I don’t know whether to be disgusted or amused when I see these world-famous aces squabbling like petty children, but Hiram at least has the excuse of ill health. He looks terrible these days: white-faced, puffy, perspiring, short of breath. He has a huge, hideous scab on his neck, just below the collar line, that he picks at when he thinks no one is watching. I would strongly advise him to seek out medical attention, but he is so surly of late that I doubt my counsel would be welcomed. His short visits to New York during the tour always seemed to do him a world of good, however, so we can only hope that homecoming restores his health and spirits.
AND LASTLY, ME.
Observing and commenting on my fellow travelers and what they’ve gained or lost, that’s the easy part. Summing up my own experience is harder. I’m older and, I hope, wiser than when we left Tomlin International, and undeniably I am five months closer to death.
Whether this journal is published or not after my passing, Mr. Ackroyd assures me that he will personally deliver copies to my grandchildren and do everything in his power to make sure that they are read. So perhaps it is to them that I write these last, concluding words…to them, and all the others like them….
Robert, Cassie…we never met, you and I, and the blame for that falls as much on me as on your mother and your grandmother. If you wonder why, remember what I wrote about self-loathing and please understand that I was not exempt. Don’t think too harshly of me…or of your mother or grandmother. Joanna was far too young to understand what was happening when her daddy changed, and as for Mary…we loved each other once, and I cannot go to my grave hating her. The truth is, had our roles been reversed, I might well have done the same thing. We’re all only human, and we do the best we can with the hand that fate has dealt us.
Your grandfather was a joker, yes. But I hope as you read this book you’ll realize that he was something else as well—that he accomplished a few things, spoke up for his people, did some good. The JADL is perhaps as good a legacy as most men leave behind them, a better monument to my mind than the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, or Jetboy’s Tomb. All in all, I haven’t done so badly. I’ll leave behind some friends who loved me, many treasured memories, much unfinished business. I’ve wet my foot in the Ganges, heard Big Ben sound the hour, and walked on the Great Wall of China. I’ve seen my daughter born and held her in my arms, and I’ve dined with aces and TV stars, with presidents and kings.
Most important, I think I leave the world a slightly better place for my having been in it. And that’s really all that can be asked of any of us.
Remember me to your children, if you will.
My name was Xavier Desmond, and I was a man.
NINE
THE HEART IN CONFLICT
OLD-TIMERS AND TRUEFEN STILL CHERISH THEIR MEMORIES OF BAT DURSTON, THAT FEARLESS scourge of the spaceways whose adventures appeared so often in Galaxy in the early ’50s.
Bat always got the cover in those days. The back cover. Under the legend “YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY” ran twin columns:
“Sound alike?” editor H. L. Gold would write, beneath the twin columns. “They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you’re welcome to it. YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY! What you will find in Galaxy is the finest science fiction…authentic, plausible, thoughtful…written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction…for people who also know and love it.”
The ad appeared on the premiere issue of Galaxy in September, 1950, and turned up again on many subsequent issues. This was back when I was a wee lad of two (I have pictures to prove it). Even Rocky Jones was in my future at that point (Rocky and Bat had surely palled around in space ranger school), along with Heinlein, Howard, Tolkien, Lovecraft, and the Fantastic Four.
By the time I reached the point where I was writing SF myself, Galaxy was well past its H. L. Golden age. Gold gave up the reins (the helm? the starship controls?) in 1961 after an auto accident, and Frederik Pohl stepped in for a distinguished stint as editor. Toward the end of the decade Ejler Jakobsson succeeded Pohl and hired Gardner Dozois to read his slush. The rest is history, as you know if you’ve read my earlier commentaries.
I never sold another story to Galaxy while Jakobsson was editor, though I did come close once or twice. I did sell many more stories to Ted White, though after “Exit to San Breta” most of my stuff appeared in Amazing, not Fantastic. But the market where I made my reputation, where all my early award nominees appeared, and ultimately my first Hugo winner, was Analog, the leading magazine in the field, which for decades had come to epitomize “hard science fiction” under its legendary editor, John W. Campbell, Jr.
JWC passed away just as I was breaking in, and Ben Bova succeeded him at Analog. Campbell is rightly regarded as a great editor. He remade the field when he took over Astounding in the ’30s, and gave science fiction its Golden Age. He was famous for developing new writers as well, but somehow I doubt that he would have responded as favorably as Bova did to the melancholy, romantic, downbeat stories I was writing in the early ’70s. Had Campbell lived for another ten years, my career would have taken a much different path, I suspect, along with many other careers.
Bova came to the editor’s chair as a science fiction writer of impeccable credentials. Ben was known for hard SF, real SF, and that was important in those vanished days of yesteryear, when the war between the Old Wave and the New Wave still raged. Nonetheless, the moment he was enthroned, Ben began to open up the magazine, and stories soon appeared within the hallowed pages of Analog that would never have appeared under JWC…mine own among them.
This was not an entirely painless process, as a glance at any letter column of that period would tell you. Every new issue contained one or two “cancel my subscription” letters from old subscribers outraged by the appearance of a profane word, a sex scene, or a less-than-competent man. Fortunately, they were a minority. The reborn Analog became the best short fiction market of the ’70s, and Ben Bova won the Hugo for Best Editor five years in a row from 1973 to 1977, and once again in 1979.
The first sale I made to Bova—my third sale overall, and the first one that wasn’t lost before being bought—was actually a “science fact” article about computer chess. I had been captain of my college chess team at Northwestern, where some friends of mine had written a chess-playing program for the big campus mainframe, a giant CDC 6400 that lived in its own sealed, temperature-controlled building. When Chess 4.0 defeated rival programs from a half-dozen other colleges to win the world’s first computer chess championship, I knew I had an article, and indeed I did.
It was the only science fact article I ever sold to Analog, the only one I ever wrote. I was a journalist, not a scientist. But once I’d sold a science fact article to Analog, no one could question my bona fides, the way they were then questioning all those squishy-soft New Wave writers who were selling to Orbit and New Dimensions. Though Bova had broadened Analog’s horizons, the magazine still had the reputation of being hard-nosed, steel-clad, scientifically rigorous, and perhaps a bit puritanical. Gardner Dozois once told a woman I was chasing that there was no point in going to bed with me, since when you sold to Analog a white van pulled up in front of your house, and two guys in silver jumpsuits confiscated your penis. (I will not comment on the truth of this, except to note that Gardner himself later sold to Analog, and presently shares an office with its editor. I have never asked to see what is in the large locked cabinet behind Stan Schmidt’s desk.)
“The Computer Was a Fish,” my science fact article about David Slate and his champion chess-playing program, was shortly followed by “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness” and “A Song for Lya” and all the rest. I had other markets besides Analog, of course. Ted White bought as many stories from me as did Bova; Amazing and Fantastic under White were terrific magazines. I also so
ld to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and managed to hit many of the original anthologies series of the day.
But I got my share of rejections as well. No writer likes being rejected, though it comes with the territory, and you need to get used to it. A few of mine were especially galling, though. Those were the ones where the editors had no problems with my plot or characterization or style, and even went out of their way to say that they’d enjoyed reading the stories. They rejected them nonetheless…because they weren’t real science fiction.
“Night Shift” was about the night shift at a busy spaceport, as the spaceships come and go. They could have just as easily been trucks, an editor said. Another said that “With Morning Comes Mistfall” put him in mind of attempts to find the Loch Ness monster. Even “Second Kind of Loneliness” took its lumps. This could be a story about a lighthouse keeper, one rejection said. The focus is not on the star ring or the nullspace vortex so much as on the “rather pathetic” protagonist, with his hopes and dreams and fears.
I mean, really. What were these guys trying to tell me? I was an Analog writer, I’d sold a science fact article…and they were claiming that I wrote Bat Durston stories!
Of course, it was true that I had based “Night Shift” on my father’s experiences as a longshoreman and a few weeks I once spent working in a truck dispatch office…
And it was true that the seed for “With Morning Comes Mistfall” had been planted when I read an article in the paper about a scientist who was taking a fleet of sonar-equipped boats to Loch Ness, intending to flush out Nessie or disprove him…
And it was true that “Second Kind of Loneliness” was peopled by my own personal demons, and based on incidents and characters from my own life, as was “A Song for Lya.”
And even “Sandkings,” a few years later, started with that guy I knew in college and his aquarium of piranha.
But so what? When I wrote the stories I moved them to other planets, and put aliens in them, and spaceships. How much more bloody science-fictional could they get?
All those years when I’d been growing up and reading fantasy and horror and science fiction, I’d never once worried about which was what and what was which or where the boundaries were drawn or whether this was real science fiction and real fantasy and real horror. My staple fare in the ’50s was made up of paperbacks and comic books. I knew the SF magazines were out there somewhere, but seldom saw one, so I remained blissfully unaware of Bat Durston and Horace Gold’s fulminations against him. As a kid I did not even know the proper names for all the genres and subgenres. To me they were monster stories and space stuff and sword & sorcery. Or “weird stuff.” That was my father’s term for all of it. He liked westerns, you see, but his son liked “weird stuff.”
But now that I was a published professional writer, and an Analog writer at that (with penis, thank you very much), it behooved me to find out what real science fiction was. So I reread Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s The Issue at Hand, and L. Sprague de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook, and looked into Locus and Science Fiction Review. I paid careful attention to Alexei Panshin’s “SF in Dimension” columns in Amazing. I followed the debate between the Old Wave and New Wave with interest, since that New Wave crap wasn’t real SF science fiction either, according to the Old Wave guys. And of course I paid careful attention to the various definitions of science fiction.
There were a lot of those about, many of them mutually contradictory. L. Sprague de Camp defined SF in The Science Fiction Handbook, and Kingsley Amis defined it differently in New Maps of Hell. Ted Sturgeon had a definition, Fred Pohl had a definition, Reginald Bretnor had a definition, David G. Hartwell had a definition, Alexei Panshin had a definition, and over in the corner stood Damon Knight pointing at something. The Old Wave and the New Wave each championed its own view of what the genre ought to be. H. L. Gold must surely have had a definition, since he knew Bat Durston did not fit it. I absorbed all of this as best I could, and finally discerned the shape of a real science fiction story, as opposed to the stuff that I was writing.
The ultimate template for the True Science Fiction Story was Isaac Asimov’s first sale, “Marooned Off Vesta,” published in Amazing in 1939. Asimov would later write more famous stories, and better stories—well, to tell the truth, pretty much everything he wrote after that was a better story—but “Marooned Off Vesta” was sure-enough pure-quill science fiction, in which everything hinges on the fact that water boils at a lower temperature in a vacuum.
This was a sobering realization for me. For although I had pages of scribbled notes for the stories I wanted to tell next year and the year after and the year after that, not one of them had anything to do with the boiling point of water. If truth be told, it seemed to me that Asimov had said just about all there was to say on that particular subject, leaving nothing for the rest of us except, well…Bat Durston.
The thing is, though, the more I considered old Bat, and Asimov, and Heinlein and Campbell, and Wells and Verne, and Vance and Anderson and Le Guin and Brackett and Williamson and de Camp and Kuttner and Moore and Cordwainer Smith and Doc Smith and George O. Smith and Northwest Smith, and all the rest of the Smiths and the Joneses too, the more I realized something that H. L. Gold did not.
Boys and girls, they’re all Bat Durston stories.
All of mine, and all of yours, and all of his, and all of hers. The Space Merchants (which Gold serialized in Galaxy as Gravy Planet) is about Madison Avenue in the ’50s, The Forever War is about Vietnam, Neuromancer is a caper novel tricked up in fancy prose, and Asimov’s Galactic Empire bears a suspicious likeness to one the Romans had a while back. Why else would Bel Riose remind us so much of this guy Belisarius? And when you look really really hard at “Marooned Off Vesta,” it turns out that it’s not about the boiling point of water after all. It’s about some desperate men trying to survive.
Step back and squint hard at the back cover of that first issue of Galaxy, if you will, and you will realize how easily those two columns might have been reversed. The same advertisement could just as well have been run on a western magazine, with only minor changes. “YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN SIX-GUN STORIES,” the editor might well have trumpeted. “Sound alike? They should—one is merely a sci-fi story transplanted to the range. If this is your idea of western fiction, you’re welcome to it. YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN SIX-GUN STORIES! What you will find here is the finest western fiction…authentic, plausible, thoughtful…written by people who know and love the Old West…for people who also know and love it.”
So I will see your Bat Durston, Mr. Gold. And I’ll raise you William Faulkner, Casablanca, and the Bard.
In the film The Goodbye Girl Richard Dreyfuss plays an actor forced to portray Richard III as a lisping effeminate poof by a “genius” director. These days that no longer seems quite as much like a parody as it once did. The London stage has given us Derek Jarman’s notorious modern-dress version of Marlowe’s Edward II, wherein Piers Gaveston’s chief item of wardrobe is a studded leather jock strap. When I was last in the West End, they were presenting a Coriolanus set against the Terror of Revolutionary France. The most recent filmed version of Romeo and Juliet made it a tale of warring urban street gangs, complete with automobiles, helicopters, and television reporters. And if you have not seen Ian McClellan’s film of Richard III, set in a fascist England during the 1930s, you’ve missed some fabulous art direction and cinematography, and a mesmerizing performance by McClellan, whose portrayal of Dickie Crookback is equal to Olivier’s.
One might argue that Richard III is rightfully about the Wars of the Roses, not the fascist movements of the ’30s. One might also insist that Coriolanus should be set in Rome, not Paris. One might point out rather forcefully that Mercutio was not, in fact, a black drag queen. All that is true, as far as it goes.
And yet…sometimes…more often than not…the Bard’s plays still work, no matter how bizarrely the genius directors decide to trick them out.
Once in the while, as in Ian McClellan’s film of Richard III, they work rather magnificently.
And for that matter, my favorite science fiction film of all time is not 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alien, or Star Wars, or Bladerunner, or (ugh) The Matrix, but rather Forbidden Planet, better known to us cognoscenti as The Tempest on Altair-4, and starring Leslie Nielsen, Anne Francis, Walter Pidgeon, and Bat Durston.
But how could this be? How could critics and theatergoers and Shakespeareans possibly applaud these Bat Durston productions, rip’d untimely as they are from their natural and proper settings?
The answer is simple. Motor cars or horses, tricorns or togas, ray-guns or six-shooters, none of it matters, so long as the people remain. Sometimes we get so busy drawing boundaries and making labels that we lose track of that truth.
Casablanca put it most succinctly. “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.”
William Faulkner said much the same thing while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he spoke of “the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” The “human heart in conflict with itself,” Faulkner said, “alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about.”