul but his genitalia, his very corpus slowly ascend from the planet, depart from this place of strife and loss and then come back again and again to the momentary circle of consciousness. His mouth a circle of fire in those instants of recovery, the anapest of his limbs clutching and unclutching the floorboards, the actor felt himself Prometheus at some final dawn of light, coming back again and again then to this one stinging moment of desertion until he came to understand that what was being enacted upon him, what Ballard had found, what Ballard in rigor and the refusal of denial had ascertained was the essential secret of the time and that secret was that death is not opposed to life, death is not merged with life, no, it was simpler than that, death and life were indistinguishable, two aspects of the same floundering corpus and to know that, to know that the states were fused and therefore arbitrary was at last to be freed from that pointless dualism which had turned the world into bisected doom. Live or die. War or peace. Fuck or be fucked. Eat or starve. Rich or poor. Tits or cock. It took a simple man of simple tastes to understand that monotheism was the first and perhaps the central consideration; that tautology was all, that one worked within a tautology so absolute that the real question was not whether one was living or dead but, rather, who one was at this time.

Stalking the Barriers, Patrolling the Night. All of this, at least, seemed clear or clearer at the time; like all great writers (painters, composers, choreographers too but that is a different attack and words, unfortunately, are far too referential; are charged with overtones or common application which force the writer to compete with the debasement of his very medium) Ballard had made it powerfully simple, absolutely stark and clear; from the black and riven surfaces of the Moon to the awful places of Asia which had become in bombardment almost indistinguishable from the targeted swell of nipple in the supine Marilyn Monroe to the clattering shatter of limbs against harness in the crash factory . . . it was all the same, everything had fused into that perfect tautology and to understand one aspect of the disaster, then, was to comprehend all of it. The dead animal lay huge on the grey sands, extruding tendrils and tentacles partially dismembered by the force of the explosion; one could seize the animal anywhere, take any of these tentacles and slowly, hand over hand, clamber to the original source, the massive head, the sunken and staring eye. Touch The Atrocity Exhibition anywhere, follow Travers or Tallis at any gait, move the corpus against the dunes and one would inevitably come to that large and misshapen head which was the center of the disaster, trace outward from the head then to the tendrils and one could replicate the disaster in assimilable proportion.

Ballard brought the twentieth century home to us then, in small and manageable pieces, a do-it-yourself home kit for apocalypse. Just as Dali had furnished the sands or archways of his buildings with pieces of the larger context, just as Picasso in Guernica had taken us down the steps into the cellar of bombardment where the animals shrieked human sounds and the babies cried like animals, just as Dali and Picasso and Antheil in Ballet Mechanique had managed to put everything into one place, so Ballard had done it too; in his compressed novels were the lunchboxes from the time and one could slowly unpack to measure every aspect of the pain and denial which had manifested itself as our time. To see the distended features of the actress, to stroke her then was to know our own yearning, to feel our yearning hurled back at us along with the implacable stone flesh of the dead woman, likewise the crags and precipices of Reagan's face, the face of Ronald Reagan confronting the subject at a tilt of some 17 degrees would simulate the places of the Moon into which however casually the astronauts had stepped. One could land upon Ronald Reagan then as Armstrong had stepped upon the Moon and in the hard little spaces of his visage one could take serious steps for mankind. Nothing was apart, we were all a nation of the dead, this and much else lurked within those blood tales, handed over to us in the small, anguished proportions of a dream, with the expressivity of the logical voice of the nightmare. Stalking the barriers, patrolling the night, this wasn't so bad at all, Ballard was saying; if something was mapped it was already mastered. The dread of the Terminal Beach ebbed as one strolled through its dimensions, the horror of the Crash abated if one placed the pillars and barriers in a certain way and began to investigate how the impact could be applied. The lone assassin, hunched in the Depository, ready to blow a hole in the century, that was terrifying, yes, but if one could get upstairs there, if one could kick the cans out of the way, pull down the hastily constructed breakfront, move behind the newspapers and instructions and cleaning rods and soiled clothing to look the assassin clearly into place, one would see a man very much like oneself, perhaps it would be oneself in that high space, another, raddled, overexcited version of the self with whom one could reason and to whom one could pass words of comfort.

"Be reasonable," one might say to the assassin, "after all, it works out pretty much the same in the end, this dualism is only a function of your excitement, in the end you'll all be indistinguishable dust anyway." The assassin would nod, his eyes round and impressed, this was the first time someone had spoken to him man to man and it was an impressive, a soothing experience. "Put it down," one would say, gesturing to the rifle, "give up this demented hope of change, walk out into the light of the beach with me. Smell the roses in the lap of the candidate's wife, hear the cries of children. We will all be better for this." The assassin would nod, smile sweetly, convert the rifle to port arms and come to his feet, a haunted expression on his simple and honest features.

"Do you think it's possible?" the assassin would say, "do you think that one could touch the roses, could hold the roses in one hand?" and one would take the assassin by the hand and say, "Yes, yes, of course it would be possible, come with me," and so to the sudden and blinding light of the downhill motor race, the cries of the crowd high and arching in the air. Hand in hand with the assassin then, walking toward the light, the late twentieth century blooming about us.

Anomaly, Exegesis, Mystification. For who is to say? who is to know? It could yet have worked this way for us; when Tallis was killed, juxtaposed by burns or gunfire, he simply went back and formed the pattern again until it was right. Who is to speak of finality? What is there to be known of endings? If the years of that white and poisoned time taught us anything, they taught us of the lack of irrevocability, the infusion and exchange of possibility and so, in the compressed and terrible novels of our lives we have learned—thanks only to Ballard I sometimes think—that revisions if not inevitable at least are in order. Anomaly, exegesis, justification, time, all of this is material of solemnity and force and so as we gather with the researchers in the anteroom, awaiting that next appearance of our beloved, we do so with that sweet and gifted patience which he has given us. I am not speaking here of Empire of the Sun. Empire of the Sun is something else entirely. I would rather not concretize metaphor or know its antecedents, but I admit—ah, what a product I am of the times of which I speak—that this is almost certainly my own terminal beach.

Presto: Con Mlizia

(Cornell Woolrich)

I've held off on public comment for a long time; I'm perhaps the author's primary source of information on Woolrich in his last years and in the summary chapter my own career and collected works are noted favorably ("a kind of noir science fiction . . ." science fiction, Nevins feels, as if Woolrich had written it and certainly some of the early works, particularly The Empty People or In the Enclosure have the closed, hermetic feel of a Woolrich stalk and a similar mindlessness of unidentifiable but efficient menace). Rather to speed the parting guest to review this unfavorably, a kind of mutuality of layoff if I write approvingly. But four years will have lapsed since publication by the time this review is printed, the book (which won an Edgar for biography in 1989) is effectively out of print and commentary of any kind will not affect the fate of this massive biography nor have any particular effect on Cornell's collected works or mine, their fate by now wholly disentangled from lives and circumstance.

I was Cornell's literary agent at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency from late 1966 until late 1967 when the agency summarily dismissed me for non-Woolrichian reasons (I found my way back that time scant months later); I talked with him a lot, got drunk with him once, refused invitations several times thereafter to get drunk with him, bought him dinner (my wife was along) at his hotel, introduced him to the editor of Escapade magazine, Ted Leighton, who published the last Woolrich story in his lifetime (Warrant of Arrest, April 1968) and then had no contact with Cornell thereafter, seeing him only past the end laid out on September 4, 1968 in the Campbell Funeral Home where, on late Friday afternoon, the second day of his embalming, the only names above mine on the visitor card were those of Cylvia and Leo Margulies. The reasons for my abandonment of Cornell do not reflect great credit upon either of us: I simply ran out of patience. Fuller details of our professional relationship, all of which are reliably reported, are in the biography. Nevins is convinced—and would convince the reader—that Woolrich was a practicing homosexual and that his fiction (emerging from his closeted self-loathing, loneliness, self-deception and despair) was wholly framed by his sexuality, that the fiction can only be fully understood or appreciated in terms of a condition which Nevins regards as pathological. (And which certainly through all the years of Cornell's lifetime was so regarded by the great majority of the populace and by the American Psychiatric Association.)

But Nevins has no credible evidence. This bothered me from the beginning; essays adumbrating this book, some of them fed directly into it, began appearing in publications like The Armchair Detective in the mid-seventies and from the beginning Nevins ascribed homosexuality to his subject. The only evidence which he was able to produce (we had extensive correspondence about this in the late seventies and early eighties) was a poorly recorded, almost inaudible cassette recording of an interview Nevins stated he had conducted with Woolrich's sister-in-law, the sister of the woman to whom Cornell had been briefly married in the late 1920s (and who had died long ago). The voice of the sister-in-law told her interrogator that her sister had told her this. Then her sister had told her that. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her this. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her that. Two (or counting Nevins) three levels of hearsay were invoked and none of them constituted the kind of evidence which would stand up in a court of law for five minutes. As the German filmmaker with whom I discussed this in 1985 said (he was in NYC to film a brief documentary on Cornell centering around the Columbia University exhibit and which was later shown on television in his country). This man is a lawyer, surely he must understand how ridiculous this evidence is." But Nevins goes at it with a prosecutor's zeal, takes no witnesses for the defense, dons the judge's robes and asks for a directed verdict of homosexuality. He gets it from his jury of one—he has been able to scurry during that final charge into the jury box—and he announces that verdict on at least 250 pages of his enormous book. Perhaps 350. I have not, with similar prosecutorial zeal, sat and counted, although if I were the late James Blish I certainly would.

I don't particularly care—and neither should any reader at the end of the millennium, decades after this wretched man's death—whether Cornell was homosexual. Nevins' case has always been disturbing to me, however, because what he carries on is in fact a prosecution and in indicting Woolrich for perceived homosexuality, he is trying to force any interpretation of the writer's work then as a "homosexual vision." This is reductive. It is, if accepted, inevitably a reduction of the writer's vision and the sense of the material. Hemingway's work is not read as that of a terrified and self-loathing misogynist (although there is far more objective evidence of this than of any for Cornell's homosexuality), Faulkner's work is not read as the outpouring of a Southern bigot and Negro-hater (although any perusal of the published correspondence will indicate that this great writer certainly was). Any attempt to frame reading of those writers in such terms would be resisted; any label pasted on a writer which will facilitate categorization is inherently reductive. Some writers have been destroyed by this kind of labelling (Chandler, Hammett and the rest of the congregation are "genre writers," Reynolds Price or Eudora Welty are "southern gothic," Flannery O'Connor or Shirley Jackson are "women writers of the grotesque"). It is the more reductive and dangerous for Woolrich, however, because his angst, the reflexive horror of his visions cannot be seen (in the absence of any real evidence) as mere examples of pathology. Such framing reduces the writer and the work and does so in ways which are irreparable.

Nevins has no evidence beyond his passion and beyond that cassette recording. He says that the late Random House editor, Lee Wright (1909-1986) stated that Woolrich was a homosexual who had made a pass at a male friend of Wright's while going somewhere in a taxi, but this is double hearsay in the first place and in the second place, I knew Lee Wright and she thought a lot of people were homosexuals and liked to say so. Many of them who she chattily named are alive but one other of them is dead: Raymond Chandler. There is a certain kind of personality which will see homosexuals, Communists, liberal Democrats, Jews, everywhere but that personality should function, at best, as the first line of inquiry, not the last.

Gary Indiana, a bright and capable writer and social critic, reviewed this book for The Village Voice in early 1989. He did not like it too well and he deconstructed it pretty good, but what I found most interesting and provocative is that Indiana—a homosexual who has written intensely and autobiographically of his sexuality and many other things—in the process of attacking the book for poor research and lack of enterprise ("if someone could find Genet's old tricks on the docks forty years later, you would have thought that Nevins could at least have looked for someone") utterly accepted the basic premise; there is a monomaniacal, one might say hallucinatory quality to the Nevins prose and its assumptions which does not exactly parallel the Master's own but can have a similar effect and Indiana's failure to carry through his lack of credulity at the research and conclusions to the sourcing itself is disturbing. It would indicate that Nevins has, in the sense that he might well perceive the issue, "won," he has succeeded in making homosexuality in the case of Woolrich an accepted fact and the doctoral thesis and library editions of the next century, assuming that there will be any, will proceed from the "facts" which Nevins has put so insistently into print and for which he has won the highest award of his field. "Forget it," Norman Kagan said to me years ago in relation to my opinions of NASA and the American body politic, "It's like you're talking on a street corner somewhere and you're going up against a team with megaphones and satellite communications. It's not that you're wrong, it's just that the situation is hopeless. Stop blaming yourself."

Well, okay. Nevins has the megaphone, I have a few scrappy signed books and a little primary material, all of which was fed into the one essay on Woolrich (it's in Engines of the Night) which Nevins adapted. But for the record: I never noted any evidence of homosexuality in Cornell. He did not proposition me nor did he lay a hand upon my knee nor ask me to join with him in admiration of a passing stranger. He did not phrase this nor he did not state that. Of course, following the Nevins line of logic, this proves the case; note the bleakness and totality of the repression here, the precision of the reaction-formation. No Edgars for me, lads and ladies, and no gilt editions either but one last bleating mumble as I sink and sink; Nevins has no case. Presto con malizia.

Repentance, Desire and Natalie Wood

(Maurice Girodias)

Check it out, here is the afterword to a chapter from Oracle of the Thousand Hands which appears in The New Olympia Reader, 1970:

Barry Malzberg lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan and is worried about having recently reached the ominous age of thirty . . . Mr. Malzberg's first hardcover novels, Oracle of the Thousand Hands and Screen are seriously-intentioned works which, according to the author, were neither fun to write nor fun in retrospect. Major influences on his work in no particular order are Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol.

Not quite. The major major influences upon the author's "seriously-intentioned" hardcover novels, as well as eight paperbacks done for the Olympia Press America between 1968 and 1973 were really: Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Hope Lange, repentance, desire, lust, resentment, ambition and the collected opi of the Four Coins, Four Preps, Four Seasons and the Belmonts. (Dion, too.) Heady stuff for the kid, though, writing for Nabokov's publisher, citing Gogol and Dostoevsky as influences; I recommend this experience to everyone having real or even slight pretensions to artistry.

Girodias fils left Paris in a flurry of debt, lawsuit and governmental revulsion in 1967, decamped to New York, found financial backing (but not too much) from obscure sources, set up active shop here as the reincarnation of that insouciant and eclectic Left Bank spirit which in the 1950s had given bewildered culture lovers the works of Akhbar del Palumbo, Henry Miller, Terry Southern and even Vladimir Nabokov whose Lolita had come to Paris in 1955 at the behest of an author whose agent had been unable to place the novel anywhere.

Maurice Girodias, 49 when he came to New York, 36 then, had been unable to sell many copies of Lolita; he hadn't done too well with Miller either (Akhbar on the other hand had been a staple) but he had ideas, he would reconstitute the age of enlightenment within the borders of a city located on the far Eastern seaboard of a country which was demonstrably going mad.

Clearly, it was going mad, it was his kind of country. First the assassination, then Vietnam, then some other, discreditable assassinations, then the Summer of Love, then Olympia Press America. Then Martin, Robert, Nixon, Apollo, Cambodia, Kent State and Wallace. But by the time of Wallace, Olympia Press was already speeding into Chapter 11 and Girodias, a year after that was, sans his new wife, sans everything sailing for Paris. "Sunk without trace" is not exactly the phrase for Olympia America, nothing is sunk without trace in this country, McGovern is on the lecture circuit and Jefferson Airplane/ Starship are heading toward the third incarnation, but it is close. Fairly close. "Sunk almost without trace" probably can be risked.

The New Olympia Reader, 300,000 words of excerpts by about fifty writers, compiled by your faithful undersigned for a freelancer's pittance (but not the author of the authorial biographies or the cited blurb) sold about 500 copies in hardcover, sold no copies in paperback since there was no paperback edition and hasn't been off my shelf in 15 years. Shortly, speedily, it will go back on my shelf.

That anthology was reviewed in a defunct literary journal by a novelist of minor reputation and high recrimination who mentioned none of the selections, spent 4000 words talking (in the abstract) about the prevalence of voyeurism in early 20th century culture as capitalized upon by senior and junior Girodiaoux and sickeningly exhibited here. Not a review but a poisonous meditation.

"Don't worry about it," the publisher said, "don't think about this twice, because of all the American literary crowd, the litterateurs in the fifties, sucking around the Rue de Whatever, he was the grubbiest, the silliest, the most desperate and the only one whose work I would not buy, I found him effete and senseless. He's been waiting to get back at me for 18 years and oh that wife of his!" This gave me little comfort, not much did give me comfort in those difficult post-prandial years when I came to understand that being Olympia's Best Writer, talisman of a disastrous hardcover program, was in effect to be Girodias's Worst Writer.

"Why am I so self-destructive?" the publisher said to me in a somewhat different context months later when British lawsuits had resulted in his first lot of hardcovers being confiscated at the warehouse and burned at the instigation of a member of the House of Lords whose name had been appropriated for spite as the title of a Traveler's Companion, "why do I do this to myself over and over again?"

"Well, Maurice," I could have said but did not, having even less wit than comprehension in that aftermath of the Summer of Love, "Maybe it's because you turned 50 on April 12, 1969 and men like you, men who have always formed themselves in terms of the debonair, the practical, the outrageous have a lot of trouble at 50 and feel at least that they are going to destruction on their own terms." I could have said that, I could have added that Maurice was exactly 15 years younger than my mother and equally capable of finding guilt in those he implicated, but I did not. One has to get fairly close or closer yet to 50 oneself to be offered such perceptions by which time, usually, it is too late to do much about them.

My mother, speaking of her, was not terribly pleased with her son, so recently the Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow but now a hounded and increasingly desperate novelist manque in search of a real market becoming Girodias's Best Writer. The fact that I was also writing science fiction and selling some of it to strange-looking magazines with androids on the cover was—for her at least—no particular compensation. She was however somewhat mollified to note in the Christopher Lehmann-Haupt 4/7/69 review of the two novels that they were defined as "a kind of anti-pornography"; this enabled her to seize the day with her friends.

"The problem with your pornography," an editor at Olympia named Uta West said to me in relation to the problem. "The only real trouble is that you write about sex the way that 95% of us experience it 95% of the time but it's hard to get us to pay to read about it, you know?"

Still, like the Common Man in Marat/Sade, I had plans. If my sex scenes were dreamy, my intentions and style were, I trusted, not: I wrote the opening chapters of Oracle of the Thousand Hands in a dead fever of February 1968, trying to figure out what might impress Nabokov's publisher's first reader and came up with a crazed pastiche of Pale Fire and Despair, the memoirs of a compulsive masturbator narrated in the alternating first- and third-person with quarts of semen spewed over electric fences, cattle mooing nostalgically in the background at the instant of self-defloration and ultimately a powerful shock from that electrified fence at the moment of final consummation. Girodias or someone there noticed what was going on, he summoned me to Gramercy Park (the Press and four employees worked out of his apartment, skirting the mattress on the floor as they sidled from room to room) and offered me a $2000 contract.

"Well," he mumbled six weeks later when on an impossible June afternoon I came to hear the verdict on the completed novel mailed oh-so-recently, "it's not your number one best seller but it's amusing and interesting isn't it?" Amusing and interesting were his favorite attitudes and everyone in the ideal Traveler's Companion or Ophelia Press book would climax with a smile and a sigh. "I have to accept this, I guess, but now you do something for me. I have a novel I want you to do as a special project for me."

That novel I soon discovered had been offered to and declined as an idea by every writer who had come trooping around or past the mattress: a young man with an empty life and much seminal backup is obsessed with film, watches five films a day, falls vividly in love with actresses, has an imagination so passionate that he can place himself on the screen with and make passionate love to Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia and the ever-popular "others." "Use their real names," he said, "I want scandale; without scandal this cannot work."

"What becomes of the guy?"

"I don't know. Who the hell cares? Maybe he becomes Joe E. Levine, what's the difference. I'll give you a clause protecting you against lawsuits. I love lawsuits," he reminded me.

I delivered Screen in two weeks, taking Martin Miller, a Department of Welfare investigator in Brooklyn (as I had been) through a series of Bijoux and into and out of the genitalia of some actresses, also to Aqueduct race track in the borough of Queens and also through more desultory (if unrequested) collision with a fellow social worker whom he did not love (roman á clef, here) but who intimated his obsession and pointed out that Martin had better get wise, "Because I'm real. I'm also your last chance." (No, she wasn't.) I hold no great brief for the novel but doubt if any better has been written faster, pace A. J. Liebling, and it contains for whatever it is worth probably the best sentence I ever wrote and maybe the best sentence published in a novel of lust in 1969; the last sentence of that novel as Martin Miller having walked away from the suddenly desperate colleague, pounds it into a star (and pounds it and pounds it and pounds it, "her body a map, her hands a road to carry me home"):

It is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.

That sentence written (as were many of the sentences of that and Oracle) with two year old Stephanie Jill burbling and cooing and muttering and bouncing and volubly discussing matters of climate at her father's knee didn't have in draft the word "damned," something seemed to be lacking and in the only revision in either of those two novels, the word was put in for rhythm and emphasis and all of it placed on or near the Girodias mattress shortly after Independence Day.

"You son of a bitch," he pointed out, "you make me crazy, do you know that? I ask you this time for pornography, a simple work of pornography, give you a plot and everything and ask you to keep it simple and low-class, I publish one book for you and ask you to do this for me and what do you do? You give me 40 pages which are beautiful, just beautiful, you even know the color of that one's bush how you tell that? and then what do you give me? You give me horse-racing, you give me existentialism, you give me despair! You give me terrible anxiety and depression! You give me pain and thwarted desire! This book will sell 400 copies, I have to publish it hardcover too because in paperback everyone will throw it away; I have to publish it because it is a masterpiece, but you destroy me, do you understand?"

It sold 350 copies in hardcover, actually, making it the leader of the second "new hardcover line" (Oracle sold half that and a novel by Alex Austin, Eleanore, sold according to statement 52 copies) but none of this was my fault, was it? I mean it was indeed (Lehmann-Haupt backed me up on this) anti-pornography for the coming age of Nixon and under the circumstances, the time could have been right.

But times were never right for the doomed Girodias. They had been laying for him in the American press for years and years, he said, because he had embarrassed them by putting into print consistently masterpieces that the American publishing establishment had been too cowardly or stupid to undertake: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and the Nexus trilogy and Candy and Lolita, and virtually everything else that Barney Rosset or Walter Minton had taken on after he had broken ground. (And because the books were published in English outside of the borders of the United States, they were by old copyright law in public domain in this country.) Perhaps he was right; it is not difficult—I can see this as clearly at 27 as I would be unable to admit it at 50—to do justly, to do mercy, to walk humbly and to be buried anyway.

Besides, Maurice had said, "Written pornography, it is finished. Finished! Visuals are coming, visuals are where it will be, that and high-toned classy books which hairdressers can hand their clientele. Softcore for the ladies, yes, but nothing for the gentlemen. Our basic audience would rather stare than read which they can hardly manage anyway. The ladies on the other hand will call it romance. It will be finished by 1972, just two years from now."

Like Fitzgerald, like Raymond Chandler, like Thomas Wolfe, my publisher could coolly observe his disaster as if from a distance and by seeming detachment from cataclysm feign control. The boat sailed anyway. The Frog Prince, the first volume of his proposed series of memoirs, takes him only up to the age of 19 (and is classically uninteresting as would, say, be the biography of the extra-instrumental life of Heifetz or Nixon), was published in France many years ago, perished in a Crown edition here at the start of this decade and bulletins are distant and infrequent. Which is a way of saying "There is no news." I am, then, or am not near the end of this memoir but would not want to finish without discussing the issue of courage. He had a crazy, a manifest, a royal physical courage which I much admired as did almost anyone who had witnessed its display; he had a true general's detachment, an indifference to consequence founded upon metaphysic. In a dangerous, a perilous Times Square bar at 2 a.m. once where we had repaired, me shuddering he debonair, after a "debate" with an ex-Congressman and a Citizens for Decency League leader on the Farber show, a debacle which had left me exhausted and trembling, ("I don't have to read your filth to know what kind of filth it is," O.K. Armstrong, the Congressman, only two months ago reluctantly but administratively passed on at 92 had snapped to me), we were drinking beer for which Girodias had paid when a truly menacing, a truly dangerous fellow approached, an even less ingenuous companion lurking in the background, pointed a menacing finger at Girodias's sleeve, a knife seeming to glint from a shrouded place and said, "Nice threads, man. Really nice threads."

"Oh," said Maurice, "oh yes, of course, thank you." He began to remove the jacket, rose from the stool, finished the job, extended it. "Would you like?" he said, "it's all yours, my pleasure." The menace went away and Maurice went away and the brave, haunted, doomed Olympia America went away too (in metaphor at least, I am still in that bar, however) and they are to be saluted. Torn wing to wing by rifle fire.

—New Jersey, 1989

Footnote to an unpublished memoir: Maurice did write and publish a sequel to The Frog Prince, was interviewed on French radio in consequence of its publication in the summer of 1990, died suddenly after the interview. One would like to think of this as further evidence of the poised irony with which this difficult man attempted to conduct his life; the jaunty bow, the tilt of the eyebrow, exercise in self-publicity and then, aha! at the apex and astride his history, that graceful tumble to the pit, the Wallenda of autobiography. But death is too magisterial to command easy, balletic grace from most of us; I cannot imagine (I was not there) how it afflicted Maurice but if anyone could, like Don Giovanni salute the abyss it was the son of Jack Kahane. And two months later, Leonard Bernstein. Larger and larger pieces of time—

—New Jersey, 31 December 1990

The Man Who Lost the Sea

(John W. Campbell)

This is written 31 years and 6 days after John Wood Campbell's death. He died suddenly on a Sunday night at home, watching television, his wife said; collapsed with a heart attack and could not be revived. Campbell had been in poor health for years; his emphysema and asthma, severely aggravated (if not caused) by his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, had ravaged him, turned him into a man who gasped after walking a city block, a man whose severe gout atop this had made him only a dim, occasional presence in the Condé Nast offices. Kay Tarrant, his assistant for over 30 years who certainly loved him hopelessly and desperately, never carnally, had been worried for a long time; tried to protect him as best she could. The man who said, drawing on a cigarette and expanding his barrel chest with smoke, that immortality could be self-willed (or at least a very, very long lifetime) barely made it into his seventh decade.

Thirty-one years and a week. Oh, that is a long time ago. There are writers like Michael A. Burstein or Shane Tourtellotte, Analog regulars, who were not born or barely so when this editor, The Editor, died. But writing under Campbell's influence still just as Asimov or Heinlein had sixty years ago. Campbell missed Apollo 13, the Internet (which he would have loved), the cell phone, Explorer, Watergate, Star Wars. He missed pathetic withdrawal from Vietnam and the essential collapse of the magazine market. (He was there for Star Trek, the Tet Offensive, Johnson's resignation and Armstrong's Moon landing.) There will never be a biography. I have been quite sure of this for a very long time.

Now and then someone, usually an academic, says in a desultory way, "There should be a biography of John W. Campbell," and this is true, but it is not going to happen. Most of the primary sources are dead, the others have had their witness published or taped to appear in the usual venues. Campbell's first and second wives are long dead, his two daughters, now in their sixties, live in the Midwest and have no contact with science fiction, have never furnished information. There is a stepdaughter (Peg Campbell, his second wife, was also married earlier) in Alabama who was, during Campbell's lifetime, intermittently active in the field and got to quite a few conventions, but she apparently has had nothing at all to do with science fiction since Campbell's death.

And, perilously for any biographer, this life cannot be separated from the work and has almost no meaning outside of it. Campbell's life although interesting—every life perceived from the inside is at least interesting—cannot be separated from the work; Campbell was an editor, in fact The Editor, and his testimony consists of almost 400 issues of his magazine, more than 10,000 letters, two volumes of which were published years ago. He is a part of the public and private memoirs of every science fiction writer of his time and perhaps it is this which subsumes or at least contains the life. The biography is spare—Campbell never traveled much, lived in New Jersey all of his adult life, edited his magazine for almost 34 years, lived almost a scandal-free life. (There were some operatics surrounding the breakup of his first marriage but it was all resolved quickly and quietly. Dona, his first wife, left the marriage in 1949 and shortly after the divorce married George O. Smith, an engineer who had been one of Campbell's significant contributors.)

(Campbell married Peg in the early 1950s and all evidence is that it was for both a very close marriage emotionally and intellectually and a source of repeated joy.) Something A. J. Budrys wrote of A. E. van Vogt in the 1960s applies to Campbell's personal (not his professional!) life: "He is clearly worthy of some kind of re-evaluation but he simply is not important enough to merit that." Campbell's personal life, the biographical details might stand examination but they are not that important. What is important, the editorship, has the most ample testimony.

Still, if there were a biography at issue, one could write a chapter conjecturing a Campbell who might (or might never) have existed; this Campbell is 23 years old, already a prominent science fiction writer, maybe the best science fiction writer, Doc Smith's only true competitor in the Interstellar Racket, already at the top of a genre whose re-invented version is only seven years old. This young John Campbell has really beaten Hugo Gernsback's scientifiction category cold; his technophiliac fables of conquest about mighty machines and their triumphant operators have come close to dominating the two magazines, Amazing and Astounding, which are his major markets. Now our hypothetical Campbell, only two years out of Duke University, overwhelmed by intelligence and ambition and the Depression as well, makes an important, considered decision: "I'm going to put the decadence in," he says.

Perhaps our conjectural JWC says this in an empty room; perhaps he addresses his young, already long-suffering spouse. "This field of science fiction needs decadence; it is time that form superseded function, mood became more important than action, the ultimate death of the universe was given equal time. A new kind of story," he says, "and therefore a new name to put on the stories because I am already identified with all of this rocketry and interstellar collisions. 'Don A. Stuart,' how is that?" he says to his wife, the former Dona Stuart. "Wouldn't that be exciting?"

Or it was nothing like this at all and Campbell simply wanted to expand his potential markets and his possibility. Very few writers or editors are that purposeful. In the last year of his life, Campbell was asked on camera what he wanted to accomplish when he became Astounding's new editor. "I just wanted to have fun," he said. In a letter to Alexei Panshin a few years before that, in response to the same question, he said that he had no philosophy, no clear set of ideas, he was just responding as an editor to what he liked. Panshin's enthusiastic retrospective analysis bored him.

The good editors, and for his first decade Campbell was a great editor, are not as purposeful as the Panshins and their friends in the English departments would like to impute. Bad or tired editors may become ideologues, may function in terms of some agenda as Campbell did for most of his last twenty years . . . but they are as full of false information as great editors, asked to explain, are full of no information at all. Ultimately, history is built upon absence as much as presence; in cases like Campbell's it can be just another specialized subdivision of fantasy. Objectively, Campbell the writer had reached the top of the small field of science fiction almost at the outset; as Heinlein, publishing his first story in 1939 in Astounding, came to utter dominance within two years, so Campbell years earlier had had a similar course. "I would have gotten a job after I graduated from Duke," he said later, "but there were no jobs at all. So I became a writer." There wasn't much money in writing for the three or four extant science fiction magazines then either but that is what Campbell did and with extraordinary success relative to the situation.

But the Arcot, Wade and Morey series obviously did not satisfy him. He was young, there were more than one of him. So it was time to put in the decadence, an apprehension of entropy which would lead inevitably past ordnance to some apprehension of breakdown and this new version of Campbell, the writer within, came to that understanding. "Twilight," "Night," "Blindness," "Atomic Power" and of course his most famous story "Who Goes There?" "Which was written just before he became Astounding's editor and published in the June 1938 issue, still using some of Tremaine's inventory.

There runs through these stories a kind of gloom, an apprehension of darkness previously unknown in USA genre science fiction. Wells had it in the closing chapters of The Time Machine, of course, and Stapledon had made the extinction of human possibility his major theme . . . but no post-Gernsback in this country was doing that until Campbell. The stories were, in their declensive way, manifestoes. "Twilight" and "Night" have lasted seven decades; the anthologies in which they appear are still in print and the influence of these works has been pervasive. "Blindness" is seated upon a terrible irony, the kind of fundamental accident upon which scientific "progress" is often perpetrated. The other two imply the end of existence, heady stuff from The Time Machine adapted for a market which wanted miracles of engineering to bedazzle its readership of adolescent boys.

And always and disturbingly, there is "Who Goes There?" Campbell's most important and memorable story. In Seekers of Tomorrow, the not always dependable Sam Moskowitz says that this story came from Campbell's childhood: his mother was an identical twin and she and her sister would assume the other's identity with little John. Who was "real?" the young Campbell learned to ask, and who was the fake that seemed real? The confusion was profound and—if Moskowitz can be trusted—might have been the underlay of Campbell's duality; there were in his earliest important relationship two people who were sharing the role of one.

Don A. Stuart and John W. Campbell trading masks, then, for kinds of fiction which could be regarded as opposed. But John Campbell, it seems clear, was evolving into Don A. Stuart; what had originated in duality was transmogrification. Had Campbell continued, the persona and vision underlying the Stuart stories would probably have been the writer. This may be one reason why the editorial position was taken so gratefully; Campbell might have been afraid of where those stories were going, the destiny they contained.

"Who Goes There?" with its mimetic, invulnerable abandoned alien in disguise at a remote polar station was the basis of a famous if low-budget Howard Hawks film, The Thing, in 1951 and then a remake decades later by John Carpenter. This was perhaps the first science fiction movie after Lang's Metropolis or King Kong to have significant general cultural impact. (Certainly, Philip K. Dick's short story "Impostor," adapted into a big-budget film which was released finally at the end of 2001, is a rewrite of that story, a recycling of its central idea told this time from the viewpoint of the monster.) His half of the $500 which Street & Smith (who in that time bought all rights to the stories it published, voluntarily ceding half of the receipts to the author) received from Howard Hawks was the only money Campbell ever received for the story. "That's all right," Isaac Asimov's memoir recalls him saying, "If it's a good movie and if it increases the audience for good science fiction, then I don't mind at all."

Granted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the Astounding editor, encouraged and bought these stories; if he had not, Campbell, scrambling to make some kind of living, would have abandoned the idea. Tremaine deserves at the distance of decades an encomium. But the stories are Campbell's. Don A. Stuart allowed a version of Campbell to escape which had never before been known and they are remarkable.

There is no question that Campbell was—with the possible exception of E. E. Smith, an industrial chemist and part-time writer and not a very good writer—at the time he became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in October 1937 the leading writer of science fiction. That was, in fact, probably the reason that he got the job as Tremaine, promoted to higher position in Street & Smith, was permitted to recommend a successor. This is stale, statistical news 65 years later but it must have been astonishing at the time; the most prominent writer of science fiction had suddenly become the editor of its leading magazine. It was as if Heinlein had become editor of Astounding in 1942 or Bradbury of Galaxy in 1953. The writers—Boucher, McComas at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Horace Gold at Galaxy—who did accede to those positions were accomplished and well known to their colleagues but they did not then or ever possess Campbell's stature.

And with that appointment, Campbell the writer effectively retired. One condition imposed by the position was that Campbell could not sell fiction to his own magazine or to any competitor (a condition which Tremaine had easily circumvented by creating at least one pseudonym and, with his brother's collaboration, establishing another identity) and the sense is that the clause was agreeable, Campbell was ready to quit.

In the 34 years to come he published very little fiction: the novella "The Moon Is Hell," a story in the Healy/McComas New Tales of Space and Time, a few scattered pieces. Even more dramatically than had been the case with Horace Gold, Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, the later reputation as editor tended to obliterate the stature of the writer's career. "Who Goes There?", "Twilight" and "Night" were to assure over the decades that there would remain some consciousness of Campbell's contribution as a writer, but they necessarily receded. "Writers come and writers go but next month's issue comes out forever."

Campbell edited Astounding from October 1937 until his death on July 11, 1971, still the longest unbroken tenure of any editor of a mass market magazine. He was probably the best editor of the century, at least in the United States—there were plenty of great ones and I think that Harold Hayes of the 1960s Esquire was Campbell's only true competitor—and what made him the best was that that Campbell left his magazine and his field utterly transformed. In his first decade he created that anomaly, "modern science fiction." With the broadening of publishing outlets and readership and with the advent of new magazines of quality, Campbell's utter dominance of science fiction was lost and the years after 1949 can be seen as a long, slow, inconstant decline and marginalization.

Campbell became a witness (a very interested and bitterly involved witness to be sure) and his profound unhappiness with what he took to be its misdirection was refracted in his editorials and choice of contents for what had in the Spring of 1960 become Analog.

These last years of increased marginalization had isolated Campbell and embittered him and the effect of his departure from the magazine was, sadly, to improve Analog under the new editor, Ben Bova. Clearly this career did not end well. Campbell stayed too long and he did so in an unvarying way. Maybe if he had left in the late forties for another editorial position, had become say at Random House or Charles Scribner the founder of the first great and widely distributed science fiction division, it would have been better for him and for science fiction. If something like that had been possible, he would have, for the first time, made substantial money and had an influence which went beyond his contributors and his magazine's readership.

But the influence, of course, would not have been as concentrated; within the scope of his magazine, Campbell was an autocrat and his position was absolute. He could do whatever he wanted, perhaps exemplifying that most famous of Yiddish curses: "May you get what you truly want."

It would have been better for all if he had turned over the magazine to a successor somewhere around the end of that brilliant first decade. It could be further argued that beginning with Hubbard's Dianetics, which were propounded in the May 1950 issue of the magazine, Campbell no longer had ideas. He had crotchets: Dianetics, Psionics (a corollary to Dianetics, really, the superior powers of the properly regressed mind), the Hieronymous Machine, the Dean Machine, Dowsing and as the crotchets overwhelmed, substituting reflex for thought, so Campbell overwhelmed his authors and turned most of them into vehicles for the expression and expansion of those ideas.

Some writers who resisted remained in the magazine but most did not and after 1960, most of Campbell's new writers came to print through the study of Campbell's ideas and their servicing. To the most tolerant, Campbell's magazine became irrelevant to the evolution of the field, but many writers and editors felt that Campbell's last decade was more seriously flawed than by irrelevance, he was actively impeding science fiction. Campbell raged editorially in late 1968 against the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he endorsed George Wallace for President not because he thought Wallace could win but as a statement of the bankruptcy of those in command of the present system. Wallace, like Campbell, had unconventional ideas, he forced a new way of thinking. (Memories of the impersonator David Frye playing Wallace on The Smothers Brothers Show: "Look at this face. Is this the face of a bigot?")

"John Campbell now advocates positions which are contrary to everything for which science fiction has fought," Harlan Ellison wrote. I wrote no less angrily in that same medium (the SFWA Forum) that "John Campbell, having given us the field of science fiction, now seemed determined to destroy it." An unhappy, polarizing time.

An explanation or at least an insight of a sort: John Campbell was a man in schism. Most of us are but his duality was profound. Those two writerly identities, Campbell the celebrant of the star paths and Stuart the decadent seemed directly opposed. Perhaps then it was two Campbells editing Astounding, the rationalist and the mystic, the man of methodology and the man who believed powerfully in the evidence of things unseen. It was the rationalist who controlled the early years (the mystic was made content for a while with the editorship of Unknown or experiments in the ether with ham radio) and the mystic who overtook that rationalist in the early years of editorial decline . . . the beginning of that decline marked for most by the advent of Dianetics in the magazine. It was the first time that Campbell allowed the magazine to become a vehicle for obsession but hardly the last: The crotchets overtook.

How sad was this? Schuyler Miller reviewing a New Worlds attributing much of their inspiration to drugs. Michael Moorcock in a letter published in "Brass Tacks" denied that drugs were part of the Ladbroke Grove Zeitgeist but added that he found the current Analog far weirder, spacier, further out than anything about New Worlds and one can take the point.

In issue after issue over those last years Campbell editorially and in his choice of fiction appeared to be desperately repudiating a present which—perhaps infuriatingly to him—could have been seen as a reasonable extrapolation of the themes and context of much of the fiction he had been publishing in the forties. Technological sprawl, the alienation effect, the increasing dislocation caused by technology, the disconnection between act and consequence facilitated by the machines . . . all of this could have been glimpsed in the fiction of Kuttner, Sturgeon, van Vogt; Kuttner's cracked and irresponsible inventor, Gallegher, was doing to scientific methodology what the Clown Prince, Abbie Hoffman, was trying to do to that 1968 Democratic Convention which Campbell so hated. Campbell's unbearable present was clearly foreshadowed in the editorial policies of Campbell's notable past and he—or at least the Don A. Stuart in him which did not believe in ordinary consequence—could not bear this.

Or looking at it another way, Astounding was always a battleground in which the two Campbells contested over the full range of the years; in the end the decadent or retrograde Don A. Stuart might have been the winner—the mysticism, the dowsing, the magazine as monthly prayer meeting—but this Don A. Stuart looked upon a barren field and called it victory . . . because that other Campbell, the rationalist, had through Heinlein, Asimov, the careful editorial projections of the '40s done the job too well, had taken Campbell and his readers inexorably into a world which no intensity of psionics could deny.

Campbell was able to divide himself as a writer: the Don A. Stuart stories did not challenge The Mightiest Machine, they were the product of a different persona. He could not, however, divide himself as an editor. That duality prevailed, it leveraged his attempts through Dianetics, Psionics and Dowsing to, perhaps, to fuse the mystic and the rationalist. This simply did not work. Campbell in his last decade might indeed have felt that science fiction as it had evolved had to be destroyed to be saved . . . no less than the world itself, all those hippies screaming "The whole world is watching!" for the television would have to be destroyed for the purpose of salvation. A most profound and terrible disconnect which became ever more disconnected in Campbell's last years and which might have left him in a state of bewilderment.

But all of this is much later; lies far down the decades from the Don Stuart stories. In these years the duality was not wrecking but celebrating the writer and "Twilight" and "Night" are powerful and reasonable explorations of entropy just as "Who Goes There?" is able—as Campbell was not able in his last, scrambling decade—to transcend the duality. Human or alien? Destroyer or victim? (Mother or Aunt?) These are the questions which dazzle the crew at the Antarctic Circle and therefore the reader. In having no clear answer, in noting the interchangeability, Don A. Stuart proved himself to be far more in accord with the Vietnam peace movement than ever the infuriated editor of Analog could have been.

This is a powerful and signatory collection; the stories are still worthy on their own terms but they are also—even the anti-rationalist essay published in the April 1939 issue of Unknown—are magnificent statements of the problem and clearly predict the dilemma that Analog would become thirty years later. That 1960s Analog was the truncated, inchoate and always resentful outcome of that Campbellian schism. If Wallace represented the clichéd politics of resentment, Analog was its celebrant. Here was a magazine of the future which fought desperately for the past, a magazine of expansion which demanded contraction. A magazine based upon an embrace of the future which feared the future.

There will be no biography, cannot be, the material is inconclusive and unavailable . . . but here in this collection suspires the essential Campbell. In thrall to his ambivalence, John Campbell's Don A. Stuart gives us everything we need to know.

"A new kind of story: wouldn't that be exciting?" asks our conjectured Campbell. The room is empty except for the two of them, Dona quietly in the corner considering him, considering herself as well, perhaps in this morning in the shocking early depth of the Depression seeing the future as well. "We are living in hard times, a new time," this John Campbell says. "The old ways, the happy machines speeding the highway to the stars, they aren't working the way they should. The strong and sturdy spacers stoking the machines, guiding the ship, they are blinded by the million suns of space, staggered and shaking in that enormity: the empty space between those suns. Now we must understand that the machines will not always work, that the highways lead not only to the end of space, to the end of time itself.

"Listen to these ideas we have: I have so many ideas. Let me tell you where our new life must take us.

"It must take us past time itself. We have to lift 'em up, take 'em up, shake 'em up now and forever, create new rules for the emptiness, the wind, the endless space between the stars; that space in which the stars themselves will begin to die."

Oh, sing unto the Lord a new song. Editor, visionary, curmudgeon and damaged and ever-seeking saint, he sung that new song. Sung it for the living and the dead in the space between the stars. Sung past the three hammer blows of fate into the clear and vaulting coda.

The song of the Earth.

Part III:

Ruthven Agonistes

Ruthven Agonistes

Henry Martin Ruthven (b. 1926), the principal of the short story "Corridors" which concludes Engines of the Night is not an autobiographical figure. Of course he cannot fail to contain aspects of the author—the central point of "Corridors" is the commonality of science fiction writers—but he was consciously and deliberately modeled upon a real figure whose identity, you betcha, I will never divulge.

From the story's completion there was always the temptation to make of Ruthven what Doyle made of Holmes or Salinger of the Glass family. I resisted that temptation for many reasons—the Glasses plainly sunk Salinger for instance and Doyle was driven to kill Holmes (unsuccessfully) but when Scott Edelman, then editing Science Fiction Age asked in 1992 for a sequel, I did not resist. There seemed a little more to say about Ruthven after a decade and I said it.

I then guarded against the lure of further Ruthven stories by performing the necessary. Ruthven would understand. He always did. He understood more than I did. He has, in fact, and as in Engines of the Night the last word.

The Passage of the Light

At the Eaton conference in 1993, sitting on a panel having to do with postmodernism—or perhaps it is the archetypal hero in history and science fiction—Ruthven has an insight. Perhaps it is not an insight but an emotion disguised as reason, mocking in this shielded form his delusion that he has at last understood himself. It is not so much the debauchery of the field of science fiction, now combined with fantasy and known in places like these as "fabulation," as decadence which has done matters in. With all of their yearnings, twitches, quick and slow poisonous entanglements on the beds of a thousand conventions, with all of their alcoholism, narcissism, cowardice and greed, his colleagues were able in the old days to separate to their satisfaction the three-cents-a-word labors and the more riotous and disgraceful entanglements which truly kept them going; now however, with the embrace of the fantastic and the outskirts of academia slowly enfolding science fiction, it seems at last to have departed—along with his remaining colleagues and their successors who have wandered through various doors—any conviction that from these small and terrible constructions might come some real portrait of the world which had caused them all such discomfort. Now it is the emolument of the performing arts which is all.

Ruthven thinks of this and other things, feeling—as he tends to feel increasingly in these public moments—a kind of disconnection so strong that it might be remorse: remorse for his 67 years, for the passage of the light, for the expunging of his own time and desire on the ramshackle surgical tables of deconstruction or anomie. It is all too much for him, along with almost everything else, and he has the good sense to remain quiet, to let matters drift around him, to let the poet, the professor, the mainstream fantabulator discuss the deconstruction or reaffirmation of the fairy tale within the post-technological context while, dreaming in the soft and radiant slants of the California sun, come late to his circumstance but beckoning him to ignore or depart earlier constraints, Ruthven thinks of women outside his marriage whom he has embraced, old griefs bedazzled and recollected in this remorseless academic cubicle, the wounded and bleak fire of the adulterer's orgasms with which in the old days he was able to stretch weekends of this sort into the stuff of recollection which could hold him in place through the summers and winters of his marriage to follow, all of those seasons of his marriage and of his twitching, inconsequential career which nonetheless has brought him to California toward the end of his life to stare at the blonde moderator, a professor of women's studies, and try to place the college sophomore from Erie, Pennsylvania whom he had met in Boston in 1980 to whom she bore some fragrant resemblance. The sophomore from Erie, Pennsylvania, had shown the 54-year-old Boskone special guest Henry Martin Ruthven all the way home, and poised upon thoughts of decadence and loss as he might have been, Ruthven could remember the thrall of his entrance, long-delayed but triumphant in its spill, far better than he could any of the statements or conclusions of this panel of some 45 minutes duration.

Later, at the reception after the first complete day of the conference, one which has invited the widowed Ruthven, all expenses plus a $150 honorarium, to offer his own remembrances and recollection of 1950s fabulation as part of an early post-millennial survey of fabulation, Ruthven has been backed against an open window on this first floor by the blonde moderator, who in close-up and in the extremity of Ruthven's regret, now looks less like the college sophomore and more like a blunter and more achieved version of his late wife, Sandra. "You had very little to say this afternoon," the moderator says. Ruthven has never troubled to retain her name. "I wonder if you found the topic unacceptable or whether we were just running on a bit. I know that there was a clear concept of heroism in your Sorcerer series so you've obviously thought about the issue."

"No," Ruthven says, "no, I haven't thought of the issue. I don't think of anything these days much, it's easier that way. In fact," he says, "I'm really a rather superficial person. Writing for the cent-a-word markets in your developing years will do that to you if you're not careful, and then if you get locked into formulaic writing, it becomes even grimmer. I'm 67 years old. It's too late for further insights, I think." And too early for death, he would add, at least in my case, at least this is what he would have added if a certain keen and absent horror had not drifted into the otherwise obtuse features of madame chairman and had not acted to propel her toward the far wall, shaking her head and waving her glass at him. He has this effect upon many people and never more so than when he is trying not to offend, when he is working in a deliberate fashion to repress the very real loathing which comes over him at any time that science fiction or fantasy or fabulation are approached in a manner which would define. But the light, what there is of it at dusk in this small and compressed place, is soft and radiant, and his sense of remorse is not so great that he cannot appreciate the strange and devious nature of his own life as it has led him so belatedly to this, and he cannot question as well the received material of inference in this room: it might have been possible for him even 10 years ago to have found someone with whom to spend the night. Now, in his final years, surmounting the poisons of his own history and the small and utter damages which he takes fabulation to have accomplished, Ruthven is able to draw some sustenance from that inference even as he knows with a less tentative force that he will spend this night alone, he will spend many nights alone, he is as likely to spend every remaining night of his life alone as his books and his contribution to the sport of alternative are likely to slide from all consideration within 10 years of his death. Anya Seton, Otis Adelbert Kline, Oscar Friend, Ray Cummings. Ed Earl Repp. Harl Vincent, the pseudonym for Harl Vincent Schoepflin, prolific contributor to Astounding Stories until Campbell had discharged Nat Schachner, Vincent and quite a few others in a stern and final decree whose insistence—real people, real situations, a real future founded upon an enclosed and apprehended past—Ruthven can feel in the soles of his feet at the present time. The golden alien bird, drifting and singing in the cage of the Snow Maiden, its throat cruelly torn open by the Star Beast, by the products of the Weapon Shops of Isher.

* * *

Ruthven had achieved a certain amount of notoriety—fame was never a word which could be used within fabulation, it was grandiose in a field of grandiosity and therefore never meant anything at all: fame for the damaged Ruthven would be the means of access to the absence of pain and he simply did not comprehend such a thing in his life, any more than he could comprehend the true, transubstantiative nature of prayer—for his guest of honor speech at the Cincinnati Convention in 1983. At this convention (which Ruthven had not at that time had the wit to think of as SinCon, and now that he did have that wit, he simply did not have the means or the audience), Ruthven had started that guest of honor speech as a reading of a transcribed satirical jaunt through the trivial and mean-spirited history of the field; he had meant it as renunciation but had somehow, caught up with self-importance or the thrust of a memory of the night he had spent with the Boston schoolteacher just before, come off the page to deliver a prayer in praise and loss of science fiction, breaking down at the end, crying sickeningly into an open microphone while the chairman hovered and at last came mercifully forward to lead Ruthven to the side under the attention of 3,000 people, most of whom had no understanding of what had happened. Ruthven's final words had been printed in Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle and—in debased form—in his hometown newspaper. They had been used in a story falsifying his career and true nature which had been used in an author collection (no magazine would have printed it) and which had become moderately famous within the field, not that Ruthven read or tried to keep up with such matters or gave a damn what ill-use had been made of his truths; ill-use had been made of him all his life. Nonetheless, the speech and its pathetic close had marked him in the dungeons and secret caverns of the field from which last perceptions eventually congealed as an emotional and sentimental man, something of a panderer, not only the author of the Sorcerer series, which had become the basis of three bad films, a series of graphic novels and multitudinous foreign editions, but a writer filled at last with that very kind of self-importance and sentimentality which he had always disdained. No Hydra Club for Ruthven or sentimental essays on the pulp days for Science Fiction Review, he had stood away from all of that and the academization of the genre as well, and yet in his prolix and unwinding years he had become a symbol after all, a kind of Tristan of the penny-a-worders, a man who had confessed to 3,000 friends and strangers that he had died for love of that which he had not known was his. It is for this reason that the invitations to places like Eaton have been coming in through the latter decade. Ruthven could be counted upon to give something of a show and remind the audience—juxtaposed against the kids with their large advances and open-ended series, the academicians with their mingling of contempt and fear, the writers of his time or just before who reacted to the Star Wars and Star Trek years like oxen led past the slaughterhouse and into an alfalfa field, the sound of the machinery around them at all times but their own lives seemingly deknived—that there was more to science fiction than the suburbs and high-rise cooperatives of fantasy and fabulation, that in its keenest and deadliest spaces science fiction seemed capable of bringing to bear the desirous, yearning adolescent child in ways which most other pursuits could not. Ruthven had taken the invitations—he needed in the first five years of this last decade to get away from the house in a justified way more than ever before—but he had not given good weight; he had always felt shame over his public breakdown, and while he accepted the invitations and certainly never denied what he came to think of as his disgrace, he was not interested in repeating it; one did that kind of thing once in a lifetime or perhaps three or four if one carefully scattered the residue, but one simply did not do much of this, because pandering soon enough would freeze into self-replication and performance, and performance would sink into expectations of design; he would become in these last years when he found it impossible to produce more than a novel a year or to write more than three pages a day or to produce more than 200 words at a single burst of work only a performer and consumer of his own perceived persona. That would make him emblematic of science fiction, he supposed, a further example in microcosm of a field whose origination as a genre in the United States had been virtually synchronous with his own birth on 4/12/26, but he had never aspired to that, had not aspired to emblems of any sort, had tried to live his life in cunning and caution and an absence of pain until at last in his 40s, the restraints had become too difficult—"fuck only at conventions and then always go home" had been the advice of a colleague when the yearnings of his 40s had so overtaken him as to leave him weak, gasping and vulnerable at the sight of a single Botticelli passing him in the streets or a shuddering recollection of one or another love object of his college years presented in the speed and dwindling of night—and his life had become calamitous, insupportable and intolerably vague only long enough for Ruthven to understand that he could no longer abide this way, not on such pain and less than $15,000 a year, and it had been about that time that the commercialization of the Sorcerer, the night drives to the state border and the serious drinking had begun, been exacerbated and finally had eased, leaving him drained if not quite resigned when he had crawled past his 50th, then his 55th birthday (the guest of honor breakdown had changed little) and finally into his 60s, the expansion of science fiction into fantasy, film, television and common obsession somehow running contrapuntally to what seemed to be the implosion of his own perspective. Film and the academicians, the fans and the furies seemed to see more: aliens, dinosaurs, stegosaurs, elves, wolves, magic rings, witches, devils, disciples, quests and rings and things and wings, but he, Ruthven, had always seen less; his focus dwindled so that all he knew were the small convolutions of his own Sorcerer books, which seemed at all odds to be holding their place in the market, and the deadlier implosion of his marriage, which with Sandra's ovarian cancer and the ongoing operations which had carried her through another three years and an extended, unpleasant death, had seemed to become a replica of itself, ever, endless replication of its own dysfunction and ruined desire holding the former world convention guest of honor ever more desperately in place—one could not leave a sick and dying wife any more than one could leave the field of science fiction to be anything else. Sandra sickened and sickened and eventually died, his age, 64 years old in 1990, the last months so striated and rending that he was able, eventually, to recall none of them.

She had died in pain and great purity, the cancer stripping the years and the desperation, the recrimination and the hurt from her even as it had taken her bones and pancreas; at the end, lying in his arms, shuddering against him with small cries reminiscent of the way he had held her in the early years of their marriage, she had become somehow the woman he had loved and she was this because she could love no more nor he nor they nor all of the dreams and disengaged portions of the heart. She had died quietly at the end and with the small, sighing release of a bird's breath, her spirit coming out against his cheek in that last exhalation, and speechless he had gone through the rest of it and three months later the death of the older daughter in an automobile accident without further emotion. He had felt through that period that surely he had become a sociopath in his endless coping mechanisms, and that the interior had been taken from him along with the last of his hair and possibility, but in the long, wracking nights to follow after the anesthesia of mourning, he had found that he was not a sociopath at all but some simulacrum of his earlier self, some desperate and shallower version of the intense young man who had read Simak and Sturgeon, had desperately wanted to reproduce that material for some kind of self-definition and more of that. He had staggered through the year of inconstant and grievous pain while paying as little attention as possible and ignoring the attempts of his younger daughter to establish some kind of bridging connection, and then he had found himself at the end of this to be another version of himself, reduced and tentative, at the edge of frailty but nonetheless recognizable, just as dying Sandra in her last breaths had been recognizably the Sandra who had cried his name and arced with him in 1955 and 1956 calling, calling him home.

Called home, again, then, called to the strange and lustrous California heat and moisture, Ruthven excuses himself from the reception and walks alone, holding a glass, on the antique and cobbled path of the college, looking at the foliage and thinking of the interstices of a business which had taken him to California and his readers to further places than that and yet which—he had to see this in his own case if not as a generality—had taught him absolutely nothing, had left him only this drained and bleaker version of the original self. While the Sorcerer had soared into extrapolation and interchangeability, his own spirit had shriveled; perhaps while science fiction itself had probed this or that corridor of possibility, it had neglected to keep itself properly embedded in the earth and had therefore utterly fragmented into this clawing and disparate animal which allowed the academics to count its toes, its appendages, and its teeth, without ever quite understanding its origin or the nature of its behavior.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps none of this held any water at all; he does not know, as strange to himself in these radiant and sinking days as his interior in childhood had been to his parents. Ruthven understands that he has lost any real sense of consequence or causality in his life, that events once seemingly linked and propelled by some constant of consequence had become disconnected, that all seemed to be outcome without trigger, the cusp of his life decanted with no trace remaining. Once his life seemed wholly explicable in terms of science fiction, most of them felt that way, that science fiction for its practitioners was the world, that fans were slans, that the possibility shack was the probability shack, that the bomb and the astronauts had made all of their speculations justifiable, inevitable. That had been a time, somewhere in the two decades after Hiroshima, when science fiction had seemed the simulacrum, but the politicization of the space program and the infusion of Tolkien into the very heart of science fiction had changed all that: elves and dragons and flat, dead voices from space talking to Mission Control in scatology-free, highly-edited language had leached from Ruthven at least any conviction that the world was responsive to what he had done. It had all become garbage to him in those bitter and enclosed 40s, the period of his unwritten book The Lies of Science Fiction and his frenetic but never pointless adultery had all become some kind of a monstrous anecdote rigged against him, and then with Star Wars and the fantastic overwhelming most of what he thought of as the stark and bitter simplicity of science fiction, everything but his income and his own ability to work had seemed to lurch out of control. Where had the academicians been in the 1950s when stroke by stroke the field had managed to redefine itself, where were the elves and the dragons when all through the 1950s the lights of the country had seemed extinguished by the brighter dazzle of television, the duller impressions of bureaucracy and commie-hunting operatives? Where were any of them? They had come in too late for Ruthven, Sturgeon, Kornbluth or Merrill, even though they had been well early enough for Alien III and Mork and Mindy, even though Merril and Kornbluth would not have known what to have done with these situations even if presented. All was radiant and simple on the way in, dark and impassable when you sought your way out; for the life of him, and it had been a fairly long life, the widowed Ruthven could not say how he had come to this condition or what any of it meant. Looking at the hills, looking at the ground, walking through the campus abandoned by the season, Ruthven had the intimation that not only his life but his very condition, the very circumstances which had framed him had been stripped away, that he was left in this 68th year of his life wandering the campus, as a wound surrounded by murmurous and damaged flesh, regret and remorse barely disguised by respiration, angel of the spaceways swaddled as a series author. A millennial preconception, perhaps, of which there was much in these times but nonetheless true for any of this. The ancient and wizened, the needful and the blood-marked genitals below, the harness of regret above, cinched like a beast to his history, Ruthven patrolled the borders not so much of circumstance and memory as his own insufficiency and realized that there were no conclusions whatsoever, none, that what had been done had come from instance and synchronicity to some kind of latter possibility but none of it at all through the efforts or hypocrisies of those who had perpetrated that which had overtaken them all.

Sturgeon, Bester, Heinlein, Asimov, Wilson, Kuttner, Clifton, Hamilton, Nourse, Kornbluth, Shaara, Campbell, and Ruthven could (but would not) go on and on; he understands that his is the legacy of chronology, he knows far more of the dead than of the living when he thinks of passion and influence. Most of the people whom he has known and loved are dead and still; in thrall, alive, Ruthven cannot commit himself to that great extinguishing hammer which in the nights and days of the lost decades had so enticed him.

* * *

Ruthven goes to bed with the blonde moderator; he connects with her after the drinks and the dinner and the speeches and the plaques on the last night of the conference; it is as easy, perhaps unavoidable, as any of these things had been for him in his 40s. No simulation or copy of Sandra, not Sandra herself had ever gripped him more explicitly nor conjoined more cunningly than the professor of women's studies, and rising bleakly, restored to himself if only for the few apocalyptic final seconds of his fleeting shudder, Ruthven sees the great bird of desire heightened in the night, reaches with a gasp, feels the fire, takes the fire, falls across the woman into the stuporous and entangling final bed which subsumes him. He sees, sinking, once again, the light against the light, the light that falls forever. He hears the sound of great timpani. He vaults the universe and he seeks, at last and at point ultimate, like all of his brethren, to begin. To begin in the light that falls forever.

Afterword: The Last Millinium

Engines of the Night concludes with the short story "Corridors" (that very short appended "L'Envoi" is only an entry for a biographical dictionary which does not exist) and Breakfast In The Ruins, for consistency, should end with the short story "The Passage of the Light" . . . but in 1980 I had subterranean hope that Engines might sequelize, as it has a quarter of a century later, and therefore needed no last word. This time I acknowledge the actuary; in another 25 years I will be 91 and I am not expectant. Nor am I optimistic about the state of publishing at that time.

So this briefest of Afterwords, avoiding the temptation of the Saroyanesque ("This book was compiled through the activities of typewriter, computer and dull pencil, assembled from simple, common, dusty materials in an aspiration for Holy Grace") or the precious Cult Of Salinger ("In the spirit of pressing upon Stephanie Malzberg, then nine months, a spoonful of farina, I gently ask that the reader accept this pretty skimpy book") but instead in memory of Ruthven: I tried in my own poor way to get back there, to truly know it, to find the light against the light. In which we all must hope to dwell.

The light against the light.

—December 2005: New Jersey

THE END

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Breakfast in the Ruins

Table of Contents

Copyright Information

Part I:

Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium

Introduction to the Baen Edition

Part One

The Engines of the Night

Introduction to the 2001

Electronic Book Edition

Introduction to the

Original Edition

The Number of the Beast

L'Etat c'est moi

I Could Have Been a Contender,

Part One

Anonymity & Empire

I Don't Know How to Put It Love But I'll Surely Surely Try

Memoir from Grub Street

The Fifties

The Fifties: Recapitulation and Coda

Ah Tempora! Ah Portions! Ah Mores! Ah Outlines!

Science Fiction and the Academy:

Some Notes

At the Divining Edge

Some Notes Toward the True and the Terrible

Wrong Rabbit

John W. Campbell:

June 8,1910 to July 11, 1971

The Science Fiction of Science Fiction

I Don't Want Her You Can Have Her—

Onward and Upward with the Arts,

Part II

Tell Me Doctor If You Can That It's Not All Happening Again

The Richard Nixon John B. Mitchell Spiro Agnew Blues

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich:

December 1903 to September 1968

A Few Hard Truths for the Troops

Onward and Upward with the Arts,

Part III

Science Fiction As Picasso

Mark Clifton: 1906-1963

September 1973:

What I Did Last Summer

The Cutting Edge

Son of the True and Terrible

The All-Time, Prime-Time, Take-Me-to-Your-Leader Science Fiction Plot

Grandson of the True and the Terrible

Give Me That Old-Time Religion

SF Forever

What I Won't Do Next Summer, I Guess

Come Fool, Follify

The Engines of the Night

Con Sordino

Corridors

L'Envoi

Son of L'envoi

Grandson of L'envoi

Footnotes

Interregnum: Preface to an Essay

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction

Afterword

Part Two Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millenium

Part I: Meditations

Introduction to Part One: Meditations

On Engines Again

Atomic Power

Tripping with the Alchemist

Some Reflections on Freud, Fantasy & the Jewish Condition

I: Not I

On Decadence

Cliftonized

Over the Waves

Thus Our Words Unspoken

A Formal Feeling Comes

Thinking About Compulsion

The Shores of Suitability

Some Notes On the Lone Wolf

By Barry N. Malzberg

Part II

Authors And Other Culprits

Flowers for Daniel

(Daniel Keyes)

Falling from the Air

(Alice Sheldon)

Dark of the Knight

An Introduction And Epilogue

(Damon Knight)

On Fredric Brown

The Stochastic Writer

(Robert Silverberg)

The Dean of Gloucester, Virginia

(William F. Jenkins)

Inextricable Disengagement:

The War Games Of David Drake

On Isaac Asimov

The Bend at the End of the Road

(Gustav Hasford)

The Cloud Sculptor of Terminal X

(J.G. Ballard)

Presto: Con Mlizia

(Cornell Woolrich)

Repentance, Desire and Natalie Wood

(Maurice Girodias)

The Man Who Lost the Sea

(John W. Campbell)

Part III:

Ruthven Agonistes

The Passage of the Light

Afterword: The Last Millinium