The editor of Orbit gave me much unhappiness and no encouragement; I am not the only writer to have felt that whip. But the colleague who I asked for favors in 1987 and 2000 came through at once with far more than I had asked. (I wrote Damon in 1987 that science fiction, thanks to him, had proven yet again to be the secular replacement of a Yiddishekeit in which I no longer believed.) The tumult and the shouting die, the Captain and the King departs but in recessional the exacting and irreplaceable contribution are ours.
He might even have been my friend. Enigmatic guy, Damon. I'll never know for sure. Hope so.
But friends and confessors: what a career! What a legacy! Libere me. Libere us all.
—Teaneck, New Jersey
June, 2002
On Fredric Brown
A reserved little guy, made a living on the linotype machine (read "Etaoin Shrdlu") in Wisconsin before he became a fulltime writer, drank too much, virtually every male writer (and many women too) of his time did, dealt with writer's block by riding Greyhound buses through the continent, just booking a couple of weeks, sat in the back of the bus, the shadows and night tableland whisking by, his unconscious off its leash. Offered to teach one of his two sons everything he knew about the writing of fiction, give him a full-time, exclusive course of instruction. His son declined. (A wise choice.) Said to Phil Klass around the time that What Mad Universe, that great and sour fan novel, was published, "They're taking over, Phil." This was in 1948. "The fans, they want in, they want to write it and edit it, they're going to overwhelm us, they'll own it all in twenty years. There's nothing we can do to change it." What Mad Universe, of course, dumps its protagonist into the structured fantasies of a science fiction fan, takes the lead through alien landscape and plenty of trouble. Talk about projection fantasies! But Brown was a personable and understated guy, stayed away from the conventions and the social rubric generally, didn't have much to do with anyone outside the group of Milwaukee writers from which he had emerged and later a few of the Mexican expatriates like Mack Reynolds, with whom he occasionally collaborated. Not exactly a recluse but certainly an iconoclast and among a small group of prominent science fiction writers of whom there is little personal detail.
Those are a few random facts about Fred Brown (1906-1972); he remains, interestingly, perhaps the only writer I can bring to mind of equal prominence in mystery and science fiction. Many science fiction writers have written mysteries (beginning with Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison) and many mystery writers have written science fiction (Bill Pronzini, Larry Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter) but their reputation, most significant accomplishment, level of recognition lie clearly in one field or the other. Brown is the exception. His first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won an early (1947) Edgar for best first mystery novel and he published more than a dozen in the genre, some highly regarded; What Mad Universe, "Arena," Martians Go Home (a poor movie only a couple of years ago) are important science fiction novels. Brown published stories other than "Arena" which were famous—"The Waveries," Martians Go Home in a shorter version, "Placet is a Crazy Place," "Letter to a Phoenix"—and is generally regarded as the best short-short story writer in the history of science fiction; his mastery of the vignette was absolute and there are tiny pieces like "The Weapon" or "The Solipsist" whose plots and payoff seem known to everyone, whether or not the author can be attributed. (Most famous of all, of course, that 200-word story in which the new computer addresses the question: "Is there a God?" with a bolt of lightning fusing its off-switch closed and the pronouncement, "Now there is!" Validating my statement, I don't remember the title, it's in one of these collections, of course, and I don't have to look it up in Contento to assure one and all that I've remembered this story for more than forty years . . . that story and "The Weapon" are probably the two Great Warning science fiction stories.) (Parentheses after a parenthesis: the title is "Answer.")
That Brown was equally effective, equally prominent in two genres as to be ultimately unclassifiable as a prime practitioner in one or the other is a powerfully interesting, salient fact; it makes his work and his contribution probably unduplicable, certainly incalculable. Like almost every science fiction writer of his generation, barring the five to ten most prominent, he has in the last few decades fallen almost completely out of print; his short stories have been anthologized now and again (most notably by Greenberg & Asimov in their 25-volume GREAT SF 1939-1963 series which was issued between 1979 and 1992) but the novels have not been exposed for a long time. (What Mad Universe was published by Bantam in the late 1970s, Martians Go Home by Baen in 1992, nothing since and nothing between the 70s and that Baen reissue.) Martians Go Home was filmed, unsuccessfully, in the mid-1990s in a version which appeared to have left the bitter, even savage treatment of its absurd premise somewhere at the post (thereby turning the story into another installment of Mork and Mindy) and an astonishing number of the short stories have been used for student films and short subjects in foreign countries; Brown's concepts are perhaps too sardonic and depersonalized to work as drama but this opinion has never interfered with the attraction his work has always had for young film directors and screenwriters.
Like nearly all satirists, Brown was deeply embittered, no fan of humanity or human possibility; this opinion comes through in almost all the work from "Hall of Mirrors" to "Honeymoon in Hell" to "The Weapon" ("Letter To a Phoenix" is an exception; this 1949 ASF story holds that humanity may be hopeless but it is absolutely unassailable, something like Phil Klass's cosmic cockroaches in Of Men and Monsters) and can be noted in its purest and most frightening version in the 1949 "Come and Go Mad" about a mental patient who might in a previous existence have been Napoleon, overtaken by dreams and seizures indicating the paradox of this possibility and which ends the debate in the author's voice with those remarkable lines, "But don't you see: it doesn't matter. Nothing matters!" That couplet didn't make a great deal of sense to me when a friend put the story under my nose in 1952 but it sure does now.
Does Brown's career itself make sense? Prophet of absurdity, he had a severe heart attack in the early sixties, published no more after the tiny collaboration with Carl Onspaugh in 1965, descended into silence in Taos, New Mexico: silence with exile if not cunning. As with the rest of them, his work remains to be rediscovered; brave and noble NESFA has done what it could; now it is your responsibility. If nothing matters, then everything matters. "The Weapon" gives that hard and rigorous lesson, a lesson beyond the arena, careless of the Martians, centered within that pulverized and extinguished heart.
—New Jersey: April 1999
The Stochastic Writer
(Robert Silverberg)
Here was the idea: write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique. Write it as Nabokov or Phillip Roth, Malamud or John Cheever would have written science fiction, as if Fred Pohl had come to them at a Milford Conference and had whispered, "I'll guarantee acceptance at our highest word rate, just do the best you can." As if Betty Ballantine or Lawrence Ashmead had sent an open appeal to the faculty at Iowa and Stanford Creative Writing Workshops: "I don't care how you write or what you write as long as I don't have to argue with the Board about it being science fiction." This was sometime around 1960. "I just got bored with being a hack," Robert Silverberg told me a decade later, "I just wanted to try something different." So he tried something different. Up the Line. Thorns. "The Feast of St. Dionysius." Born with the Dead. "Good News from the Vatican." Oh boy, those were different.
Well, okay. Alfred Bester, another Grand Master (1987), was trying the same thing in the 1970s, so was Theodore Sturgeon in that decade (no Grand Master for Sturgeon, he died in 1985, a few years too soon), and the Kuttners, Catherine and Henry, were lighting it up in the 1940s all the way through John Campbell's Astounding. (No Grand Master for the Kuttners either, Henry was dead in 1958 before the SFWA was born and Catherine never published a line of science fiction after his death.) Sturgeon, Bester, the Kuttners: fierce and in the fire long before our New Wave. But Silverberg's work in its grace, deliberativeness and great aggregation was not so much their successor as proof of a proposal: You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that.
A revelation! Of course there were others who started at about the same time (whereas Silverberg had already had one career) who were doing this as well. Ballard, Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and maybe the merciless Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. But no one this prolific. The man was not only at the front of a movement, he was through fecundity virtually a movement himself.
So then and not a year too soon (a few years too late in fact) a celebration. Like Wallace Shawn's Designated Mourner I perch as Designated Celebrant. This had better cajole humility, for our newest Grand Master is indeed his own celebration. He needs no sounding brass, tinkling cymbal, not from me anyway.
But let me, as Allan Tate said of an Emily Dickinson poem, consider the situation.
An essay about our Grand Master, not about me, of course. But let me nonetheless note that I wrote Silverberg's profile for the Special Issue (4/74) of Fantasy & Science Fiction dedicated to him and a year later the introduction to the Pocket Books collection The Best of Robert Silverberg. Nice rounding effect, surely. In the magazine essay I proclaimed the author's height to be five feet seven inches and his condition as the best living writer in English. Both judgments discombobulated their ever-poised subject and so in the Introduction to the collection I had another go, estimating his height at a fraction under six feet (he has subsequently informed me that he is actually five feet ten inches tall) and adding less grandiloquently that Silverberg could be termed one of the ten best living writers in the language, thus grouping him with the aforementioned Malamud, Roth, Nabokov, etc. This latter correction made him blush only a shade less brightly but I have nonetheless always regretted; my first judgment was closer to correct. Nabokov published Transparent Things that year and Malamud's Dubin's Lives lay ahead of him but neither was worth a Mass. Born with the Dead is worth a Mass. (Roth did become indisputably great but that took another twenty years.)
And another personal note: in 1984 our Grand Master introduced me in Brooklyn to his mother, Helen. She was—like my own mother, two years deceased then—a retired schoolteacher who over a period of at least twenty years had coincidentally lived less than a mile from my own dear Mom. I said to Helen in the most bemused fashion, "Your son has always been ahead of me and I don't mean just chronologically. He is in fact the Stations of my Cross. I am a science fiction writer from Brooklyn, he is the science fiction writer from Brooklyn. My first science fiction story was a 1,200-word squib in the August 1967 Galaxy, your son had the lead novella ("Hawksbill Station") in that issue. I through luck and circumstance sell a couple of novels to Random House, he sells Random House Born with the Dead. I sell a 1,000-word story to the gorgeous new Omni and two months later he sells them a novelette and then another and then another and then another. I publish a few okay science fiction novels, he publishes twenty masterpieces. I take my mother into a backdate magazine store on Nostrand Avenue in 1980 and she says to the proprietor 'My son writes science fiction' and the proprietor says, 'The mother of another science fiction writer comes in here for his magazines all the time. She is so proud of him.' (My mother was not proud of me.) I might say that this was kind of humiliating except that he gives me honor by being my friend. He is not only ahead of me, he is ahead of us all."
Certainly true in 1984 and had already been so for almost twenty years. The accomplishment is so astonishing that the Grand Master conveyed is obiter dicta. Had he not gotten his right soon, right quick, the award would have been an embarrassment to any other recipient.
The acclaimed masterpieces—Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Tower of Glass—are indisputable of course but—ah, Fast Eddie Felsen, patron saint of the circumstantially challenged!—my deepest caritas is for the Silverberg novels at least as good which, because of his sheer prolificacy, never attracted the attention they deserved. The Second Trip (Bester's Demolished Man turned another way and ignited), The Stochastic Man, probably the best of all science fiction novels of politics, and the fierce and riotous Up the Line—the time travel novel about the man who pursued, won and bedded his remote ancestress—is as stylistically poised, rococo, savagely baroque as anything by Bester and also over-the-top humorous, a comic novel to stand with Voltaire's or those of Peter de Vries. Grand Masters get their due but not necessarily all of their works.
Silverberg himself has dated the true beginning of his more intense and literary work to 1962 with the short story "To See the Invisible Man," a riff out of Borges which was the first story written for Fred Pohl's magazines under an unusual contractual arrangement which gave Silverberg, story by story, utter creative freedom. (The arrangement: Pohl would buy the story submitted although he could then terminate the agreement. Silverberg found this to be utterly liberating, he could write to stylistic or subjectual limit, absolved of rejection.) "To See the Invisible Man," a narrative of social cruelty and alienation unusual for its elegance and restraint in the penumbra of a brutal theme, was more than commendable but its skill and force are in fact well foreshadowed in some of the earlier work. What Silverberg called his yard-goods period in the 1955-1960 period was yard goods only to him. "Birds of a Feather" (carnival time in the spaceways), "Warm Man" (more alienation), "The Iron Chancellor" (a house which could have been wired by Gallegher and locked by Kuttner), are considerable. Yard goods there were also, assigned space-filler for the Ziff-Davis magazines, but the early Ace Doubles show real craft and are better than most of the work surrounding them. (In an introduction written in 1978 for a reissue of those Ace Doubles Silverberg noted without inflection how many readers there were who felt that these were his best work, work before he had gone into the valleys of pretension, and he dedicated one of those reissues to such readers.)
Conventional wisdom, an oxymoron if one ever existed, gives us an "early" (pre-1967), transcendent "middle" (1967-1978) and somewhat lesser "late" (to the present) Silverberg but conventional wisdom is like payback. Conventional wisdom with its glass eye, cane, and small, blurry features stumbles through the servants' entrance and falls down the stairs. From that "late" period came the novellas "In Another Country," "The Secret Sharer," "Sailing to Byzantium," came "Hot Sky at Midnight," came "Blindsight," which was one of the brilliant dozen stories done for Playboy, and these are not only at the level of "middle" Silverberg but in some cases ("Another Country" in the 3/89 Asimov and published by Tor the most serious culprit) perhaps beyond. Unlike so many of us our Grand Master got larger as he went on.
An early (1974) collection of mine is dedicated to "Robert Silverberg, the best one." He's the best two and three as well. All the dozens, all the variegate colors, all of the fire. I wrote when he was writing, I published in some of the places he published contemporaneously. These are my greatest accomplishment by proxy.
The Dean of Gloucester, Virginia
(William F. Jenkins)
"Murray Leinster" was the pen-name William F. Jenkins (1896-1975) used for his science fiction; his was one of the longest and most honorable careers the genre offered. The breadth of that career is astonishing; his first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper was published in Argosy magazine in 1919; seven years before the science fiction genre inaugurated in the 4/26 issue of Amazing Stories had been established. And the short novel, The Pirates of Zan, included in this volume, was one of the last serials to appear in Astounding Science Fiction (February through April 1959) before, in February 1960, just after its 30th anniversary, it changed its name to Analog. The January 1960 issue was the last one under the Astounding name, and Leinster was there with the short story Attention Saint Patrick, 30 years after his first appearance in the magazine.
This is a career and the career is only a part of Jenkins' contribution; he was also an inventor who obtained many patents. One of them, for the so-called "back-screen projector" used in movie theaters to this date, is that device which enables you or the annoying person in the row ahead of you at the Bijou to stand and leave the auditorium in mid-movie without casting a shadow on the screen. Jenkins who lived in Gloucester, Virginia, for most of his adult life, had four children, wrote much other than science fiction (appearing frequently in Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, other mass circulation magazine of the 1940s and 1950s) but it is clearly the science fiction by which he will be remembered.
He wrote and wrote to great effect and is one of the very few writers to have contributed more than one short story to the canon regarded as famous and which reach far out of the genre of science fiction. (Arthur C. Clarke, author of The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God, is another; Ray Bradbury, author of The Million Year Picnic and The Sound of Thunder would also qualify.) First Contact, the first and still best story of humanity's first intersection in deep space with an intelligent, spacefaring alien race, was publishing in Astounding in 1945, reprinted hundreds of times and is regarded as not only an extraordinarily effective work of fiction and speculation but as a blueprint, a virtual manual, for how such contact might be accomplished safely and in a way which protects the parties who are alien to one another. The other story—which appears in this volume—is A Logic Named Joe, published in Astounding in early 1946, which brilliantly and with astonishing accuracy not only predicts but maps the contemporary Internet, Google searches, dial-up remedies and all. Like Arthur C. Clarke's communications satellite (virtually blueprinted by the young Clarke in 1945) this was here before the subject was here and not only the accuracy but overlap are remarkable. It is also, as you will note, a bitterly funny story.
There is a third work, Sidewise in Time, not nearly as skillfully written, which may be equally influential: published in the 1930s it is one of the earliest treatments of the alternate/parallel-universe theme in science fiction, the branching "real" worlds which would have existed had other choices been made and which adjoin our own. There is a science-fiction award, the "Sidewise" for best annual treatment of the alternate-world concept, named in its honor.
Jenkins was always around; he was a major science fiction writer in the pre-John Campbell magazines of the 1930s, then was one of the very few writers to effortlessly manage the transition (with Campbell's installation as editor of Astounding in late 1937) to what we now call "modern science fiction." He was a constant presence in Astounding in the 1940s and 1950s, won his Hugo finally at the age of 60 with the 1956 Astounding novella Exploration Team (the Hugos were only instituted in 1953; science fiction had to catch up to Jenkins), wrote one of Astounding's last serials, as I've noted, and continued publishing through most of the 1960s, most of this latter fiction being the Med Service stories (published in another volume of this reclamation of his work by Baen Books) and certainly had by the mid-sixties earned the not at all ironic sobriquet "The Dean of Science Fiction," which phrase in fact appeared in his obituary in the New York Times.
A remarkable figure, then, one of the central figures (as so noted in the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) of "magazine science fiction"—and it was magazine science fiction which drove the category, at least until the early seventies. Until then, virtually all important and influential science fiction appeared first in the magazines, only to reach book form later, and Jenkins was one of the ten or a dozen signal figures of the 1940s Campbell Astounding who were integral to the genre, which had reached its real maturity under Campbell. There is a consensus that Jenkins' novels were not at the level of his short fiction; certainly he published none which had a fraction of the reach and force enacted by First Contact or A Logic Named Joe, and most of the novels have been out of print for many years. The best of the shorter work is, however, unimpeachable and the span of the career, almost fifty years at or near the very top of the genre, is close to unparalleled. It should be added, and not parenthetically, that Jenkins also wrote mysteries and was the editor of an important early science fiction anthology.
A writer of significant range, Jenkins published two stories in Horace Gold's sardonic early fifties Galaxy, If You Was a Moklin and The Other Now, which managed to embrace Gold's grim world-view in no less sprightly fashion than First Contact had embodied Campbell's more positive mien, and there is little doubt that a Jenkins born fifty or seventy years later could have functioned very well on the cutting edge of contemporary science fiction. Surely A Logic Named Joe was as savagely innovative in 1946 as anything published in our celebrated cyberpunk eighties.
A remarkable, irreplaceable figure. Take him out of the history and as with Campbell that history might collapse. Fortunately we do not have to so speculate; he is here and we are lucky to have him. This collection is both celebratory and as absolutely contemporary as this great writer.
Inextricable Disengagement:
The War Games Of David Drake
"Hammers Slammers" no misnomer, that is what war accomplishes, combat demands, training forces: it hammers, it slams, it breaks you down, reduces to nullity. They'll tell you that training first breaks you down "only to rebuild you" but that is snare and delusion, brochure hype, a sell because what training breaks it never replaces, cannot replenish, you become something else if you are restored at all, some foggy mountain breakdown self. War guts, eviscerates, makes all of us the same living and dead, in so doing blurs—as is training's purpose—the line between living and dead to indistinguishability. The only difference in these extreme conditions is that the living perceive themselves as dead while the dead perceive nothing at all.
Believe this: it is not only the outcome of assessment, it is taken from the pulp of experience. I settled for Basic Training at Fort Dix in the last months of Eisenhower's sleepy post-Korean Army; Drake was in the flames of Johnson's Vietnam. We appear to have reached the same conclusions however and our work is much closer than one might think. The shuffling, burnt-away assassins of my FINAL WAR are Slammer dropouts, not rejects.
