"Four," said Mother, "but—" Mrs. Santa Claus disappeared into the kitchen.
Mother sat down at a table and picked up a menu. I did likewise and started to drool—here is why:
Minted Fruit Cup Rouge
Pot-au-feu à la Creole
Chicken Velvet Soup
Roast Veal with Fine Herbs
Ham Soufflé
Yankee Pot Roast
Lamb Hawaii
Potatoes Lyonnaise
Riced Potatoes
Sweet Potatoes Maryland
Glazed Onions
Asparagus Tips with Green Peas
Chicory Salad with
Roquefort Dressing
Artichoke Hearts with Avocado
Beets in Aspic
Cheese Straws
Miniature Cinnamon Rolls
Hot Biscuits
Sherry Almond Ice Cream
Rum Pie
Pêches Flambées Royales
Peppermint Cloud Cake
Devil's Food Cake
Angel Berry Pie
Coffee Tea Milk
(Our water is trucked fifteen miles; please help us save it.)
Thank you. Mrs. Santa Claus
It made me dizzy, so I looked out the window. We were still spang in the middle of the grimmest desert in the world.
I started counting the calories in that subversive document. I got up to three thousand and lost track, because fruit cups were placed in front of us. I barely tasted mine—and my stomach jumped and started nibbling at my windpipe.
Daddy came in, said, "Well!" and sat down, too. Junior followed.
Mother said, "Charles, there is hardly anything here you can touch. I think I had better—" She headed for the kitchen.
Daddy had started reading the menu. He said, "Wait, Martha! Sit down." Mother sat.
Presently he said, "Do I have plenty of clean handkerchiefs?"
Mother said, "Yes, of course. Why—"
"Good. I feel an attack coming on. I'll start with the pot-au-feu and—"
Mother said, "Charles!"
"Peace, woman! The human race has survived upwards of five million years eating anything that could be chewed and swallowed." Mrs. Santa Claus came back in and Daddy ordered lavishly, every word stabbing my heart. "Now," he finished, "if you will have that carried in by eight Nubian slaves—"
"We'll use a jeep," Mrs. Santa Claus promised and turned to Mother.
Mother was about to say something about chopped grass and vitamin soup but Daddy cut in with, "That was for both of us. The kids will order for themselves." Mother swallowed and said nothing.
Junior never bothers with menus. "I'll have a double cannibal sandwich," he announced.
Mrs. Santa Claus flinched. "What," she asked ominously, "is a cannibal sandwich?"
Junior explained. Mrs. Santa Claus looked at him as if she hoped he would crawl back into the woodwork. At last she said, "Mrs. Santa Claus always gives people what they want. But you'll have to eat it in the kitchen; other people will be coming in for dinner."
"Oke," agreed Junior.
"Now what would you like, honey?" she said to me.
"I'd like everything," I answered miserably, "but I'm on a reducing diet."
She clucked sympathetically. "Anything special you mustn't eat?"
"Nothing in particular—just food. I mustn't eat food."
She said, "You will have a hard time choosing a low-caloric meal here. I've never been able to work up interest in such cooking. I'll serve you the same as your parents; you can eat what you wish and as little as you wish."
"All right," I said weakly.
Honestly, I tried. I counted up to ten between bites, then I found I was counting faster so as to finish each course before the next one arrived.
Presently I knew I was a ruined woman and I didn't care. I was surrounded by a warm fog of calories. Once my conscience peeked over the edge of my plate and I promised to make up for it tomorrow. It went back to sleep.
Junior came out of the kitchen with his face covered by a wedge of pinkstriped cake. "Is that a cannibal sandwich?" I asked.
"Huh?" he answered. "You should see what she's got out there. She ought to run a training table."
A long time later Daddy said, "Let's hit the road. I hate to."
Mrs. Santa Claus said, "Stay here if you like. We can accommodate you."
So we stayed and it was lovely.
I woke up resolved to skip even my twenty-eight calories of tomato juice, but I hadn't reckoned with Mrs. Santa Claus. There were no menus; tiny cups of coffee appeared as you sat down, then other things, deceptively, one at a time. Like this: grapefruit, milk, oatmeal and cream, sausage and eggs and toast and butter and jam, bananas and cream—then when you were sure that they had played themselves out, in came the fluffiest waffle in the world, more butter and strawberry jam and syrup, and then more coffee.
I ate all of it, my personality split hopelessly between despair and ecstasy. We rolled out of there feeling wonderful. "Breakfast," said Daddy, "should be compulsory, like education. I hypothesize that correlation could be found between the modern tendency to skimp breakfast and the increase in juvenile delinquency."
I said nothing. Men are my weakness; food my ruin—but I didn't care.
We lunched at Barstow, only I stayed in the car and tried to nap.
Cliff met us at our hotel and we excused ourselves because Cliff wanted to drive me out to see the university. When we reached the parking lot he said, "What has happened? You look as if you had lost your last friend—and you are positively emaciated."
"Oh, Cliff!" I said, and blubbered on his shoulder.
Presently he wiped my nose and started the car. As we drove I told him about it. He didn't say anything, but after a bit he made a left turn. "Is this the way to the campus?" I asked.
"Never you mind."
"Cliff, are you disgusted with me?"
Instead of answering me, he pulled up near a big public building and led me inside; it turned out to be the art museum. Still refusing to talk, he steered me into an exhibition of old masters. Cliff pointed at one of them. "That," he said, "is my notion of a beautiful woman."
I looked. It was The Judgment of Paris by Rubens. "And that—and that—" added Cliff. Every picture he pointed to was by Rubens, and I'll swear his models had never heard of dieting.
"What this country needs," said Cliff, "is more plump girls—and more guys like me who appreciate them."
I didn't say anything until we got outside; I was too busy rearranging my ideas. Something worried me, so I reminded him of the time I had asked his opinion of Clarice, the girl who is just my size and measurements. He managed to remember. "Oh, yes! Very beautiful girl, a knockout!"
"But, Cliff, you said—"
He grabbed my shoulders. "Listen, featherbrain, think I've got rocks in my head? Would I say anything that might make you jealous?"
"But I'm never jealous!"
"So you say! Now where shall we eat? Romanoff's? The Beachcomber? I'm loaded with dough."
Warm waves of happiness flowed over me. "Cliff?"
"Yeah, honey?"
"I've heard of a sundae called Moron's Delight. They take a great big glass and start with two bananas and six kinds of ice cream and—"
"That's passé. Have you ever had a Mount Everest?"
"Huh?"
"They start with a big platter and build up the peak with twenty-one flavors of ice cream, using four bananas, butterscotch syrup, and nuts to bind it. Then they cover it with chocolate syrup, sprinkle malted-milk powder and more nuts for rock, pour marshmallow syrup and whipped cream down from the top for snow, stick parsley around the lower slopes for trees, and set a little plastic skier on one of the snow banks. You get to keep him as a souvenir of the experience."
"Oh, my!" I said.
"Only one to a customer and I don't have to pay if you finish it."
I squared my shoulders. "Lead me to it!"
"I'm betting
on you, Puddin'."
Cliff is such a wonderful man.
AFTERWORD
Santa Claus, Arizona, is still there; just drive from Kingman toward Boulder Dam on 93; you'll find it. But Mrs. Santa Claus (Mrs. Douglas) is no longer there, and her gourmet restaurant is now a fast-food joint. If she is alive, she is at least in her eighties. I don't want to find out. In her own field she was an artist equal to Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. I prefer to think of her in that perfect place where all perfect things go, sitting in her kitchen surrounded by her gnomes, preparing her hearty ambrosia for Mark Twain and Homer and Praxiteles and others of her equals.
RAY GUNS AND
ROCKET SHIPS
FOREWORD
One of the very few advantages of growing old is that one can reach an age at which he can do as he damn well pleases within the limits of his purse.
A younger writer, still striving, has to put up with a lot of nonsense—interviews, radio appearances, TV dates, public speaking here and there, writing he does not want to do—and all of this almost invariably unpaid.
In 1952 I was not a young writer (45) but I was certainly still striving. Here is an unpaid job I did for a librarians' bulletin because librarians can make you or break you. But today, thank Allah, if I don't want to do it, I simply say, "No." If I get an argument, I change that to: "Hell, No!"
"Being intelligent is not a felony.
But most societies evaluate
it as at least a misdemeanor."
—L. Long
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."
"Science Fiction" is a portmanteau term, and many and varied are the things that have been stuffed into it. Just as the term "historical fiction" includes in its broad scope Quo Vadis, nickel thrillers about the James Boys or Buffalo Bill, and Forever Amber, so does the tag "science fiction" apply both to Alley Oop and to Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. It would be more nearly correctly descriptive to call the whole field "speculative fiction" and to limit the name "science fiction" to a sub-class—in which case some of the other sub-classes would be: undisguised fantasy (Thorne Smith, the Oz books), pseudo-scientific fantasy (C. S. Lewis's fine novel Out of the Silent Planet, Buck Rogers, Bradbury's delightful Martian stories), sociological speculation (More's Utopia, Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality, H. G. Wells' The World Set Free, Plato's Republic), adventure stories with exotic and non-existent locales (Flash Gordon, Burroughs' Martian stories, the Odyssey, Tom Sawyer Abroad). Many other classes will occur to you, since the term "speculative fiction" may be defined negatively as being fiction about things that have not happened.
One can see that the name "science fiction" is too Procrustean a bed, too tight a corset, to fit the whole field comfortably. Nevertheless, since language is how we talk, not how we might talk, it seems likely that the term "science fiction" will continue to be applied to the whole field; we are stuck with it, as the American aborigines are stuck with the preposterous name "Indian."
But what, under rational definition, is science fiction? There is an easy touchstone: science fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws. The result can be extremely fantastic in content, but it is not fantasy; it is legitimate—and often very tightly reasoned—speculation about the possibilities of the real world. This category excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy.
But the category includes such mindstretchers as Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, William Sloane's To Walk the Night, Dr. Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust, even though these stories are stranger than most outright fantasies.
But how is one to distinguish between legitimate science fiction and ridiculous junk? Place of original publication is no guide; some of the best have appeared in half-cent-a-word pulp magazines, with bug-eyed monsters on their covers; some of the silliest have appeared in high-pay slicks or in the "prestige" quality group.
"The Pretzel Men of Pthark"—that one we can skip over; the contents are probably like the title. Almost as easy to spot is the Graustark school of space opera. This is the one in which the dashing Nordic hero comes to the aid of the rightful Martian princess and kicks out the villainous usurper through superscience and sheer grit. It is not being written very often these days, although it still achieves book publication occasionally, sometimes with old and respectable trade book houses. But it does not take a Ph.D. in physics to recognize it for what it is.
But do not be too quick to apply as a test to science fiction what are merely the conventions of better known fields of literature. I once heard a librarian say that she could not stand the unpronounceable names given by science-fiction writers to extraterrestrials. Have a heart, friend! These strings of consonants are honest attempts to give unearthly names to unearthly creatures. As Shaw pointed out, the customs of our tribe are not laws of nature. You would not expect a Martian to be named "Smith." (Say—how about a story about a Martian named "Smith"? Ought to make a good short. Hmmmm—)
* * *
But are there reliable criteria by which science fiction can be judged by one who is not well acquainted with the field? In my opinion, there are. Simply the criteria which apply to all fields of fiction, no more, no less.
First of all, an item of science fiction should be a story, i.e., its entertainment value should be as high as that which you expect from other types of stories. It should be entertaining to almost anyone, whether he habitually reads the stuff or not. Second, the degree of literacy should be as high as that expected in other fields. I will not labor this point, since we are simply applying an old rule to a new field, but there is no more excuse here than elsewhere for split infinitives, dangling participles, and similar untidiness, or for obscurity and doubletalk.
The same may be said for plotting, characterization, motivation, and the rest. If a science-fiction writer can't write, let him go back to being a fry cook or whatever he was doing before he gave up honest work.
I want to make separate mention of the author's evaluations. Granted that not all stories need be morally edifying, nevertheless I would demand of science-fiction writers as much exercise of moral sense as I would of other writers. I have in mind one immensely popular series which does not hold my own interest very well because the protagonist seems to be guided only by expediency. Neither the writer nor his puppet seems to be aware of good and evil. For my taste this is a defect in any story, nor is the defect mitigated by the wonderful and gaudy trappings of science fiction. In my opinion, such abstractions as honor, loyalty, fortitude, self-sacrifice, bravery, honesty, and integrity will be as important in the far reaches of the Galaxy as they are in Iowa or Korea. I believe that you are entitled to apply your own evaluating standards to science fiction quite as rigorously as you apply them in other fiction.
The criteria outlined above take care of every aspect of science fiction but one—the science part. But even here no new criterion is needed. Suppose you were called on to purchase or to refuse to purchase a novel about a Mexican boy growing up on a Mexican cattle ranch; suppose that you knew no Spanish, had never been to Mexico and were unacquainted with its history and customs, and were unsure of the competence of the author. What would you do?
I suspect that you would farm out the decision to someone who was competent to judge the authenticity of the work. It might be a high school Spanish teacher, it might be a friend or neighbor who was well acquainted with our neighboring culture, it might be the local Mexican consul. If the expert told you that the background material of the book was nonsense, you would not give the book shelf room.
The same procedure applies to science fiction. No one can be expected to be expert in everything. If you do not happen to know what makes a rocket go when there is no air to push agains
t, you need not necessarily read Willy Ley's Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel—although it is a fine book, a "must" for every library, desirable for any home. You may instead consult anyone of your acquaintance who does know about rocket ships—say an Air Force or Artillery officer, a physics teacher, or almost any fourteen-year-old boy, especially boys who are active in high school science clubs. If the novel being judged concerns cybernetics, nuclear physics, genetics, chemistry, relativity, it is necessary only to enlist the appropriate helper.
You would do the same, would you not, with a novel based on the life of Simón Bolívar?
Of course, there is the alternate, equivalent method of testing the authenticity of any book by checking on the author. If the Simón Bolívar novel was written by a distinguished scholar of South American history, you need concern yourself only with the literary merit of the book. If a book about space travel is written by a world-famous astronomer (as in the case of the one who writes under the pen name of "Philip Latham"), you can put your mind at rest about the correctness of the science therein. In many cases science-fiction writers have more than adequate professional background in the sciences they use as background material and their publishers are careful to let you know this through catalog and dustjacket blurb. I happen to be personally aware of and can vouch for the scientific training of Sprague de Camp, George O. Smith, "John Taine," John W. Campbell, Jr., "Philip Latham," Will Jenkins, Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, E. E. Smith, Philip Wylie, Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Damon Knight, Harry Stine, and "J. J. Coupling." This listing refers to qualifications in science only and is necessarily incomplete, nor do I mean to slight the many fine writers without formal scientific training who are well read in science and most careful in their research.
But some means of checking on a writer of alleged science fiction is desirable. Most writers of historical fiction appear to go to quite a lot of trouble to get the facts of their historical scenes correct, but some people seem to feel that all that is necessary to write science fiction is an unashamed imagination and a sprinkling of words like "ray gun," "rocket tube," "mutant," and "space warp." In some cases the offense is as blatant as it would be in the case of an author of alleged historical fiction who founded a book on the premise that Simón Bolívar was a Chinese monk! It follows that, in order to spot these literary fakers it is necessary to know that Bolívar was not a Chinese monk—know something of the sciences yourself or enlist competent advisers.