ON SF (2005) by Thomas M. Disch

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Izbacicu ovdje, u zasebnom topiku, nekoliko tekstova iz odlicne ali manje poznate kolekcije eseja i recenzija neprezaljenog Thomasa M. Discha (1940-2008), On SF (2005), jednog od najboljih stilista SF zanra, i to iz ere kada se dobro pisanje najvecma zapostavljalo prevashodno u korist Ideje djela. Stavise, pojedini njegovi eseji iskreno koliko i zestoko – ali uvijek sa beskrajnom erudicijom – govore bas o toj literarnoj dihotomiji, dakle o debati/sagledavanju/rekapitulaciji 'dobar/los SF roman' kojoj smo svi makar jednom pristupili na ovim stranama.

Disch, iako Amerikanac, ponikao je iz britanskog New Wave talasa 'mladnih, ljutih zanrovaca' (neko vrijeme proveo je i u Engleskoj) eventualno izbacivsi remek-djela SF zanra – a nikada u stvari bliza mejnstrimu – poput Genocides (1965) i Camp Concentration (1968). U medjuvremenu je napisao i dva (gotika/) krimica sa Johnom Sladekom koga, zacudo, ne spominje ekstenzivnije u svojim recenzijama, osim kada s vremena na vrijeme nabraja velikane zanra.

Izmedju ostalog, tokom 80/90-ih, objavio je i cetiri izvanredna (metafiktivna) horora: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994) & The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999). 1999. je zabiljezio i svoj pogled na zanr u The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science-Fiction Conquered the World, pristupivsi SF-u ne samo kroz literarnu vec i socio-politicku i religijsku prizmu. U esejima koje prilazem nalazi se toliko toga – ako ne i sve – sto je kasnije uobliceno i kanalisano u spomenutu knjigu. Disch je, pored toga sto je ateista, takodje i pjesnik. A osim knjizevnih kritika, pisao je i o pozoristu. Objavljivao je kritike i prikaze u casopisima kao sto su The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Twilight Zone i Atlantic Monthly.

Koliko znam, kod nas je samo objavljeno par Dischovih djela, bolje reci Camp Concentration – od onih najesencijalnih. Od marginalnih romana publikovani su mu The Puppies of Terra (1966) i Echo Round His Bones (1967); ovaj potonji u novosadskoj ediciji 'SuperNova' koja je losim prevodom i nepotrebnom montazom vec masakrirala Besterov The Demolished Man i ko zna jos koliko romana u najcudnijim/najbesmislenijim pejperbek izdanjima koje sam ikada imao prilike drzati u rukama (nijedan od njih nema istu velicinu iako svaki ima jedan te isti svenervirajuci font).           

Medju esejima sto ce se ovdje naci, zateci cete i par Dischovih recenzija, pocevsi sa recenzijom+esejom o E.A. Pou, odnosno njegov uvod za antologiju Strangeness: A Collection of Curious Tales koju je 1977. priredio sa svojim bracnim sadrugom Charlseom Naylorom (bio je veliki postovalac gotskog zanra). Sa Naylorom je jos napisao i jedan istorijski roman koji se eventualno nije dopao Anthonyju Burgessu, pa cu valjda naci vremena i tu recenziju ovdje da izbacim.

Vezano za Poa, U The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, koliko znam, Disch je jedini teoreticar sto je ustvrdio Poa kao pretecu SF zanra i o tome opsesivno pise u poglavlju naslovljenom sa "Poe, Our Embarrassing Ancestor", ukazavsi i na to kako ga je djelo ovoga covjeka u stvari i priklonilo zanru.

Takodje se u jednom poglavlju svoje studije osvrnuo i na rad autora sa imenom Whitley Strieber i njegovim navodnim susretima sa vanzemaljcima (Vitli je navodno vec godinama kidnapovan od strane vanzemaljaca – vidi film Communion – i uzgred je morao da trpi nimalo prijatne eksperimente sto ukljucuju i raznorazne sonde u zadnjici...), pronasavsi 'smoking gun' u Vitlijevoj ranoj storiji "Pain", i obrazlozivsi svoje sumnje vezane za sado-mazo tekstualnu paralelu izmedju spomenute price i Strieberove knjige/memoara Communion, eventualno razotkrivsi citavu Vitlijevu laz. Medju Dischovim esejima u On SF ima i o Vitliju i njegovim vanzemaljcima i, ako raspolozenje dozvoli, negdje cu postovati i taj esej. Svakako bi bilo fino da citava njegova knjiga zavrsi ovdje, ako to ne bi sa sobom povuklo i neke ekstremnije kopirajting represalije.

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     'The Embarrassments of Science Fiction'

Embarrassment is in itself an embarrassing subject. Like beauty, it is all too apt to have its source in the sensibility of the beholder. Why should I be made uneasy by someone else's faults unless I fear to see my own mirrored in them? A capacity for embarrassment implies, at the very least, a lack of that loftiness and high cool that we all try to pretend is natural to us. No one, for instance, blushes at the blunders in a school play, for it is easy to see children, even one's own, in their eternal aspect. The point of having them on stage is for the charm of their inevitable failure in filling out their grown-up roles. If it were, instead, one's husband or wife who were so publicly failing, embarrassment would be hard to avoid — though there might still be charm for others in the audience.

Sophistication requires one to have no friends, or only those who can be counted on either never to fail or never to venture forth. In the quin-tessentially sophisticated world of Proust's novels there are no moments of embarrassment: his artists are first-rate, his aristocrats know better than to 'do' anything, and everyone else is a provincial. A provincial is any person who 'would' be embarrassing if he were a friend or a member of the same club.

Science fiction writers are the provincials of literature. We have always been able to embarrass each other, but to the world at large our gaucheries are generally accounted a major (if not the entire) part of our charm. If the critic Leslie Fiedler could end a speech in praise of science fiction with the sincere hope that sf should not lose "its slapdash quality, its sloppiness, or its vulgarity," so might a countess lavish praise on the ruddy health and unaffected manners of milkmaids. Samuel Delany wrote a long and satisfying essay taking Fiedler to task for his condescensions and pointing out that milkmaids acquire their complexions and their fetching rags as a consequence largely of the conditions they must work in and the pay they receive. I can't do better, by way of moving on, than to quote Delany: "Slapdash writing, sloppiness, and vulgarity are, no matter how you catch them, fat, diseased lice."

So much for our relations with the mainstream. While we remain provincials, it will not be possible to command any other kind of atten¬tion from the capitals of art. It is for us to take ourselves seriously and to consider the uncomfortable question of whether we ought to be permit¬ted out into company. Many of the failings of provincials—their clothes, their manners, their accents—are easily correctable or else forgivable, but others, such as ignorance and complacency, are rooted in the provin¬cial condition. My purpose in this essay is to consider the degree to which science fiction has its source in its own most flagrant faults.

Late in 1970, I made a suggestion in the bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America that I thought satisfactorily accounted for most of what is radically wrong with sf, as well as a good part of what is right. I suggested that science fiction is a branch of children's literature.

Let me count the ways.

In my own case, and in that of almost all my contemporaries who admit to a taste for it, that taste was acquired at around age thirteen. Often earlier; seldom much later than fifteen (though I have met a woman of mature years who became an avid reader of sf at age forty, during a long period of hospitalization). The taste may persist throughout life, but it seldom again exercises the addictive force it possesses in early adolescence, except among science fiction fans (concerning whom I shall have more to say by and by).

Consider, too, how many classic novels and stories in the genre are about children of exceptional wisdom and power. There was an early anthology, Children of Wonder, which I doted on, devoted to this sole theme. There are, as well, van Vogt's 'Slan', Sturgeon's 'More Than Human', Wyndham's 'The Chrysalids' ('Re-Birth' in America), Pangborn's 'A Mirror for Observers', and major novels by Clement, Clarke, Asimov, and Blish — in all of which the protagonists are children. May it not be safely assumed that one reason for this is that such books were written 'for' children?

To say that a book is written for children is not a condemnation, of course, but it is a limitation. It is limiting intellectually, emotionally, and morally. To consider those limitations in that order:

The intellectual limitations of sf are the more remarkable by virtue of the degree to which many of its readers and writers seem to regard their involvement with the genre as a badge of intellectual distinction, like membership in Mensa. This sorts oddly with an engrained anti-intellectualism and repeated demands that sf should stick to its last and provide only escapist entertainment – and yet many of the elder statesmen of the field are capable of such seeming self-contradictions. In fact, if they could but state it, their position is demonstrably consistent, and in fact, like all our opinions, is essentially a rationalization of their practice. Briefly, they would allow writers to deal speculatively with whatever materials might be introduced into a beginning course in the physical sciences, while disbarring irony, aesthetic novelty, any assumption that the reader shares in, or knows about, the civilization she is riding along in, or even a tone of voice suggesting mature thoughtfulness. Sf obeying these rules is called hard-core sf, and some purists would have it that it is the only kind that matters. A classic hard-core story, many times reprinted, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" concerns an eighteen-year-old girl stowaway on a space ship who must be jettisoned because in calculating the fuel needed for landing no allowance has been made for her additional mass. Much is made of the fact that at an acceleration of five gravities the girl's one-gravity weight of no pounds will increase to an effective 550 pounds. As a specimen of English prose, of character portrayal, of sociological imagination, the story can only be judged as puerile; yet within its own terms, as a fable designed to convey to very young people that science is not a respecter of persons, it is modestly suc¬cessful.

The emotional limitations of children's literature are even more restrictive. There are, here and there, children bright enough to cope with the 'Scientific American' or even the 'Times Literary Supplement', but crucial aspects of adult experience remain boring even to these prodigies. At the cinema children fail to see the necessity for love scenes, and if a whole movie were to prove to be about nothing else, then they would just as soon not sit through it. No less an authority than Kingsley Amis has pro¬nounced sex and love as being outside the sphere of interest proper to sci¬ence fiction. Other subjects commonly dealt with by mainstream writers are also presumed not to be of interest to sf readers, such as the nature of the class system and the real exercise of power within that system. Although there is no intrinsic reason (except difficulty) that sf should not venture into such areas, sf writers have characteristically preferred imag¬inary worlds in which, to quote Sprague de Camp, "all men are mighty, all women beautiful, all problems simple, and all life adventuresome."

The moral limitations of a literature built on such premises should be immediately apparent. Evil is seen as intrinsically external, a blackness ranged against the unvaried whites of heroism. Unhappy endings are the outcome of occasional cold equations, not of flawed human nature. There can be no tragic dimension of experience. Even a tentative expres¬sion of pessimism is regarded as grounds for dismissing a work out of hand. Compare sf to mysteries in this respect. Every mystery, however misbegotten, assumes that men are all capable of any degree of evil. That is, all characters are suspects. Such an assumption is essentially foreign to the experience of children. This is not to say that children are innocent, but only that they suppose they are. Having put forward these reasons for considering sf to be a branch of children's literature, I must confess that something essential remains lacking — chiefly, an explanation of why it is read by so many adults. Further, science fiction has other failings and limitations that this theory fails to account for. I am left with an interesting and only partially valid observation, whose chief merit is that it has been a small annoyance to various people I don't like.

Let me approach the problem from a different direction — the problem, that is, of who reads sf and why. And let me explain, as a kind of belated preface, why the nature of science fiction's readership is so crucial a consideration.

Genre fiction may be distinguished from other kinds of writing in being shaped by the (presumed) demands of its audience rather than by the creative will of its writers. The writers accommodate their talents to the genre's established formulae. These formulae exist in order to guarantee readers the repetition of pleasures fondly remembered. It is no more reprehensible for a writer to seek to gratify such expectations than for a restaurant to do so; and it may be done, in one case as in the other, with more or less skill. This emphasis on replication rather than creation does explain why cookery — and hack writing — finally must be consid¬ered as crafts rather than as arts. Indeed, the very mention of "art" is apt to bring a manly sneer to the lips of the hack writer, who prides himself on his craftsmanship, his competence as an entertainer meeting the demands of an audience. It follows that we may learn more about any genre by examining its readership than by studying its writers.

As an example of such an approach let me quote an article in which I sought to account for the conventions of the gothic romance:

Gothics are mostly read by housewives or those who see a life of housewifery looming ahead. In gothics, the heroine is mysteriously threatened and wonders whether it was her husband/fiance who tried to drop the chandelier on her.... Few of the ladies who devour gothics are in serious danger of being pushed off a cliff in Cornwall for the sake of their legacies, yet the analogue of the brand of fiction they buy to their real predicament is close. Every gothic reader must ask herself whether her marriage is worth the grief, the ritual insincerity, the buried ran¬cour, and the sacrifice of other possibilities that every marriage entails. To which the gothic writer replies with a resounding Yes! It is worth all that because down deep he really does love you. Yet to the degree that this answer rings hollow the experience must be renewed. Poor Eleanor must return to the dark castle of her doubts, and the doubts must be denied. And then again.


Is there an analogous model of the representative reader for the much broader and more complex genre of science fiction? I believe there are probably several. One such might be a precocious fourteen-year-old, impatient with his education, anxious for economic independence, with a highly developed faculty for daydreaming and little emotional or moral sophistication concerning the content of his daydreams. That is a fairly accurate portrait of myself at age fourteen, when my passion for sf had reached its height. Now, not just any daydream will serve for such a reader. It must be one to suit his circumstances. Try this, for instance. I quote from the back cover of a paperback:

Somewhere in this world there are six people who —together — can do anything. Some day, perhaps tomorrow, they will put their power to work and the world will be transformed. In the meantime they are wait¬ing quietly. They look — and often behave — like people you know. But with a difference: they think of themselves as "I" — not "we" — because in a curious way they are One.


Add to this that the central figure of the book is a schoolboy of prodigious intellectual gifts desperately trying to pass himself off on 'the' world as the boy next door. This book, as every sf reader will recognize, is Theodore Sturgeon's 'More Than Human'. It is a book that even today I can¬not praise highly enough. Among its many excellences is the fact that it uses its considerable power 'as a daydream' to inculcate ethical values and spiritual insights usually entirely absent from genre writing. For instance, the book's insistence on mutual interdependency (and, by implication, on psychic integration) is in sharp contrast to the legion of stories in which the hero discovers the fate of the world to rest in his sole power. Another theme of the book – the need to bide one's time – is of obvious utility to any fourteen-year-old. But the largest subliminal lesson is latent in the fantasy of possessing secret mental powers. What this represents, I believe, is an assurance that there 'is' a world of thought and inner experience of immense importance and within everybody's grasp. But it is only there for those who cultivate it.

So long as one stands in need of such assurances and exhortations, so long will sf remain a source of solace and of strength. That is why sf is par excellence the literature of students, and why, usually, once you've got your degree and begun to lead a livelier life in the wider world, your need for the intellectual cheerleaders of sf slackens. However, if for any reason you don't get the degree, or if the degree doesn't get you what you thought it would, then you may be doomed to spin the wheel of this one fantasy forever. These, the second especially, are large qualifications. Few expectations worth the having are likely to be entirely fulfilled, and so there remains in every foolish heart appetites that only fantasy can assuage.

That is one model of the science fiction reader, and essentially it is an elaboration of my first theory — that sf is written for children. There is, however, another kind of science fiction reader, more typical formerly than now, who is drawn to the genre by distinctly different needs. His preference is for a different sort of sf than that I've been considering till now. He regards the Golden Age of sf as the thirties and forties. He is an admirer of E. E. Smith, of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of A. E. van Vogt, and, at the farthest stretch of his imagination, of Robert Heinlein. This is the science fiction "fan," and he exercises, by the preponderant and inarguable weight of his purchases, a major influence on the genre.

Since I cannot frame a description of this reader in terms that do not betray my bias against him, I should like to defer to John W. Campbell Jr., who in 1952 wrote this description of his conception of the average reader of his magazine, Astounding:

     Reader surveys show the following general data: that the readers are largely young men between 20 and 30, with a scattering of younger col¬lege students, and older professional technical men; and that nearly all the readers are technically trained and employed.
     The nature of the interest in the stories is not economic, not love, but technical-philosophical.


Now, as an example of what Campbell's technically trained elite was enjoying in those days in the pages of Astounding, I'd like to quote a brief passage from A. E. van Vogt's 'The World of Null-A', which Campbell has called "one of those once-in-a-decade classics." In this passage the hero and his girlfriend have gone to a giant computer to be tested on their understanding of the principles of a new all-purpose science called General Semantics:

     "Now that I'm here," said Teresa Clark, "I'm no longer so sure of myself. Those people look darned intelligent."
     Gosseyn laughed at the expression on her face, but he said nothing. He felt supremely positive that he could compete right through to the thirtieth day. His problem was not would he win, but would he be allowed to try.


The story proves his doubts to be justified, for he is beset on all sides by mysterious and implacable enemies. Thanks, however, to his grasp of non-Aristotelian logic he does win through. Concerning the virtues of this new philosophy, van Vogt had this to say in his introduction:

Every individual scientist is limited in his ability to abstract data from Nature by the brainwashing he has received from his parents and in school. As the General Semanticist would say, each scientific researcher "trails his history" into every research project. Thus, a physicist with less educational or personal rigidity can solve a problem that was beyond the ability (to abstract) of another physicist.

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What can be inferred of a reader for whom van Vogt's sentiments and the situations of his fiction are persuasive? First, I think, that education is a subject of profound ambivalence. On the one hand, success is equated with passing a test administered by a computer that shares the author's reverence for non-Aristotelian logic. There is some apprehension as to one's competitors, for they look "darned intelligent." On the other hand, we (of the real world) are apparently "brainwashed" in school, and physi¬cists with less education may be better qualified to solve certain problems than their better-educated peers. While I have my own reservations about the educational system, there is a ring for me, through all of this, of dead-end jobs and correspondence schools (whose come-ons regularly grace the back covers of sf magazines). The technical training and employment that Campbell speaks of are all too often likely to be training in the use of the soldering iron or even the crowbar. Van Vogt and Campbell speak all too clearly the language of lower-middle-class aspiration and resent¬ment, nor are they alone in this. By far the greater part of all pulp science fiction from the time of Wells till now was written to provide a semi-liter¬ate audience with compensatory fantasies.

This aspect of the social origins and provenance of sf, though seldom spoken of, will not come as a surprise to the seasoned reader of the genre. The pulp magazines that arose at the turn of the twentieth century had, as a matter of survival, to cater to the needs of the newly literate working classes. Inevitably, it shows.

Sf is rife with fantasies of powerless individuals, of ambiguous antecedents, rising to positions of commanding importance. Often they become world saviors. The appeal of such fantasies is doubtless greater to one whose prevailing sense of himself is of being undervalued and meanly employed; who believes his essential worth is hidden under the bushel of a life that somehow hasn't worked out as planned; whose most rooted conviction is that he is capable of more, though as to the nature of this unrealized potential he may not be too precise.

Another prominent feature of sf that is surely related to the naive character of its audience is its close resemblance, often bordering on identity, with myth, legend, and fairy tales. Throughout the twentieth century a large part of the American urban lower classes, from which the sf audience was drawn, were recent immigrants from what is commonly called the Old Country – that is to say, from the place where folk tales were still a living tradition. Indeed, except for the stories of their religions, this was likely to have been the only literary tradition familiar to these immigrants. Thus few of the first sf readers were more than a generation away from the oral tradition at its most traditional. Think of that sense of wonder that is the touchstone of the early pulp stories: could it not be, in essence, an analogue of the sense of wonder all country mice experience at their first view of a modern metropolis? Doubtless, the twentieth cen¬tury has had some surprises even for sophisticated city mice, but it is part of their code not to let on to this. Surely they will not erect wonder, novelty, and the massive suspension of disbelief into first principles of their aesthetics. Sophisticates require the whole complex apparatus developed by two centuries of realistic novelists in order just to begin enjoying a made-up story. But for a naive audience, as for children, it is enough to say, "once there was a city made all of gold," and that city rises up in all its simple splendor before their inner eye.

A less beguiling feature we may expect to find in a lower-class literature is resentment. Resentment, because it has its source in repressed anger, usually is expressed in indirect forms. Thus, the chief advantage of the ruling classes, their wealth and the power it provides, is dealt with in most science fiction by simply denying its importance. Power results from personal virtue or the magic of machines. It is rather the personal characteristics of the wealthy that become the focus of the readers' resentment – their cultivated accents, their soft hands, their preposterous or just plain incomprehensible ideas, which they refuse to discuss except by their own ornate rules in their own tiresome language. Most maddeningly, they hold the unanswerable and utterly unfair conviction that because they've had the good luck to be better educated they are therefore smarter. In a world full of doltish university graduates, this assumption of superiority is in the highest degree exasperating to any moderately intelligent machinist or clerk. But what is to be done? To attempt to catch up could be the work of a lifetime, and at the end of it one has only succeeded in becoming a poor copy of what one originally despised – an effete intellectual snob.

Happily, or unhappily, there is an alternative. Deny outright the wisdom of the world and be initiated to a secret wisdom. Become a true believer – it matters not the faith, so long as it is at variance with theirs. All millennialist religions have their origins in this need for creating a counterculture. As religion loses its unique authority, almost any bizarre set of beliefs can become the focus of a sense of Election. Whatever the belief, the rationale for it is the same: the so-called authorities are a pack of fools and frauds with minds closed to any but their own ideas. Just because they've published books doesn't mean a thing. There are other books that are in complete opposition. Beginning with such arguments, and armed with the right book, one may find one's way to almost any conclusion one might take a fancy to: hollow earths, Dean drives, the descent of mankind from interstellar visitors. For the more energetic true believer there are vaster systems of belief, such as Scientology. I select these examples from the myriad available because each historically has been a first cousin of science fiction. And for this good reason: that sf is a virtual treasury of ways of standing the conventional wisdom on its head. Only sophisti¬cates will make a fine distinction between playing with ideas and adopt¬ing them. For a naive reader the imaginative excitement engendered by a new notion easily crystallizes into faith.

As this begins to sound like an indictment of sf and its readers, I should like to point out that these class-associated features of sf should not be considered as faults. They are essentially neutral and may be employed to good or ill effect, according to the gifts and goodwill of any given writer. Fantasies of power are a necessary precondition of the exercise of power — by anyone. One cannot do what one hasn't first imagined doing. The upper classes possess a great initial advantage in discovering while still young that the world is in essential agreement with their fantasies of power. Princes have a great resource of self-confidence in knowing that someday they'll be kings. Self-help books, from Samuel Smiles through Dale Carnegie, all agree on the crucial importance of hyping yourself into a state of self-confidence. Without that, there is little chance of competing against the toffs who got their gleaming teeth and firm handshakes, as it were, by inheritance. As a device for schooling the mind in what it feels like to be a real go-ahead winner, a few novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs could be quite as effective as an equivalent dosage of Positive Thinking. To denigrate the power fantasies of sf is very like laughing at cripples because they use crutches. A crutch that serves its purpose is to be admired.

As to the kinship between sf and fairy tales and legends, I should not think it would be necessary to make apology. What more fertile soil could any fiction sink its roots into, after all? If individual artists have not always been equal to their materials, that is their loss. It is our gain as readers that often, even so, their botched tales retain the power to astonish us. Even in a cheap frankfurter pork tastes good.

Finally, as to resentment, who shall say that there are not, often enough, good grounds for it? Anger and defiance may he healthier, manlier modes of expression, but when the way to these is barred, we must make do somehow. "Cinderella" and "The Ugly Duckling" are fantasies inspired by resentment, and they possess an undeniable, even archetypal, power. When we are compelled to recognize that our allegiance is owing to powers, whether parents or presidents, whose character is flawed or corrupt, what shall we feel in acquiescing to those powers (as we all do, sometimes) unless resentment? The lower classes may feel their oppression more keenly because it is more immediate and pervasive, but resentment to some degree is part of the human condition.

However (and alas), this does not end the matter. Resentment may be universal, but it is also universally dangerous, for the political program of the resentful inevitably savors of totalitarianism and a spirit of revenge. Once they attain to political power the know-nothings can have a sweet triumph over the know-it-alls by 'declaring' that the earth is flat, or Einstein a heretic. The books of one's enemies can be burned or re-edited. I am by no means the first to observe and deplore this fact of political life, nor yet to note its bearing on a certain variety of science fiction. For a fuller consideration of the fascist lurking beneath the smooth chromium surface of a good deal of sf, I recommend Adolf Hitler's remarkable novel, 'Lord of the Swastika', also known as 'The Iron Dream', by Norman Spinrad.

This aspect of sf is only alarming to the degree that the jack-booted variety of sf writer can make good their claim to speak for the field as a whole: which today, surely, is far from being the case. However, this side of sf does remain an embarrassment so long as sf is regarded as a unitary phenomenon, an extended family whose members have a general obligation to notice each other's existence. In the larger world of mainstream literature, matters are ordered otherwise. The better sort of writers simply ignore the productions of their inferiors, even as they crowd their own off the bestseller lists. They do this in much the same way that the gentry arrange their lives so as to be able to ignore the scowling faces of the lower orders. This has its inequalities, as when good writers have the misfortune to be tagged as "popular entertainers" and fail to receive the critical attention their work merits. But it is undeniably a convenient arrangement, and for good or ill, it is happening right now to sf. It is stratifying into the same three-deck arrangement of highbrow, middle¬brow, and lowbrow. A new variety of reader has sprung up beside the older fandom and the ever-replenished ranks of juvenile readers. This new readership has its own distinctive needs and preferences. Being one of the trees, my own view of the forest is not necessarily to be trusted, and so I will not try to characterize these readers, except to call them — us. My only reason for bringing up the matter at all is to pose the question of what our relation to them should be.

In my first notes for this essay I had a kind of half-aphorism that I haven't been able to sneak in anywhere along the way. It was this: sf bears the same relation to fiction that Scientology bears to science. It works for some, but it won't bear looking at. Essentially the question that remains to be asked is whether such a statement — that it won't bear looking at — is justifiable or wise. When it is said that the poor shall always be with us, too often the implication is that one may therefore ignore the poor, and that listening to their grievances is a waste of time.

The alternative to letting sleeping dogs lie is to risk being bitten. That is to say, for me to speak candidly about the books of certain of my colleagues in the field is to invite their hostility and to wound the feelings of many readers who've enjoyed these books; and this without any expectation of entering on a fruitful dialogue, since I have no confidence at all that we share enough common assumptions about life and literature to enable us to undertake a meaningful discussion. "Fan," after all, is a shortened form of "fanatic." Moreover, as I've indicated, in many ways I have no quarrel with these books, just as I have no interest in reading them.

Nevertheless, I feel that my subject requires me to offer at least one specific instance. Recently I had occasion to read Robert Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers', a book that surely provided Norman Spinrad with one of his models for 'The Iron Dream'. Thanks to Norman it isn't necessary to say much concerning Heinlein's politics. I'm sure that Heinlein himself would reject the label so many of his critics would pin on him, that of "totalitarian." He might, after a bit of qualifying, go along with "authoritarian" since his story does make such an issue of implicit obedience to authority.

What is embarrassing to me about this book is not its politics as such but rather its naivete, its seeming unawareness of what it is really about. Leaving politics aside and turning to that great gushing source of our richest embarrassments, sex, I find 'Starship Troopers' to be, in this respect as well, a veritable treasury of unconscious revelations. The hero is a homosexual of a very identifiable breed. By his own self-caressing descriptions one recognizes the swaggering leather boy in his most flamboyant form. There is even a skull-and-crossbones earring in his left ear. On four separate occasions, when it is hinted in the book that women have sexual attractions, the only such instances in the book, each time within a single page the hero picks a gratuitous fistfight with the other servicemen — and he always insists on what a lark it is. The association is reflexive and invariable. Sexual arousal leads to fighting. At the end of the book the hero has become a captain and his father is a sergeant serving under him. This is possible because his mother died in the bombing of Buenos Aires by the Bugs, who are the spiritual doppelgangers of the human warriors. In an earlier captain-sergeant relation there is a scene intended to be heartwarming, in which two men make a date to have a boxing match. Twice the hero makes much of the benefits to be derived from seeing or suffering a lashing. Now all of this taken together is so transparent as to challenge the possibility of its being an unconscious revelation. Yet I'm sure that it was, and that moreover any admirer of the book would insist that it's just my dirty mind that has sullied a fine and patriotic paean to the military life.

So why bring it up at all? For two reasons. The first is that such sexual confusions make the politics of the book more dangerous by infusing them with the energies of repressed sexual desires. It may be that what turns you on is not the life of an infantryman, but his uniform. A friend of mine has assured me he knows of several enlistments directly inspired by a reading of 'Starship Troopers'. How much simpler it would have been for those lads just to go and have their ears pierced. The second related rea¬son is that it is a central purpose of art, in conjunction with criticism, to expand the realm of conscious choice and enlarge the domain of the ego. It does this by making manifest what was latent, a process that can be resisted, but not easily reversed. And so even those who dislike what I have had to say may yet find it useful as a warning of how things appear to other eyes, and be spared, in consequence, needless embarrassment.

At the beginning of this essay I pose the question whether the faults of sf are extraneous to its nature or intrinsic. In looking back at what I've said, my answer would seem to be that they are intrinsic: but then so are its characteristic strengths. Sf deals with the largest themes and most powerful emotional materials — but in ways that are often irresponsible and trivializing. Altogether too many of us, even the true giants like Philip Dick, are willing to trust our powers of improvisation untempered by powers of retrospection and analysis. We accept the interest paid to the overriding fascination of our subject matter as a tribute paid to our talents, which in few cases have been exercised to anything like their full extent. It would be gratifying to add, byway of rounding this of – on a mellow note, that none of this much matters – that lousy books don't survive and good books do. And why not, after all, end on that note? It may not be entirely true, but it must be an article of faith for anyone who wants to write good books. I believe it. So should you.

[Tripp]

     
     'Ideas: The Popular Misconception'


In recent issues of 'Foundation' and other magazines Ian Watson has been reiterating a notion that I finally cannot resist calling into question. His thesis, in its most skeletal form, is that science fiction characteristically treats of Ideas, and that such is the weight, wonder, and significance of these Ideas that the genre transcends mundane literary criteria, which are dismissed as "stylistics." This argument begs so many questions that it is virtually unassailable. As to his central thesis, that important Ideas are exciting, or vice versa, who will deny it? How, from this vast and fuzzy premise, he comes round to his usual conclusion that sf is the sacred preserve of a muse unlike all others varies from pronouncement to pronouncement, but that is his unchanging moral. I would like, here, to point out some of the ways in which his arguments strike me as wrong-headed, self-serving, and dishonest.

First, let me nod in passing to the old dichotomy of Style versus Content, which will go on being debated as long as there are college freshmen. Old hands at the literary game know this to be a false and spurious distinction, especially in aesthetics. The Ideas in a work of art do not exist independently of the medium that conveys them — whether that medium is language, paint, or musical notes. To plead on behalf of a writer's ideas while offering excuses for his style is tantamount to confessing a sense of at least the partial inadequacy of those ideas, to admit that the writer in question has not commanded one's entire loyalty or whole attention. A writer's strengths as much as his inadequacies prove, when examined carefully enough, to be attributable to his particular use of language — to what Watson would dismiss as "style." But this line of argument, though so established as to amount to a truism, is too abstract to be appealing. It is more comfortable to speak of books as we remember them (big urns full of Characters, Plots, Ideas) than as we experience them (a modulated flow of language). So rather than scuttle Watson's case before it's embarked on the high seas, I'm willing to talk about Ideas and Style.

Let me ask, first, what Ideas are we talking about? Whose Ideas, in which books? I particularly want to know which otherwise meretricious works (stylistically speaking) must be forgiven on account of their good Ideas? Those of E. E. Smith, perhaps? Watson wrote, in Arena 7, of Smith's books:

"Blasters roar, crypto-science jargon jangles evocatively, galaxies collide. It's gawkish stuff. Yet there is such sheer passion for science, discovery, space; such wonder (even though the human and social dimension is missing and the stuffis frankly unreadable beyond the age of 14 with its lumpy style, minimal characters and histrionic plots) that I turn with sadness to some more obviously mature, adult, artistic sf of today."

Does Watson mean to say that there are good Ideas hidden in the dreck? Does it amount to an Idea to say, "Hey, what if there were real spaceships and we could fly them to another galaxy a zillion light-years away!"? Strictly speaking, yes it does—but scarcely an original Idea, even, I would suppose, for the most naive of Smith's readers. This is not to say that it can't be made an exciting Idea, however familiar, by a dramatic presentation—but aren't we talking about "stylistics" at this point? Wat¬son does cite a more original notion of Smith's—that his hero saves "kid¬napped girlfriends from falling into dead stars by firing Morse-code mes¬sages through space by machine gun." An irresistible Idea, in its way, but of the category Dumb Idea. Dumb Ideas are, indeed, the particular delight of the old pulps, and anyone can enjoy a giggle at their expense — or a sigh, like Watson's, for the supposed lost innocence (was it ever really his, though?) that could accept such absurd concoctions at face value. This is what Camp is all about, and Camp, these days, is scarcely an elitist pleasure. Even in my youth, so long ago, 'Mad Magazine' was trafficking in Camp. People like Dumb Ideas, even though they know they're dumb; witness the success of 'Star Wars'.

But Watson (I assume) isn't defending Dumb Ideas, or only incidentally, insofar as they may be general enough (the Idea of Space Travel, for instance) to encompass an Idea that actually has something going for it, the sort of Idea that a professional scientist or philosopher need not be ashamed of. The question then suggests itself to me — if one has got hold of such a really Good Idea, why not present it to the world in the glory of its naked truth? Why is fiction, in any form, required as swaddling clothes? The most successful Ideas have generally been disseminated in nonfictional form. (Though the fancy immediately suggests an alternative universe in which Newton and Darwin felt compelled to propose their theories in the form of novels or epic poems.) The answer is obviously that fiction is not a suitable medium for presenting Ideas for scientific or philosophical evaluation.

What it is good for, and what it often does, is to take Ideas and systems of Ideas from the cool context of the laboratory and the seminar room and demonstrate their relevance to human life. Insofar as the Ideas of sf are worth taking seriously, they belong to a community of discourse that neither originates witiiin the field nor remains there. Truly original Ideas are few, and most intellectual activity consists in glossing them, cross-referencing them, and restating them more lucidly or more forcefully.

But already I find myself falling into the same slovenly usage as Wat¬son in speaking of Ideas as though they were all of one generic type, like Cats. In fact, when we speak of the Ideas in a work of fiction they are of a radically different nature from the Ideas of science and philosophy.

Consider 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'. What is its basic Idea? That animals might be surgically altered so as to become almost like people? Only the most naive reading yields this banality. (Though how often sf critics seem to think it is enough to catalogue the salient nuts-and-bolts of a plot by way of summing up its "Ideas"!) If the book deserves our intellectual con¬sideration, it is rather because it examines human nature in the light of Darwin's theories and speculates on the degree to which human nature resembles that of the brute creation. Wells, however, is not under the onus of explaining Darwin's theories to his readers. Rather, he drama¬tizes the conflict between two views of human nature. He does this with such artistic economy that the uncritical reader is simply swept along by the story — not so much unthinkingly as thinking (with Wells's help) so quickly and efficiently as not to notice what he's about. The Ideas are there, by implication, but taken in the context of the ongoing drama they are not particularly striking Ideas. Only when Wells's art has imparted an intensity and human significance to these Ideas do they become "his" (or as a genre "ours").

In a word, Wells is mythmaking. Here, for a moment, Watson and I may find ourselves on common ground, for in his essay in Arena 7, he speaks of sf as the mythology of the modern age. Our difference may come down to this—that he would emphasize the material being made a myth of, while I would emphasize the process itself. But this shift of emphasis has large repercussions, for it means that Watson wants to believe his Ideas, while I am content to entertain mine.

No doubt that's disingenuous. I have the same vested interest in my Ideas as Watson has in his (or if not in my Ideas as such, in something I think of as uniquely my own; I'd probably call it my Art). The founding text of the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, propounds a very interesting Idea. To wit — that all systems of thought (ideologies) are ultimately no more than special pleading for the ideologue's privileged position. No one, Mannheim maintains, has any Ideas but those that it is to her advantage to have.

To apply this thesis to the present case, artists, when they turn to criticism, are chiefly engaged in expounding the peculiar excellence of their own work as artists, but by proclaiming its virtues and exculpating its faults, Watson, in maintaining the primacy of Ideas in sf and denigrating the importance of "Stylistics," is telling us how we are to read and value his own fiction. It is an evaluation in which other critics have concurred, though not always with the same unqualified approbation.

More than this, however, Watson seems to be demanding that his Ideas be judged on their own merits — not as the elements of a fictional invention but on the grounds of their literal truth. He makes a distinction between science and poetry parallel to that between Ideas and Stylistics. E. E. Smith, for all his failings, is to be admired for his faith in Science, while other writers, manifestly more accomplished, are nevertheless deplored because they worship the false gods of Poetry, Irony, and Skepticism. Of the work of these writers (though he doesn't mention me by name, I trust he would include me in their number), Watson writes:

The science ideas of genuine sf, and science itself too, become all too often a form of stylistic kitsch, reflecting a self-indulgent disillusion with science, wonder, and hope, the future and their replacement by a sophisticated Silver Age rococo.


Science, in its current usage, is that area of knowledge which does not fall under the strictures that apply to Ideology. It is certain, not relative. "Science ideas," thus, are ideas we can believe in, and that is what Watson longs for on the evidence of his own work. The consistent theme of his fiction is that of human transcendence. Transcendence is a religious pre¬occupation, and like many other sf writers, Watson uses science fiction as a vehicle for exploring the vast, dim, and undeniably fascinating terrain on the borderland between here and somewhere transcendentally else. Faith must be, by definition, in things unseen and unproven — but passionately longed for. There is always a temptation to insist that one has, in fact, seen those things. Gospels are written to this effect, and novels. And yet, maddeningly, doubters continue to express their doubts about one's words of witness, doubters who reflect, to quote Watson again, "a self-indulgent Western disillusion with science, wonder, hope, the future."

I am not suggesting that Watson's Ideas are Dumb Ideas on a par with those of E. E. Smith. But they are Doubtful Ideas, in that they are not susceptible of proof and so find themselves in the same boat with other Ideologies.

The Ideas of Poetry, similarly, tend to be Doubtful Ideas (and I would even suggest to Watson — and to sf writers in general — that Poetry, willy-nilly, is the business that they're in), but poets have a different relation to their Doubtful Ideas than do true believers. Poetry is the language Faith speaks when it is no longer literal, a language that is, of course, self-indulgent (i.e., playful, provisional, undogmatic) and that is also, perhaps, disillusioned (if the alternative is to be illusioned). It is the language of Ovid, of Dante, and of legions of other poets, and nowadays it is the language of such science fiction as I would care to make a case for. If it smacks of the Silver Age, there is no disgrace in that — for the Golden Age never did exist. Least of all in science fiction.

[Tripp]

     'Mythology and Science Fiction'


The sun, under which there is nothing new, also rises, and what has happened will happen again, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This doctrine, though sanctioned by many authorities, has never found much favor among those whose trade is Novelty — gallery owners, fashion photographers, messiahs, and science fiction writers.

It can be argued that there are, in fact, new things under the sun nowadays — Concorde jets, Kellogg's Pop-Tarts, sun lamps, the 'Tomorrow' show with Tom Snyder, and much else besides, some good, some bad, and all pouring with indiscriminate abundance from the cornucopia of technology.

What hasn't changed (so far) is the nature of the darkly wise being who must confront both old and new and make some sense of them. The forms of that sense are the structures of mythology, the forever bifurcating, often rickety architectures that support every conceivable (human) meaning.

Myths are everywhere — in every morsel of food, decorating banks and birdhouses, tingeing the blandest discourse with dire resonances, making the mildest encounter a drama. Don't take my word for it: read Freud, or Levi-Strauss, or Barthes. In this very broad sense mythology embraces the whole realm of the cultivated and the civilized, everything shaped by the hand and mind of men, which, for most of us, includes everything in sight. Indeed, even where the hand can't reach, the all-conquering imagination extends its empery, staking a claim on the stars by the simple act of connecting the dots and naming the figures formed by the lines: Orion, Cassiopeia, Hercules, Draco.

Myths are everywhere, but especially in literature. Reduce whatever tale to its atomic components and you'll find those eternal champions and heroes of a thousand farces, Mr. and Ms. Mythos. There they are, skulking in the background of even the likeliest story, disguised as people with next-door names — Steven, Edward, Anna, Emma — but recognizable for all that as Adam, Oedipus, Ishtar, or Snow White. It is not the ingenuity of critics that accomplishes this, but simple human nature. We are a species, alike not only in the morphology of the flesh but as well in that of the spirit—and limited in both. Limited, too, in the relations we can form with others. People arrange themselves in pairs, in eternal triangles, in square dances, and so on, up to about twelve. Thirteen at table is unlucky; fourteen anywhere is a mob (or, if they're our mob, a tribe). Like the Sun Himself, we are prisoners of plane geometry, and the geometers who have described and defined the configurations we are capable of forming are the makers, and remakers, of our myths.

Myths are everywhere in literature, but especially in science fiction, in which category I would (for present purposes) include all distinctively modern forms of fantasy from Tolkien to Borges. The reasons for this aren't far to seek. Myths aim at maximizing meaning, at compressing truth to the highest density that the mind can assimilate without the need of, as it were, cooking. (Extending that metaphor, natural philosophy — science — would represent truth in a less immediately ingestible form — dry lentils, so to speak.) To attain such compression myths make free use of the resources of the unconscious mind, that alternate world where magic still works and metamorphoses are an everyday occurrence. Science fiction presumably abjures magic, but only — like Giordano Bruno, Uri Geller, and other canny charlatans — in order to escape the Inquisition. In fact, sf has been trafficking in magic and mythology since first it came into existence. Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' is subtitled 'A Modern Prometheus', and the horror-show monsters whose image continues to be emblematic of the genre are provably the descendants of "Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire." There is scarcely a theme in sf for which a classic parallel cannot be found: try it.

As mythmakers, science fiction writers have a double task, the first aspect of which is to make humanly relevant — literally, to humanize — the formidable landscapes of the atomic era. We must trace in the murky sky the outlines of such new constellations as the Telephone, the Heli¬copter, the Eight Pistons, the Neurosurgeon, the Cryotron. Often enough, in looking about the heavens for a place to install one of these latter-day figures, the mythmaker discovers that the new figure corresponds very neatly with one already there. The Motorcyclist, for instance, is congruent at almost all points with the Centaur, and no pantheon has ever existed without a great-bosomed, cherry-lipped Marilyn who promises every delight to her devotees. But matching old and new isn't always this easy. Consider the Rocket Ship. Surely it represents something more than a cross between Pegasus and the Argo. What distinguishes the Rocket Ship is that (1) it is mechanically powered and that (2) its great speed carries it out of ordinary space into hyperspace, a realm of indefinable transcendence. My theory is that the contemporary human experience that the myth of the Rocket Ship apotheosizes is that of driving, or riding in, an automobile. We may deplore the use of cars as a means of self-realization and of public highways as roads to ecstasy, but only driver-training instructors would deny that this is what cars are all about. And, by extension, the Rocket Ship. The twenties and thirties, when driving was still a relative novelty, were also the heyday of the archetypal — and, in their way, insurpassable — power fantasies of E. E. Smith and other, lesser bards of the Model T. Among adolescents and in countries such as Italy, where car ownership confers the same ego satis¬faction as surviving a rite of passage, the Rocket Ship remains the most venerated of sf icons — and not because it embodies a future possibility but because it interprets a common experience.

The second task of sf writers as mythmakers is simply the custodial work of keeping the inherited body of myths alive. Every myth is the cre¬ation, originally, of a poet, and it remains a vital presence in our culture only so long as it speaks to us with the living breath of living art; so long, that is, as it continues to be twice-told. Everyone pitches in — from Mesopotamian parents recounting the story of Gilgamesh to scholars translating that story into modern languages. Even Homer, probably, felt the anxiety of influence; by Ovid's time all stories were old stories. The names might be changed, the scenery altered, but the basic patterns were as fixed and finite as shoemakers' lasts. This is why Kipling can maintain that "there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and— every—single—one—of—them—is—right!"

Science fiction writers do not have a unique responsibility toward pre¬serving the body of inherited myth. It is a task that we share with poets, painters, playwrights, choreographers, composers, and commentators of every description. I offer the following catalogue not so much as an Extra-Credit Reading List (though they will all get you points) but to suggest the variety, range, and universality of the undertaking. Among works that conscientiously retell discrete myths from beginning to end are T. H. White's 'The Once and Future King', Joyce's 'Ulysses', Richard Adams's 'Water-ship Down', Cynthia Ozick's 'The Pa.gan Rabbi', Mary Renault's 'The King Must Die', Mann's 'Joseph and His Brothers'; any number of plays by Yeats, Eliot, O'Neill, Gide, Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Sartre; operas by Bartok, Schoenberg, Strauss, and Stravinsky. Additionally, there are writers who, instead of retelling one specific tale, retrace the underlying structures of mythology as these have been systematized by scholars like the Grimm brothers; Frazer, Graves, and Joseph Campbell. Notable among such "synthetic legends" have been Goethe's "Marchen" (perhaps the first artificial folktale), Koch's 'Ko', Barth's 'Giles Goat-Boy', Hoffmannstahl's libretto for 'Die Frau ohne Schatten', and Naomi Mitchison's 'The Corn Kino and the Spring Queen'.

Only in the last ten or fifteen years have science fiction writers shown much interest in the preservative as against the interpretive side of myth-making. The most obvious reason is that writers for the early pulps were not notable for literary sophistication. Van Vogt's stories, at their best, have some of the charm of fairy tales, but I doubt that this was ever his aim. Similarly, the standard space opera often follows a pattern strikingly similar to that which Joseph Campbell describes in 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces', but again I would submit that the likeness was inadvertent. (Though not, of course, accidental: archetypes are hard to avoid once you've set out to tell a story.) The writers of the fifties, such as Blish, Knight, or Bester, though themselves men of undoubted literary culture, were obliged to write for a naive audience for whom almost any story was mind-blowing. The shades of irony or degrees of finesse that may distinguish one revision of a familiar story from the next are lost on readers for whom just the idea sets their sense of wonder to tingling.

What changed in the early sixties wasn't the nature of sf writers but of their audience. Simply, it had grown up. Not all readers, of course. There were still, there are still, and there will always be those for whom sf represents their first trip into the realms of gold. But now side by side with these are readers who can be counted on to know more about the life of the mind than can be discovered in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Charles Fort; who have the knack of reading books in pretty much the spirit they were written.

The point, for instance, of Michael Moorcock's 'Behold the Man' isn't that, gee whiz, a Time Traveler questing for the historical Jesus is involved in a case of mistaken identities. The point isn't What Happens Next because the reader is assumed to be able to foresee that. The point is, rather, how seamlessly the modern (ironic) version of the myth can be made to overlay the gospel (and so, inevitable) version. To a large degree, therefore, the point is the author's wit, his grace, and his depth. In a word, style.

Style not in the niggling sense of being able on demand to use the subjunctive and to come up with metaphors, similes, and stuff like that. Style, rather, in the exclamatory Astaire-and-Rogers sense of (in the words of Webster) "overall excellence, skill, or grace in performance, manner, or appearance."

[Tripp]

   
      'Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills: The Further Embarrassments of Science Fiction'


In his lecture "From Poe to Valery," T. S. Eliot characterized science fiction's most venerable American ancestor in a manner that describes the genre quite as aptly as the author:

That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty. The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights: wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the supernatural, cryptograms and cyphers, puzzles and labyrinths, mechanical chess-players and wild flights of speculation. The variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire.

Eliot could have continued, even more damningly, in the same vein by noting the respects in which Poe's representations of sexuality are typical of those adolescent rakes and roues whose information on the subject derives from the library and a theoretical fascination rather than from experience or actual desire. The Poe who, in his early twenties, wrote "Berenice," wherein the soulful, aristocratic Egaeus develops a passion for the teeth of his affianced cousin Berenice, is a kind of adult impersonator, a teenager grossing out the grown-ups by reducing their lusts to an absurdity.

"The teeth!" Egaeus famously raves, "— the teeth! — they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them... In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a frenzied desire." In the tale's denouement, with wonderful celerity, Berenice dies in an epileptic fit; she is buried, and a menial whispers to Egaeus "of a violated grave — of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing — still palpitating — 'still alive!'

I cannot resist quoting Egaeus/Poe's last breathless paragraph in full:

He [the menial] pointed to my garments: they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gendy by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and, in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.


In 1975 1 gave a talk on the theme "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction," in which I developed a notion I had first advanced in 1970, in the bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America: that science fiction should be accounted, as best can be understood, as a branch of children's literature. I noted how often a taste for sf is acquired in early adolescence — the golden age of science fiction, our tribal wisdom has it, is thirteen. I pointed to the number of classic stories about children of preternatural wisdom and power. And I deplored, at some length, the limitations that result from the genre's readership demographics. Implicit in my critique was an agenda for an aesthetically and intellectually mature science fiction, written by grown-ups for grown-up tastes; the sort of science fiction I supposed that I and some few of my friends were writing at that time — the writers, as we advertised ourselves, of the New Wave.

Well, the New Wave is ancient history now, most of what we wrote out of print and all of it out of date — for there is nothing so ephemeral as yesterday's thoughtful predictions, whether in the op-ed page or in sf magazines. The predictive imagination is driven by archetypes; it demands Big Bangs, stunning upsets, Vistavision. History arrives incrementally and often by the side door. Consider how, in the twenty-three years since 2001, the space program has dwindled away to insignificance, a victim of public apathy, bureaucratic gigantism, and systemic corruption. Consider in that same film the anthropomorphic HAL, a melodrama villain disguised as a computer; consider all sf s failures to imagine the cybernetic age, despite the easy-to-follow instructions of Alvin Toffler and like pundits, until we were actually living in it. Consider such dreaded transformations as those that are threatened by the greenhouse effect or the destruction of the ozone layer or AIDS. Consider the new geopolitical imbalance of power. Consider all these things, and then ask what sf has had to say about them.

Almost not a word. Yet science fiction has never been more popular than in these past fifteen years. Beginning with 'Star Wars', in 1977, sf movies have been a major component of the Hollywood product — no longer grade-B entries for the drive-in crowd but big-bucks extravaganzas, which, often enough, have been remakes of earlier, drive-in movies such as 'The Fly' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. At the same time, sf titles have begun to appear regularly on bestseller lists, to the degree that in recent months a quarter to a third of best-selling fiction titles on both hard- and soft-cover lists have been sf or else of the kindred genres of horror and heroic fantasy.

Nearly without exception, the genre works that have enjoyed such popularity have been of the type that I characterized in "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" as children's literature. For while I had faintheartedly bemoaned the genre's juvenility, more farsighted souls — editors, notably Ballantine's Judy-Lynn del Rey — had taken the same estimate of the situation and seen an enormous untapped market. Del Rey and those who followed in her footsteps discovered and groomed writers like Stephen Donaldson, Terry Brooks, and Piers Anthony, who could scale down Tolkien or Asimov from the seventh- or eighth-grade reading levels of the overeducated fifties and create tetralogies suitable to the diminished reading skills of today's children.

Other publishers pioneered the sf equivalent of franchise merchandising, issuing series like the ongoing 'Star Trek' paperbacks, a practice that minimizes the risks, costs, and unpleasantness of having to deal with "name" writers. (Editors know better than anyone that authors at this level of production are not irreplaceable. Indeed, for a hack writer it is a liability to have too identifiable a voice.) Finally, as part of a recent innovation, the most marketable of the older name writers, Asimov and Clarke, have been persuaded to become generic labels, by expanding classic short stories or undertaking "sequels" to the work they wrote before this high-rolling era. The actual work is subcontracted to "co¬authors," including such onetime aspirants to menu-A status as Robert Silverberg and Gregory Benford (both of whom have undertaken collaborations with writers of still lesser clout).

These market forces have had a predictable effect on writers, who have had to adapt or die. Few veterans have succeeded at adapting. Silverberg wrote a gargantuan heroic fantasy, 'Lord Valentine's Castle', by way of atoning for the elitist sins of his New Wave days, but it was not quite enough; somehow his audience could hear a Galilean murmur, beneath his formal recantation, of "e pur se muove." With his 'Book of the New Sun' tetralogy, Gene Wolfe succeeded at the seemingly impossible task of making literature of the mongrel subgenre of science fantasy, but the work's very excellences told against it in the current sf market. Brian Aldiss experienced a similarly disillusioning 'succes d'estime' with his "Helliconia" trilogy.

Conventional publishing wisdom has it that the midlist title is doomed to extinction at most trade publishers, and with it that middle rank of novelists who scrape along by selling fifteen thousand to twenty thousand hardcover copies. Publishing houses, under the dominion of their accountants, no more have a compelling incentive to subsidize the middle rank's scraping along than General Motors has to sustain the existence of Flint, Michigan.

Just as the wiser residents of that city abandoned their homes before they were evicted from them, so a goodly number of the more sensible and prescient science fiction writers have departed the field for other genres or for the traditional haven of the literary writer, academia. Samuel Delany now heads the department of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and devotes most of his writing ener¬gies to criticism and other forms of nonfiction. J. G. Ballard made his entry into the big time with a memoir of his adolescence as a POW in China, 'Empire of the Sun', a work that became a Steven Spielberg epic. John Sladek, whose novels about robots were so long without a U.S. publisher, has become an executive in a firm that designs real robots.

Hollywood and television have proved more eager to assimilate sf ideas into film and video than the writers originating those ideas. It may well be that a different degree of professionalism is required, or (if this is not a tautology) of cynicism. Would Philip K. Dick's two posthumous hits, 'Blade Runner' and 'Total Recall', have succeeded at the box office if they had not been dumbed down by show-biz pros? At least in Dick's case, as in that of Arthur Clarke, some credit is given to the original. The great majority of the sf movies that have been hits in recent years — the 'Star Wars' series, 'E.T.', 'Alien' and 'Aliens', 'Back to the Future' parts 1, 2, and 3, and so forth — have been written by director-writer-producer teams who have dealt with sf as a pool of imagery, tropes, and plots in the public domain, which can be cobbled together as well by one creative team as by another. The success of these movies, and dozens of others, has proved them right, and the unhappy consequence for sf writers is that success within the genre is seldom a stepping-stone to any larger success generated by adaptation to film. The significant exceptions in the past decade have been writers of horror fiction, since in that field there is not that disjunction, characteristic of sf, between what readers will read and what audiences will buy tickets to see.
           
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Dinosaurs versus New Wave versus Cyberpunk

Market forces, though they are powerful, don't explain everything. Sf writers of diverse generations have maintained a steady creative pace throughout their careers with no thought of the main chance or ordinary prudence. Increasingly, as he grew older, Robert Heinlein wrote books that defied the conventions of pulp fiction (and almost every other kind), and they became bestsellers. Dick followed his instincts just as single-mindedly though he was legendarily ill fated and undervalued (admittedly, much of the legend was created by the author, who was an ace self-mythologizer). Frederik Pohl has been producing novels with clockwork diligence for half a century, and enjoying a modest prosperity without ever producing a "crossover" novel. But such continuous, career-long productivity is unusual.

More often there is a gradual tapering-off or a complete cessation, as with Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Judith Merrill, Walter Miller Jr., Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, Algis Budrys, Damon Knight, James Blish, Robert Sheckley, Joanna Russ, and Harlan Ellison (to mention only those considered of the first rank). Diverse as their gifts were, graphs of their creative-energy expenditure would have roughly the same shape, and in few instances, to my knowledge, can these writers offer extrinsic reasons for their diminished production (extrinsic, that is, to the life of the imagination). A happy few continued to produce memorable work, though at a slower rate; others ground out ever more dismal hackwork; a few retired from the field at the height of their powers, sometimes mumbling of a magnum opus in the desk drawer.

Doubtless all the arts have a high attrition rate. If one were to divide all the art in the world, in whatever medium, into that created by those under thirty-five and that by those over thirty-five, the former, I would wager, would be the richer lode. Advance the dividing line to age forty (which is the Yale Younger Poets criterion), and there is little doubt. Work produced before age forty includes everything by Byron, Shelley, Keats, most of Shakespeare, the best of Wordsworth; all of Raphael, Van Gogh, Mozart, Bellini. Even where death or mid-life burnout did not close accounts, even where the highest talents continued in spate into old age, the 'defining' work was usually done by age forty, especially in those arts where innovation is at a premium. Cubism, Impressionism, Jugendstil, the modernist movement in poetry — these were all creations of people in their twenties and early thirties.

The same has been true of science fiction. Indeed, the New Wave of the sixties represents the first generational opposition in science fiction. I remember how at a 1969 sf convention I spoke dismissively of the "dinosaurs" then impeding the proper appreciation of young mammals like myself. Twenty-three years later all but a couple of the dinosaurs I had in mind remain the commanding presences in the field, at least from a marketing perspective, and some of my fellow mammals now look more and more like dinosaurs themselves, even those who have not retired to the pastures of the backlist.

Like the elder dinosaurs — Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury — these newly old writers tend to recycle the same imaginative raw material. Ballard is Ballard still, and even in the act of renouncing her earlier fiction Ursula LeGuin perpetuates it. In terms of an individual artist's career track such continuity may be inescapable and even advantageous. But it has been the tacit mandate of science fiction that its writers should create a kind of consensual future, a map of both what we've agreed to wish for and what we collectively dread. The vision of the Asimov-Heinlein generation was the cheery Buck Rogers universe of space travel and infinite economic expansion, an imaginative landscape that mirrored the socioeconomic ideals of America from 1948 through 1962.

The next consensual future, that of the New Wave, sprayed graffiti on the edifices it inherited. Norman Spinrad, in 'The Iron Dream', re-imagined Heinlein's oeuvre through the eyes of Adolf Hitler. Fear of the bomb and distrust of the System were the order of the day. At the essential task of creating a period vision or style — defining images like the rocket ship, the robot, the Gotham City of art deco skyscrapers — the New Wave scored near zero. The magazine 'New Worlds' under Michael Moorcock promoted a brand of pop art that montaged Carnaby Street with affirmations of existing pop icons like highway signs and consumer packaging, but pop art celebrated images that were already retro in their day; the "future" in the sixties existed only in quotation marks, as a form of camp and an abandoned faith. This antiquarian quality of the "future" was epitomized by the cover of the 1979 'Science Fiction Encyclopedia', on which, beneath a giant cantaloupe that, at second glance, may be the moon, an ocean liner is washed up against a tumbling Empire State Building. For the New Wave writer of the sixties, die characteristic future landscape was the ruins of what the thirties and forties had dreamed of.

The next generation in sf is that of the Cyberpunks, whose works are still in progress and so not yet within hindsight's advantaged purview. One thing that can already be said of the Cyberpunks, however, is that they have created a distinctive consensual future with a look all its own, a look consciously adapted from Hollywood set designs, notably those for 'Blade Runner', and from computer graphics. It is a funky look that might be seen as an affirmation of the graffiti the New Wave writers scrawled on the city of the future they inherited, as though to say, "Well, yes, the future is a mess, and a lot of it is in terrible repair, and the rest is mostly an electronic illusion, but you might as well enjoy it while it lasts."

That sense that the future may not last for long is often assumed to be a prerogative of youth, the dialectical complement of another misconception the young are noted for — the conviction that they are immortal. The punk component of the Cyberpunk aesthetic celebrates the fecklessness of youth and its preferred risks: drugs, sex, and macho aggression. But how could it do otherwise in our culture? I think it is more significant that today's older generations share the Cyberpunk vision of a disposable future of diminishing options, to which the logical response is hedonism and the idea that problems can be solved by denying that they exist. Is there a hole in the ozone layer? Does the federal deficit relate to anything real? Just say no.

My sense of the moral dimensions of Cyberpunk was confirmed by an op-ed piece by Lewis Shiner, himself a sometime Cyberpunk, in the 'New York Times' of January 7, 1991. In the course of turning in his official resignation from the movement, Shiner delivered this summing-up: Cyberpunk "offers power fantasies, the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies like 'Rambo' and 'Aliens'. It gives Nature up for dead, accepts violence and greed as inevitable and promotes the cult of the loner." Shiner began that piece with a simple but telling observation: "I'm 39 years old."

Of course, it is not inevitable that one's aesthetic becomes tender as one's arteries harden. William Burroughs, a patron saint of punk in all its varieties, cyber included, is an author whose prophetic vision has altered scarcely a whit since 'Naked Lunch', of 1959 (when Burroughs had reached the astonishing age, for someone in his actuarial class, of forty-five). He's still going, each new novel as dependably like the last as those of Terry Brooks and Anne McCaffrey, and he has been the most popular bad boy of his era, the discovery of each countercultural generation since the Beats, never more popular than among the Cyberpunks. The secret of Burroughs's appeal is that he is consummately yucky, a living gross-out than whom there is none grosser. His novels wearily recapitulate the same doubtless sincere masturbatory images of young men achieving orgasm at the moment of strangulation while old creeps, dazed with opium, look on. There is also a lot of playful surgery that calls to mind those dental instruments that rolled out of Egaeus's little box. And byway of avant-garde authentication, a portion of Burroughs's oeuvre is given over to verbal montage produced by intercutting existing texts in a ran dom fashion, a method of composition that anyone can emulate (but that no one except the terminally stoned will be likely to read in any quantity). Finally, there is the testimony of the man: a long-term heroin addict, a pederast of sepulchral uncomeliness, a wife-killer, and an unfailing source of trendy paranoid delusions. Surely the man was not of woman born but rather formed from ashes and cerements plundered from the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe.

I exaggerate, but only with regard to the matter of his birth, for Burroughs was, like many of Poe's heroes, a scion of wealth; indeed, the family business has evolved into Unisys, a multinational defense contractor of the kind that rules the Cyberpunk universe. Perhaps there is a hidden blessing in the fact that Burroughs's vocation was for heroin and literature rather than the family business: he might have been just as successful in putting his vision to work for Unisys.

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Youth, Too Often Callow

Between them, Poe and Burroughs represent a paradigm of what is most gauche, most deeply and painfully embarrassing, in science fiction, including that of the New Wave. I speak here of youth, not childhood — for childhood, from an adult vantage, is not an embarrassment, and that part of science fiction that recommends itself to the tastes of pre-teens is charming or, at least, harmless. Once such a taste has been acquired, it may be exercised long afterward, as teddy bears may live long secret lives hiding in closets or behind pillows. I came to understand this recently when a student in a writing class passionately protested his readerly loyalty to one of my 'betes noires', Piers Anthony. A sophomore, intelligent and socially couth, he could not find any principle on which to base his liking. The author's sense of humor was the student's last bulwark, but there was no single joke or whimsy in the text which he could point to as being actually amusing. I realize now that we were fighting over a teddy bear, which he, quite rightly, refused to surrender or renounce, though he could offer no rationale for his loyalty. What can one say in such cases but "He's my teddy, and I love him!" Piers Anthony's work accomplishes its purpose exactly to the degree that an adult taste 'can't' tolerate it: his silly puns and patchwork plots stand like toy soldiers forbidding all grownups entry into his never-never land.

In youth the most awkward age — the one that gives us the most to blush for—is the one we have just quitted. College students have a horror of being mistaken for high-schoolers; those in their mid-twenties wince at the gaucheries of college years. Thereafter, embarrassment is not so much a matter of maturity as of social class. Those who write embarrassingly may do so in ignorance of, or despite, generally understood rules of decorum. Usually naivete combines with rashness, as when suburban teenagers write sad tales of the deaths of inner-city hookers, or Bret Easton Ellis imagines what it would be like to be an amoral and well-dressed sex maniac. The new candor that came to science fiction in the seventies (and to the culture at large, for the New Wave was only part of a larger confluence of forces), the liberty to speak of sexual matters in barracks language, has yielded a richness of embarrassments, from Heinlein's first-person pronouncements on female sexual fulfillment to Ballard's solemn but equally hypothetical pontifications in the New Wave mini-classic 'The Summer Cannibals'. I quote a typical unit of his prose:

A Kraft-Ebing of Geometry and Posture. He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; the mysterious eroticism of the multistorey car park, a Kraft-Ebing of geometry and posture; her flattened thighs on the tiles of the swimming pool below; her right hand osculating the finger-smeared panel of the elevator control. Looking at her from the bed, he re-created these situations, conceptualizations of exquisite games.


That passage does elicit some of science fiction's traditional sense of wonder, but after the fashion of one white teenager solemnly misinforming another about the sexual peculiarities of Asian women. Take two mental steps back from "a Kraft-Ebing of geometry and posture," and the author's portentousness just looks silly and self-important, a failed effort to pump significance and glamour into vacation snapshots of the Spanish coast near Alicante, where, Ballard later wrote in a footnote to 'The Summer Cannibals':

I once pushed my tank-like Armstrong-Siddeley to ioo mph on the beach road, and where my wife died in 1964. The curious atmosphere of the Mediterranean beach resorts still awaits its chronicler It has a unique ambience — nothing, in my brief experience, like Venice, California, or Malibu. At present it is Europe's Florida, an endless parade of hotels, marinas and apartment houses, haunted by criminals running hash from North Africa, stealing antiquities or on the lam from Scotland Yard.


There is nothing wrong with helping the tourist industry glamorize its wares. Writers of all sorts and every degree of sophistication are constantly about such business. What gives Ballard's testimony its ring of callow youth is the arrogance of his assumption that he is the first person ever to see his favorite stretch of beach the way it really is — that he is the chronicler Alicante has been waiting for.

Self-importance is commonly the armor of the insecure. Poe wrote "Berenice" in the meanest of circumstances, unemployed, living in the garret where his brother had died, supported by the charity of an indigent aunt who went round to relatives to beg for groceries. And this is how his narrator describes his circumstances:

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more rime-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars — in the character of the family mansion — in the frescos of the chief saloon — in the tapestries of the dormitories — in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory — but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings — in the fashion of the library chamber — and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents — there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.


Again, the impulse to compensate for the indignities of poverty by fantasizing about the lifestyles of the rich and famous is a universal trait. What is characteristically youthful in Poe's performance is his ingenuous confidence that he's taking us in.

I feel a particularly keen twinge of embarrassment for Poe at such moments because I can read in all too many passages of my own work exactly the same threadbare pretensions. Recently I learned that an Italian publisher intends to reprint "5 Eggs," a story I wrote at age twenty-three, when I was living in decidedly mean circumstances. The story is a string of embarrassments large and small, but I think this paragraph best captures its tone:

Standing in the dining room where appetizers, salads, and sauces were spread on the great mahogany table amid the plunder of his mother's cupboard — the gilt-edged china, the heavy silver, the crystal — he stared out the French windows at the bleak, moonlit autumn hills that lay beyond his watered lawn.


And there is this picture of high society a page later:

Mrs. Shreve with her husband was the next to arrive. Shreve was his publisher. Mrs. Shreve received the news of [his fiancee's] desertion politely, as she might have received the news of a friend's bankruptcy, with an invitation to dinner, with the understanding that as long as the friend's evening clothes and composure were intact the invitation stood. Mrs. Shreve had brought along galleys of his latest book, and they talked business and drank.


Nothing in my own prose can match the glory of "the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory," but clearly the same compensatory mechanism is at work. Perhaps it is no accident that the plot of my tale, like Poe's, features a tragic romance of a sort that only young men of pris¬tine inexperience and perfected amour propre have ever imagined. And who should their readership be but other such young men, for whom the authors' inauthenticities are more solacing than a lifetime subscription to Connoisseur, from which they would learn only the true dimensions of their exclusion from the frescoed saloons and tapestried dormitories of the rich.

The final and most excruciating callowness of youth is what sf readers particularly prize: Big Ideas. Now, there are some ideas that genuinely are big, which is to say, full of implication and repercussion. Copernicus's remodeled universe is such an idea. But an idea need not even be valid to be big: Spengler's 'Decline of the West' is as big as all history, and its central thesis is pure twaddle. But when I was twenty-five, I revered Spengler, and I was willing to accept any amount of twaddle on faith for the sake of his system, the wonderfully lucid pattern that provided a pigeonhole for every datum of history.

There is nothing that so militates against the sense of one's own vast ignorance as adopting some such Big Idea, and the young, whose ignorance is largest and rawest and most exasperating, have a natural predilection for Big Ideas. Marxists, Ayn Randers, Scientologists, and deconstructionists have one thing in common: they tend to have been recruited young. Once in the fold, they may remain there indefinitely and turn into fossils, but twigs are bent in the teens and twenties.

To a certain degree sf provides a natural playground for the harmless exercise of Big Ideas, even those that are radically unsound. Utopias that could never be implemented in the real world are fun to explore in simulation. Witness the Utopian sf novels by writers of such diverse temperaments as LeGuin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. The Gaia hypothesis is also a natural for science-fictionalization. Indeed, sf anticipated it, in many stories, including Richard McKenna's 1963 work "Hunter, Come Home." However, not all writers approach Big Ideas in a spirit of intellectual playfulness. Some come to believe in their privileged wisdom and become intolerant of contradiction, and this can happen at various levels of sophistication. The most gullible can simply report to the local Scientology recruiting office. Others dope their sf hobbyhorses with an ideological fix. Ursula LeGuin pro¬motes a return to the wisdom of a Native American never-never land. Michael Moorcock has become an advocate of Andrea Dworkin. The tendency is always to venture toward the current ideological limit as an inherently more dramatic situation, which is also, however, inherently silly.

Ideological silliness is an affliction more tolerable in the young, and, for reasons I've tried to lay out, exactly the same may be said of a taste for science fiction. This is not meant to be my way of abjuring the field or declaring that I am not now nor have I ever been a science fiction writer. I have been and I continue to be. I will even go on reading and reviewing the stuff, as long as some small portion of what is published continues to suit my taste. But I won't act as a booster for the genre as a whole, which has become, as a publishing phenomenon, one of the major symptoms of, if not a causal agent in, the dumbing-down of the younger generation and the lowering of the lowest common denominator.

[Tripp]

       'Poe's Appalling Life'

[Recenzija knjige Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, by Kenneth Silverman.]

Poor Poe. No other American writer of equivalent fame led such a consistently miserable life as he. Abandoned by his father in infancy; orphaned at age three and entrusted to the care of a rich Richmond merchant, John Allan, whose love and/or money was ever in short supply; renounced by Allan and cut out of his will; perpetually impoverished and obliged often to sell his best work for a pittance; saddled with a wife and mother-in-law as poor as he (who were, as well, his first cousin and aunt) in a marriage that was probably unconsummated; an alcoholic with a penchant for disgracing himself at those rare intervals when a glimmer of sunlight appeared through the clouds of his consistently wretched life; thwarted in virtually all his ambitions. There can have been little happiness for Poe except such times as he was in the embrace of his Muse, and she was fickle, frowsy, and not always compos mentis. Little wonder that the last year of his life seems a headlong, hell-bent rush to suicide.

Poor Poe, but poor Kenneth Silverman, too. For to explore Poe's life and lack of character as extensively as a biographer must is to invite certain disenchantment with both the man and his work. Poverty rarely ennobles. Stifled ambition breeds envy and vindictiveness. Practiced liars are liable to become self-deceivers. To these rules Poe was no exception. Even when he was good (i.e., writing well) he was rather pathetic; but when he was bad he almost out-Heroded the libels written about him by his first biographer, mortal enemy, and (by his own request) literary executor, Rufus Griswold, who printed his calumnies as an appendix to the first full-scale edition of Poe's works, thereby securing for Poe the eminence he has enjoyed ever since as Americans' premier poete maudit — a wastrel, drunkard, opium addict, and all-round demoniac. Poe was undoubtedly indulging his own Imp of the Perverse in putting Griswold in charge of his posthumous reputation, but he was also exercising his usual instinct for self-promotion. Subsequent biographers have exposed Griswold's lies and forgeries, but none have been able to make Poe look quite human. He remains the object of our baleful fascination, a semi-charlatan whose florid poems and lurid tales we can't keep from reading, re-reading, and remembering.

Silverman's is in every respect, including its relative brevity, the best biography of Poe yet written, a position held heretofore by Hervey Allen's Israfel of 1934. Allen is much more inclined than Silverman to take Poe at his word, to extenuate his faults, and simply to like him. He is also inclined to gush, and his critical perceptions rarely exceed forty watts. A representative judgment by Allen: "Poe's own mysticism was purely personal, and the subliminal landscapes which he created . . . were the refuges and spiritual lands of his own darkened soul. It was for this rea¬son that his poetry was more original than that of any other American poet of the age." Silverman casts a much colder eye. He is willing to dismiss most of Poe's criticism as bombast and pedantry, his hatchet-jobs inspired by envy and his raves by sycophancy. He would accuse other writers — especially his nemesis, Longfellow — of plagiarisms visible to no eye but his own, while he was an unconscionable plagiarist himself. Silverman quotes a letter in which Poe praises himself for "an inveterate habit of speaking the truth," and comments, "Actually he had fallen into a routine of easy lies and half truths since at least his adolescence."

Nothing in Poe's life so disgraced him as the leaving of it, and the last quarter of Silverman's book is devoted to the period from the summer of 1848 to his death in October of 1849. His child-bride, Virginia, had died of tuberculosis the year before, and Poe, his creative energies seemingly exhausted, turned fortune hunter, wooing several prospective brides simultaneously. The extensive correspondence that has survived shows Poe at his most oleaginous. To a wealthy widow in Providence he wrote, after their first meeting:

    I saw that you were Helen — my Helen — the Helen of a thousand dreams — she whose visionary lips had so often lingered upon my own in the divine trance of passion — she whom the great Giver of all Goods had preordained to be mine — mine only.


This is excerpted from a letter twelve pages long.

When his drunkenness caused his first engagement to be broken off, he returned to his hometown of Richmond, where he had a second widow in reserve. Evidently he had a way with the ladies. Indeed, in drawing room mode, Poe could come across as the beau ideal of gothic romances then and now — a dark, brooding, Byronic figure doomed to wander the earth in torment until he found the Helen of his dreams. His problem was rather in moving from the drawing room to the nuptial chamber, for his horror of conjugal relations and (gasp) physical intimacy was so great that when there seemed no way to escape marriage to his second betrothed he absconded to Baltimore and drank himself to death.

Silverman's most considerable achievement is that despite the man's manifold faults he manages to paint a sympathetic portrait. His Poe is more sinned against than sinning, a victim of an age when only those with private incomes could aspire to careers in the arts. Few American writers (excepting those born into slavery) have accomplished their work in circumstances of such desperate poverty. As to his duplicities, they can be seen as complementary to the trickster side of his character and his art, the first of a long American tradition of scapegrace artists that continues in our time with writers like Henry Miller, Raymond Carver, and Charles Bukowski.

Finally, of course, it is the work, and not the life, that makes us bother with the man at all, and if Silverman's biography has a single flaw it is in the perfunctory nature of his examination of the major tales. For a just critical estimate of Poe's work, for an explanation of why he actually matters, the best book is still Daniel Hoffman's study of 1972, 'Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe'. But so little is known of Poe's circumstances in the years when he was accomplishing his best work that a biographer cannot hope to offer much direct critical illumination in any case.

All in all, an appalling life and one that I imagine Mr. Silverman must be happy to have departed.

[Tripp]

      'Luncheon in the Sepulcher: Poe in the Gothic Tradition'

[Introduction to Strangeness: A Collection of Curious Tales, edited by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor.]


"There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulan, speaking truly of all the forms and 'genera' of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion."

It is easy enough to assent to this proposition, which comes upon us at the beginning of Poe's "Ligeia." The exquisite beauty of that tale certainly has more than a little strangeness in the proportion, as do the stories collected in this volume. So, if your preference is all for the practice of storytelling, and if its theory has no lure for you, let us make an amicable parting here. You have my assurance that your taste for strangeness will be gratified abundantly, diversely, and perhaps, in one or two instances, to excess. What can an introduction do, finally, but offer that assurance?

Now, for the rest of us left in the study, a rhetorical question: Is it true, as Poe insists, that all the forms and genera of beauty are endowed with Strangeness? Is it not rather the specific virtue of classic art that it smooths away all traces of the "grotesque and arabesque" to reveal some irreducible wholeness, to offer us the no less exquisite (if not always so immediately arresting) beauty of the Ideal? I don't mean only the classic art of Homer and Praxiteles or of Raphael and Palladio. In this normative sense, the cool architecture of a Cubist still life, or a movie such as 'The African Queen', in which admirable people perform noble deeds in Hollywood's most stately style, can be said to be classical.

With Poe, the Ideal is experienced as oppressive (as in "The Domain of Arnheim"), the normative as ridiculous ("The Devil in the Belfry"). Indeed, without too great of a distortion to his aesthetic, one could reverse Bacon's formula and say that there is, in Poe, no strangeness without some beauty of proportion; no horror that lacks an underlying loveliness.

Bear with me, readers. There is a reason why, though there is not a sin¬gle story by Poe in this volume, he is the subject of this introduction. It is not so straightforward a reason as cause-and-effect: I don't think all the writers represented here are in a direct line of descent from Poe (though I'd be surprised if there were any who were not on familiar terms with his best work). In fact, such fantasists as Bierce, Lovecraft, and Bradbury, who are too visibly his inheritors, have been deliberately excluded from the contents page. Likewise, there are no stories by writers of the "Southern Gothic" school, since their kinship with Poe is at least of the degree of cousinship. And again, on the grounds that few readers need to be pointed the way to such golden oldies, none of the celebrated progeny of C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's primordial detective, will be met with here. These have been the acknowledged heirs. I believe that Poe's real accomplishment and influence have been greater than this list of legatees would suggest.

His significance is a touchstone, as the first perfected form of a distinctively modern kind of sensibility. This is not the Poe known to his own countrymen, but the Poe celebrated by Baudelaire: Poe considered as a contemporary of Kierkegaard. Americans have always had difficulty viewing Poe in this light, for we are likely to encounter him first at too tender an age and to continue to think of him, in our later years, as a writer for children. That used to be my own case, certainly. I loved to terrify my younger brothers, and myself, reading aloud "The Tell-Tale Heart" by the light of a flashlight. My brothers have since assured me that these were vivid renderings, and I know they were sincere, so it can't be said that I was entirely missing the point — or that Americans do, in general. And part of the point (which Baudelaire misses, as surely as we miss his) is that Poe is as much a charlatan and barnstormer as he is a mystic and modernist. Since an adequate account of his entire artistry is beyond the scope of anything less than a book, and since that book already exists, I will limit myself to recommending it ('Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe', by Daniel Hoffman) and continue trying to make my single, if elusive, point about him — which is that his work embodies everything in the gothic tradition that can command serious, adult attention; and further, that this tradition is much broader than has usually been reckoned.

Before setting forth a general theory of either Poe or the gothic sensibility, I'd like to consider some of the specific ingredients to be found in his stories. Not the obsessive themes, such as incest or inhumation, for these, besides having received ample attention elsewhere, are idiosyncratic and limiting; nor yet the ornamental, fustian style, of which the same can be said. I mean such specifics as the landscapes he evokes, which are at once so nebulous and so minutely observed, or the peculiar humor of his "grotesque" tales, or the maniacal voices of so many of his narrators. The voice, for instance, of the murderous lunatic who tells "The Tell-Tale Heart": "Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Mad¬men know nothing. But you should have seen me." This is at once a dry burlesque of the high paranoid style and a lyric to delight the soul of R. D. Laing. For, of course, besides being absurd, it is true: madmen do possess a knowledge that is denied to others. As the same narrator observes: "the disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the Heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad?"

Since those words were written the possibility that madness may be — at least for fictional purposes — a higher form of wisdom has become a staple of generations of writers, some of whom one would not readily class with Poe. The stories of Joyce Carol Oates and Virginia Woolf are both prime examples of this vein of psychological horror, or Naturalized Gothic. Oates's affinities with the gothic have occasionally been noted, but... Virginia Woolf? Yet her tale "Solid Objects" cannot be considered a fluke, for the same theme of madness as a form of visionary experience is even more intensely rendered in what I believe to be her most representative novel, Mrs. Dalloumy. Other stories in the present anthology inhabit this same intriguing, prenumbral zone between dementia and poetry, but to say which ones would be to spoil the unfolding of more than one ingenious plot. Another entire volume might be filled with tales in this vein that have acquired the status of the classics, like 'The Turn of the Screw', 'The Yellow Wallpaper', and "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," as well as novels like 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'Some of Your Blood'. It is very nearly a genre in its own right.

Poe's humorous tales are not as widely read as his exercises in the macabre, but they have not been without their influence. Poe's is a humor of utter alienation. The workaday world involved in its business and domestic affairs becomes a kind of clockwork nightmare, in which ridiculous catastrophes overtake grotesque human automatons, like the unfortunate Psyche Zenobia, who is beheaded by the minute hand of a giant clock and describes the entire process in the first person: "I was not sorry to see the head which had occasioned me so much embarrassment at length make final separation from my body. It first rolled down the side of the steeple, then lodged, for a few seconds, in the gutter, and then made its way, with a plunge, into the middle of the street."

What underlies this humor is the realization that stories, being no more than words on paper, do not have to follow the rules that govern the day-to-day workings of the universe. The writer is free to fabricate ... anything at all! The freedom is a dangerous one, but like all other freedoms, once it has been set loose upon the world, it becomes impossible to suppress. Samuel Beckett, Harry Matthews, and Michael Moorcock have each written a trilogy of masterful and magnificently funny novels that may be said to spring from the same tradition.

The relevance of landscape to the craft of fiction is a harder matter to expound, yet in Poe's case it is crucial. Often it is all there is. His two longest fictions, "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" and "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal," are little more than extended travelogues, in which the only significant interactions are between the protagonists and their environments. These landscapes, whether on the monumental scale of the whirlpool in "The Descent into the Maelstrom" or reduced to the claustrophobic dimensions of a coffin, as in "The Premature Burial," are always inimical in a manner identifiably Poe's. The single most succinct rendering of his typical milieu occurs in "The Fall of the House of Usher," when the narrator describes one of the "pure abstractions" painted by Roderick Usher:

"A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rec¬tangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor."


It would be a century before artists like de Chirico, Dali, and Tanguy would create canvases in the stripped-bare style of Roderick Usher, and they were followed by a generation of French writers who pursued a very similar aesthetic. In practice I find the English practitioners of the roman nouveau — particularly J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss — more compellingly readable than Robbe-Grilletand others like him. Readers unfamiliar with this genre could not do better than to turn to Aldiss's novella "Where the Lines Converge," which is an epitome of this kind of infernal geometrizing.

A landscape need not be reduced to diagrammatic plainness for a family resemblance to this kind of avant-garde gothicism to be observable. Much of the fascination of "hard-core" science fiction lies in its creation of environments as spare and enigmatic, as full of strangeness, as any roman nouveau. Arthur Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama' is the very apotheosis of this kind of science fiction, being an account of the systematic (and not very dramatic) exploration of an alien artifact, which its explorers never really come to understand. The novel ends, like Poe's "Pym," with a question mark the size of an iceberg. It's altogether maddening, as of course it's meant to be.

In "The Black Cat," another of Poe's mad narrators declares, "My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events." That statement might well stand as an epigraph before many of the tales that follow. Poe was one of the first gothic artists to have understood that terror likes to warm its feet at the domestic hearth, that it has no need for exotic paraphernalia. Shirley Jackson's "The Beautiful Stranger" is an excellent example of such curdled coziness, as is her classic story "The Lottery." (For a further consideration of why this should be, may I recommend Freud's brief "Essay on the Uncanny"? Beginning with the simple observation that the German word for "uncanny," 'unheimlich', is often used as an equivalent to its opposite, 'heimlich', or "homelike," Freud deduces a series of consequences as baroque as any of the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin.)

Readers of Poe soon come to the conclusion that the ultimate source of strangeness lies even closer to home than the hearth; it is to be found in the blood-dark depths of the heart, or even deeper, in the soul. All Poe's landscapes, from the arctic desolations at the end of "Pym" to the tatty eclecticism of the "Venice" described in "The Assignation," and most notably the House of Usher and its environs, are externalizations of what is forever unwitnessable within. Poe is not a dramatist; he speaks in a single voice to which even Echo does not reply. His secondary characters, when they exist, are mere wraiths, names without substance. Invariably, they are on hand to serve as victims: Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado," Madeleine in "Usher," the wife in "The Black Cat," the nameless old man in "The Tell-Tale Heart." But the isolation of Poe's protagonists is greater still, for even when their contest is between themselves and their environment, that environment is really but the flimsiest of tissues, a screen on which the protagonist (who is Poe) projects his inner conflicts; he inhabits, so to speak, his own dreams.

This may sound like a criticism, and indeed I don't think it's a method that would serve a novelist very well, but for short stories it has proven a highly effective formula. Stories as diverse as Greene's "Under the Garden," Zoline's "The Holland of the Mind," and Mann's "The Wardrobe" all employ this same procedure.

I stated earlier that Poe can profitably be considered a contemporary of Kierkegaard. What they may be said to have in common is an expertise in the etiology of hidden disorders of the soul, specifically that condition known as "alienation." However, for both writers the traditional term "damnation" is more to the point.

Poe secularized the idea of damnation. For all his gothic paraphernalia, he seldom has recourse to supernatural explanations. In this he is following the Devil's own advice, as it has been presented through such able interpreters as Goethe and Baudelaire, who observes in one of his prose poems that "the Devil's cleverest wile is to convince us that he does not exist."

Whether or not the Devil exists is a matter of opinion, Baudelaire notwithstanding. The existence of the damned, however, is a matter of observable fact, and Poe was one of the fact's best observers. All the specific qualities of his art referred to earlier become, when viewed in this light, facets of a single torment. The heightened awareness of his madness is not different from the unholy knowledge ascribed to such earlier gothic protagonists as Faust, Manfred, or Melmoth. To the damned soul, sealed within its selfhood, the world can appear only as ridiculous or threatening. From this fact proceeds the peculiar, skewed character of Poe's humor, the insubstantiality of his dramatis personae and of his landscapes, as well. The damned are all, all alone: the other is invisible to them in all its forms — in nature, in personal relations — except insofar as these forms have been corrupted by evil, and the vision of the damned is most acute.

I say this not in disparagement of Poe, but by way of homage. Damnation — or, if you prefer, alienation — is the central theme of Romantic literature. It ties together such works as Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," Blake's "Songs of Experience," Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," and de Quincey's 'Confessions'. And these represent simply the first sounding of the theme, which swelled, by the latter part of the century, into a pandemonium. Within the chorus, Poe's voice remains, even today, one of the most distinct.

Put it another way. Say that the problem is how we are to understand our human destiny, in all its complexity and ambiguity, without the support provided by the theoretical apparatus of religion; especially, how we are to face the problems of evil, of death, of despair, in a world deserted by the friendly gods of springtime. Simply to look the other way, denying the problem's existence, is (as Kierkegaard argues in 'The Concept of Dread') to consign oneself to damnation in its darkest (if also its most common) form. But to face the problem is a treacherous business, as well, and the safest way to do so is vicariously, through the agency of art.

An interest in diseases is necessarily a morbid interest, and this is — let us admit it — the nature of our interest in Poe, and in the gothic tradition, in general. That does not make it an unhealthy interest. Dualities must be studied in pairs. Health and disease are phases of a single process. The road to heaven, as mapped out by Dante and many other expert cartographers, proceeds through the central avenues of hell.

[Tripp]

Mali detour. Bardzisova recenzija Dischovog i Naylorovog romana iz NY Tajmsa:


March 22, 1981
Carlyle and Friends
By ANTHONY BURGESS
   

NEIGHBORING LIVES
By Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor.

Chelsea - the locus of this eccentric historical novel - is a London borough built on the north bank of the Thames. Sir Thomas More lived there, and those who saw the film of Robert Bolt's play ''A Man for All Seasons'' may retain an image of rural green, river taxis and the tinkle of cowbells. But by the 19th century, Chelsea had ceased to be an appendage of London and was becoming the city's artistic, even genteelly bohemian, quarter.

In the later days of the reign of William IV, when this novel begins, Chelsea was ready to become a fashionable residential area for the lettered but not for the rich, who clustered mostly round Belgrave Square. It was Thomas Carlyle, known as the ''Sage of Chelsea,'' who helped to initiate its seedy distinction. The book starts with the arrival of the great Scot, poisoned (as they used to say) with constipation and porridge, and his wife, Jane, at Cheyne Walk in 1834. ''Neighboring Lives,'' which is written in a deliberately archaic 19th century style and seems more scholarly than fictional, keeps the Carlyles at its center. But it also introduces us to Leigh Hunt, John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters and others, all of whom either lived in the area or, drawn by the dyspeptic Sage, came for a visit. Even Chopin visited for an hour or so, visibly dying but deigning to demonstrate that Mrs. Carlyle's piano was out of tune.

Samuel Butler once said: ''How good of God to make Mr. Carlyle marry Mrs. Carlyle, thus making two people unhappy instead of four.'' But it is not in the nature of this novel to dig very deeply into the sexual lives of the Carlyles, whose marriage remained unconsummated. Tom is something of a tyrant, as well as a martyr to his Aryan hierology and the convolutions of his craft, but the sweet intelligent Jane is only conventionally submissive. Her letters survive and are drawn on to show a bright gossipy talent. Theirs does not seem too bad a life, especially when the authors set it against Leigh Hunt's disastrous menage, the mess of Rossetti's amours, and the prolonged adultery of John Stuart Mill with Mrs. Harriet Taylor. It is in connection with what the latter does to the first part of Carlyle's ''French Revolution'' that I have vague doubts about the exactness of Messrs. Disch's and Naylor's scholarship. The manuscripts are represented as having been burnt to a crisp by a vengeful Harriet Taylor, who resents Carlyle's reliance upon her lover's detailed knowledge of the French Revolution. The authorities I have consulted inform me that the culprit was Mill's cook, who used the MSS. as pie bottoms. (And, incidentally, how do two people write a novel? I look forward sometime to the authors' disclosure of procedure. If collaboration makes the writing of fiction quicker and easier, why then, teach me how to collaborate. And, of course, somebody else.)

As in some Broadway musicals we notice the libretto delicately moving toward a show-stopping song, so here, with the Leigh Hunt sharing the Carlyles' supper porridge and learning that Jane can also be Janie, Jeanie and Jenny, we prepare ourselves for the only good poem that poor Hunt wrote: ''Jenny kissed me when we met.'' She did, and does, too. Hunt, gray, ill, dying, a failure, is saluted affectionately by Jane, and the show stops for that song. The whole Hunt episode is well done, though the Hunt family squalor is a little underplayed. Indeed, the squalor of the place and period seems generally subdued, perhaps in deference to modern susceptibilities. I remember Tietjens's outburst about Dante Gabriel Rossetti in ''Parade's End'': ''I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he's slept in, standing beside a five-shilling model with crimped hair ... gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.''

Messrs. Disch and Naylor are in love with the Victorian age, and they are right to be, but their love is of a kind that blots out the grosser blemishes of the beloved. If we want the wretched filthy London that was the background to Carlyle's thunderings and the neorealism of the Pre-Raphaelites, we must go to Dickens (who by the way does not visit the Carlyles), or, in modern fiction, to John Fowles's ''The French Lieutenant's Woman.'' The very devotion the authors expend on their eminent Victorians makes for a reluctance to move on, clip, slash, subordinate detail to the elan of true fiction. But true fiction is what this book is not; writing novels about real people does not impede fictional method in the hands of genuine novelists. Messrs. Disch and Naylor, concerned with giving us a kind of painless history lesson, emphasize unity of place at the expense of plot. Some of us prefer to get our history straight.

Still, there are things here we are glad to have. Carlyle comes, with the silent but ironically smiling Jane, to see Holman Hunt's new picture ''The Awakened Conscience.'' He shakes his stick at it and fulminates: ''And do ye call this phosphorescence and putrescence a representation of Jesus Christ! ... This - this Christ! It is naught but inane, Grimmsmarchen make-believe and untruth, the which to fabricate and bring-to-view is a heinous occupation for a painter who would respect his own soul.'' Carlyle is the most caricaturable of our great writers; wisely, Messrs. Disch and Naylor let him caricature himself. But, hearing his costive borborygmi, we can't help wishing for a copy of the long-out-of-print ''Don't, Mr. Disraeli,'' by Brahmas and Simon, in which the comic potentialities of the whole Victorian scene are unblushingly exploited. Messrs. Disch and Naylor give us Morris, Rossetti and Burne-Jones drinking beer in Cremorne Gardens, Swinburne visiting George Meredith, Lewis Carroll and his Alice - and with a minimal change of approach, they could all be hilarious. As it is, all we are permitted is an affectionate smile:

''The atmosphere today was that of spring. Swinburne could almost feel the altered tilt of the earth under his feet - though, in truth, the difficulty was rather to be attributed to the ill-laid pavement under foot and the glass of wine he'd taken with his lunch. Shopfronts fairly whirled before him; clouds hurtled by in the contrary direction. Such a gusting wind: already it had taken his hat, but no matter, one could enjoy the wind more without it. And here, already, was Hobury Street.'' And Swinburne is only here because Hobury Street is in Chelsea.

Despite such objections, this is a substantial book. When we come to the end, with Jane Carlyle dead and Miss Jo Hiffernan saying goodbye to Chelsea, offering her services as a model and her beauty to M. Gustave Courbet, an inferior painter to Jimmy Whistler but more reliable as a man, we have a final glimpse of the Sage. He already belongs to another era. It is 1867 and we are preparing for the modernity of which Whistler is a portent. It is evidence of the skill of the duumvirate that they are able to present both the movement of history and the changelessness symbolized by London's river. Impressionism and estheticism may be coming, but the aging Carlyle is further ahead of his time than Wilde: his will be the last work read by Hitler and Goebbels in the Berlin bunker. And west of Cheyne Row, just by Battersea Bridge, in the same block as Whistler, the great Turner lived, the most modern painter of them all. This book is a fine tribute to that most creative region of London, and it is an admirable rendering of its most creative time. It is not, however, a novel, except in a Pickwickian sense.

[Melkor]

Srecna i tebi Nova Godina!

(a saad treba ovo procitati)

[Monsun]

Sjajni tekstovi, hvala na postovanju... Mozes li još da dodaš i tačne internet izvore odakle su tekstovi preuzeti? Možda će nekom zatrebati ukoliko želi da ih citira...

[Tripp]

        Izbacicu, nadam se, jos koji txt.

        Sto se tice knjige, ovo nije besplatan i svakom dostupan txt, iliti bilo kakav public domain, koliko znam, vec ocr-ovani txt. Znaci, ako bi se nesto i citiralo iz ovih eseja neka individua jednostavno napise da je citat preuzela iz On SF by T.M. Disch. Na kraju knjige postoji spisak gdje su txtovi prvobitno publikovani, medjutim kako mi se na prvi pogled ucinilo da na vecini nije bilo datuma, picajzla u meni me jednostavno nije podsjetila da to na vrijeme dodam. Ali evo (valja se uzeti u obzir da su neki eseji publikovani pod drugacijim naslovima):

       "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" (published in Science Fiction in Dimension, ed. Peter Nicholls, Harper & Row, 1976)

       "Ideas: A Popular Misconception" (published in Foundation)

       "Mythology and Science Fiction" (published in New Constellations, ed. Thomas M. Disch, HarperCollins, 1976)

       "Poe's Appalling Life" (The Los Angeles Times; valjda 1991)

       "Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills..." (published in Athlantic Monthly 269, no.2, 1992)

        "Luncheon in the Sepulcher: Poe and the Gothic Tradition" (published as the introduction in Strangeness, ed. T.M.Disch & C.Naylor, Avon, 1983)

         

[Mica Milovanovic]

E, puno hvala na ovim tekstovima.

Što se tiče Diša, osim Logora koncentracije, koga smatram "jednim od najznačajnijih dela svekolike naučne fantastike" i neuspelog pokušaja čitanja nesrećnog prevoda Odjeka oko njegovih kostiju, pročitao sam samo nekoliko priča, i to uglavnom kratkih...

334 nisam nabavio u ono vreme, mada znam i o čemu je i mislim da bi ga vredelo pročitati.

U X100 SF je izašala i novela Psi sa Tere za koju po imenima glavnih junaka pretpostavljam da bi mogla biti White Fang Goes Dingo, ali je nikada nisam pročitao...

Sirius 7 str. 67-71 januar 1977 Thomas M. Dish & John T. Sladek   Otkriće nulitrona (The Discovery of the Nullitron)
Sirius 7 str. 71 januar 1977 Thomas M. Dish & John T. Sladek Dannyjev novi prijatelj s Deneba (Danny's New Friend from Deneb)
Kentaur (26) str. 3-145 1978 Tomas M. Diš LOGOR KONCENTRACIJE (Camp Concentration)
Sirius 35 str. 5-15 maj 1979 Thomas M. Disch Ljubav na extoplazmičan način (Come to Venus Melancholy)
Sirius 63 str. 95-98 septembar 1981 Thomas M.Disch Utopija? Nikada! (Utopia? Never!)
Sirius 65 str. 118-121 novembar 1981 Thomas M. Disch Polu-poticaj (The Demi-urge)
Sirius 134 str. 61-63 juli 1987 Thomas M. Disch Cefalotron (Cephalotron)
Sirius 141 str. 3-17 februar 1988 Thomas Disch Planet silovanja (Planet of the Rapes)
X-100 SF 37 str. 3-83 juni 1988 Tomas M. Diš PSI SA TERE  (najverovatnije White Fang Goes Dingo)
Supernova 12 str. 3-186 1989 Tomas Diš ODJEK OKO NJEGOVIH KOSTIJU (Echo Round His Bones)

[Mica Milovanovic]

PSI SA TERE su The Puppies of Terra, što je svako sa malo više inteligencije od mene mogao pretpostaviti...  

U pitanju je produžena priča "White Fang Goes Dingo", a roman je prvobitno objavljen pod nazivom Mankind under the Leash.

[Tripp]

Da. I u Zivkovicevoj Enciklopediji stoji asteriks pored Mankind Under the Leash. Taj tzv. roman prosao je, koliko shvatam, kroz par transformacija dok na kraju nije postao The Puppies of Terra. Svejedno, ni u jednoj Dischovoj bibliografiji ne ide kao Mankind Under the Leash, vec kao Puppies. Vjerovatno se radi o onim spletkarenjima kada se neki roman u dvije hemisfere prodaje pod dva naslova. Besterov The Stars My Destination u Britaniji je publikovan kao Tiger! Tiger!

Takodje, Logor koncentracije je jedna od onih knjiga koja bi stalno trebala da bude dostampavana cim je ponestane u knjizarama, i to u izdanjima kao sto je - recimo - Alnarijevo Salemovo, koje sam tek juce vidio i prijatno se iznenadio kako dobro izgleda. A takvo izdanje bih sigurno ispratio i prevodom romanaGenocides, posto drzim da je to Dischov najreprezentativniji SF. 334, na zalost, ni ja nikada nisam imao prilike da procitam.   

[Tripp]

     'SF: Guides to the Ghetto'

[Recenzija knjiga: Microworlds: Writing on Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Stanislaw Lem; and Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, by David Pringle. The Times Literary Supplement.]

It is Stanislaw Lem's deeply felt and closely argued contention that the field of science fiction has produced only four authors worthy of that genre's rich potential: Verne, Wells, Stapledon, and himself. The proliferation of work by other writers in the genre, especially by Americans, has actually been a morbid condition characterized by "retrogression, degeneration, or at the very least developmental stagnation, typical of populations isolated from the outside world and vitiated by inbreeding" such as obtains in ghettoes. American sf is the "domain of herd creativity," and it "repel's the more exigent authors and readers, so that the loss of individuality in science fiction is at once a cause and an effect of ghetto seclusion." Lem charitably makes an exception for Philip K. Dick, on the basis of reading only seven of his novels, from which he is nevertheless able to abstract a "main sequence" comprised of "'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', 'Ubik', 'Now Wait for Last Year', and perhaps also Galactic Pot-Healer."

As that "sequence" will evidence to any reader well-acquainted with Dick's major novels, the fatuity and self-serving nature of Lem's pronouncements on the field of sf are matched only by the slenderness of the reading on which they are based. Most of the essays in 'Microworlds' date from ten to fifteen years ago, and even then Lem's knowledge of sf was based (according to the book's introducer, Franz Rottensteiner, who is also Lem's agent in the West) on French translations chosen by Rottensteiner, a filtering process that provided Lem with a canon of American science fiction that systematically excluded most of the titles that were, even within that time-frame, canonical. Except for his random sampling of Dick's novels, most of the titles he cites are by those writers of the forties and fifties — Asimov, van Vogt, Heinlein, Bradbury — whose appeal is essentially to a juvenile audience. Taxed with having dismissed American sf as "a hopeless case" without having read its best authors, Lem, in a postscript to one of his essays, shifts the blame from himself to criticism in general, which has failed to establish a canon. Lem himself, apparently, as a meta-critic stands above the drudgery of distinguishing between the wheat and the chaff.

And truly, he needn't bother, for it is clear from his treatments of even those texts for which he professes some regard that the only living author who can command his sustained attention is Stanislaw Lem. The first essay in the book, "Reflections on My Life," is an exercise in unwitting self-betrayal as droll as the diaries of the thirteen-and-three-quarters-year-old Adrian Mole. It begins with a ponderous inquiry as to whether the series of events that has led to the crowning achievement of his own work can be ascribed to mere chance or whether Destiny didn't somehow enter into it. He marvels at his own IQ: "mine was over 180, and I was said to have been ... the most intelligent child in southern Poland." He re¬invented the differential gear and "drew many funny things in my thick copybooks, including a bicycle on which one rode moving up and down as on a horse." He proves by deductive logic the radical novelty of his most recent work, and as an afterthought remarks on those books that exhibit not his philosophic achievements but his cavortings in the provinces of the humorous — of satire, irony, and wit — with a touch of Swift and of dry, mischievous Voltairean misanthropy: "As is well known, the great humorists were people who had been driven to despair and anger by the conduct of mankind. In this respect, I am one of those people." In the creation of the figure of Stanislaw Lem, if in nothing else, one must grant that he's one of the great humorists, but in the other essays that follow his little autobiography he comes across more vividly as a great pedant driven to despair and anger by the failure of other writers to follow his own example in adulating Stanislaw Lem.

Concerning science fiction in its non-Lemish aspects, a much better guide is available in 'Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels'. These are by the author's admission a personal selection, but Pringle knows the territory well (since 1980 he has been the editor of Foundation, the best critical journal surveying the field) and his selection is judicious, respecting the 'monstres sacree' of the genre without weighting his list with their dinosaur eggs. Omitted are such standard texts as Asimov's 'Foundation' Trilogy (it "has always seemed to me to be overrated," Pringle explains) and Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', and popular favorites like Anne McCaffery and Marion Zimmer Bradley are dismissed as purveyors of "planetary romance" for which Pringle has no use. In short, Pringle's concern is to single out those books and authors (the one hundred titles are by seventy-three authors) likeliest to appeal to the generally literate reader who wants something better than junk food when her imagination is dining out in the genre. As a checklist of what to stock up on, I don't think this book has a rival. Pringle's summaries of the one hundred chosen novels exactly convey the merits and fascination of each book without spoiling its surprises, and I finished the one hundredth evaluation with my own list of a dozen sure bets that I will be making room for on my shelf of ready-to-read good intentions. As an indication of Pringle's (and my own) taste, here are some of the titles from just the last twelve years that receive his highest encomia: Ballard's 'Crash' and 'High-Rise', LeGuin's 'The Dispossessed', Russ's 'The Female Man', Crowley's 'Engine Summmer', Benford's 'Timescape', and Wolfe's 'The Book of the New Sun'. Strict honesty obliges me to note that I get three citations, and doubtless that made me better-disposed to the book than if I'd had none, or only one, but I can still aspire to the condition of Ballard and Aldiss, who get four each, and Philip Dick, who gets five and an apology for the omission of further first-rate books. I commend the book to one and all — and particularly to Stanislaw Lem.

[Tripp]

      'BRAVE NEW WORLD Revisited Once Again' [Omni]

Just fifty years ago, at the dawn of the new era that dates from the death of Henry Ford, a young, half-blind, upper-class Englishman published a novel destined to become — along with Orwell's '1984' — one of the two most enduring prophetic visions of the future ever to clatter from the typewriter of man. The novel was 'Brave New World', its author Aldous Huxley, and the vision was of the Jazz Age gone to heaven. Anything goes in A.F. (After Ford) 632, but what goes particularly well are those two pillars of the affluent society, sex and drugs. What has been eliminated from that society as being subversive and destabilizing is: family life, passionate love, social nobility, and any art but the "feelies," fashion design, and dance music. Here's a sample of the song lyrics and the lifestyle of A.F.
632:

Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.


What was most shocking to the first readers of 'Brave New World' (and probably still is, for the book has always been a favorite target for censors) wasn't so much the way Huxley turns conventional values upside-down but the verve and logic with which his villain, Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, justifies a social order based unashamedly on the beehive and the iceberg — with "eight-ninths of the population below the waterline, one ninth above." Mond sums up the lives of the majority of lower-caste Gammas and Epsilons this way: "Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labor, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for?" Indeed, even the privileged one-ninth of Alphas above the waterline had better not ask for more than that if they don't want to be shipped to Iceland, where rebels and skeptics are kept in permanent quarantine.

In 1952, when 'Brave New World' was twenty years old and I was twelve, it seemed to me the height of all that was wicked, sophisticated, and far-fetched. (So wicked, indeed, that I had to glue the cover of another thirty-five-cent paperback over the [wonderfully lurid but quite inaccurate] cover art of a couple dressed in nothing but wisps of cloud.)

By the book's twenty-fifth birthday and my seventeenth I still gave it high points for wickedness and sophistication, but rather than thinking it far-fetched I now believed that the world of A.F. 632 was, except for some minor details, already upon us. Those were the years, as you might remember or may have heard, of the Organization Man, of a nationwide conformity enforced not by a 1984-style Big Brother but by the rewards of an affluent consumer society. The first tender shoots of the sexual revolution were up, and even soma — in the form of tranquilizers — had appeared as an "ethical drug." As for Huxley's system of social indoctri¬nation by hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching, television was already having a fair success instilling such 'Brave-New-Wordly' slogans as "Ending is better than mending," and "I love new clothes," and "A gram is better than a damn."

Now, a round half-century after it came out, I was curious to return to Huxley's novel and see if his batting average as a social prophet had grown or shrunk since my last visit. In some obvious ways the book is now more on target than ever — especially if one hearkens to the dire warnings of those who regard "Secular Humanism" as Public Enemy #1. Mustapha Mond, with his cavalier dismissal of family life, freedom, and God and his championing of promiscuity and drugs, is just the antichrist the Moral Majority yearns to combat. If only (they must often wish) Jerry Brown would be as up-front about things.

From a strictly technological point of view Huxley himself, in 1950, admitted: "One vast and obvious failure of foresight is immediately apparent. 'Brave New World' contains no reference to nuclear fission." And none, one might add, to television, or space travel, or computer technology, or even to genetic engineering. However, it's only the last subject that's actually relevant to the book's themes. Yet even without breaking the DNA code in advance of Watson and Crick, Huxley's blueprint for a "hatchery" for human infants remains an impressive feat of technological imagining. Less convincing is his rationale for producing people on assembly lines, like Model Ts. Present methods achieve the same results more efficiently at less expense, though no doubt there are some radical feminists who would welcome the experiment.

Where our own world most differs from Huxley's is in the matter of contention and instability. Huxley wrote at a time when it was still possible to believe that the League of Nations might evolve into a world state, that war might be rendered obsolete by sound management, and that antagonistic class divisions might be transformed into a frictionless caste system, in which the lower classes were bred and brainwashed to be happy, dutiful morons. Nowadays world government seems about as likely a prospect as the Second Coming. 1984 has cast a long shadow across the pages of 'Brave New World'. In his own book-length reappraisal, 'Brave New World' Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley took a grimmer view of the global situation and predicted: "it is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now (i.e., in 1978) all the world's overpopulated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule — probably by the Communist party." Not a bull's eye, but pretty close.

'Brave New World' goes widest from the mark, I think, in its picture of a trouble-free, beehive-style caste system. Huxley grew up in an upper-class family in Edwardian England and shared much of the myopia and some of the arrogance of his "class-mates" when he wrote about those who hadn't shared his privileges. Quite simply, he could not conceive that anyone of working-class background could possess more than a rudimentary intelligence or spiritual dignity. (At least in none of his novels did he bother to imagine such a possibility.) In this regard, 'Brave New World' is not so much a prophetic vision of the future as nostalgia for a mythical Golden Age before there was a servant problem.

My final quarrel with the book is one of emphasis from my first reading. I've always had a sneaking fondness for the world Huxley invented. I know I'm supposed to disapprove. But I would like to try soma just once, and I wouldn't say no to a night at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret dancing to the music of Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists. The lyrics of the songs may be sappy, but I'll bet they've got a good beat. As for the feelies, I suppose the plots are pretty simpleminded, but any more so than Raiders of the Lost Ark?

This is not to endorse all the sinister theories of Mustapha Mond, only to suggest that fun's fun, and that some of the targets of Huxley's satire are mean-spirited, insofar as he is making a case against pop culture, sexual candor, and the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Relax, Huxley. You worry too much. Have a gram of Tylenol. Things could be worse. This might be 1984.

[Tripp]

     'Measures of Hanging'

[Recenzija romana 'Cities of the Red Night', by William S. Burroughs. The New York Times Book Review.]

'Cities of the Red Night' is a book of limited but, for its own happy few, intense appeal. Opium addicts who are sexually aroused by witnessing and/or enacting garroting and hangings will find 'Cities' a veritable gallows of delight. Admittedly, female-hanging buffs and those of the heterosexual persuasion may feel cheated of their due, for the Muse of Strangulation – "Ix Tab" William S. Burroughs calls her in his invocation — seems not to extend her patronage to the fair sex. Guided by Ix Tab, a jealous goddess, Mr. Burroughs has eliminated from his book everything incidental to the central task of spinning and respinning the same yarn — characterization, wit, stylistic graces, anything that might detract from the erotic fascination of death by hanging. Even the romance of heroin addiction, which offered an alternative Universal Metaphor to inter¬preters of 'Naked Lunch', has dwindled to a few rather pro forma evocations of his new drug of preference, opium. In this book drugs are merely a means to an end, and that end is the gallows.

Impatient readers or those whose attention span cannot encompass the demands of Mr. Burroughs's prose (in the earlier chapters there are sometimes eight or nine pages of continuous, linear narrative!) will want to know where to turn for immediate gratification. Worshippers of Ix Tab should dogear the following pages: 18, 27,47,77,108,142,154,162,173, 179-83, and about everything thereafter.

Mr. Burroughs's eternal tale is told in varying modes. Sometimes it is a fantasy of life aboard a pirate ship. Sometimes it is the story of a private eye investigating the hanging and decapitation of various attractive young victims. Sometimes his decor derives from sci-fi of the more brain-damaged variety, as in the following account of the transmigration of souls in a Utopia of strangulation:

These hardy Transmigrants, in the full vigor of maturity, after rigorous training in concentration and astral projection, would select two death guides to kill them in front of the copulating parents. The methods of death most commonly employed were hanging and strangula tion, the Transmigrant dying in orgasm, which was considered the most reliable method of ensuring a successful transfer. Drugs were also developed, large doses of which occasioned death in erotic convulsions, smaller doses being used to enhance sexual pleasure... In time, death by natural causes became a rare and rather discreditable occurrence....

Readers who would like to add the thrill of hypocrisy to the other pleasures of the text can take their cue from the jacket copy of Naked Lunch, published in 1959, where Mr. Burroughs's achievements as a moralist, satirist, and all-around genius were saluted by John Ciardi, Robert Lowell, and Norman Mailer. Mr. Burroughs himself, however, out-Herods them all in the arts of whitewash: "Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.' These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is."

Oh yes, and one might add that Pasolini's movie 'Salo' is an indictment of Italian Fascism, Swinburne's obsessive doggerel on the subject of flogging an attack on corporal punishment in schools, and de Sade's 'Justine' a Christian allegory after the manner of John Bunyan.

Forget morality! Forget art! What Mr. Burroughs offered the rubes back in 1959 and what he offers them today, in somewhat wearier condition, is entrance to a sideshow where they can view his curious id capering and making faces and confessing to bizarre inclinations. The backdrops are changed every few minutes by lazy stagehands, but the capering id delivers an identical performance before each one. It's grotesque, it's disgusting, but gosh — it's real!

Readers who have never caught Mr. Burroughs's act would do better to read 'Naked Lunch' than this rather anemic clone. The twenty-two intervening years have impinged little on Mr. Burroughs's consciousness. He's read, or at least heard of, such books as 'Future Shock' and 'The Biological Time Bomb', but even such (one might suppose) congenial events as the Man-son murders or the Jonesville massacre cannot divert his imagination from its own perfected self-absorption.

[Tripp]

        'The Village Alien'

[Recenzija knjige Communion, by Whitley Strieber. Nation, 14. mart 1987.]

If Whitley Strieber isn't fibbing in his new book, 'Communion' (and the book's cover boldly affirms that it is "A True Story"), then it must be accounted the most important book of the year, of the decade, of the century, indeed, of all time. For what Strieber recounts in 'Communion' is nothing less than the first contact of the human race, in the person of Whitley Strieber, with an ancient alien civilization that abducted him from his cabin in the Catskills on the nights of October 4 and December 26,1985 (and on various other occasions over the years), and took him aboard a flying saucer, where he communicated with a variety of alien beings and was subjected to surgical and sexual indignities. To cover their tracks the alien abductors then implanted false "screen memories" in Strieber's mind (as they have been doing, he has come to suspect, throughout his life). Only later, in March 1986, did hypnosis reveal the true character of what had happened to him.

There have been other, similar reports of UFO sightings and contact with aliens, but Strieber's is unique in two important respects. First, as he notes himself, "If mine is a real experience of visitors, it is among the deepest and most extensive as yet recorded." Second, this is the first time a best-selling author has written his own extensive, firsthand account of a UFO experience. Strieber's early novels were horror stories, taking traditional figures like werewolves ('The Wolfen', 1979) and vampires ('The Hunger', 1981), and placing them in contemporary urban settings.

Both books became successful movies. Two later science fiction nov¬els were written as collaborations with James Kunetka: 'Warday' (1984) is a fictional "documentary" of nuclear holocaust, and 'Nature's End' (1986) treats global ecological catastrophe on a similar panoramic scale. 'Communion' seems the end of a logical progression, leading Strieber from the fiction side of the bestseller list to the nonfiction side. That assumes that Communion will make it onto the list, but with a one-million-dollar investment in the book, William Morrow would seem to have confidence in its success.

Skeptical readers (and I freely confess that I began as one) may feel that the million-dollar advance paid for the book is in itself reason to doubt the good faith of the author. For there certainly could be writers who might be tempted for such a price to invent such a tale out of whole cloth and swear to its truth. Strieber does not address this question directly in his book, but he makes it clear that he deplores charlatanry and pseudoscience, and those who profit from the public's credulity:
One of the greatest challenges to science in our age is from modern superstitions such as UFO cults and people who are beginning to take instruction from space brothers. Charlatans ranging from magicians to "psychic healers" have tried to gather money and power for themselves at the expense of science. And this is tragic. When one looks at the vast dollars that go each year to the astrology industry and thinks what that money would have done for us in the hands of astronomers and astrophysicists, it is possible to feel very frustrated. Had the astronomers been awash in these funds, perhaps they would have already solved the problem that I am grappling with now. I respect astrology in its context as an ancient human tradition. Still, I wish the astronomers could share royalties from the astrology books.

Strieber is aware that there will be those who may doubt what he is saying, and even admits: "I did not believe in UFOs at all before this happened. And I would have laughed in the face of anybody who claimed contact." He maintains, furthermore, that until impelled by his own experience to examine other UFO literature, he had taken no interest in such matters. If he had read widely in the literature, the striking corre¬spondences between his own UFO experience and that recorded by oth¬ers could be ascribed to imitation. A case in point: 'Science and the UFOs', by Jenny Randies and Peter Warrington, a book that by happy coincidence he'd received from his brother at Christmas of 1985, just hours before the visitation of December 26. He did not read it at once, for "I was surprised to find that 'Science and the UFOs' frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first five or six pages read." Later, however:

I finally finished Science and the UFOs. Toward the end of the book I was astonished to read a description of an experience similar to my own. When I read the author's version of the "archetypal abduction experience," I was shocked. I was lying in bed at the time, and I just stared and stared at the words. I, also, had been seated in a little depression in the woods. And I had later remembered an animal [a screen memory]. My first reaction was to slam the book closed as if it contained a coiled snake.


Throughout the book, the correspondence between Strieber's and other contactees' experiences constitute one of the main criteria offered for our believing that Something Must Be Happening, something bigger than Whitley Strieber:

What may have been orchestrated [by the aliens] with great care has not been so much the reality of the experience as public perception of it. First the craft were seen from a distance in the forties and fifties. Then they began to be observed at closer and closer range. By the early sixties there were many reports of entities, and a few abduction cases. Now, in the mid-eighties, I and others — for the most part independent of one another — have begun to discover this presence in our lives.
Even though there has been no physical proof of the existence of the visitors, the overall structure of their emergence into our consciousness has had to my mind the distinct appearance of design.


There does, indeed, appear to be a design, but could it not be accounted for by the tacit collusion of the witnesses? Of course, we have Strieber's assurance that he was innocent of earlier testimony until his own experiences prompted him to do research. But by his own account Strieber's memory is an erratic instrument, due (it may be) to the aliens' implanting, virtually on an annual basis, of false "screen memories," the weeding out of which constitutes a very large part of 'Communion':

       Many of my screen memories concern animals, but not all. I remember being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut, and yet I know that I never saw Mr. Peanut except on a Planter's can. I said that I was menaced by him at a Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, but I now understand perfectly well that it never happened. For years I have told of being present at the University of Texas when Charles Whitman went on his shooting spree from the tower in 1966. But I wasn't there.
     Then where was I? And what is behind all the other screen memories?
      Perhaps on some level I do know. Maybe that's why I spent so much time peeking into closets and under beds. If I really face the truth about this behavior, I must admit that it has been going on for a long time, although in 1985 it became much more intense. Now that I have uncovered these memories, though, it has ended completely.
       As a matter of fact, I cannot remember a time in my life when I have felt as well and as happy as I do now.


That is not to say that Strieber's life has been untroubled since the surfacing of the aliens. 'Communion' records so much distress, suffering, agony, anguish, and pain that in undertaking to write of the book I dreaded to think that I might be adding to it by taking a tone that would suggest that I am scoffing at the author. Strieber has had the same dread and in his introduction cautions against making light of "people who have been taken by the visitors": "Scoffing at them is as ugly as laughing at rape victims. We do not know what is happening to these people, but whatever it is, it causes them to react as if they have suffered a great per¬sonal trauma. And society turns away, led by vociferous professional debunkers whose secret fears apparently close their minds." Here is a sampling of the sufferings, both physical and mental, that Strieber has had to endure:

     [Aboard the saucer] the next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.
     My wife reports that my personality deteriorated dramatically over the following weeks. I became hypersensitive, easily confused, and, worst of all, short with my son. ... I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal. By December 28 I was so depressed and in such a state of inner conflict that I sat down and wrote a short story in an effort to explore my emotions.... I called it "Pain."

This story appears in an anthology of horror stories edited by Dennis Etchison, 'Cutting Edge', and a most revealing exploration it is. See below.

     [After hypnosis by Dr. Donald Klein] I recalled seeing a landscape with a great hooked object floating in the air, which on closer inspection proved to be a triangle. Then there followed a glut of symbolic material, so intense that even as I write I can feel how it hurt my whole brain and body to take it all in. I don't remember what this was — triangles, rushing pyramids, animals leaping through the air.
     Are such experiences the source of the performance anxiety that has been detected in psychological tests I have taken, or does that have to do with the many recollections I have always had of sitting in the middle of a little round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul?


Finally, this 'cri de coeur', wrested from the author during hypnosis as he relives his examination by the aliens aboard the saucer. Dr. Klein has asked, "Are they paying attention to you?" and Strieber replies:

     "Yes. There's one of them now sitting down in front of me staring right at me, and she's completely different from the others. The others are all very small people. This one is tall and thin. And she's sitting down. She's all gangly. I don't know what to make of that. I don't know what to make of this. Where the hell — how the hell — you know, it's like I can't see. I just don't know what the hell to make of this. It's just impossible. It's totally impossible. It can't be like this."


What the aliens are actually up to zipping around in their UFOs and inserting probes into the orifices of selected citizens never becomes very clear. Although he often has had the opportunity, Strieber rarely has the presence of mind to ask his aliens where they come from or what their intentions are. Once they volunteer the information: "You are our chosen one." A more ambitious chosen one than Strieber might want to know what such an announcement portends. Does it mean he is the single person chosen from the whole human race to be the aliens' go-between? If so, what an awesome destiny! But Strieber declines to speculate, though the bulk of the book is given over to his speculations: whether the visitors come from outer space or from some other dimension; whether they are archetypes or ancient gods conjured up from the communal unconscious; whether their natures are insectlike; and questions even more improbable:

     What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest edge of my soul. Below me were vast spaces, totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lives within. They only knew what little it had chosen to reveal of itself.
     Were human beings what we seemed to be? Or did we have another purpose in another world? Perhaps our life here on earth was a mere drift of shadow, incidental to our real truth. Maybe this was quite literally a stage, and we were blind actors.


Perhaps. Who can say? Perhaps I only dreamt I read Strieber's book. Perhaps James Landis at Morrow only dreamt he paid a million dollars for it. Or perhaps (it occurred to my ever-skeptical mind) human beings 'are' what they seem to be, and Whitley Strieber is embroidering the truth.

Certainly in the last passage quoted he looks remarkably like a hack writer padding out a thin story with a lot of guff. Some novelists do that. Even Whitley Strieber. Perhaps (we ought to at least consider the possibility) he is making up the whole story just as if he were writing fiction! Novelists, especially horror novelists, know all kinds of ways to make the implausible seem plausible. It's what they're paid for.

Another thing novelists have been known to do is to enlarge, develop, or inflate a short story they have written to novel length. Sometimes they do this because they feel the story's theme has not been fully realized; sometimes simply because they have no better hook to hang the next novel from. If 'Communion' were a novel and not A True Story, anyone who had also read the short story "Pain" would feel certain that there was such an acorn-to-oak relation between the two works, and for that reason it is worth examining in detail. It begins with a professional narrative hook: "When I encountered Janet O'Reilly I was doing research into the community of prostitutes." The narrator is circumstanced much like Strieber himself: he is a professional novelist living in Greenwich Village with his wife and three children. (Strieber himself has one child, a son, age eight, who is reported in 'Communion' to have shared, with Strieber and his wife, in some of the close encounters the book describes.)

For my new book [the narrator relates], to be called Pain, I wanted to know not only about prostitution but also about the various perver¬sions that attach themselves to it. There are sexual desires so exploita¬tive that people will not gratify them without being paid even in our exploitative society. These have to do for the most part with pain and death. For death is connected to sexuality — witness the spider. Who hasn't wondered what the male spider feels, submitting at the same time to the ecstasy of coitus and the agony of death?

There follows a male spider's precis of Western culture, from the ritual sacrifice of kings and Roman emperors to Hitler's death camps and the Kennedy assassination. Then comes a fairly extensive consideration of "ufology," which is surprising in view of Strieber's claim in 'Communion' that he had not been concerned with such matters at the time "Pain" was written — and had, indeed, been a skeptic. The narrator of "Pain," by contrast, sounds quite convinced that Something Is Happening:

     There is evidence all around us of the presence of the hidden world. We reject it, though, as silliness and foolery.
     Because it knows that this hidden civilization feeds on us, the government does everything possible to hide reality. It does not want us to know that our lives, our culture, our very history has been designed for the purpose of causing us suffering, and that there is nothing whatsoever that any of us can do to relieve ourselves of this burden.
     I was astonished to see in 1983 that NSA had been approached by CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy) under the Freedom of Information Act to divulge what it knows about UFOs. Officially, the government has made a massive effort to debunk the whole notion of "flying saucers," claiming that they are all either hoaxes or misperceptions.


After these discursive preliminaries the story begins again at its first beginning:

     I met Janet O'Reilly at the Terminal Diner at the corner of Twelfth and West streets in Greenwich Village. I was there because of my research. The Hellfire Club is nearby, a haunt of New York's sadomasochistic community. I particularly wanted to connect with some of the people who went there to make money. I wasn't interested in the compulsive participants, but rather in the men and women who preyed on them.


Well, one thing leads to another, and before he knows it the narrator has been lured to Janet's apartment, "a miserable filthy cellar on Thirteenth Street," where the library contains books by Proust and Celine. She invites him to crouch at her feet, and when he demurs she kicks him in the chest. She is verbally abusive: "Unlike you, I don't lie about myself. Now you're here and you're still having difficulty submitting." Eventually, however, he comes around, only to learn this sorry wisdom:

     When I go to her and submit myself, a part of my suffering will be the certain knowledge that all of their lives [i.e., those of his wife and children] will be damaged by my act. My pain will be infinitely greater for understanding that It will lead to theirs. To know that you will cause grief to those you love is a very hard thing.


As True Stories go, "Pain" has more of a ring of truth than 'Communion', but possibly that is because Strieber has had more experience as a writer of fiction than of nonfiction. It is at times hard to remember that Janet O'Reilly is an alien and not just a fly-by-night dominatrix. The narrator's visit to her flying saucer is over almost before it begins. One minute he's having a beer behind a cabin (how life does imitate art), and then: "The next thing I knew I was in a tiny, droning airplane with Janet. At first I didn't recognize her. Then I saw that she was flying the plane, watching me out of the corner of one eye. She spoke in a language I could not quite understand."

The textual parallels between "Pain" and Communion are even more extensive and systematic than this synopsis can indicate, but it would be hard to deny the virtual identity between the Active Janet O'Reilly and the nameless alien who abducts Strieber and, in one rather breathless paragraph of hypnotic transcript, has something like sex with him.

                                                                                   >>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There are two ways I can think of to account for this. The first is that Strieber, having made the imaginative equation between the "archetypal abduction experience" and the ritual protocols of bondage and domination, realized he'd hit a vein of ore not previously tapped by ufologists, who have been generally a pretty naive lot. To have drawn such an explicit parallel in 'Communion', however, would have risked alienating the audience at which such a book is targeted, and so among Strieber's many speculations there are none that examine or allude to the metaphorical premise of the story and its relevance to the "abduction experience," a relevance that is only to be found, once again, beneath the longer narrative's surface, like a prize bone dug up and then reburied.

A second possible explanation is that the story represents the first surfacing of materials repressed by the aliens, who had, only days before the story's writing, taken Strieber aboard their saucer and given him such a hazing. This is undoubtedly the explanation Strieber would adopt if the question should ever come up, though in 'Communion' he is content to let that sleeping dog lie.

That Strieber appreciates that "Pain" poses an awkward question was confirmed early this morning (Monday, February 23) by a telephone call from Strieber in Chicago, the latest stop on his extensive promotional tour. He had earlier agreed to be interviewed in New York on Saturday, but then called to cancel that meeting. I decided to begin this essay without the benefit of speaking with Strieber, but I still wanted to know more about the chronology of the composition of story and book. Yesterday, to that end, I telephoned Dennis Etchison, in whose anthology "Pain" appeared, and asked when Strieber had been solicited for a story and when Etchison had received the completed manuscript. There was nothing in the dates to contradict Strieber's account, and Etchison was full of praise for his friend and contributor (who had been "a national debating champion and studied for fifteen years with the Gurdjieff Foundation"), and for "Pain," confiding that Strieber had told him that he regarded it as "a major turning point in my life and my career."

Etchison inquired for what magazine I was writing my piece: Omni? I had to admit it was the 'Nation', and this produced a resonant silence and an expressed wish that his remarks were all off the record. I would cer¬tainly have complied with his wish if he had not himself at once sent out an SOS to Strieber, who then left the following message on my answering machine:

Tom, it's Whitley at 8:30 on Monday morning. I'm calling you from Chicago. I still have got time problems. I also understand from other people who you've talked to that you're planning what is apparently a really vicious hatchet job on 'Communion', and I'm not sure I even want to talk to you about it. It's an awful, ugly, terrible thing to do. The book is so obviously from the heart! To think that it was written for money — it shows an absolute lack of sensitivity, and also a lack of understanding of die book market. You know, the book was turned down by its original publisher [Warner], and I had to write it knowing it had no publisher. The fact that I got... a good price for it... I shouldn't be punished for that, Tom, nor should the people that this strange experience — [Here the machine stopped recording.]


About an hour later, he called again, and this time I was doing my own answering. Without any prompting or argument, Strieber repeated his reproaches, deploring all those flaws in my character that he'd first observed when I'd taken over the PEN table from him at the 1985 Small Press Fair at Madison Square Garden. Even from our brief time-filling conversation he'd sensed a lack of human decency and feeling that had made him feel... sorry for me, nothing but that. He suggested that it was not too late to show some elemental respect for human feelings, that I didn't have to subject him to the agony my essay would surely cause. When he'd lost his first head of steam, I pointed out that, not having read what I'd not finished writing, he was arguing with straw men. No, he said, he could tell where I was heading just from my condescending tone of voice, and from the questions I'd been asking about "Pain." It became clear that "Pain" was a sensitive area, and without my having to state my sense of its relevance, Whitley volunteered his own, which corresponded to the "second possible explanation" given above, that the story had just bubbled up from his subconscious as a result of his encounters with the aliens. It wasn't the acorn, so to speak, but the first little oak.

What Whitley could not have imagined at that moment (and what I certainly was not going to tell him after so many minutes of vituperation) was that I was no longer a skeptic about UFOs, that, in fact, in the course of writing this essay I have been in contact with alien beings, and though my aliens — the Winipi (pronounced Weenie Pie; singular, Winipus) — are not of the same race as those in touch with Strieber (who are known, and feared, throughout the galaxy as the Xlom), they, the Winipi, are well informed of the purposes of the Xlom and the grave danger they represent.

However, before I relate what I've learned about the Xlom and their human minions, I should give an account of how I encountered the Winipi and was taken aboard their flying saucer. It was on the same Sat¬urday I was to have seen Strieber. I had gone downtown to get coffee at my favorite coffee store on Bleecker Street, and, realizing that I was only a few blocks from the address Strieber had given me to call at, I thought I would see where he lived. It was a brick building larger than a brown-stone but smaller than the massive piles of Washington Square Village, which it faces. Its facade was paneled at ground level with squares of black slate, and the lower doors and windows were secured with heavy ornamental iron gratings. On an impulse I went down the short flight of steps and entered the foyer. I pushed the buzzer marked "Strieber," thinking that he might find time to see me after all. No response. I pressed the buzzer a second time, and as I released it I felt a strange shuddering vibration pass over me, which I ascribed at that time to static electricity.

Leaving the foyer, another unconsidered impulse made me turn right (instead of left, toward home), and within minutes I found myself beside a fenced-in quarter-acre of wasteland, which a signboard declared to be a "Time Landscape." The sign went on to explain that this was "an environmental sculpture of a primeval forest, showing how this area looked in the fifteenth century." If the Time Landscape was any clue, Manhattan was in pretty sorry shape in the fifteenth century. Stunted oaks, scrawny maples, a few empty beer cans, and a broken umbrella contested with one another for the parched bare dirt.

In the middle of this primeval squalor I observed a strange phenomenon, which at first I assumed to be no more than a metallic-hued Frisbee gliding slowly in a long curve through the sickly branches of the dying shrubs. But why did it not reach the end of its trajectory? Why did it seem to hover inches above my head, emitting a pallid cinnamon-scented effulgence? (Strieber notes that the scent of cinnamon is often associated with alien contact.) Why did I seem to hear an eerie contralto voice whispering in my ear, "Sleep! gigantic Terran, sleep!"?

And then, nothing, blackness, snores. I awoke 'inside' the wire enclosure of the Time Landscape with my green spiral notebook lying beside me in the dirt. And Strieber's words were echoing in my ears: "I don't know what to make of that. I don't know what to make of this." I walked home in a daze. I dined in a trance. I went to bed in my pajamas — and when I awoke, that same eerie contralto I'd heard earlier ordered me, in implacable accents: "Go to your desk."

The next morning, after breakfast, I discovered that I had filled an entire floppy disk with what must be thought of as a kind of automatic word-processing. Are the words on the disk my own writing? I cannot say. They are on the disk. A brief prefatory note declares that they were written on "Washington's Birthday, February 22, 1987, 3:34 A.M.: I cannot tell a lie!" They seem to be the transcript of the dialogue I had carried on with my abductors the previous afternoon. They are, like Strieber's transcriptions of his testimony under hypnosis, unedited:

Me: Where am I? Who are you? What's happening?

Winipus I: [Giggles; then] Hello, Terran. You are in the Time Landscape on La Guardia Place between Bleecker and Houston, aboard our spacecraft, Winipi Frisbee IV. Welcome! And what is happening, Terran, is your own archetypal abduction experience. [More giggles; scurrying sounds; a burp]

Winipus II: [Speaking in a deeper, masculine voice, with a strong scent of peanuts on his breath] Welcome to the club. Just as Whitley warned you, right there in the endpapers of his book, "Don't be too skeptical: somewhere in your own past there may be some lost hour or strange recollection that means that you also have had this experience."

Me: I can't believe this! I'm in your flying saucer. But it was no bigger than a Frisbee.

Winipus I: That is because we Winipi are no bigger than peanuts. The tallest of us is not quite one centimeter. We had to use our shrink-blasters to get you inside the ship.

Me: [Confused] Shrink-blasters? But Strieber doesn't say anything about shrink-blasters. This is some kind of practical joke, isn't it? You're not aliens. You're — oh my God, no! I see you now! I smell you! You're ... Mr. Peanut! It wasn't a screen memory that Strieber had. You were at the Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio!

Winipus II: We were there, yes, but we weren't threatening him. We were trying to save him from the Xlom. You see, Terran — do you mind if we call you Tom? You see, Tom, there are two alien races, us and the Xlom. The Xlom are, as Whitley intuited, humanoid insects with a hive mind. They have only one goal in their group mind, one all-consuming purpose, one hunger that drives them from star system to star system—Arcturus, Antares, Vega, Venus, and now Earth. They want money.

Me: Money? But if they're aliens ...

Winipus I: [Twirling his cane] It's ridiculous, isn't it? Why would a Xlom need dollars? We've never understood that side of their characters. We only know they're insatiable, and utterly without a sense of humor.

Winipus II: That's why we have been following them everywhere through the universe. Because what we Winipi love more than anything else is comedy. The Xlom are just so funny. And in combination with you earthlings! I mean, what you never said in all those pages about Whitley's wonderful book is how funny it is. It's a classic, right up there with McGonagal's poetry or the Ninja thrillers of Eric Van Lustbader. Caviar, absolute caviar!

Me: But if what he says is true, then it isn't that funny. Clumsily written perhaps, but there's a point to all his nebulous fears. He may be in grave danger, if—

Winipus I: [Chuckles] Oh, it's much too late to save Whitley from the Xlom! He's one of them now himself. Surely you've seen 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. Well, that's what the Xlom have done with Whitley. All those sessions of forced feeding that he reports? That's how it was done. Whitley's consciousness now is 95 percent Xlom. Even back at the parade in San Antonio it was too late to help him.

Me: Wait a minute. Why would the Xlom be letting Whitley reveal all their secrets? That's the major logical objection to his book in the first place: if the aliens are so wise and powerful, why is a [characterization deleted] like Strieber their "chosen one"?

Winipus II: First, there was money to be made, and as we've explained, the Xlom will do anything for money. They nearly became extinct a millennium ago when they began selling their children to the Arcturans for spare parts. But that's a separate story. There's not just the money for the book. There are already movie offers. Whitley's certain to write a sequel. And there's an outside chance he can get a whole cult going for himself on the order of that woman in Washington, the one who's been reincarnated so many times. Didn't you notice that 'Communion's last page is an invitation to write to Whitley at 496 LaGuardia Place? What better way for the Xlom to make mass conversions of humans into Xlom minions? As to his book letting the Xlom's cat out of the bag, do you think most sensible people will believe it? Of course not. Oh, talk-show hosts treat him politely enough. In the broadcast time allotted to Silly Season celebrities like Strieber, they're content to let him tell his tall tale, take his bow, and head back to the airport. A wink and a smile will convey their sense of what kind of goods are being sold. But to call him to account would be like trying to swim in a swamp. It's more than they're paid for. As for what we've revealed to you, your readers will just dismiss the whole thing as satire, a story you've invented as a demonstration of how easy it is to make up any nonsense and call it A True Story as long as its only probative basis is the good faith of someone who'll swear he's not lying.


Here the transcript of my conversation with the Winipi breaks off. I can dimly recall other things that took place aboard the Winipi Frisbee IV, including a grueling tap-dancing lesson with a large group of Winipi, for which I was forced to wear a Mr. Peanut costume. (My feet hurt terribly the next day, so strange as this memory seems, I know it must be true, and not a screen memory.) I also learned the names of many other humans who have, like Whitley Strieber, been transformed into Xlom. Some of the most notable or notorious figures in modern society are Xlom, from Wall Street arbitragers to movie stars and high-ranking White House officials! The Xlom are everywhere, and there is no way they can be detected except with the Xlom-detecting technology developed by the Winipi — which I alone, of all humanity, have been entrusted with! After the Winipi had tuned the Xlom-detector (which is in itself undetectable) to my neural patterns, and as I was about to leave their saucer and be de-shrunk, one of them said to me, "You are our chosen one."

And then they laughed!

[Tripp]

       'Primal Hooting'

[Recenzija knjige Transformation, by Whitley Strieber. Nation 247, No.14]

Whitley is back! Those who treasure the more exotic forms of untruth will need no further prompting.

'Communion', Whitley Strieber's 1987 account of his abduction by aliens, was a primal hoot. Its sequel, Transformation, recycles the same whoppers with only minor variations, but it offers generous portions of the same shameless charlatanry and page after page of Whitley's patented prose with its peanut-butter-and-jelly mix of penny-dreadful horror and saccharine sanctimony. Here's a taste of the peanut butter:

        Andrew [his seven-year-old son and coabductee] started screaming. The shock that went through me this time was absolutely explosive. ... His screaming filled my ears, my soul. Listening to it, I wanted to die. ... I thought I was going to suffocate. My throat was closed, my eyes were swimming with tears. The sense of being injured was power¬ful and awful. It was as if the whole house were full of filthy, stinking insects the size of tigers.

And here's the jelly:

        The visitors are sweeping up from where we buried them under layers of denial and false assurance to deliver what is truly a message from the Beyond... They have caused me to slough off my old view of the world like the dismal skin that it was and seek a completely new vision of this magnificent, mysterious, and fiercely alive universe.


UFO stories are generally not accorded serious media attention, but Strieber was a special case. He had already published best-selling horror novels that had gone on to become movies. Here was a bankable Name Writer willing to go on record as a UFO abductee. "It's rather doubtful that a non-writer could spark the kind of enthusiasm that you find in this book," his editor at Morrow, James Landis, confided in the August 14, 1987, Publisher's Weekly. Whitley got a million-dollar advance for 'Communion'. Morrow and Avon aren't ballyhooing what they're paying for the sequel, for such publicity might confirm doubts among those inclined to believe that Whitley's motivation is mercenary rather than his declared desire to seek a completely new vision of our mysterious universe. Surely it is hard to account for Whitley's and his publisher's conduct on any other basis. Read as a factual account of alien contact, 'Communion' and 'Transformation' have the verisimilitude of a Paul Bunyan legend. Taken as a strategy for commercial and psychological self-aggrandizement, however, they make perfect sense.

Consider only the internal chronology and publishing history of the two books. 'Communion' tells of Whitley's encounters with the aliens on October 4 and December 26, 1985, events the aliens had made him forget until the memories were retrieved via hypnosis in March of 1986. Between March and the fall of that year, Whitley must have made and sold the book proposal and written the book, which appeared in bookstores promptly in January 1987. Meanwhile, on April 2, 1986, Whitley now reports in 'Transformation', his seven-year-old son, Andrew, underwent his own UFO abduction, which was the source of the paternal anguish quoted above. Readers of 'Transformation' won't learn much about little Andrew's sufferings at the hands of the aliens, since Whitley is extremely respectful of his son's privacy in this matter. For the inside story on that one, we'll probably have to wait another couple of years until Andrew is old enough to appear on talk shows to sell his own searing account. Does it not seem strange that Whitley would not have mentioned these latest tricks his aliens were up to in the book he was then writing? This is a question not addressed in 'Transformation', but I can hypothesize two answers: (1) Andrew's abduction was held in reserve for 'Transformation' because of its can-you-top-this, sequel-making value; or (2) Whitley did not want to expose his boy to the merciless scrutiny of the press at that time, but then, coming to realize the awesome significance of his revelations, decided that he would sacrifice these paternal scruples in the interest of the Truth.

'Transformation' differs from 'Communion' in several significant ways. Whitley no longer accesses his abduction memories via hypnosis. Indeed, he is now critical of the practice and of his fellow UFO expert Budd Hopkins, whose competing and more lurid account of abduction — and rape — by aliens, 'Intruders' (Random House, no less), appeared in bookstores shortly after 'Communion'. "I feel," Whitley warns, "that the present fad of hypnotizing 'abductees,' which is being engaged in by untrained investigators, will inevitably lead to suffering, breakdown, and possibly even suicide." Hopkins's book reported that women were being impregnated by aliens, returned to earth, and then re-abducted for the harvesting of the fetuses, and while Whitley wisely refrains from questioning the literal truth of such claims, he does take Hopkins to task for his view of the aliens as a destructive force:

     I cannot agree with this. Certainly it is clear that our response to an encounter is often one of fear and terror. Our perceptions are distorted by panic at the high level of strangeness we observe.

But it is premature to assume that our experiences are actually negative in content.
Whitley is now promoting an upbeat UFO abduction experience. Fear is to be a key that opens up a cosmic funhouse:

     We must learn to walk the razor's edge between fear and ecstasy. [The visitors] made me face death, face them, face my weaknesses and my buried terrors. At the same time, they kept demonstrating to me that I was more than a body, and even that my body could enter extraordinary states such as physical levitation.

In 'Communion' Whitley solicited readers to come to the front of the church and testify about their UFO experiences, an invitation that yielded a brief fad of abductee support groups. In 'Transformation' Whitley extends a more enticing possibility, a form of transcendence that doesn't depend on the whims of aliens, who are notoriously undependable, never appearing when they're invited. How about out-of-body travel? It's safe, it's cheap, and it's semi-reliable, if, like Whitley, one uses the methods developed at the Monroe Institute in West Virginia, where Whitley went to learn methods for entering a "mind awake/body asleep" state that allows the wakeful sleeper to shuffle off this mortal coil and visit friends in a discorporate but not imperceptible condition. Two people Whitley tried to contact in this way didn't receive his vibrations, but then, in February of 1981, Eureka!

     A friend in Denver called me to report an odd experience. She had awakened and seen the outline of my face across the room from her. Later she wrote me, "What I saw exacdy was the impression of your face wearing the glasses you wear amid the leaves of a plant hanging near the door of my bedroom for about three seconds in the dark. I turned on the light and nothing was there."
     I probably would not have mentioned the incident had it not kept happening. Chicago radio personality Roy Leonard awakened on the night of June 7, 1987, to find my presence in his bedroom. He reported that he could "almost" see me.
That night I had an extremely strange dream of moving like a ghost through an endless, dark woods and entering a little room that was so dark I couldn't see a thing. How Roy Leonard ended up on the receiving end of that dream I do not presently understand.


What Whitley's out-of-body capabilities have to do with his UFO experiences is never precisely spelled out, but it makes good sense intuitively. To paraphrase Judy Garland, "If UFOs fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh why can't I?" In any case, there is no need to speculate about Whitley's intentions and supernal powers, for I have been able to discuss all these matters in confidence with Whitley's disembodied spirit! Only last night — October 13, 1988 — Whitley's ecoplasmic, night-wandering self visited me in my bedroom, and this time it was no mere three-second, now-you-see-him-now-you-don't fugitive vision. His pale, tormented visage hung around for several minutes, and though I lacked the presence of mind to tape-record our dialogue, you can take my word for it that what follows is substantially what Whitley confided to me. Whitley himself may not recall our conversation, just as he seems to have forgotten his visit to Roy Leonard; he may even deny that it took place, but I am entirely persuaded it was Whitley I spoke to and no one else, though a skeptical friend has suggested to me that what I perceived as Whitley was only a product of my own overheated imagination. Or then again, it may be, as Hamlet surmised:

The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy
As he is very potent with such spirits
Abuses me to damn me.

I had just laid aside the volume of Browne's 'Pseudodoxia' Epidemica with which I had been beguiling the sleepless hours when I began to feel a curious sensation, not unlike one recounted by Whitley: "It felt as if I had come unstuck from myself. The experience was strange in the extreme — almost beyond description." At the same time I heard an unearthly mewling sound that seemed to come from outside the window screen. It was inconceivable that a cat could have made its way to my window ledge, eleven stories above ground level, for there is no fire escape, and yet I could distinctly see a dark shape on the ledge — a shape that, even as I watched, dumb with horror, proceeded to drift through the screen and to hover above a spider plant in the far corner of the room. Slowly the dark cloud coalesced into the mirthless face I had seen on so many television talk shows.

"Whitley!" I gasped. "Is it possible?"

His face trembled as though molded of colorless Jell-0 and solidified into a sneer. "Of course not. You must be one of those fantasy-prone per¬sonalities I've read about. You must be having a hypnopompic hallucination."

Whitley was undoubtedly referring to Robert A. Baker's discussion of 'Communion', which had appeared in the winter 1987-88 issue of the 'Skeptical Inquirer', a journal put out by CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, an organization devoted to the thankless task of debunking all the varieties of supernatural and pseudoscientific fraud. According to Baker, Whitley's UFO stories are textbook cases of hypnopompic hallucination:

     complete with the awakening from a sound sleep, the strong sense of reality and of being awake, the paralysis (due to the fact that the body's neural circuits keep our muscles relaxed and help preserve our sleep), and the encounter with strange beings. Following the encounter, instead of jumping out of bed and going in search of the strangers he has seen, Strieber typically goes back to sleep. [All these patterns are repeated in 'Transformation'.—T. D.]... Strieber, of course, is convinced of the reality of these experiences. This too is expected. If he was not... then the experiences would not be hypnopompic or hallucinatory.

                                                                         >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Until this moment I had been skeptical about Baker's theory, which seems designed to give Whitley and other self-styled abductees the benefit of the doubt with regard to their good faith. The internal evidence of 'Communion' suggests to me that even if Whitley's aliens had their origins in his waking dreams, they have long since been assimilated into a wholly conscious hoax. Whitley can bring passionate conviction to the defense of his lies; he even boasts of how he breezes through lie-detector tests (while enjoining "'debunkers' intent on twisting the facts" from contacting his front man, Dr. John Gleidman). But liars characteristically evidence a passionate commitment to their lies. Witness such recent bearers of false witness as Oliver North, Kurt Waldheim, President Reagan, and Jim and Tammy Bakker. The list could be continued for many column inches. The 1980s are the Age of Isuzu. Lying has become a form of entertainment. Surely a large part of Whitley's readership approaches his books in a spirit of connoisseurship rather than credulity, relishing the spectacle of his effrontery as one might the penitential tears of Jimmy Swaggart.

But there is no need for me to frame an indictment against Whitley. He did so himself with unforgettable (and uncharacteristic) eloquence on the night of October 13.

"Must you come visiting me in my dreams?" I grumbled at the phantasm of Whitley. "Why can't we just declare a truce?"

"You started this, Disch," it hissed. "No other respectable writer thought it worth his while to attack a book about UFOs. There's a gentleman's agreement in the book trade that crackpot ideas are not discussed in highbrow journals."

"Right. Only on The Tonkjht Show, and then only if there's no one there to contradict you."

The disembodied head nodded. "Exactly. I am in the business of founding a new faith, and faiths are, by definition, beyond criticism. It's quite simple, really. In a world of systemic corruption, we must all look the other way. If every Watergate conspirator had had the reticence and decency of G. Gordon Liddy, children might still have some respect for constituted authority."

"Oh, Liddy had great team spirit, I'll give you that. The thing is, Whitley, I'm not on your team."

"That makes no difference when religion is at issue. Meeting a Mormon socially, you would not cross-examine him about his honest opinion of the revelations Joseph Smith received from the Angel Moroni. And I claim the same exemption from criticism. As I see it, there's not much difference between the books I've written and the synoptic gospels. Like the witnesses of the resurrection and the other miracles reported in the gospels, all I am saying is that I saw what I saw. Impeach my honesty and that of those who have colluded in one or another of my fancies, and you impeach the honesty of all true believers, and so my first priority is to take the moral high ground, along with the author of Proverbs, who wrote, 'Smite a scorner, and the simple will beware.' Or, a verse I like even better, 'Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the backs of fools.'"


This had the ring of the Whitley whose first, fictional exploration of ufology, a short story called "Pain," had taken the form of soft-core S&M porn; the Whitley who witnesses, in Transformation, the following cautionary tableau:

     ... a stone floor with a low stone table in the middle of it. The table was a bit more than waist high, and on it there was a set of iron shackles. A man was led down some steps and attached to these shackles. He was right in front of my face, not two feet from me, looking directly at me with eyes so sad that I almost couldn't bear it. . . . Behind him was a taller person wearing black.... The next thing I knew this person was beating the poor man with a terrible whip. Before my eyes this man was being almost torn to pieces by the fury of the beating.
     Somebody behind me said, "He failed to get you to obey him and now he must bear the consequences."


"There's one thing I still don't understand," I confided to Whitley's head. "I can see your incentive to pile it on. You earn a fortune, and it makes you a kind of celebrity, and there must even be a kind of high-wire thrill to see how far you can go with it. But what's in it for the other Johnny-come-lately abductees? They won't have bestsellers or movie sales; they won't be interviewed by talk-show hosts."

"Ah, but as Jesus said at some point, every little bit counts. Bruce Lee, for instance. His testimony wasn't required of him. He isn't even my editor at Morrow. He simply saw there was an opportunity to do something for his employer, and for me, and pitched in. Talk about team players!"

Whitley was referring to one of the drollest tales in his book, concerning the night that Bruce Lee, a senior editor at Morrow, visited a bookstore on Manhattan's Upper East Side on an evening in January 1987 and witnessed two aliens in winter coats, their faces muffled with scarves. The aliens were paging through the newly released 'Communion', "turning — and apparently speed-reading — the pages at a remarkable rate." Mr. Lee noticed that "behind their dark glasses both the man and the woman had large, black, almond-shaped eyes." Lee, a former reporter and correspondent for Newsweek and Reader's Digest, "felt decidedly uneasy, deeply shocked." Later, Lee would take a lie-detector test administered by Whitley's own polygraphist, Nat Laurendi, and when asked if he thought the beings he saw in the bookstore were aliens — or, as Whitley prefers, "visitors" — Lee replied yes. Then: "He was asked if I had offered him anything of value to tell his story. He answered 'no' and this answer was evaluated as true."

"Yes," Whitley went on, "Bruce is a peach. But really, everyone at Morrow has been wonderful. Sherry Arden, who is the president and publisher, has been quoted in 'Publisher's Weekly' as saying, 'We truly believe this happened to Whitley.' And Rena Wolner called me 'one of the most creative people I know.' And then there's Phillipe Mora, who'll be directing the movie of 'Communion': he came out to the cottage and met one of the aliens ... oops, excuse me, visitors, right there where it all began."

"But none of them are exactly disinterested witnesses, are they? I'm surprised that everyone at Morrow isn't required to declare their belief in UFOs as a condition of continued employment. The people I can't understand are the people who imitate you for no obvious mercenary reason."

"Every abductee, within the smaller public sphere of his or her own social circle, is a mini-celebrity, a person important enough to have been taken up into the high-tech heaven of a genuine flying saucer. That should be inducement enough for millions of people — once I've got this thing rolling."

"Even though everyone knows they're bull-shitting?"

"And who isn't these days? Why should the right to lie and be respected for one's lies be reserved for televangelists and the highest officials of our government? Indeed, in that regard the situation nowadays is strikingly close to that of the Roman Empire in the early Christian era, when the emperors were officially divine. Caligula claimed to have enjoyed sexual congress with the moon-goddess in a manner not unlike my own spicier moments aboard the UFOs. What could have been more personally satisfying for an ordinary Roman citizen, confronted with such poppycock, than to declare an equivalent demi-divinity? If not Godhead, at least co-immortality with the crucified and resurrected God. So much for the divine pretensions of Caligula, or Pat Robertson, or Nero, or Nixon, or Heliogabalus."

"Whitley, are you trying to suggest that your potboilers are on a par with the gospels?"

Whitley smiled a sly smile. "Did I say that? No, no, you're putting words in my mouth."

Before I could ask him any more questions, Whitley laid a pseudopod aside of his nose, and, with a wink, he disappeared. But I fully expect he will return, in a year or so, with new spiritual revelations from his hand-puppet aliens.


     Postscript

     The attentive reader will have noticed a curious feature in the transcript of Whitley's dialogue with me. Repeatedly he paraphrases or exactly quotes phrases and whole sentences that appear in my essay "UFOs and the Origins of Christianity." At first I could not imagine why he would do this, until it dawned on me that he might have intended these as "evidence" that I was cannibalizing my own writing and not giving an actual transcript of his visitation! How could he have accomplished this? I had to ask myself. The essay in question had not yet appeared in 'Foundation', a British magazine he would be unlikely to have read in any case. Then I realized that he must have made earlier night-journeys and seen me at work on that essay. The force of its argument had, in effect, etched my words on his consciousness, and he was able, perhaps unwittingly, to repeat them in the course of the visitation recorded above.

[Lord Kufer]

Nije asteriks nego asterisk 

[Mica Milovanovic]

I u Zivkovicevoj Enciklopediji stoji asteriks pored Mankind Under the Leash.

Tu zvezdicu u Enciklopediji sam ja stavio 

[Lord Kufer]

Ma da, za sve je kriv Obeliks i njegova trapavost  

Nego, Jeka oko njegovih kostiju, ima li je neko skeniranu, pošto se knjiga ne može nikako naći... Zakk je nesto pominjao... Nađoh gomilu stvari od Diša na torentima, ali Jeke nema pa nema...

[Tripp]

        'Dick's First Novel'

[Uvod za Solar Lottery, by Philip K. Dick. Gregg Press, 1976.]

There are, by now, many science fictions, but for myself (for any reader) there is only one science fiction — the kind I like. When I want to find out if someone else's idea of sf corresponds significantly with mine (and whether, therefore, we're liable to enjoy talking about the stuff), I have a simple rule-of-thumb: to wit — do they know — and admire — the work of Philip K. Dick?

An active dislike, as against mere ignorance, would suggest either of two possibilities to me. If it is expressed by an otherwise voracious consumer of the genre, one who doesn't balk at the prose of Zelazny, van Vogt, or Robert Moore Williams, I am inclined to think him essentially unserious, a "fan" who is into sf entirely for escapist reasons. If, on the other hand, he is provably a person of enlightenment and good taste and he nevertheless doesn't like Dick, then I know that my kind of sf (the kind I like) will always remain inaccessible. For those readers who require sf always to aspire to the condition of art Philip Dick is just too nakedly a hack, capable of whole chapters of turgid prose and of bloopers so grandiose you may wonder, momentarily, whether they're not just his little way of winking at his fellow-laborers in the pulps. Even his most well-realized characters have their moments of wood, while in his bad novels (which are few), there are no characters, only names capable of dialogue. His plots may limp or they may soar, but they don't hang together. In short, he is not a bard in fealty to Apollo, not a "literary" writer.

What sets Philip Dick apart and lets him transcend the ordinary categories of criticism is simply — genius. A genius, what's more, that smells scarcely at all of perspiration despite a published output, over the last twenty years, of thirty-one novels and four collections of stories. Perhaps I'm being unfair to an art that conceals art, but the effect of his best books is of the purest eye-to-hand first-draft mastery. He tells it as he sees it, and it is the quality and clarity of his Vision that make him great. He takes in the world with the cleansed, uncanny sight of another Blake walking about London and being dumbfounded by the whole awful unalterable human mess in all its raddled glory. Not always an enviable knack.Vision, if you're not well-trained in its use, is what bad trips are made of, and most of us, given the choice, will avoid the roads that tend in that direction. So, possibly, it is the very excellence of Dick's books that has kept readers away.

Not all readers, of course. There is a fair-sized and growing cult that faithfully buys each new book before it passes from the paperback racks into oblivion. But by comparison to the sf writers who have made a name for themselves in the Real World, who can be bought at the SuperValu and are taught in the trendier tenth-grade classrooms, by comparison to the likes of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, or Vonnegut, Dick might as well be an avant-garde poet or a composer of electronic music. The Public hasn't heard of him.

It isn't fair. If he were guilty of metaphors or some such elitist practice that makes books hard to read, you could understand people being leery of him, but Dick is as democratic as Whitman, as demotic as Spillane. When he's at his best he is — even by "literary" standards — terrific. His prose is as plain and as sturdy as Shaker furniture, his characters as plausible as your next-door neighbors, his dialogue as authentic as a Water¬gate transcript, and his plots go rattling along with more ideas per para¬graph than the College Outline Series' 'Introduction to Western Philosophy'. He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, he makes you think, and think again: who could ask for more?

So what went wrong? Why have so many sf writers who are clearly his inferiors (naming no names) been so much more successful in the marketplace — and even in attracting the attention of academics, who, after all, are supposed to be able to recognize Quality? The simplest theory is just — that's the breaks. A careless agent sold his first books to the worst of all paperback houses, and for years he was stuck on a treadmill of speedwriting to meet deadline after deadline, world without end. The wondrous thing is that instead of being broken by this system and declining into a stumblebum twilight of hackwork, drunk on the Gallo burgundy of fannish adulation (many the bright young writer who has vanished into that Saragasso!), Dick moved steadily from strength to strength with no other reward (excepting a single Hugo Award for 'The Man in the High Castle' in 1963) than the consciousness of having racked up yet another Triple-Star Bonanza score on the great literary pinball machine in the sky.

That's one theory. The theory I prefer is that Dick's books have failed to win a mass audience precisely because of their central excellence —  their truth to life. Not that Dick (or any other sf writer, for that matter) is in the Prediction Sweepstakes. Forecasting the future is best left to Jeane Dixon and the Rand Corporation; sf has better things to do. The truths of sf (in its platonic form) and of Philip K. Dick are prophetic truths in the Old Testament sense, home truths about here, now, and forever.

Also, they're dark truths. Any reader with the least proclivity toward positive thinking, anyone whose lapel button shows a sappy grin, anyone, in short, who still believes in the essential decency, or even feasibility, of the System, is liable to experience one of Dick's novels as a direct assault on his sanity. Indeed, that, in a nutshell, is the plot of what many hold to be his most mind-bending novel, 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'.

For all that, Dick isn't really one of that infamous Brotherhood of Blackness that includes Swift, Beckett, Burroughs, and the suicide brigades of modern poetry. There is too much of the sunlight and wine of California in him to let Dick qualify for the deepest abysm of Literature.

Perhaps the problem is his evasiveness, the way his worlds refuse, iridescently, to stay in any kind of unequivocal moral focus. (As against the clear blacks and whites of Heinlein's homilies, or even the subtly graduated grays of Ursula LeGuin's.) Guys you thought were on Our Side end up acting like monsters — even, or especially, such guys as God. Dick is slippery, a game-player whose rules (what is possible, and what isn't, within the world of his invention) change from book to book, and sometimes from chapter to chapter. His adversary in these games is — who else? — the reader, which means that as fun as his books are, as smooth as they are, they are also surprisingly strenuous.

There is a form of Monopoly called Rat in which the Banker, instead of just sitting there and watching, gets to be the Rat. The Rat can alter all the rules of the game at his discretion, like Idi Amin. The players elect the person they consider the slyest and nastiest among them to be the Rat. The trick in being a good Rat is in graduating the torment of the players, in moving away from the usual experience of Monopoly, by the minutest calibrations, into, finally, an utter delirium of lawlessness. If you think you might enjoy Rat a bit more than a standard game of Monopoly then you should probably try reading Philip Dick.

Where to begin?

Not, in fact, with the book in hand, 'Solar Lottery'. While it is far from being one of his downright losers (by all accounts 'Our Friends From Frolix 8' takes the cake in that category), neither is it a book by which converts may be won. In this respect it is like the early work of many titans-to-be. Few readers approaching Shakespeare by way of 'Titus Andronicus' and 'Henry VI' would feel awfully impelled to plunge on. Similarly, Henry James's first novel, 'Watch and Ward', does not represent the Master at his most enticing. First novels are interesting, usually, as grindstones for the sharpening of hindsight. They show us the size and shape of the still-unfaceted diamond, but to appreciate them properly one must first have some notion of the diamond in its polished state.

So, if there are readers of this introduction who are as yet unacquainted with Dick's masterpieces, I'd advise them to begin with two or three of those and then return to 'Solar Lottery'. (An alternative course, and not necessarily a worse one, if you possess unbounded faith, is to begin with 'Solar Lottery' and read all the rest in sequence.) Having read 'The Man in the High Castle', 'Martian Time-Slip', 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', and 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', and the novella "Faith of Our Fathers," which are my nominations for Dick's quintessential and all-time classics, one may then return to 'Solar Lottery' with an eye for all the excellences that exist here in, as it were, an embryonic state.

'Solar Lottery' is also illuminating with regard to all that Dick had in common with his predecessors and his peers in that long-ago year of 1955. Even the highest and loneliest artists are engaged in a communal endeavor. Art is a vineyard in which all contemporaries — Kyd and Shakespeare, James and the myriad manufacturers of penny-dreadfuls, Dick and ... whoever — work side by side, in a perpetual condition of recipro¬cal influence and aid. Dick's influence on later writers is clear enough. It seems highly unlikely that Ursula LeGuin would have written 'The Lathe of Heaven' without an example of such earlier adventures in solipsism as Dick's 'Eye in the Sky' and 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'. What his inspiration may have been is less evident, especially if one's acquaintance is limited to the works of his maturity, in which early influences have either been assimilated or eliminated. In 'Solar Lottery' this is not the case, and it offers us an ideal middle ground from which to view both the heights of what is to come and the common grounds from which these were to spring.

'Solar Lottery' appeared in 1955 as half of a thirty-five-cent Ace Double Novel, and it is from the plates of that edition that the present book has been photographically reproduced. (A mutilated edition of the book appeared the next year in England from Rich & Cowan, under the title 'World of Chance'. Its copy editor showed unerring literary tact in eliminating, wherever possible, all of the book's more inspired passages. Truly, a monument to what may be achieved by patient mediocrity!) Unlike the novel on the flipside, Leigh Brackett's 'The Big Jump', 'Solar Lottery' was not published serially. A yellow blurb above the red-and-white title declares: "FIRST PRIZE WAS THE EARTH ITSELF!" (This, if inaccurate, does try to make sense of the title, a task that the novel itself never undertakes — probably because the title was not of the author's choosing.) The cover art shows a man in a spacesuit hurling a red boulder at a speck of a man (unsuited) below him on a cratered plain of celadon green. For a wonder, this scene does derive from the novel (the close of chapter 12), right down to the paradoxical detail of the person walking about on the moon without so much as a snorkel. There is this further Oddity, that the threatened figure is the villain, his threatener one of the minor heroes, and it is he who is actually in danger at this moment. Even this early, things aren't what they seem in a Dick novel.

What is being promised by such a cover, and what Dick in fact delivers (if somewhat grudgingly), is an action-adventure set in the Far Future (and Outer Space), a story with heroes and villians, a beginning, a middle, and an end. By comparison to almost any of his later books 'Solar Lottery' seems conservative in dramatic conception and (except for the rare flare-up) restrained, even perfunctory, in execution. A journeyman space opera. It is, after all, the first published book of a young man who cannot know, at this point in his career, the degree to which he may be permitted to depart from the established ceremonies of an Ace Double.

The nature of that ceremony and the requirements it places on its celebrants are very much at issue here. As with other rigid dramatic forms, such as the Western or the Requiem Mass, the artist must find how to be sincere within the narrow bounds of the form given him. Most pulp sf never gets off the ground because most hack writers write cynically, parroting the early, genuine successes of the genre without tracing them back to their emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic sources. (Ditto for Westerns and Requiem Masses.) But it is always possible. Witness the Westerns of Bud Boetticher and Sergio Leone. Witness the requiems of Mozart (a Freemason) and Verdi (an atheist). Witness the science fiction of Philip Dick.

I've written at length elsewhere (in "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction") concerning the emotional dynamics of pulp sf, the ways in which the needs of the sf audience dictated the form and content of classic space opera. In that essay I maintain that through most of its history science fiction has been a lower-class literature that purveys compensatory power fantasies specially aimed at readers sensitive to their social and educational shortcomings. At its most intense and obsessive, in sf fandom, this purpose becomes so overriding that fans may well be likened to Jehovah's Witnesses, whose millennialist theology is likewise calculated to feed the insatiable hungers and nurse the unhealing wounds of those among the oppressed who would still resist their despair. If this is so, one may better understand why ordinary literary criteria are not only a matter of indifference to readers of sf but are actually a matter of alarm: the sheer urgency of their need is so great that so long as the need is satisfied nothing else signifies. The clarity that Art brings represents an unwanted degree of illumination. Some actions are best performed in the dark.

The sf writers who most perfectly fit the above description are L. Ron Hubbard and A. E. van Vogt. Hubbard left sf relatively early in his career to found his own religion (one which precisely occupies the interface of fandom and millennial religion). Van Vogt simply wrote. And wrote simply: his books make the productions of such other founding fathers of proletarian pulp as Hammett and Chandler look like mandarin poetry. His prose rises above the laws of rhetoric and approaches the condition of phatic noise, the direct communication of emotional states by means of grunts and groans.

Now, if there is a single writer who may he said to have exerted a forming influence on the author of Solar Lottery, it is A. E. van Vogt. It is possible, as well, to hear echoes of more sophisticated voices, specifically those of Bester and Kornbluth-and-Pohl. Like 'The Demolished Man', 'Solar Lottery' is about a crime that must be carried out despite a corps of telepathic guards. Like 'The Space Merchants', it presents a world of systematic and ironic reversals, as in the contrast between the random choice of a world president and the convention called to elect that leader's assassin. (This Erewhonian procedure would reach its apotheosis in the geopolitical ingenuities of 'The Man in the High Castle'.) Yet it would be several years before Dick could be said to have rivaled or beaten Bester and Kornbluth-and-Pohl at their own game. While in the case of van Vogt, Dick has certainly done just that. In a sense, 'Solar Lottery' is van Vogt's best novel.

The opening of 'Solar Lottery' is substantially identical to that of van Vogt's most characteristic work, 'The World of Null-A'. In both books a down-and-out hero is on his way to what seems a cross between a final exam and a job interview. Though suffering momentary doubts as to his ability to Get Ahead, it is suggested that each hero's apparent lack of success so far has been due to bad luck and, possibly, lack of effort. But this time, the story promises, the hero will try, and he does, and as a result he ends up in the last chapter as President of the Universe. It is the plot skeleton of the Brave Little Tailor and a hundred fairy tales besides. But with this difference, that the readers of sf may be presumed to be older and to have a somewhat solider grasp on reality (where fantasies of infantile omnipotence don't stand much of a chance). Some reason, however spurious, must be offered for the hero's success. He is surrounded not only with rockets and blasters to tickle the reader's sense of wonder but also with such plausibilities as coffee cups and contemporary (to 1955) urban landscapes, like this one: "Across the street a looming hotel shielded a motley family of parasitic stores and dilapidated business establishments: loan shops, cigar stores, girl houses, bars." Further, pseudoscience is called on to explain the hero's specialness. In The World of Null-A, the hero, by his mysterious command of the non-Aristotelian logic of the title (an elusive discipline borrowed from a once faddish movement called General Semantics), is destined to triumph over those ignorant sods and highbrow Establishment Scientists still mired in the old-fashioned Aristotelian logic of either/or. In fact, not much is ever really made of Null-A logic, for the sufficient reason, I would think, that not much can be.

The 'real' reason a van Vogt hero wins through is that his innate genetic superiority (and the author's predestining hand) has thrust greatness on him. Slan is die supreme example in his work of paranoid racism, while the Null-A books offer his most full-blown Superman. The political implications of these traditional sci-fi themes have been exhaustively and hilariously dealt with in Norman Spinrad's satire, 'The Iron Dream'. Dick, in 1955, could not be so audacious as Spinrad in the seventies. He was committed to producing a novel of van Vogtian intrigue that would provide its readers with their traditional vicarious satisfactions. That he has found a way to do so that no longer need offend a liberal sensibility is no mean achievement.

                                                                           >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


  Consider Dick's use of game theory. Though not so questionable a discipline as van Vogt's General Semantics, it was being used in the fifties as a kind of intellectual smokescreen for U.S. foreign policy decisions that would have appeared much more unseemly without such scholastic trappings. In an author's note in the frontmatter of the Ace edition, Dick writes: "I became interested in the Theory of Games, first in an intellectual manner (like chess) and then with a growing uneasy conviction that Minimax was playing an expanding role in our national life.

. . . Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union employ Minimax strategy as I sit here. While I was writing 'Solar Lottery', Van Neumann, the co-inventor of the Games Theory, was named to the Atomic Energy Commission, bearing out my belief that Minimax is gaining on us all the time." This is certainly alarming, but then no more is made of Game Theory until well into the penultimate chapter of the book, when there is a flurry of Minimax terminology followed by some hugger-mugger between the leading ladies. There is a lottery by which the Quizmaster (President of the Universe) is selected, but it is the simplest kind of lottery, and in no way requires Game Theory to be understood. Game Theory, in short, has about as much to do with Dick's story as the logic of Aristotle, or its refutation, has to do with 'The World of Null-A'. It is a bit of legerdemain calculated to give the guileless reader a sense that the book is about Something Important, a name to drop if not a whole idea. The difference is that in van Vogt such hocus-pocus is associated with the Good Guys; in Dick (as in real life) it is associated primarily with the Bad Guys.

Consider the social landscape of 'Solar Lottery'. Like van Vogt, Dick is writing for the proverbial "little man," for readers who will feel an instant bond of kinship with the elderly Cartwright when he is challenged by the villain in these terms: "You can't operate this [the post of Quizmaster/ President]. This isn't your line. What are you? I examined the records. ... You had ten years of nominal school in the charity department of the Imperial Hill. You never excelled in anything. From high school on you dropped courses that dealt with symbolization and took manual shop courses. You took welding and electronic repair, that sort of thing." And here is Dick's epic catalogue of the unks (people who lack "classified" ratings, i.e., proletarians) who set off in a rickety ore freighter on a quixotic quest for the Flame Disc (the Utopian planet promised to them by their prophet John Preston): "A bewildering variety of people crowded anxiously around [Cartwright]: Mexican laborers mute and frightened, clutching their belongings, a hard-faced urban couple, a jet stoker, Japanese optical workmen, a red-lipped bed girl, the middle-aged owner of a retail goods store that had gone quack, an agronomy student, a patent medicine salesman, a cook, a nurse, a carpenter. . . . These were people with skill in their hands — not their heads. Their abilities had come from years of practice and work, from direct contact with objects. They could grow plants, sink foundations, repair leaking pipes, maintain machinery, weave clothing, cook meals. According to the Classification system, they were failures." These are the Good Guys, clearly.

There are two Bad Guys, the super-rich multinational corporation director, Reese Verrick, whom Dick allows to glow with the glamour of power, a glamour entirely denied to the sub-villain, Herb Moore, who is obliged to represent so many of the things that Dick dislikes (the servility of the Organization Man, the desexed rationality of a behavioral scientist, etc.) that he never coheres as a character. Moore creates a kind of golem for Verrick, the purpose of which is to assassinate the usurping (but benevolent) Cartwright. Which is to say: Money rules the world and shores up its power, whenever threatened, by its control of Science (a Science that is, for that reason, dehumanizing). That is far from being the sole or even a primary "meaning" of 'Solar Lottery', but it is surely one of the book's underlying assumptions. The chief difference between then (1955) and now (1976) is the degree to which, then, left-wing sympathies of any consistency had to be disguised and "translated" into politically neutral language. (Compare, in 'The Space Merchants', of 1953, one of the models for 'Solar Lottery', the authors' clever substitution of the imaginary "Consies" [Conservationists] for the dreaded "Commies." An uncannily correct extrapolation.) Again, Dick's use of the Pellig/superman figure may be contrasted to the work of van Vogt, in which the golem/superman is there precisely to afford his readers an unequivocal vicarious delight: If only it were me!

'Solar Lottery', along with most of its successors, may be read as a self-consistent social allegory of a more-or-less Marxist bent. As such Dick's books are unique in the annals of American sf, whose brightest lights have either been outspokenly right-wing, like Heinlein, or blandly liberal in the manner of Asimov or Bradbury, or else they've back-pedaled after a fire-eating youth, like the post-Kornbluth Pohl. Doubtless this is what has enabled Dick to be excepted from the anathemas of Stanislaw Lem, the Polish sf writer and critic. But Dick's political imagination, though powerful, is not, I believe, his central strength.

Dick's big theme, the one that consistently calls forth his finest and most forceful work, is transcendence — whether it's possible, what it feels like, and whether that feeling ultimately represents wishful thinking or some larger reality. He is constantly torn between a rationalistic denial of the ultimate reality of transcendent experience and a (still ironic) celebration of the brute fact of it.

Viewed in the light of this concern, many of his themes take on shades of meaning that sort oddly with strict dialectical orthodoxy, or even any known variety of revisionism. Why, for instance, does he celebrate "people with skill in their hands — not their heads"? Not just because they're underdogs who perform vital work and are denied adequate recompense or recognition. Handicraft, for Dick, is a spiritual discipline, somewhat in the way it was for Shakers, whose motto, "Hands to work and hearts to God," might well be his own. The most fully developed of Dick's craftsmen/heroes is Frank in 'The Man in the High Castle', a maker of modern silver jewelry. Much of that novel's plot centers around the specifically spiritual quality of Frank's jewelry, a spirituality that in one instance allows another character than Frank to transcend the terrifying Nazi-dominated world of that novel (by, ironically, escaping into our own).

The Prestonites' voyage in quest of the Flame Disc and their discovery, en route, of the seemingly resurrected John Preston represent 'Solar Lot¬tery's' initial sounding of this typical theme. It is not one of the stronger things in the book, in part simply because it is scanted in Dick's pell-mell rush to get the second half of his advance. But it may also be that the Flame Disc sequences fail because they haven't been sufficiently transformed from orthodox Christian eschatology. Dick is not about to make a declaration for Christ, though he always seems to be flirting with the possibility, symbolically. However, his confessional impulse is invariably contradicted by dramatic events of much greater emotional suasion. In 'Solar Lottery' the exhumed body of John Preston proves not to be alive, as expected, but a simulacrum. Through all his novels Dick entertains the possibility that creatures of flesh and blood are all essentially robots, mechanical monads obeying laws of a mechanistic creation. 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' is his single most compelling vision of man's unredeemably material nature, but there is one moment in 'Solar Lottery' when the later book's dark paradoxes are powerfully prefigured. It occurs on page 138: to say more would spoil 'Solar Lottery's' finest coup de theatre.

This essay cannot begin to enumerate all Dick's characteristic motifs, much less to analyze their complex interactions. The best I can do is to suggest a context in which Dick's work may be viewed more fruitfully than that of other science fiction stories, and that is the context of Romantic poetry, especially the poetry of Blake and Shelley. Both were political radicals whose circumstances prevented them from translating their convictions into political action. Both demonstrated a profound and prophetic understanding of those realms that lay beyond the Age of Reason. Both were artists of process, prevented by the very urgency of their apprehensions from creating works of classic amplitude and concinnity of form.

This is not to say that readers will find no formal pleasures in Dick's novels, that it is all a matter of snuffling about for truffles of Meaning, as I've been doing here. But his commitment to an aesthetic of process means that, by and large, whatever he writes is what we read. There is no turning back to rethink, revise, or erase. He improvises rather than composes, thereby making his experience of the creative process the focus of his art. This is not a novelty, of course. It is the wager of Scheherazade, too, that she can be interesting and authentic absolutely all the time, and this tradition of the novel is as old and as honorable as the more Flaubertian idea of the novel-as-prose-poem that presently holds sway in academia. Within this tradition Dick is one of the inmortals by virtue of the sheer fecundity of his invention. Inevitably there are dull patches, days when his typewriter refuses to wake up, but on the whole these are few and the stretches of song, when they come, are all the more remarkable for being, so visibly, the overflow of a spirit... that from Heaven, or near it, pours its full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

[Tripp]

        'In the Mold of 1964: An Afterword'

[Predgovor za roman The Penultimate Truth, by Philip K. Dick. Bluejay, 1984.]

In December of 1961 the U.S. Defense Department announced a fallout shelter program aimed at establishing 235,000,000 fallout shelter spaces. At that time the entire population of the country had yet to exceed 200,000,000.

In October of 1962, Kennedy had his moment of macho glory when he declared a quarantine around Cuba, where the Russians were building missile bases. For a few days everyone was waiting for the bombs to fall. The sensation of dread and helplessness was just the stuff nightmares are made of. For those who had read more than the government's bromidic brochures on the subject of nuclear destruction and who were living at that time in a major (i.e., targeted) city, there was little to be done but figure the odds for survival. Fifty-fifty seemed the general consensus among the New Yorkers I knew. The poet Robert Frost, legend has it, reckoned doomsday even likelier than that, and when he appeared at a symposium at Columbia University, he declared himself to be delighted that now he would not die alone (he was then eighty-eight) but would take all humanity along with him.

A year and a month later, in November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated — probably as a 'quid pro quo' for his earlier efforts to play a similar dirty trick on Castro. However, at the time we were asked to believe that the deed was accomplished by a single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Earl Warren, having been admonished by President Johnson that continued doubts of the scapegoat's sole guilt could lead to nuclear war, was directed to write a scenario to this effect. The Warren Commission issued its report in 1964, the same year in which 'The Penultimate Truth' was published. Neither was nominated for a Hugo, for indeed both books were much too hastily written to deserve such an honor. But as a snapshot of the angst that characterized that period — and of the blackly humorous emotional antidote to that angst — 'The Penultimate Truth' is an essential document.

According to die records of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, the outline for 'The Penultimate Truth' was received in March of 1964, and the completed manuscript in May. Conceptually it represented the splicing together of two short stories Philip K. Dick had written in the earliest years of his apprenticeship. The first of these, "The Defenders," appeared in the January 1953 issue of 'Galaxy'. It duplicates, in miniature, the Nicholas St. James portion of the plot, in which all humanity has been tricked into believing it must continue living underground to escape the radiation and other dangers of a nuclear war. In this story it is the leadies (robots) that have perpetrated the deception in order to keep mankind from self-extinction, and the story's last wistfully liberal tableau represents two groups of escaped U.S. and Russian troglodytes blasting off into the sunset, reconciled by the rational leadies:

     "It has taken thousands of generations to achieve," the A-class leady concluded. "Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction. But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the beginning of a new stage of history."
     "The conquest of space," breathed Colonel Borodsky.
     "The meaning of life," Moss added.
     "Eliminating hunger and poverty," said Taylor.
     The leady opened the door of the ship. "All that and more. How much more? We cannot foresee it any more than the first men who formed a tribe could foresee this day. But it will be unimaginably great."
     The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home.


The second source story for the novel was published in 'If' (August 1955), and its title, "The Mold of Yancy," was intended, in a slightly emended form, "In the Mold of Yancy," as the original title of the book. It concerns the conspiracy of the yance-men of Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter, to brainwash the guileless Callistotes into a condition of abject conformity by means of the televised speeches of a (nonexistent) homespun philosopher who is a cross between Arthur Godfrey and George Orwell's Big Brother. The problem is resolved not by revealing the deception to the gullible population but by using the Yancy mannikin to inculcate a preference for Greek tragedy and Bach fugues among those who formerly were satisfied by Westerns and the songs of Stephen Collins Foster.

It is clear, even in that early story, that Dick's interest in the premise is more with the secret power exercised by hidden persuaders, such as advertising copywriters, speechwriters, and filmmakers, than with the moral question of the legitimacy of such persuasion. It's less clear whether, as he wrote "The Mold of Yancy," Dick recognized his personal fascination and identification with the yance-men of Callisto, but surely by the time he had decided to rework that old material into a novel, he knew himself to be a yance-man — albeit one employed in the lower ech¬elons of the power structure — as a hack writer producing sci-fi paper¬backs. By way of signaling that fact and of sharing it with the unhappy few who could be counted on to read his hack novels as a phantasmal form of autobiography, Dick gave the Agency that is responsible for this global deception the then-current address of his own literary agent, Scott Meredith, at 580 Fifth Avenue.

What it meant, for Dick — as for his novel's protagonist, Joseph Adams — to be a yance-man was that he knew, as most of his fellow citizens did not, that the real sociopolitical function of the cold war and the arms race was to guarantee comfortable "demesnes for corporate execu¬tives and other officials of the military-industrial establishments." Only as long as there was the menace of an external enemy would a majority of people agree to their own systematic impoverishment. But if one's "enemy" was in the same situation with respect to its captive populations, then a deal could be struck to keep their reciprocal menace ever-threatening — not at all a difficult task with the unthinkable power of the nuclear arsenals both sides possessed.

In another novel, 'The Zap Gun', conceived and written in the same few months of spring 1964 that produced 'The Penultimate Truth', Dick hypothesized a very similar conspiracy between the superpowers. The hero of that novel, Lars Powderdry, is a weapons fashions designer whose imposing but impotent creations are derived, telepathically, from an Italian horror comic, 'The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan'. The moral of both novels is clear: government is a conspiracy against the people, and it is maintained by the illusion of a permanent crisis that exists, for the most part, as a media event.

Such a view of world affairs was much less common in the early sixties than it has become since Watergate, but it was surely not original to Philip Dick. Its most forceful expression is probably found in George Orwell's '1984', in which a perpetual state of war and shifting alliances among the three superpowers provide the basis for totalitarian rule, and in which the head of state is, like Talbot Yancy, a chimera. Many critics have pointed out that 1984 is intended, not as a prediction or a warning against some dire possible future, but rather as a nightmarishly hyperbolic picture of the actual state of affairs at die time it was being written, a meaning concealed in the title: 1984 = 1948.

The great difference between Orwell's world-nightmare and Dick's is that the possibility of nuclear holocaust has not yet informed Orwell's vision, while it dominates Dick's — and often obscures it. Never mind that the future Dick has imagined could not come into being, that the radiation released by a nuclear war would have had far more awful and widespread consequences than the singeing represented in 'The Penultimate Truth'. The emotional basis of the inability to comprehend nuclear reality has been compellingly discussed by Jonathan Schell in 'The Fate of the Earth', where, after demonstrating the virtual certainty of human extinction as a result of a large-scale nuclear war, he argues:

     It thus seems to be in the nature of extinction to repel emotion and starve thought, and if the mind, brought face to face with extinction, descends into a kind of exhaustion and dejection it is surely in large part because we know that mankind cannot be a "spectator" at its own funeral, any more than any individual person can.


Might not the congruent sense of "exhaustion and dejection" pervading the first chapters of 'The Penultimate Truth' be symptomatic of Dick's natural inability to think the unthinkable — that is, to imagine the aftermath of nuclear war in plausibly dire terms?

Of course, Dick never intended to write a plausible, realistic post-holocaust novel. Readers who want a verismo version of their own future deaths might read 'On the Beach' (novel, 1959; movie, 1959). Dick has another Zeitgeist to summon, a new wisdom that is at once happier and blacker, the Spirit of'64. He simply denies that the cold war is happen¬ing.

It is a denial we all learned to make, having passed through the twin crises of 1962 and 1963: the Missile Crisis and the Assassination. Robert Frost died alone, after all, and the rest of us, by and large, survived. If we'd never bothered listening to the news, there'd have been no reason to be fussed. Life went on. The Beach Boys produced new and better songs. Ditto Detroit and cars. That segment of the entertainment industry devoted to politics had an election, Johnson versus Goldwater, and the plot was that Goldwater would lead us into war. So we voted, by and large, for Johnson.

But that's getting ahead of the story, since this cannot chronicle the entire unreality of the nuclear era, but only the particular slice represented by 'The Penultimate Truth' — spring of 1964.

Consider our presidents. Up to the age of fifteen, Dick would have known but one, FDR, and he would undoubtedly have shared in the idolatry accorded Roosevelt in the war years, Dick being eleven years old in 1941. It can be maintained (and often has been) that two of the next three presidents — Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy — achieved their success because of die image they projected rather than through some special competence. Indeed, Eisenhower's nomination in 1952 was denounced by Taft's supporters as a triumph of showbiz over politics, while, with the benefit of hindsight, Kennedy's entire career seems a pageant choreographed by the yance-men about him — Schlesinger, Bradlee, even Mailer. Christopher Lasch writes, in the October 1983 issue of 'Harper's' magazine: "Never was a political myth so consciously and deliberately created or so assiduously promoted, in this case by the very people who had deplored Madison Avenue's participation in President Eisenhower's campaigns." As Norman Mailer wrote in his account of the 1960 Democratic convention, which helped to fix Kennedy's image as an "existential hero," the "life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far" during the dull years of Eisenhower and Truman. It was Kennedy's destiny, Mailer thought (along with many others), to restore a heroic dimension to American politics, to speak and represent the "real subterranean life of America," to "engage" once again the "myth of the nation," and thus to bring a new "impetus ... to the lives and the imaginations of the American."

If this is how one of the man's vassals speaks of him, in public, in his lifetime, Lasch's case — and Dick's — seems fairly unassailable. Of course, those intellectuals who promoted Kennedy for his mythic potential felt with a certain complacent knowingness that they were privileged to see the reality beyond the myth (for that is a yance-man's greatest reward). Mailer begins his teasingly self-revealing, self-concealing 'An American Dream' (which first began to appear, serially, in 'Esquire' in January 1964) with a paragraph calculated to make all true yance-men swoon with envy:

   --- I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.


In every respect but one 'An American Dream' is a more accomplished novel than 'The Penultimate Truth', but that one respect is crucial to its (failed) ambition. 'An American Dream' does not succeed as an evocation of the Zeitgeist of the dawn of the assassination era — for the sufficient novelistic reason that Mailer has murders to discuss much closer to his own heart. However, both novels share the same courtier's fascination with the intrigues presumed to be the reality behind the myth of Camelot/Talbot Yancy, and both find something glamorous in the ruthless exercise of power by well-placed criminals.

It must be admitted, however, that the hugger-mugger surrounding the Machiavellian schemes of the smarmily villainous Brose and the Byronic David Lantano is the central weakness of 'The Penultimate Truth'. Brose's plot for entrapping Runcible is so unnecessarily preposterous, and involves such needless multiplication of hypotheses, and is at last so irrelevant to the outcome of the story, that one might wonder at Dick's willingness to permit such an obvious blemish to remain, except that one knows, from his own admissions and from other internal evidences, that Dick's method of work was to plunge on ahead and never look behind. If he'd been Orpheus, Eurydice would have had nothing to worry about backwards-looking-wise (as Dick would say).

                                                                      >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


I'd like to intrude a long parenthesis here concerning the faults of the book, which are, pretty obviously, the result of Dick's chosen manner of writing, a manner comparable to downhill racing. The results can be spectacular, though often the spectacle provided is one of disaster. But rather than appearing to guess at Dick's technique of composition on the basis of internal evidence, let me quote his account of the matter, written to an editor at Harcourt, Brace early in 1960:

    I wonder why you say I write so much; that is, produce so much. My anxiety is that I produce too little — that if I bore down I could produce a lot more. Most of the work, for me, lies in the pre-typing stage, in the note-taking. I generally spend five to six months doing no typing, but simply outlining. At best I can now bring forth no more than two novels a year... Under certain conditions, however, I can write very fast, even without notes. The Lippincott book was written in two weeks, proofread and then retyped in two more.... My work tends to force a pace on me; I'll do forty to sixty pages a day for days on end, until I'm exhausted, and then not uncover the machine for several months.
     I wait until I am sure of what I want to put down, and then away I go.


After winning a Hugo for 'The Man in the High Castle' in 1963, Dick was actually able to increase his rate of production to a little better than three novels a year, a rate he maintained almost to the end of the sixties.

The downhill-racing style of novel-writing is not uncommon in science fiction or other genres, and when it is brought off well, there is a fizziness and exhilaration to such books that is not to be found in more carefully wrought novels, however favorably they might otherwise be compared. Often, however, speed-written novels run out of steam spo¬radically. Forty to sixty pages a day means a week's continuous work for a novel the length of 'The Penultimate Truth', and it is difficult to scintillate virtually nonstop for an entire week. Often it is all that bleary eyes and weary fingers can do to type coherent sentences. Take as a for-instance chapter 14, four labored pages of dialogue in which two minor characters rehash a situation the reader is already well aware of, arrive at no conclusions, and can't refrain from dropping hints right and left as to how low Phil Dick is feeling at that late hour, after his seventeenth cup of coffee: "A Yance-man, female, named Arlene Davidson, who has a demesne in New Jersey; the Agency's top draftsman. Died of a massive coronary during the past weekend. Late Saturday night.... She may have been given a deadline, for something major; overworked. But that's conjecture." And then, a page later: "Still shuffling his documents, trying to come up with something of use, trying and unhappily failing, the abstract-carrier Footeman said, 'I wish you good luck. Maybe next time.' And he wondered if, for Runcible, there would be a further report. This inadequate — admittedly so — one today might well be the last ..."

The wonder is how often Dick was able to produce work of real interest and wit in these marathons of typewriting. For readers who read at a pace proportioned to his speed of writing (as most sf fans learn to do, or else cease being fans), the dull patches disappear into a haze of white powder as they careen down the slopes of the narrative. It is the ideas they are after, and Dick always provides more than a sufficiency of these.

Indeed, for slower readers like myself, who are so old-fashioned in their tastes as to demand some kind of consistency and continuity in the plot of a book, this profusion of ideas often is a bigger stumbling block to the enjoyment of Dick's lesser novels than the chapters written on automatic pilot. Take the way Dick picks up, and throws away, and again picks up, the idea of time travel in 'The Penultimate Truth'. First he posits a "time scoop" that can propel objects back into the past, a device Brose intends to use to plant false archaeological "proofs" of an extraterrestrial invasion of fifteenth-century North America. Brose's plot comes to nothing, though several chapters are devoted to its preparation. Then, fudging the explanation like mad, Dick asks us to believe (1) that one of the yance-men, David Lantano, is actually a Cherokee Indian who has managed to ride the (now two-way) scoop back into the twenty-first century; (2) that in a manner never fully explained this Lantano's physical age oscillates between young manhood and old age, when he becomes the real Talbot Yancy; and (3) that he has taken a few starring roles in the intervening five centuries.

None of which has much to do with what the book set off to be about, nor does it impinge very much on the resolution of the plot. Yet, it is clear from scattered footprints, broken twigs, and other spoor of the downhill-racing novelist what Dick would have liked this stew of impossibilities to accomplish. Lantano first appears as the yance-man most likely to succeed — and to succeed the hero, Joseph Adams, as the Agency's most accomplished speechwriter. Adams envies the way Lantano, in one of the speeches he has written for the Yancy simulacrum, is able to "openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are systematically deprived of what they're entitled to." Here is how Dick, using the mask of Lantano (who is using the mask of Yancy), describes the characteristic deprivation of the tankers' (i.e., working-class) lives:

     Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age . . . they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, its streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine — figuratively — dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at workbenches making leadies for a purpose which — but even Lantano could not go on here.


But Lantano's place in the scheme of the novel isn't limited to his rhetorical abilities. He is meant to be the redeemer of a humanity not simply downtrodden but buried, a Christ figure whom Nicholas St. James, his evangelist, at once recognizes as such, murmuring when they first meet, "He was oppressed and despised," a misquotation that Lantano himself corrects to "despised and rejected of men." However, about the only way that the Cherokee Lantano resembles Christ is in having been appointed the task of harrowing hell — that is, of being the agent by which the subterranean tankers will win release and inherit the earth. Yet, the means Lantano adopts resemble those of Danton much more than those of Christ, for Lantano proves to be the sneakiest and most ruthless of the book's sundry schemers, and in this he represents Dick's own ambivalent — and unformulated — feelings on the question of how human liberation is to be achieved.

The same ambivalence is mirrored — but more coherently — in the opposition between the two chief protagonists of the novel. Nicholas St. James is an ideal proletarian, the "president" of his ant tank, resourceful, courageous, and a dupe. Joseph Adams has only one thing going for him, apart from a certain ineffectual "liberal" goodwill — the fact that he is not a dupe. Dick admires Nicholas St. James, but he identifies with Joseph Adams (who is, accordingly, the only character in the book with an intermittently plausible inner life).

With regard to plot construction, therefore, Lantano is an unnecessary complication, a deus ex machina whose powers prove almost as illusory as those of the figurehead of Yancy with which he is identified. At the end of the novel, as a result of Lantano's coup, humanity is to be released from its bondage, but this has been accomplished without any recourse to Lantano's special characteristics as a time-traveling, Christ-like Cherokee warrior.

What, then, was the purpose of such "ideas"? Were they no more than a kind of conceptual padding, a way to pump up the premise of the origi¬nal stories to novel length? After the fact, perhaps yes, but in the pell-mell of writing I think Dick's throwaway ideas represent a kind of self-pitched curve ball that he honestly hopes to knock over the stadium wall. There are similarly transcendental elements in the plot of another novel from 1964 (and one of his best), 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'.

If Dick had stopped to think (but that's something a downhill racer can't do), he might have realized that there was an essential dramatic disparity between the two stories he was trying to weld together. The Yancy part of the plot generated a story about dirty tricks in high places, a genre for which Dick possesses little flair (compare Le Carre and his better imitators), while that element of the story that all readers remember, after the lapse of however many years, is the notion of the human race imprisoned in underground factories because they've been tricked into believing that a nuclear war has destroyed the world. It's an extraordinarily resonant idea. One thinks of the dwellers in Plato's cave who know nothing of the reality but the shadows cast on the wall; of the similar destiny of Wells's Morlocks; of the prisoners in Beethoven's Fidelio; and of ourselves, living in the shadows of a nuclear threat that is only bearable when we pretend that it does not exist. To have recognized that our situation is a kind of madness ("What, me worry?" sang the Titanic's passengers) has not helped us toward a solution, for our situation with respect to the bomb is not much different in 1983 than it was in 1964. And for that reason 'The Penultimate Truth', for all its flaws, remains a book that can speak to the terror that is the bedrock of our social order.

[Tripp]

     'The King and His Minions: Thoughts of a TWILIGHT ZONE reviewer'


"The time has been," Macbeth reminisces in Act V, "my senses would have cool'd to hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in it." Read a few too many dismal treatises, however, and you may find, along with Macbeth, that: "I have supp'd full with horrors; direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, cannot once start me."

It may be, however, that this disclaimer, coming just before his "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, is the theatrical equivalent to the obligatory false alarm in every horror movie when the cat leaps out from behind the curtains and we all shriek, and then have to laugh to reassure ourselves that "It's only the cat!" — though we know quite well that there is enough direness ahead of us to cool our senses to freezing. Not only such basic physical direness as death, disease, die frailty and corruption of the flesh, the hunger of various predators, and the dangers posed by psychopaths at loose after dark, but the further, horrible suspicion that the social system we are necessarily a part of, which is supposed to keep these dangers at bay, may instead have formed some kind of unholy alliance with them — the suspicion, to put it another way, that Macbeth may be the person who's answering the phone when we dial 911.

Those would seem to be enough different varieties of direness to guarantee some degree of timeliness and universality to the genre of the horror story. This plentitude explains why the range of the horror story, in terms of literary sophistication, should be wider than that of any other literary genre, running the gamut from the elemental night-shrieking nastiness of EC Comics to the highbrow frissons of James's 'The Turn of the Screw' or Kafka's "Metamorphosis". Horror, like his brother Death, is an equal opportunity employer.

To the degree that a theme is universal, it is in proportion exploitable, and the proliferation of schlock horror novels in the wake of such box office successes as 'The Omen' series, et al., is hardly to be wondered at. So long as there are rustics to buy ballad-sheets there will be balladeers to supply them, though as the mean reading speed of the audience and the technology of printing have both greatly advanced in recent centuries, it's not ballad-sheets that are hawked nowadays but paperback originals.

Without dwelling on the easy irony of the word "original," let's take a quick peek inside a recent 329-page ballad-sheet brought out by Pocket Books, 'The Deathstone', by Ken Eulo, author of 'The Bloodstone' and 'The Brownstone' (and doubtless, if the market holds up, of 'The Headstone', 'The Whetstone', and 'The Rhinestone'). There is nothing intrinsically unworkable in the book's premise of a small town keeping up the pagan tradition of human sacrifice: it's done yeoman service for Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," and the movie 'The Wicker Man'. Horror stories are usually reenactments of favorite myths. What sinks Eulo's book to the rock-bottom of the sophistication spectrum (from savvy to sappy) is the style of his reenactment, a style that is equal parts soap-opera mawkish and button-pushing portentous, graduating to dithering hysteria for the big moments:

    They were circling the fire now, dancing in a madman's frenzy, delirium, their huge animal heads weaving in and out of shadows. The fire blazed up with a roar, sending a column of red flames soaring. They moaned and wailed and shouted. Even though the words were unintelligible, Ron felt that their hideous shrieks were like a hand held toward him, a handshake with death.


Don't worry though, kids. Ron doesn't die. He saves Chandal and little Kristy from the Widow Wheatley and the other wicked Satanists and returns to his talent agency in Hollywood.

                                          *    *    *

If there is one key to prejudging books and consigning them, half-read, to the holocaust, it must be Style, and "Style" is the single word most likely to provoke hack writers and hack readers to postures of defense. Storytelling and yarn-spinning are simple, wholesome crafts, they would aver, to which questions of Style are irrelevant. Style is to be left to stylists, like Hemingway or Faulkner or Joyce, the writers you have to read in school.

Nonsense. Style is simply a way of handling yourself in prose so as to signal to an attentive reader that she is in the presence of someone possessed of honesty, wit, sophistication, irony, compassion, or whatever other attributes one looks for in a person to whom one is about to give over n-many hours of one's mental life. People who insist otherwise usually have mental halitosis.

Which is why I think it's fair for reviewers to indicate which books they have found unreadable. Otherwise the longest, dullest, worst books would only be reviewed by people able to read them, i.e., unable or unwilling to recognize their gross defects. Only creative writing teachers would review John Gardner. Only Scientologists and veterans of the Golden Age of science fiction would review 'Battlefield Earth'. Only authors' friends would review, say, such a book as John Shirley's 'Cellars'. And publishers would come to think that no one ever actually noticed what they were doing.

I might suggest burning 'Cellars', though, as it's a paperback, it will yield at most only enough heat to roast some marshmallows. The tell-tale elements are a willingness to fill a blank space with any cliche that comes to mind ("like a thundering symphony"), an urge to dress up the text with portentous guff ("And the sage remembers"), a merciless determination to recycle said guff, and an emotional sympathy lavished exclusively upon the first-person singular. To these attractions the novel proper adds a couple wheelbarrowfuls of standard-issue splatter-movie grue ("A woman spread-eagled on her back. Her blouse had been torn away. . . . Her breasts had been symmetrically quartered like fruit sections in salad"), and a misogynistic regard for the fair sex to a degree that makes Mickey Spillane look like a radical feminist — all smoothed over with mystic mummeries so false they're probably intended as comic relief, as when our hero explains to the Keystone Kops the killing style associated with the mayhem quoted above: "The lettering on the circle looks like ancient Persian to me, and I suspect the ritual has something to do with the demon Ahriman." Ah so!

So 'Cellars' goes, the grue alternating with the hokum for 295 pages of prose that is 85 percent pulp padding and 15 percent amplified scream (under another hat Shirley is the head of a punk rock group called Obsession). There is, I admit, an aesthetic to screaming, and Shirley's shriller screams can get to your crystal ware, but screaming is, as a general rule, less effective on the printed page than in rock music, where the silly lyrics are blessedly incomprehensible and the beat goes on. Novels, alas, don't have a rhythm section to keep them moving — so when the pages refuse to turn: burn, baby, burn.

                                  *     *     *

Let me state clearly here that I am not disparaging "escapist reading" in order to promote "serious literature." I have a keen appetite for entertainment novels of all kinds. For some readers, it may be, the very unnaturalness and ineptitude of the lower grade of occult novels are welcome distancing devices from what might otherwise be too scary, too close for comfort. For them, mustache-twirling villainy and dime-store Halloween masks serve the same sanitizing function that the code of genteel taste serves for readers of more middlebrow spinemasseurs (tinglers they're not), such as Jonathan Carroll's 'Voice of Our Shadow', a preppy ghost story as decorously conventional and capably tailored as a Brooks Brothers suit. Carroll just doesn't believe in ghosts, and his disbelief is contagious. But does anyone believe in ghosts, after all?

Spiritualism flourished in the nineteenth century and lingered into the early decades of the twentieth. Since it was the chief tenet of spiritualist faith that there are ghosts, many writers of ghost stories in those years expropriated for their own use much of the spiritualists' genteel intellectual baggage. This new breed of ghosts were not specters of the damned, like Hamlet's father, nor bleedin' 'orrors, beloved by readers of the penny dreadfuls. They were, instead, Lost Souls — most in transit to the Other Side, confused about but not necessarily ill-disposed toward creatures of the flesh.

Under this new dispensation, ghosts were domesticated and made to conform to the decorous tastes of a middle-class, middlebrow audience. In the American pulps there was still full-frontal ghastliness, but British ghosts were expected to comport themselves like ordinary people. When an ex-wife wished to haunt her faithless husband (as in Mary Treadgold's "The Telephone"), her reproaches were conveyed over the phone, in what we must imagine to be a subdued tone. The theory is that ghosts are credible in proportion to the gentility of their manners. The brush of a sleeve, a stifled sigh — these are to be the stuff of horror, and in the hands of a good writer they serve very well. The greatest of all ghost stories, James's 'The Turn of the Screw', doesn't bother with horrid shrieks and rattled chains.

Yet if they were on their oaths, I'm sure most of the best ghost-story writers would admit that their ghosts are symbols of Something Else. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, finally, Eulo and Shirley and Carroll (and unnumbered others) fail for this reason — a reluctance to make eye contact with their fears. Instead of real horrors to sup upon, with meat and maggots on their bones, they offer plastic skeletons.

                                                             >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Stephen King is another matter. He has enjoyed his success precisely because he's remained true to his own clearest sense of what is fearful, fearfuler, fearfulest. What King fears is his own and other people's capacity for cruelty and brutality, madness, loneliness, disease, pain, and death: men, women, most forms of animal life, and the weather. When King introduces supernatural or paranormal elements into his tales it is as a stand-in for one of the above-mentioned "natural" fears. Thus, Carrie's telekinetic powers in his first novel are emblematic of the force of a long-stifled anger erupting into rage, and the horror of 'Salem's Lot' is that of witnessing the archetypal Our Town of Rockwell, Wilder, and Bradbury electing Dracula as mayor and appointing his wives to the Board of Education.

King's 'Different Seasons' is a collection of four quite separate tales, only one of which (and that, thankfully, the shortest) failed to shiver my timbers perceptibly — though King has throughout 'Different Seasons' kept to the hither side of the natural/supernatural divide. The other three, in ascending order of both length and personal preference, are: "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," a quietly paranoid curtain-raiser that persuaded me never to be framed for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment; "The Body," a vivid if sometimes self-consciously "serious" account of the rites of passage practiced by the aboriginal teenagers of Maine's lower-middle class (and a telling pendant to the novel 'Salem's Lot'); finally, the hands-down winner of the four and, I think, King's most accomplished piece of fiction at any length, "Apt Pupil." (In his book's afterword, King complains about the difficulty of publishing novellas of twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand words. Yet "The Body" and "Apt Pupil" are, respectively, double those lengths, and even the shorter tale would have made a weightier book than Carroll's 'Voice of Our Shadow'. I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, only to point out that 'Different Seasons' is more nearly a collection of novels than of stories.)

The premise for "Apt Pupil" could scarcely be simpler. A bright, ail-American thirteen-year-old discovers that one of his suburban neighbors is the infamous Kurt Dussander, commandant of a Nazi death camp. Instead of reporting Dussander to the police, this paragon of the eighth grade begins to blackmail him — not for money but just "to hear about it":

      " 'Hear about it?'" Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed.
      Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. "Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they'd fall into them. The ..." His tongue came out and wetted his lips. "The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff."
      Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. "You are a monster," he said softly.


To tell more of how this oddest of all couples leapfrog down the road to damnation would be a disservice to anyone who hasn't yet read the book. I'm told by those who have a hand on the pulse of sf and fantasy fandom that "Apt Pupil" has not been exactly taken to the hearts of King's usually quite faithful subjects. I can only suppose that this is a tribute to how closely it cuts to the bone. Surely, in terms simply of generating suspense and keeping the plot twisting, "Apt Pupil" cannot be faulted. I hope Losey gets to make the movie, or that Hitchcock could return from the grave for just one more production. Not since 'Strangers on a Train' has there been a plot so perfectly suited to his passion for ethical symmetries.

                            *     *     * 

As I write this, Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary' has already been on the 'New York Times' bestseller list for ten weeks. The considerable interest (and ultimate failure) of 'Pet Sematary' is directly related to the themes I've been dealing with above. The story concerns a doctor disordered by his grief for a loved child, and who succumbs to the temptation of "resurrecting" the child by interring its corpse in an Indian burial ground that has the spectral property of reanimating the dead. King does his usual skillful job of seducing us into accepting his unlikely story, and at the same time creates an atmosphere drenched in the fear of death. One would have to be a very guileless reader indeed not to foresee that the author has doomed his hero's child to an early death. The real element of suspense is how the child will behave in its resurrected state, and King's answer is to have the little zombie go on a rampage of homicide and dirty talk that is like watching a cassette of 'The Exorcist' on fast-forward. My objection to this denouement is neither to its strain on credibility nor to its mayhem, but to the way it fails to carry forward, still less to resolve, the novel's so powerfully stated themes — the human need to believe, at any cost, in an afterlife, a need that can drive those who lack the safety valve of a religious faith to such bizarre excesses as spiritualism.

King's opting for a conventional splatter-movie resolution to the question "What if the dead were to live again?" is all the more regrettable, since in the figure of Church, a zombified cat, he has prefigured a possibility that is both more harrowing and more pertinent to the central themes of loss and grief, though in Church's case it is the loss of those vital energies that together constitute the soul. From having been the beau ideal of cattiness, Church degenerates into a sluggish, surly scavenger; not at all a demonic cat, just spoiled meat. If the dead child had returned from the grave similarly disensouled, the horror would have been infinitely greater, because that loss would be a vivid correlative to a parental fear of a fate truly worse than death, the fear that one's child may be severely mentally impaired.

It's doubtful, of course, whether the public wants to be harrowed. The blustering denouement King does provide is reassuring to readers precisely to the degree that it's conventional; it's King's way of telling us not to be upset: it was only a ghost story, after all.

Part of the problem is simply that ghost stories are by their nature short, since the psychology of most literary ghosts is simple in the extreme: they want to getcha. "Dark fantasy" (Charles L. Grant's high-toned euphemism for "horror stories"; thus undertakers become "grief counselors" and garbagemen "sanitary engineers") is a traditional rather than an experimental or innovative art form, as much a ritual as a form of literature, and its "devotees" bring to bear criteria of judgment that have less to do with criticism than with incantation and magic. The old ways must not be departed from, nor any traditional rite omitted.

There are undeniable advantages to playing the game by the rules. Geniuses may fly in the face of tradition, but when their epigones attempt to follow them, the result is likely to lack both the strength of conventional post-and-lintel construction and the energy of first defiance. Traditional values in fiction (a strong plot, believable characters, flowing prose) are a safeguard against major debacle in much the way that wear¬ing evening clothes protects one against sartorial solecisms. They offer, as do the sonnet and the sonata form, the aesthetic satisfaction of 'tight' closure. But the chief virtue of a traditional narrative, for most readers, is surely that it is 'comfortable', like a couch one has lived with many years and that has learned the shape of one's head. Since horror stories must deal with subjects that are inherently disquieting, this observance of aesthetic decorums ("Once upon a time") helps defuse — or at least distance — feelings that could be genuinely dangerous, if given a less circumscribed expression.

At his best, Stephen King has shown himself capable of combining the frissons of the supernatural thriller with the weightier stuff of tragedy, but in the present instance he has decided to sidestep that harder task and just lay on the special effects till he's spent his budget of potential victims. I hope it doesn't represent a long-term decision.

                              *     *     *

In the two-and-a-fraction years that I reviewed for 'Twilight Zone' magazine, I was able to divide my column inches about equally between the genres of science fiction and horror, with occasional forays outside those adjoining ghettos, but I confess that I found less and less of it that I could read with pleasure, interest, or vigorous dissent. In the case of horror fiction, this is probably not to be wondered at. Being by definition limited to the evocation of a single emotion, and by hoary convention to a few traditional narrative themes, a steady diet of the stuff is calculated to produce an eventual toxic reaction. As well give all one's musical attention to oboe concerti.

Even in science fiction, while its potential may be undiminished, the actual stuff that sees print has been (with some honorable exceptions) more tepid, more formulaic, and more ill-written than at any time since its last cyclic nadir in the late fifties and early sixties. In part it's the publishers who are to be blamed; they manufacture a product suitable for the most reliable part of their market, the proverbial Lowest Common Denominator, who are, not to put too fine a point on it, dopes, or if that seems too harsh, let us say they suffer from reading dysfunctions.

There has been increasingly louder lamentation in the publishing industry during the last few years over the fate of what is euphemistically called midlist fiction, by which is meant novels not likely to become bestsellers. Most fiction of any quality nowadays falls into this midlist category, as witness the now virtually total disparity between the books the 'New York Times Book Review' commends to our attention and those that fill its hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. Consider the sf titles on the Times list for the week of, say, January 9, 1983. There is 'The E.T. Storybook', titles by Clarke and Asimov (I won't rehash my dissatisfaction with 'Foun¬dation's Edge' and '2010' except to say I found the plots of both books numbingly predictable and the wattage of the prose varying between sixty and fifteen), a prehistoric bodice-ripper, and a new potpourri of toothless whimsies by Douglas Adams. A sorry lot, but no sorrier, in literary terms, than the rest of the list, which contained not a single title remotely conceivable as a candidate for the major literary awards.

Why does dreck so often rise to the top of the bestseller list? Is there some merit in these books that their prose disfigures, as acne can disfigure a structurally handsome face? Or is it (I will propose) precisely their faults that endear them to an audience who recognizes in these novels a true mirror image of their own lame brains?

Meanwhile, in the realm of Something Lower, where books are but numbers in a series, the hacks grind out and the presses print the sf and horror equivalent of Silhouette Romances, the sheer mass of which is awesome in much the same way that Niagara Falls is awesome: there is so much of it and it never stops. The metaphor needn't stop there: it is, similarly, not very potable, and most of it courses through the paperback racks without ever being reviewed. Why should it be, after all? Are sneakers or soft drinks or matchbooks reviewed? Commodities are made to be consumed, and surely it is an unkindness for those favored by fortune with steak in plenty to be disdainful of the "taste" of people who must make do with Hamburger Helper.

This is not the proper occasion to speculate how this situation has come about; whether the publishers by their greed, the writers by laziness or native incapacity, or the audience by its hunger for the swill are most culpable. Yet I can't resist stepping down from the platform without relating one final anecdote that bears on these matters. Recently at an sf gathering where fans and writers were mingling, a younger writer from Texas insisted on explaining to me, at great length, the secret of his success. (His first tetralogy has been through several printings; his second, he assured me, was destined for still bigger bucks.) His secret was that he'd found out the name and address of every sales rep who worked for his publisher and had programmed his computer to write each one of them a warm and personal letter thanking them for the efforts he was sure they were making on his behalf. He said it was especially important to get the sales reps to stock your title at airport book stalls; he knew this because he'd been in the distribution end of the business before he'd turned to writing. He assured me that the quality of a book was quite beside the point and that what mattered most of all was the writer's relationship with the reps. When I was in high school we had a name for that relationship.

Well, it's a good anecdote, but I don't think it explains the smell of the world in general. Some lousy writers — and those usually the most successful — are doing their level best. Other lousy writers kvetch about market forces but are happy for the excuse to produce slipshod work. In many cases, the problem is engine failure.

                               *     *     *

My tenure of office as 'Twilight Zone's' book critic from the issue of May 1982 until February 1985 was not all as discouraging as those last dire reflections may sound. I may be disgruntled by some of the poorer books that came under review, but not driven to despair by them. Indeed, rereading assorted columns, I am reminded not only of the original pleasure of combat, but also of the simpler, gregarious pleasures of working with TZ's then-editor T. E. D. Klein, who offered a reviewer all he could ask for: carte blanche in the choice of what I reviewed, decent wages, a sufficiency of applause, and hours of good talk about writers and what they write. Since leaving my post at TZ, it is those visits with Ted that I've most missed.

Though I had carte blanche at TZ, it was nevertheless imperative that I should deal with any new Stephen King book that appeared. He was not only the King of the genre but already, even then, of bestsellerdom as a whole. Ordinarily I would have shied away from reviewing a writer in that position. As someone who tills in the same genres — but for vastly lower wages — enthusiasm for his work can easily look like one is sucking up to the man and his success, while to give him any critical lumps at all can easily be interpreted as sour grapes. In the context of 'Twilight Zone', such reservations seemed to loom less large.

Furthermore the kind of criticism that King's work most lacks is the kind that deals with more than theme and that awards merits or demerits for "originality" or "style" — that is, a kind of criticism that goes beyond reviewing. But that kind of criticism is hard work, and I doubt whether King's oeuvre really requires such attention. For that reason, and also because the latest additions to the oeuvre have not seemed especially tempting (I've read 'Thinner' and thought it thin; I've contemplated the horrid bulk of 'IT', read its reviews, and shuddered), I have not taken advantage of this opportunity to double my two-cents-worth on the subject, except to note, in as neutral a tone as I can command, that the interest of King's work stems at least as much from its success as a commodity as from its aesthetic merits. King is more than a writer, he is a publishing phenomenon and as such transcends criticism.

His most salient virtue, as a commodity, is the consistency and reliability with which the Product is produced. Fame hasn't made King slack off or aspire greatly. The result is a fictional Levittown, acres of decent housing all at exactly the same middling level of accomplishment and ambition. It doesn't give a critic much to consider.

It's the personality and the situation that are interesting. King has been very successful in creating a public image of himself as a Big Kid who's just having fun and goofing off and filling nickel tablets with million-dollar novels, the latest of which, IT, concerns a novelist in just that happy situation. Self-referentiality is supposedly a hallmark of postmodern writing, and there's King being as self-referential as can be. But why? Because the Stephen King Story cries out to be told? Or because he has a canny sense of the market and knows that every fannish (i.e., addicted) Reader entertains daydreams of becoming a Writer like King, rich and famous and triumphant over all those insensitive souls who laughed when he sat down to play?

[PTY]

Kad smo već kod Dišove esejistike, Ubik osmica donosi The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. How Science Fiction Concquered the World, u Žiljkovom prevodu. Odlično štivo, vrlo provokativno, divota jedna što je najzad i odomaćeno. 

Thomas M. Disch, jedan od najuglednijih pisaca znanstvene fantastike novog vala, autor romana Logor koncentracije, Psi sa Tere, Odjek oko njegovih kostiju, 334 i Na krilima pjesme, u knjizi Snovi naše stvarnosti daje sliku američke znanstvene fantastike koja je na prvi pogled prepoznatljiva kao kritički putopis kroz novele, romane, filmove i autorske opuse od Poea do Zvjezdanih staza, Philipa Dicka i kiberpanka. Međutim, u beskompromisnom tekstu — koji je Dischu priskrbio žanrovsku nagradu čitatelja HUGO za najbolju publicističku knjigu o znanstvenoj fantastici — i skriven iza obrnutoga šekspirijanskog naslova-citata, krije se vehementan Dischov "obračun sa svima", ironijska invektiva koja prikazuje znanstvenu fantastiku kao "tkanje snova" od koje je sazdana američka stvarnost koja kao da je proizišla iz uma pisaca znanstvene fantastike. Disch predočuje Ameriku lažaca, loših kičera poput Poea, ufologa i otetih od strane izvanzemaljaca, Ameriku vjernika novih religija poput scijentologije, proizišlih sa stranica SF knjiga, Ameriku patriota i militarista koji širenje u svemir vide kao novi Divlji zapad, Ameriku vidjelaca i proroka, putnika na drogama, medijskih fanatika, ali i običnih luđaka i masovnih ubojica inspiriranih SF knjigama, Ameriku rasnih i rodnih sukoba preobraćenih u metaforu Drugoga kao potisnute krivnje nacije zbog genocida nad Izvornim stanovništvom, i još mnogo, mnogo toga ... Ova kritička knjiga o američkoj znanstvenoj fantastici iz pera njezina istaknutog autora prikazuje taj žanr kao način života — američki način života. Ovo je knjiga o znanstvenoj fantastici, ali i knjiga o Americi, a po Dischu teško je razlikovati to dvoje.