Extreme conditions flatten, make us all the same, combat is among the most extreme conditions and Drake's Slammers, dead-gone mercenaries fighting in squalor for their own squalor inherit Remarque, Mailer, Heller. Only sentimentalists believe that there is a difference between mercenaries and "ideological" warriors and there are no sentimentalists in foxholes, no foxholes in sentimentalists. They grieve and gravitate these warriors and they leave ideology to the landlocked, protected homefront. Their ideology is their etiology: survival.
To live through Hammer's Slammers is to pay the piper, to understand that these blown-out functionaries are our own idealized selves no longer idealized. David Drake has through furious refusal to compromise, from refusal to special plead, has taken us into the bowels and apparatus of wartime as has no science fiction writer; he is the inheritor of the cold flare of military fiction's history and his rifle sight, his shot pattern is exact. Exact and exacting; a freezing, burning, incontestable body of work.
—New Jersey: 2005
On Isaac Asimov
Some thoughts on the life and death of Isaac Asimov: He and Leonard Bernstein lived to almost exactly the same age . . . Bernstein was seventy-two years, one month and nineteen days at death, Asimov was seventy-two years, three months and four days. Like Bernstein in many ways—his fecundity, his passion (in Ned Rorem's words) to "be the Onlie Begettor," his bemused but dead serious attempt to be all things to all of us, always—Asimov had begun to fail close to his seventieth birthday; like Bernstein he was obsessed with the fate of his father and the feeling that a sad ending would duplicate the father's demise. At his seventieth birthday celebrations in August, 1988, Bernstein recollected how Sam Bernstein had had a huge party on his own seventieth, had passed through that age only to fall apart physically almost immediately thereafter and lived a miserable, invalided, truncated old age. Asimov's father died in 1969 at seventy-two. Asimov had apparently been obsessed for a long time with the intimation that he would die at that age.
Bernstein wanted to write all the symphonies, be all the symphonies, make love to every composer, conductor, musician and listener in the world and, heedless of his condition or risks, smoked three packs a day, drove on and on, conducted Bruckner in Vienna and Bruckner in Manhattan and Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood and the student symphonists in Florida, defying all limitations . . . but when he stumbled off the stage at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, having coughed and gasped his way through the two final movements of Beethoven's Seventh, he went to the respirator, sunk into a chair while Koussevitsky's magical cloak was draped around him and, waving his hands said, "I'm canceling the tour." He had been scheduled to take the Tanglewood students to Europe in September. "I'm canceling the tour," he said and went back to his apartment, announced his retirement on a Tuesday less than two months later and died on a Sunday. Isaac Asimov, as The New York Times guy Gerald Jonas said, wanted to write the Encyclopedia Galactica and gave it a good try, but when he got to column #399 in his unbroken series of monthly essays for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he had made one try at the 400th column and quit, announced that he was incapable of going on. This man who counted publications in the way that Doctor Johnson had counted fenceposts backed off from his 400th column, announced that he had retired and spent his last months in silence. On the last afternoon of his life, Bernstein watched Live at Lincoln Center, listened to Yo Yo Ma and Emannuel Ax play the Rachmaninoff sonata for cello and piano; lying there, breathing through the respirator, listening to Rachmaninoff (who died of cancer in 1943, less than a week before Rachmaninoff's birthday), what could the conductor have been possibly feeling? In those last months, what would Asimov have felt? But this is not the issue of course; Bernstein's thousand recordings and videotapes, West Side Story and the Age of Anxiety Symphony are already in or on the verge of the canonical and scholars, common and uncommon readers will still be trying to assess the effect of Isaac Asimov a century from now. His contribution was no less extreme than Bernstein's and—in its influence upon the young, in the way that the work directed so many of them toward a lifetime of awareness and in some cases commitment, was no less resonant.
When I came into this field in the mid-sixties it was—as I have written elsewhere years ago and quite sentimentally at that time—still a one-generation field. Almost everyone who had ever written science fiction in this country, almost everyone who had defined it as a distinct genre was still alive and (in most cases) writing. The field was so much a one-generation phenomenon that those who had made signification contribution and had died were virtually a special interest themselves, a cell within the party, another division like costume fandom or First Fandom. There was Kornbluth and Kuttner and Weinbaum, there was Lovecraft (not really a science fiction writer although some of his important work had appeared in Astounding), there were marginal figures like Oscar Friend ("The Kid from Mars") but almost everyone else was alive. This was, of course, an actuarial fluke and everyone was quite aware that science fiction would soon enough join the mystery and that lurking anomaly, mainstream fiction, on the mortality tables but at the first convention I ever attended, the 1967 world convention in New York at the Statler Hilton it was possible to feel hermetic, almost smug about the buying and selling and population count of the field. It was at that convention—on Saturday night, September 5 I think at what was then and now called a "pro party" although I was no pro—that I met Isaac Asimov for the first time. Terry Carr introduced me; Asimov struck me as a splendidly ebullient man, utterly unaffected, even unaware of his fame, and as he embraced Richard Wilson in that crowded room, I did not know if it was Asimov or Wilson who I envied more. The time went on as it inevitably does (find a science fiction writer in distress and you will get a cliché every time) and the deaths of consequence began and kept on and on—Gernsback in 1968 and Campbell of course which was a shocker and so onward until the staggering late eighties when suddenly Sturgeon and Moore and Simak and Shaara and Wilson and Heinlein went in a shockingly brief span of time . . . but it still felt like a one-generation field. Ravaged, of course, doomed and haunted, forced to become worldly all against its will ("First Fandom will never die!" one of the brethren said to Harry Harrison in 1970 when Harrison had suggested, gently, that First Fandom might want to explore formally the possibility of a Successor Fandom as inheritors) but the essential containing factors were there. What were those factors? One could construct a complex metaphysical or literary paradigm to explain why science fiction, even in ever greater absence, even while beginning to sound like Haydn's Farewell Symphony still seemed self-contained but the explanation was really not at all elaborate or metaphysical.
Isaav Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the reason that it still felt like a one-generation field. Present at what the canoneers had come to regard as the creation (Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction, that 7/39 issue of the magazine and then the Foundation and the robots and later on Horace Gold and Tyrann and The Caves of Steel and right on to the big boom and the six-figure advance) he was still there all the time and tomorrow; the magazine with his name on it, the Foundation sequels as best-sellers, the Fantasy & Science Fiction essays going on and on. "He was fixed in the heavens, as immovable as the North Star," Isaac Asimov had said in a 7/71 eulogy for Locus when John Campbell had died and so seemingly was Asimov; his presence held the field together in a single, continuing line, his absence bisects it abruptly and permanently. It was said of Beethoven that he made music something that came before him and after and can be heard in no other way; art critics seem to feel the same way about Picasso. This may be the final judgment on Asimov, that his death and the end of his work marks the point at which science fiction, which has been on the verge of implosion or atomization for many years now, begins—like one of Van Vogt's great space cruisers in "Storm"—to break up.
* * *
Asimov was not the only binding figure by stature and chronologically; it is probable that he was so stylistically as well. Everyone after about 1945 either wrote like him or tried to write like him or tried to write unlike him; his was the voice which was either imitated or violently repelled but it was the reasonable, clarifying, paradigmatic voice of modern science fiction itself. (For these opinions I am indebted to John Clute who pointed it out to me in private correspondence and he is absolutely right. Everything after this parenthesis however may be seen as my own misinterpretation; from this point, Clute is a free man.) I think it was Edmund Wilson who defined Ernest Hemingway as the most important and influential American novelist; after he became famous everyone either tried to write like him or, as in the case of Faulkner and Faulkner's disciples, went out of the way to not write like him, doing everything possible to function in reaction and avoid comparison. Certainly, the reactive changes in both style and content which can be clearly perceived in the 1950s and which by the late sixties had become the cutting edge (if never the most widely read or even read at all) of science fiction came in clear reflex to that rational voice which had amassed background and plot and enabled the one to drive the other in the most logical and concise fashion, the emphasis upon clarity. There were many science fiction writers who attempted that clarity and expository force but were simply not good enough to carry it off at all, but it is Asimov driving the most familiar novels and most of the content of the magazines through the decades by inspiration and occasional example. In that sense he was, even more than Campbell (who had become quirky and then an isolated figure in his last twenty years) the fundamental influence that held matters together and he did so with an utter conviction of audience which in no way can be disputed by sales figures; he, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke are still the only science fiction writers to have had work on the best-seller lists and Clarke's work is driven by 2001 and its movie sequel, Heinlein's by the extrinsic success of Stranger in a Strange Land, but Asimov—who never had a film adaptation of any consequence at all in his lifetime and who remained locked within the perimeters of science fiction, being for the general audience synonymous with science fiction—seemed capable without any particular effort other than the work and the effortless presentation of persona to find an enormous audience for his fiction and he did so with utter consistency.
* * *
This becomes, then, the death which is a stake through the shield; that first death beyond which there is no other. Heinlein was a strange brooding, isolated figure, sick and shielded by barbed wire and an obdurate wife and his own glare of fear and contempt for the audience. Sturgeon, a great writer in his time, had shrunk to near silence and clownishness; Bester, another great writer, had never attracted much attention outside the field and had in any case vanished from it utterly between 1950 and 1973, emerging only when the job at Holiday had folded up and he had to raise some new money. Simak was a beloved figure and a writer of no mean consequence but he had been no ambassador to the masses; isolated in Minnesota he had barely been an ambassador to himself. Judy Lynn del Rey was a much more important figure than almost any of us had recognized until very close to the end, but she had come to the field only through a kind of indirection and the period of her great influence lasted less than a decade. Asimov had been the single, the controlling, the central voice of the field for fifty years.
Leonard Bernstein's death was devastating to classical music (Vienna and all of Austria had their flags at half-staff, the sense of devastation was global and absolute) but it was the immediate family, the two daughters, the son and the closest friends who felt the death not as symbol or metaphoric passing but as desperate, personal loss; the "outside world" for Isaac Asimov was composed of all those who had read the books and reacted to the public figure . . . but the immediate family in his case was science fiction itself. It is an intolerable—but irreversible—death in the family, then, and beyond that and some mumbling about atomization, one would have to be a fool to make predictions.
* * *
Isaac Asimov died on April 6, exactly nineteen years to the date after The Gods Themselves did not win the first John W. Campbell Memorial award for the best novel of the year, an award which most of the community would have felt proper (the novel did win the Hugo and the Nebula). Instead, that award was won by your undersigned, and perpetrated a series of resentments and troubles (never from Isaac Asimov) which for me will never be over. "I wonder what that means or what he would have made of that," I said to my wife that evening. "Only you would even think of something like that," she said.
Almost 100 percent but not quite, I think that Asimov, if it had been called to his attention, would have found something profound and yet hopeful to say about that as this (essentially) despairing man managed with almost everything. But we'll never know, will we?
I'll never know.
9 May 1992
The Bend at the End of the Road
(Gustav Hasford)
Just as I once theorized that David Goodis was where Cornell Woolrich went to die, that Hammett conducted his own funeral rites in The Thin Man, that Raymond Chandler's cemetery was the acreage tilled uncompromisingly by George Crumley . . . so I moved beyond these rather sophomoric equations, decided that writers did not die so much as they ran their own material and implications to extinction and then were revitalized by good writers, interred by lesser ones. But if I did still take with this theorizing I would let Crumley out on a forty-eight hour pass and say that when Raymond Chandler really went off to expire, it wasn't Byron Preiss who turned the key, it was Gustav Hasford in this, his third novel. Here is the narrator, Dowdy, the meanest book-dealing P.I. in Los Angeles meeting cute with Yvonna early:
"What are you looking for?"
"I'm a kind and considerate guy looking for a moody bitch for a love-hate relationship. I'm looking for a good woman who knows how to be bad. Women should be obscene and not heard."
"You can just check your flattery at the door, chief. I am not flattery operated."
"You know, Yvonna, I think maybe Jaws wouldn't bite you because he'd be afraid he might chip a tooth on your heart."
"I'm always cold when a man comes on to me like I'm a hot yam at a picnic . . ." (page 10)
Four pages later they are still at it; six pages later they are in bed where Yvonna is "breathing like a wounded animal," fifteen pages further on Yvonna awakens Dowdy to tell him that she is in jail and needs bond money. Dowdy does what he can but when he sees Yvonna again (having enlisted the services of a murderous bondsman and some criminal elements) it is only very briefly at his door when she staggers in and falls dead at his feet. Dowdy's quest for revenge and knowledge leads him through the studios and back lots of the movie business (which Hasford, a screenwriter on the Kubrick film of Hasford's own novel, The Short-Timers, knows very well), to one savage confrontation and then another, to a shootout and some pulped, eviscerated bodies on the freeway and finally into the dust of incoherence. Faulkner and Huston called Chandler during the filming of The Big Sleep, bewildered by the novel (Who killed the chauffeur? Chandler said after a pause that he simply didn't know) but the notoriously casual Big Sleep is riveted solid compared to this. A Gypsy Good Time uses the rhetoric and apparent form of the P.I. novel, strung out to its furthest point, but fails to make the minimal sense which lurked at the edge of Chandler and which Ross MacDonald was able to tease into some kind of baroque consequence.
I want to make my position clear on Hasford: This is neither a contemptuous nor a mocking review, properly speaking it is not a review at all, but a cry of pain. Hasford has done to the private eye novel what one mainstream novelist after another has done to science fiction over the decades, he has decided that since this stuff seems to make no sense and is probably read uncritically anyway, a "real" writer can show how it is really done. All that Hasford has demonstrated is that in the post-Spillane era, in the era of the neo-baroque and the Private Eye Writers of America it may not be possible to do it at all, lacking some real sense of connection of which Hasford, in this novel, has none.
Let me try that paragraph again: I want to make my position clear on Hasford. The Short-Timers (1975), basis of Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket, is a horrifying short novel, a novella really, not much longer than Gogol's The Nose or Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Illyitch, probably the best work of fiction to emerge from Vietnam. If that isn't, then Hasford's second novel, The Phantom Blooper (1990) would be; that sequel takes Private Joker into Viet Cong territory as a POW and then, mysterioso, back to his own forces and civilian life. I think it is the best American novel of its decade. But A Gypsy Good Time is a mistake which I think comes from a misassumption. The misassumption is that a "real" writer can do this shit and show the lifers how it really can come off. The outcome is a novel which works only in terms of its quirky individual scenes and conceptualizations (a nightmare bar populated by devastated Vietnam veterans who hang out with and cover for one another like Andrew Vachss' subway underground of losers, a down-on-the-rim used bookstore with some of the rarest editions in the world and a couple of proprietors who would just as soon kill as acquire), a novel which sways between the parodic and the pastiche and fails to make sense, fails of sequentiality. Hasford or his editor would perhaps say that this is the point: Nothing makes sense, Vietnam was the ultimate, bloody expression of angst, the narrator has been expelled into a world whose surreality he now understands has no relevance or external causality at all, and what better than a P.I. novel to absorb this post-atomic, post-technological, century-of-barbarism insight? It is an argument which can play powerfully in the graduate seminars, the University of Bowling Green popular culture collection and course list are founded upon this kind of equation. Furthermore, it has to be noted that Hasford can write wonderfully well and he must be given his time in court:
I remember the day in Vietnam when it was all over for me like a period on a sentence. I got hit. I got hit real bad. AK rounds turned my flak jacket into rags. I was drunk when I got hit, I was hammered on about forty-five bottles of Tiger Piss beer. The corpsmen stabbed me with morphine, then gave me up for dead and tagged me as KIA . . . I started singing a pornographic drinking song about Walt Disney characters having an orgy—Mickey Mouse was humping Minnie Mouse's brains out with some degree of enthusiasm when the frightened corpsmen unzipped the body bag and resurrected me to something resembling life. (page 108)
Gang kids do kill one another, but always from ambush or with drive-by shootings and then only after they've worked themselves up to it with a full night of drinking and bragging. Life's hard; it's harder when you're stupid. When you're dumb, lazy and don't have any money, being tough is all you've got left. (page 65)
But "writing well" is the curse not only of the graduate school but of the professional writer; it is possible if one is gifted enough (and Hasford is perhaps the most gifted of all) to use style to elide sense, consequence, sequentiality, implication of any sort. The P.I. novel in its post-Chandler manifestations, too, opens the way for this kind of thing; even at the top, Chandler never made a great deal of sense, the novels (all except Lady in the Lake, with its amazing coincidence which does bring it all together) worked in scenes but never as a totality. Where did Terry Lennox hang out for 300 offstage pages? Who killed that chauffeur? Why all the trouble taken to drug the poor fool in The High Window into believing that she was the killer when she could have simply been pushed the same way? Questions at the center of these novels, questions of a different sort in Hammett (we never know what the protagonist of The Glass Key's thinking or what his fix on this material is or whether in fact he is simply not mad?) reduced their authors and perhaps the genre itself to a kind of paralysis, later decadence (see Crumley) and left the door open to someone really smart, brave and accomplished like Gustav Hasford who thought that he could use the incoherence to ratify or refract his own post-apocalyptic vision. (We never learn who grabbed Yvonna or why she jumped bail, why she came back or, for that matter, why she came together with, then abandoned Dowdy; things after Vietnam, Hasford suggests, just kind of happen.) But this is dangerous, it is seductive but not the way to go; it was never the incoherence but, I think, the promise of order which was the focusing matter of the P.I. novel, the indication that there was someone deep of soul, moving toward the center who would pound some meaning from all this. The writers, the great ones and the hacks alike, failed, like the science fiction writers of Ruthven's anguished guest-of-honor speech in Corridors they failed again and again in a thousand places in millions of words but still at the dead-center there was that sense of striving, of struggle, of the arc toward the light of knowledge. It is this which chased Hammett and Chandler and when they could no longer see the light, perhaps then it was why they gave up, but it is not this which chases Hasford (or, I think, Crumley); for them it is the darkness and the dank corridors which they see the genre as inviting. But those corridors were exit ramps and cul de sacs and taking them caused Hammett and Chandler to give it up; A Gypsy Good Time for all of its skill (because of all its skill) simply is not the way to go. Back then, back toward the ascendant light. If the genre cannot struggle toward illumination, then it is not a symptom, it is the disease.
The thing itself.
The Cloud Sculptor of Terminal X
(J.G. Ballard)
The Stones of Circumstance. Ballard came from the tradition of the British disaster novel, a lexicon which perhaps predates modern science fiction as we have come to define it. The Drowned World, The Crystal World, all those sunken empires and bizarre formations are prefigured by Wyndham, Christopher, H. G. Wells . . . there is something about the ruination of the globe which has always fascinated Ballard's compatriots, perhaps it has something to do with the image of Empire being slowly disentangled, all of the rude colonies coming to storm the consulates at tea time, perhaps it has to do with their ruddy and difficult clime. In any case, the early Ballard novels, short stories too are surprisingly conventional in their background and data if not precisely in their articulation; they were more precise than The Midwich Cuckoos or Day of the Triffids, perhaps, but at the center of it was the same old stuff: it was going to become pictorially, illustratively very bad and Ballard would provide us the maps; it is nonetheless possible to conceive of a literature roughly equivalent to our own without those novels written in the early sixties.
Portents, Egalitarian Shifts. Not so the short stories which from the beginning were distinct, compressed visions of stoned disaster, an egalitarian doom visited upon the poor and rich, the sensibility and insensible alike; in those cracked swimming pools, drained bathtubs, odd, empty cities in which ruined surgical teams or demented astronauts paced out their rounds of denial and circumstance it was possible to see some refraction of the century itself; the machinery or its portents had created a democracy of doom. Still, Ballard was dealing in the apocalyptic, in various versions of games theory, closed cycles and winding down; his landscapes were encysted with the soft watches and auto-sodomized virgins of early Dali, but blinking beyond these, in the distances beyond the sightlines it was possible to grant a version of perfect peace. Like all of those bomb stories in the Astounding of the 1940s, a magazine which Ballard read on Army bases for a while until he began to feel that all the contents were the same, Ballard gave us, like Sturgeon, like Chan Davis or Bertram Chandler no clue beyond that perfect garnishment of mortality.
Interpolation. Ballard's "The Assassination of JFK Seen as a Downhill Motor Race" is a pastiche of Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion as an Uphill Foot Race"; in the Jarry an exhausted but almost debonair Jesus weaving to his outcome, in the Ballard a merry portrait of soldiers on the run, jostling a suicidal JFK who had been looking for something big enough to get him out. "If Oswald was the starter, who fired the gun?" Perhaps the first true Ballard story, the first of them which could have been written by no one else, it passed through every American market to varying reactions of incomprehension or disgust and was published, along with most of the contents of The Atrocity Exhibition, in New Worlds. Several editors questioned not only the taste but the sanity of the author. Jarry had a difficult time as well.
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. But in "The Terminal Beach," "The Assassination of JFK Seen As a Downhill Motor Race," "The Drowned Giant," Ballard moved beyond his history, voyaged upon his strange and original contribution to the genres of science fiction and literature (held at this time in the 1960s, as they had been for decades before, as independent approaches to the reality problem; much would happen in the remainder of the decades to assault the barriers and Ballard was not the least of those effects but at the time of which we are obsessed, there were science fiction writers still and there were writers and they had relatively little to do with one another): consider a post-apocalyptic world Ballard said and consider that it will be as rich, as entertaining, as filled with possibility as that world which we think of as "before the disaster." More filled with possibility! For heavens, heavens, if the bomb fell, if the aliens sucked clean the planet, if we blew out the oceans and every head of state, if we fornicated ourselves into biological disaster . . . if any or all of these things happened we were freed at last of the shackles of the 20th century, we were released to a land where because anything had happened, anything could. Striding the terminal beach, peering through the wreckage, examining the detritus for signs of passage, the survivor had become, miraculously, the witness and at last the commentator. After the ooze of the soft watches, then, the imprint of chronology in the sands. The biology of the giant, his enormous hands, abscessed features, eyebrows like mountains, knees like the pilings of the Pequod . . . here was a lad, the exploration of whom could keep a platoon of scientists or research assistants cheerfully occupied for huge spans of timeless time, there was an energy and a sense of liberation to these aftershocks which the swaddling technology of the century had itself denied.
Because that was the answer, that was the essence of the Ballard insight: Technology, the evolved state of the planet, was merely a toy, a dream, a rest, a means of concealment; strip it away, get beyond it, turn that technology against itself to rend small or larger holes in the canvas and one could get a look at the true circumstance. "It is not a gloomy poem," Allen Tate says of Emily Dickinson's most famous work. "It merely takes a look at the situation." Ballard gave us a good look at the situation. Energized by disaster as they could never be by the concealments of their condition, his protagonists scampered through the ruins, glowing, learning.
