Empties (28 page)

Literature, or artfulness, should carry within itself all those qualities that are bundled inside the term “entertainment” (provocation, beauty of expression, even incitement to thought and action). Writers should kick ass, or try to, because, even when they don’t, they are the alarm canaries in the mineshaft—except that they don’t choke on the gas right away to warn the miners; they go on choking, slowly, word by word, with every household dollar, asking themselves what they think they are doing.
 

I wrote
Empties
with no publisher in mind, with no contract in hand, which I had done since my first novel. I wrote it in delight over what Fritz Leiber’s examples of craft and artfulness had taught me. On one note regarding superstition and science I have followed his example: the “witchcraft” in
Conjure Wife
is rationalized into a science fictional way of thinking, as part of the husband’s character; in my novel, Dierdre’s mindpower may have a natural explanation, but it is mostly assumed. The transcendent question may well be, does anything in what we call reality happen without cause? To answer with the words “chaos” and “uncaused events” may be the most horrific ideas anyone can consider, as all conceptions of order are ruled out before the “old darkness” that seems to press in on us from inside and from the “outer horrors” of the cosmos.
 

Fritz might have said that you can escape form or content, but you can’t escape both and hope to produce anything more than an empty-headed time waster.
 

Toward the end of Fritz Leiber’s private sessions with his sorcerer’s apprentices, I ventured to say that one day I would hope to write a novel to equal (I dared not say surpass)
Conjure Wife
.
 

“Do you have one in mind?” he asked, and I still see his sharp-eyed gaze.
 

“No,” I said.
 

“You will,” he said, “you will...”
 

Some years later I was at a book signing, where I sat with Robert Bloch, the author of
Psycho
, Pamela Sargent, and astronaut Scott Carpenter; I mentioned my novel to Bloch, which I had sketched and set aside.
 

Bloch smiled at my gleeful
precis
of the central notion, then said, “Sounds right to me. Don’t neglect it.”
 

George Zebrowski Delmar,  
|New York, May 2008
 

About George Zebrowski

George Zebrowski’s nearly forty books include novels, short fiction collections, anthologies, and a book of essays.
 

Science fiction writer Greg Bear calls him “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration,” and the late Terry Carr, one of the most influential science fiction editors of recent years, described him as “an authority in the SF field.”
 
Zebrowski has published about a hundred works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays, and has written about science for
Omni Magazine
. His short fiction and essays have appeared in
Amazing Stories
,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Science Fiction Age
,
Nature
, the
Bertrand Russell Society News
, and many other publications.
 

His best-known novel is
Macrolife
(Harper & Row, 1979), which Arthur C. Clarke described as “a worthy successor to Olaf Stapledon’s
Star Maker.
It’s been years since I was so impressed. One of the few books I intend to read again.”
Library Journal
chose
Macrolife
as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and The Easton Press included it in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. Zebrowski’s stories and novels have been translated into a half-dozen languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Stranger Suns
(Bantam, 1991) was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year.
 

The Killing Star
(William Morrow, 1995), written with scientist/ author Charles Pellegrino, received unanimous praise in national newspapers and magazines.
The New York Times Book Review
called it “a novel of such conceptual ferocity and scientific plausibility that it amounts to a reinvention of that old Wellsian staple, [alien invasion]...”
The Washington Post Book World
described the novel as “a classic SF theme pushed logically to its ultimate conclusions.”
 

Brute Orbits
(HarperCollins, 1998), an uncompromising novel about the future of the penal system, was praised by reviewers for its characters, originality, and thought. Paul Di Filippo, in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, said that “Zebrowski never ceases to invest his individual characters with three-dimensional roundness... Startling, sobering, provocative,” while
Publishers Weekly
called this novel “boldly speculative.” The book was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year.
 

Cave of Stars
, a novel that is part of his Macrolife mosaic, was published by HarperCollins in 1999.
Skylife
, an anthology edited by George Zebrowski with physicist and writer Gregory Benford, was published by Harcourt Brace in 2000.
Swift Thoughts
(Golden Gryphon), a hardcover collection of his stories, with an introduction by Gregory Benford, came out in 2002. A second hardcover collection,
In the Distance, and Ahead In Time
, was also published in the same year.
Synergy SF: New Science Fiction
, the next volume of his legendary Synergy series of original anthologies, was published in 2004.
Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts
(Golden Gryphon), with an introduction by Howard Waldrop, came out in 2006, and a new edition of
Macrolife
was published in that year by Pyr Books, with an introduction by Ian Watson. Golden Gryphon published his horror novel
Empties
in 2009.