And I think to myself, What am I doing here? I don’t need this. But I just shrug and say, “Well, some people think so—I did win the Science-Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year.”
The kid shuts up, but I figure—what the heck—I’ll ask him what he does. And he says, “I’m a clerk at Blockbuster Video.”
And I copy the surly tone he used on me, demanding, “Are you any good?”
And he thinks about it, it’s clear, for the first time in his life, and he looks at his shoes, and says, absolutely crestfallen, “No, not really.”
Flashforward two years: another SF convention, another hotel, another city. I’ve given up my weekend to be here. Sure, the con (as SF conventions are universally known) is paying for my hotel and meals, but there’s nobody here—I mean, man, it’s postapocalyptic, just a few survivors left, twenty people all told, rattling around in a big old hotel, and three of those twenty, they’ve got things that look liked cow patties glued to their foreheads—they’re grown men, pretending to be Klingons from Star Trek.
Somehow the organizers have forgotten to promote the convention: the local SF specialty bookstore only heard about it three days before the event, and when I run into the city’s biggest-name SF author at another convention in another city the following weekend, he’s stunned to hear that there’d just been a con in his town.
But you know…
You know, by the end of that weekend in California, the kid from Blockbuster had bought some of my novels in the dealers’ room (the place at a con where books and merchandise are sold). And by the end of the weekend at the other con, I’d actually gotten to know the Klingons, and they turned out to be a lot of fun, with a lot of interesting things to say.
Some SF conventions are magnificent—a chance for a writer to meet with his or her existing audience, and to entice new readers. Others are less so—too often these days, a convention committee relies on what I call the Field of Dreams philosophy: they believe that if they hold it, people will come, without the necessity of doing vigorous publicity.
But this year alone, SF conferences have taken me to Melbourne, Australia; Fredericton, New Brunswick; Columbus, Ohio; Providence, Rhode Island; Barcelona, Spain; and, yes, to Ottawa, Ontario. Indeed, traveling to SF conventions either with all expenses paid as Guest of Honor or even just on your own tax-deductible nickel is one of the few real perks of the science-fiction writing game.
Winning over surly teenagers is just an added bonus.
Remembering Judith Merril
It’s always sad when a friend dies. When that friend is a national treasure and one of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, it’s a tragedy. Judith Merril passed away in 1997, and The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper called while I was at her shiva to ask me to write this appreciation of her; it appeared in the Tuesday, September 16, 1997, edition, and was reprinted in both the newsletter of The Writers Union of Canada and the SF short-fiction review magazine Tangent.
A few people disliked this article, apparently because I painted Judy warts and all. But many others praised it highly, and I cherish the phone conversation I had about it with Judith Zissman, Judy’s grand-niece in Brooklyn, who contacted me to tell me how much she loved it, and how well she thought it captured Judy.
I first met science-fiction writer and editor Judith Merril twenty years ago, in 1977. I was a high-school student at Northview Heights Secondary School in North York, Ontario, and our school SF club was planning a science-fiction convention.
It’s traditional at such events to have an author designated as “Guest of Honor.” We all agreed that Judith was the person we wanted. At that time, she was hosting segments of the British SF series Dr. Who on TVOntario. Hers was a name to conjure with—even as teenagers, we knew she was a towering presence.
We wrote Judy, inviting her to attend, and, to our delight, she agreed. The truth, though, was that at that point none of us had yet read any of her work. So we began to seek it out.
We were surprised by how little of it there was, and that, even then, none of it was recent. Judy had a tiny output, almost all of which was written in the 1950s: a handful of short stories, a couple of solo novels, a couple more in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth under the pseudonym Cyril Judd.
But, still, she had left an indelible mark. One short story in particular—her first published work, “That Only A Mother,” dealing with a horribly deformed child born to a woman exposed to nuclear radiation—is a genuine classic.
Science fiction was invented by a woman—Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein—but had been dominated by men for over a century thereafter. Judy brought a feminine element back into it; she demonstrated with that one, simple, stark story that SF could be a vehicle not just for detached extrapolation about the future, but for powerfully moving explorations of the human condition.
Judy and I kept in touch after the convention and, in 1984, I was one of a couple dozen people to receive a copy of a letter she sent out to all the “good science-fiction heads” in the Toronto area. Judy had been noting the emergence of writers such as Terence M. Green, Guy Gavriel Kay, Edward Llewelyn-Thomas (now deceased), Andrew Weiner, and myself, and had declared that the Toronto SF community had reached “critical mass.”
In the early 1950s, Judy had belonged to The Hydra Club in New York, a group of young SF writers who provided networking and support for each other. She was asking us all to gather at Toronto’s Free Times Cafe to create “Hydra North.”
Hydra North is still going strong 13 years later. But Judy only came to four meetings in all those years.
That was typical Judy. She was a catalyst, a great starter of things: founder of Hydra North; founder of what’s now called The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, part of the Toronto Public Library; founder of the Tesseracts series of Canadian SF anthologies published out of Edmonton.
She was, I think, always looking to recapture the past—perhaps an odd thing for a science-fiction writer to long for. Her Hydra Club in New York had included a lot more than just gossip about the publishing business: there’d been a fair bit of bed-hopping, as well, and Judy, right until the end, was a lusty woman.
She made passes at more than one local SF author. Until declining health forced her to curtail her traveling, she wintered in Jamaica where, as she used to often observe with a twinkle of her piercing gray eyes and a lascivious grin, men don’t mind older women.
Indeed, I remember being quite flustered interviewing her in 1985 for CBC Radio’s Ideas series; she kept making comments about the phallic nature of the microphone.
Anyway, the members of Hydra North were too Canadian, too sedate, too yuppie for the Judy who used to be a Trotskyite; for the Judy who came to Canada to protest the American involvement in Vietnam; for the Judy who had lived at Toronto’s notorious Rochdale College; for the Judy who smoked pot. You could hardly call someone who was born in 1923 a child of the Sixties, but, really, she was precisely that: a believer in free love and a radical.
Judy was often seen at meetings of The Writers’ Union of Canada raising hell, and she was active with numerous political and social causes. She was a great protester in the Sixties, and, to our huge benefit, she never outgrew that.
So, yes, she rarely attended meetings of the group she started, and yet, somehow, she was always there: a presence. Her name would come up every time, with people recounting whatever outrageous thing Judy had said or done recently.
Judy died this past Friday. By coincidence, there was a party for the local SF community Saturday night at the home of Robert Charles Wilson, another Toronto SF writer; it had been long planned, and there seemed no reason to cancel it.
Indeed, I think we all felt a need to get together and talk about our loss. And, of course, we toasted Judy, and some of us got misty-eyed. But over and over again people commented on how difficult it was to be Judy’s friend; how demanding and sharp-tongued
she could be.
(A few years ago, a Toronto SF writer got married; his wife proudly announced the news to Judy, whose reply was, “My condolences.”)
Yes, she could be hard to like. I always thought it was perhaps because she had a wider perspective. She was looking out for the human race; individuals sometimes got lost in the shuffle.
And I was lucky, I guess. In twenty years of friendship, I can’t recall us ever exchanging a harsh word. But I saw others feel her sting.
She wasn’t mean—I don’t think she had a vindictive or nasty bone in her body. But she was always blunt: she said exactly what she thought. And what she thought was always penetrating; she had one of the sharpest minds of anyone I’d ever met, and could slice though artifice and pretension with surgical precision.
For years, Judy got grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, in theory to write her memoirs. I say “in theory” because, well, there was some feeling amongst other writers that perhaps she wasn’t really working on them. Oh, we all believed her at first, but as years went by and they didn’t materialize, people did begin to talk.
(Despite respiratory and cardiac problems, Judy smoked right to the end; she used to say she’d had two great addictions in her life, and she’d managed to break one—writing.)
Her memoirs could have been explosive. She was there at the birth of modern science fiction; she knew all the greats, including Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, Poul Anderson, and Frederik Pohl (who was her husband for four years), and, well, as I said, she had been a lusty woman. Multiple publishers were interested in acquiring the book.
At the shiva for Judy on Sunday, several other writers and I went gingerly into her office in her apartment at Toronto’s Performing Arts Lodge (her stint hosting Dr. Who had made her eligible for residency there). For writers, the office is in many ways more personal, and more revelatory, than even a bedroom.
We looked over the detritus of her writerly life: old magazines, almost crumbling to dust, with stories by Judy in them; Japanese translations of her books; and so on. We could feel her still there, in that cramped room, at that chair, in front of that Macintosh computer—a presence.
But what caught our eyes most were the bottom two drawers of her black steel filing cabinet. Both were labeled “Memoirs.”
They did exist; perhaps not finished, perhaps not polished, but they did indeed exist—two drawers full of them. Pandora’s box was there, in front of us. We desperately wanted to open the drawers but, of course, we didn’t.
Still, there was no doubt that Judy knew how to play the grant game—remember, she hadn’t published a word of new fiction since coming to Canada in 1968, and yet she managed to frequently receive arts-council grants.
Indeed, I remember her phoning me in 1985 and asking me to interview a female French Canadian SF writer for CBC Radio; Judy wanted this writer to come to Toronto, and if she could line up a couple of interviews, she could get her a Canada Council travel grant to make the trip. I agreed; one did not refuse Judy.
And, of course, it was arts-council money that covered her fee for editing the first Tesseracts anthology of Canadian SF, which came out in 1985.
Five more volumes in the series have been produced since (my wife and I edited the most recent one, Tesseracts 6). Judy—who many would say was the greatest SF anthologist ever—could easily have edited all the volumes herself, receiving cushy grants to do so. But she chose not to. Instead, she insisted that each volume have a different editor.
Why? Well, starting in 1956, Judy had edited twelve annual best-of-the-year science-fiction anthologies in the United States, culling the finest work from both genre pulps and general magazines.
Her singular taste defined what science fiction was during that period; she drove it in new directions, changing its face forever.
Also influential was her 1968 anthology England Swings SF, which brought the British “New Wave” in science fiction—a literary movement devoted to soft, psychological tales exploring inner, rather than outer, space—to North America.
More than any other editor in its history, Judith Merril shaped modern SF, and moved it squarely into the realm of literature.
I think, perhaps, Judy was surprised by what a force she turned out to be, and by what an impact she had had on the genre. And although in the early 1980s she recognized the burgeoning field of Canadian SF, and had decided to spotlight it, she felt uncomfortable, somehow, about being the one shaping it; indeed, she wanted no single vision to control it, hence her insistence on a rotating editorship for the anthology series she founded.
In all the years I knew Judy, this was the only indication I ever had that she really understood—and was perhaps even a little daunted by—what she had become.
A presence.
I’ll miss her.
Science and God
In 2000, to promote the release of my novel Calculating God, Borders Books and Music commissioned this essay, which they emailed to thousands of science-fiction readers. It seemed to help: the hardcover of Calculating God did very well indeed, and the paperback hit number one (“by a wide margin,” according to the editorial note) on the bestsellers’ list published by Locus, the California-based trade journal of the SF field.
Science and God.
Although most people might consider the two nouns (“science,” “god”) to be the key words in that phrase, for me the most important one is that little conjunction in the middle.
That’s because the alternative wording would be “Science or God”—which seems to be the choice many want to offer these days. Take Stephen Jay Gould, for instance: he calls science and religion “nonoverlapping magisteria,” insisting that some things are properly matters of science and others are only appropriately considered as questions of faith.
Now, I’d never put All in the Family’s Archie Bunker on the same intellectual plane as Gould, but old Archie did say precisely one thing I agree with, during all his other rants: “You want to know what faith is? Faith is when you believe something nobody in their right mind would believe—that’s what faith is!”
So Gould’s dichotomy, filtered by Bunker’s definition, leaves us with what I find to be an untenable position: some questions are best answered by science, and other questions can only be addressed if you’re willing to consider the irrational.
I flat-out reject that. I’m convinced that science is the only legitimate way of knowing. Not received wisdom from putative holy texts. Not mystical insight. Science.
Why? Because only science allows for the falsification of a premise. Since my twelfth novel, Calculating God, came out, I’ve been besieged by radical religious fundamentalists. For them, all data supports their a priori conclusion that God does exist.
For instance, one creationist wrote to tell me I should believe in God because “of the awesome complexity in the universe, proclaiming God’s handiwork.”
I countered that in fact the human eye is incompetent handiwork. Not only is it prone to myopia, but it has a blind spot because of the way the optic nerve passes through the retina—and we know it didn’t have to be this way, since octopi and squids, whose eyes evolved independently of our own, don’t have blind spots.
My correspondent’s response? “God made it that way to remind fallen mankind that we don’t ‘see it all’ or ‘know it all’!”
Nonsense. If both perfection and imperfection are taken as proof of God’s existence, then the whole idea of proof simply falls apart.
Why should the existence of God be exempted from normal standards of proof? It seems quite reasonable to ask whether we live in an intelligently designed universe. And we should be able to answer this not by looking at Biblical or Koranic accounts, and not by praying for insight, but rather by simply looking at the facts.
And, surprisingly, the facts do seem to point to some very-careful tweaking of the fundamental parameters of the universe. For instance, if the force of gravity were only a little bit stronger than it actually is, the uni
verse would have collapsed shortly after the big bang, long before life could have evolved. But if gravity were just a tad weaker, hydrogen clouds never would have coalesced to form stars.
Further, if the strong-nuclear force (which allows protons to cluster together despite their positive charges repelling each other) were only slightly weaker, no multi-proton atoms could exist; in other words, everything would be hydrogen. On the other hand, if it were only slightly stronger, all of the universe’s initial supply of hydrogen would have rapidly converted into helium, meaning there would be no hydrogen at all—and without hydrogen, stars could not shine.
And what about water? It’s so common, most of us aren’t conscious of just how remarkable a substance it is. If you take almost any other liquid and freeze it, it becomes more dense: a gold brick will sink to the bottom of a vat of liquid gold. But if you freeze water, it expands, which is why ice floats on the surface of lakes. If water didn’t have this unique property, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, obliterating delicate sea-floor ecologies. Indeed, once they’d started freezing, bodies of water would freeze solid and likely remain so forever.
Nor does water’s unique nature end with its thermal properties. Of all substances, only liquid selenium has a higher surface tension. And it is water’s high surface tension that draws it deeply into cracks in rocks, and, as I said, water does the incredible and actually expands as it freezes, breaking those rocks apart. If water had lower surface tension, the process by which soil is formed would not occur.
There are numerous other examples. Cosmologist Paul Davies has concluded that the odds of our universe, with its specific, ultimately life-generating properties, arising by chance are one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Those kinds of odds virtually demand the conclusion that someone did indeed tweak the parameters, carefully fine-tuning the universe’s design.