The Engines of the Night (18 page)
Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
Corear is moved by all of this and wishes that it had been different, wishes too that at least he had been able to share with Lothar a filial love. Still, it is too late, isn’t it? He assumes the throne and rules justly and wisely for thirty-seven years using the coin when necessary to get him out of scrapes. He continues to refuse its possibilities for sexual submission, however, and hence never marries. Or has a relationship with a woman. Although from time to time there might have been opportunities.
* * *
“Vigilante”: The brawling and lusty crew of
North Carolina Tarheel
, a medium-sized space surveyor, lands upon a subsidiary planet in the Antares Cluster for a shore leave. There they find themselves—the canny Scot, the redheaded naïve kid eager to learn, the shrewd old engineer, Sparks the Communicator, Lila the Mysterious Captain—in the midst of a planetary revolution.
A corrupt system based upon slavery is being attacked by a disorganized group of vigilantes who have driven them to their plantations but have then run out of weaponry, energies, and ideas. The vigilantes plead with the Survey Team their first day on the planet to use their technology and wits to help them, and although Lila feels that the crew should be detached, she does not interfere when the others decide to take part in the revolution. “After all,” as Sparks says, “we have to take a position sometime as representatives of a decent galaxy.”
The bumbling redheaded kid gets into amusing difficulties in constructing the world-wrecker and is captured by the oppressors, but they are otherwise no match for the Team, who bloodlessly unseat them when the Team persuades that resistance would be hopeless against a world-wrecker. The world-wrecker of course turns out to be papier-mâché and the scheme a bluff but too late for the oppressors. The slaves are freed.
Sparks is asked by the grateful freedom-loving slaves to be King but declines in favor of Lila, who he has always known had as her secret wish a planet to rule. She takes charge of matters—calling herself not King but Queen—while the Team fuels up matter-of-factly and prepares for further adventures. The redheaded kid is taken at one point for a renegade oppressor but just in the nick of time his identity is revealed and he is saved; on this note of comic and joyous relief the Team sails away under command of Sparks, who has always wanted to command a Survey Team, and why not? He gets all of the credit and none of the responsibilities.
(Special note: If the regime being overthrown is
anti
slavery and this is cleverly masked, it might be possible to get a magazine sale on this. The regime corruptly wants to give the barbarians the freedom for which they are not prepared and so on and so forth. Whether one wants the better distribution but somewhat lower word rates and ephemeral aspect of the magazines is an individual decision to be sure. It would be difficult to get
both
. Keep in mind that foreign sales can be an important proportion of the eventual income on a book, whereas the magazine publishers purchase world serial rights.)
* * *
“Come and Get It”: Jones is an old, sickly, half-blind Terrestrial Scout; he is about to be pensioned off after this, his final expedition. Congestive heart failure, failing gall bladder. Unluckily—he has never had extreme luck but in the end gets through, he thinks—he is abducted by a fleet battalion of Rigelians seeping through the stars in search of Terrans who might be able to give them information that can be used in the continuing great war. Jones uses his two pieces of wood in confinement to construct a solar generator, no small feat considering that the two weak suns overlooking this Rigelian outpost are dwarf stars in the last moments of their celestial lifetime.
Nonetheless, a lifetime as a hobbyist engineer is converted to use as Jones stupefies the Rigelians during interrogative sessions with threats of apocalypse; he then brings about a simulated solar eclipse which panics them as myth has informed that darkness portends ten thousand years of nightfall. Oh boy. “Help us,” the senior Rigelian begs Jones, “I speak in telepathic hookup for all the millions of us when I beg you most sincerely to let the sun shine again. We can’t really deal with this. How much of this do you think we can take?”
“You must surrender,” Jones says shrewdly, “and turn over all of your treasure, to say nothing of the prisoners you’ve taken to Earth.”
“Absolutely,” the panicked Rigelian says, “just get us out of this!” Jones nods and causes the illusory eclipse to dissolve. The Rigelian babbles gratitude and as a gesture of thanks cures Jones’ congestive heart failure (he cannot do much with that gall bladder) and installs him as ruler of the Rigelians, who become a subrace of the Rigelian outpost of Empire Earth.
* * *
“Amazing Grace”: A prophetess appears amidst the superstitious and primitive peoples of a prehistoric Earth and forecasts the wonders to come: Pyramids, Sphinx, television, radar, automobiles, time travel, and guns. The primitives, awed, commit her to death by fire shockingly reminiscent of the death of Joan of Arc. In fact it
is
the death of Joan of Arc.
In an epilogue-flashback the prophetess is seen as an ordinary time-traveling citizen of the fourth millennium about to try an amusing experiment. In going to prehistory she knows she flouts canon, and in planning to tell the natives of the future she lurches into Temporal Apostasy, but she is a stubborn lass. In a further epilogue it is disclosed that none of the events described occurred since, of course, her death by fire would render impossible those events which brought her to it, but in a final
final
epilogue the first paragraph of the story is repeated, indicating that Temporal Paradox is nothing to be trifled with by anyone.
* * *
“Hold That Tiger”: A child in the American Midwest of the early twentieth century is escorted by his father through a marvelous circus in which he sees—
A green beast, a three-horned beast, a magician with taloned hands, a spider with golden web, a polar bear who plays cello (but only in the first position), and a camel who plays violin (but without vibrato and shaky intonation; the duets are dreadful). And similar marvels. “This is wonderful, daddy,” the child says, “who made it up?”
“You did,” the father says, and would say more except that the polar bear cellist puts down his instrument with determination and whisks the child away. The child is terrified but his roistering screams are thought by the sparse audience to be merely part of a Wonder Screaming Child Presentation, and he obtains little satisfaction. The polar bear places him in a tent and waits for the camel, who appears carrying both instruments. The two then play (execrably) the third movement of the Brahms Double Concerto in A Major for Violin and Violincello. The carnival attractions mass to listen and the child sees the magician become a marvelous flower, the flower opening to speed him from dream to the reality of his deathbed at the turn of the millennium.
(Please note: If the intent is the young adult market, the child does not awaken on his deathbed but in his father’s arms outside the circus. “Would you rather see this stuff or save a few dollars and go right home?” the father asks. “I’d just as soon take you home now but it’s up to you. Everything’s up to you. You have to be responsible, you’re a young adult now.”
(“I go home, dada. I go home right now. I go home from this rotten place and I never come back again.”
(“That’s a mature and responsible decision. After all, it’s all phony anyway.”
(“I hope so, dada. I really do.”)
* * *
I cannot
guarantee
a sale on any of these plots. There are no guarantees in our complex, painful, and competitive business. On the other hand I have done the best that I can and I assure you that if you use them you are on the right track. I can in fact promise—assuming as always that you have friends among the editors, and every one of you, as Damon Knight once said, had better make them where you can—a swift and sympathetic reading, a concerned and passionate response, a delayed but viable contract, and some time beyond that an advance to speed you through the writing of all these novels and all of their sequels through all the eight to twelve to (if you are a saint) twenty-five years of your productive and creative, your artistic and dedicated, your daring and soul-testing writing career.
1979/1980: New Jersey
Grandson of the True and the Terrible
T
HE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENCE FICTION WRITER OF THE FORTIES
was probably Theodore Sturgeon. He was not the best nor the most significant nor did he make the most fundamental impression; even as a stylist (the basis of his reputation) he might have fallen behind the Kuttners in top form, but what Sturgeon did was to keep open the possibility for a kind of science fiction that eventually many others came to do.
That possibility was style-oriented, science fiction built upon configuration and mood. No other writer was doing this. Heinlein was certainly the most important figure of the decade, Asimov probably the most imaginative, van Vogt the most characteristic and crazily inventive, the Kuttners the most polished and adroit . . . but all of these writers were replaceable. There were others who were doing what Heinlein was doing if not nearly so well, similarly Asimov. Their style, their approach to science fiction as an extrapolative medium impressing circumstance upon character, was expression of Campbell’s vision. The Kuttners were better than good but their depth exceeded breadth and
The New Yorker
, for instance, was full of fine writers (some of whom, like John Collier and Robert Coates, had clearly influenced them). Van Vogt was more
sui generis
, but L. Ron Hubbard knew a few things about the paranoid plot.
If any of these writers had been lifted out of the science fiction of the forties, the forties would have been an inestimably poorer decade . . . but the history of modern science fiction, less their own contribution, would be essentially the same. Even Heinlein’s work, hardly as skillfully, would have been done eventually.
But Sturgeon’s contribution was unique. In his use of style, internalization, and quirky characterization he was keeping the door open for everything that happened after 1950 when the Gold, Boucher, and fifties perspective became the alternative that dominated the field. If Sturgeon had not been around through his decade to hold the flag for this kind of science fiction, had not established that the literature could be style-oriented, it is possible that the fifties perspective would not have developed; the editors and potential audience might have been there but no basis would have existed upon which writers within the field could build.
Science fiction without Sturgeon might have been a science fiction without
Galaxy
, Walter Miller, Jr., Brian Aldiss, Damon Knight, the original anthology market or
Dying Inside
. And other things. Without Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, Hubbard, or de Camp the medium would have been the poorer, but without Sturgeon it might by the middle of the fifties have played itself out in extrapolative gimmickry and arcana and not have existed at all.
At least it is something to think about, just as it is to think about what might have happened if Campbell had not been persuaded that Theodore Sturgeon wrote science fiction at all. Just as it is to think about what might have been if Sturgeon—who had serious literary ambitions and wanted to publish in the quarterlies and mass magazines—had not failed in his field of first intention and had had to settle for science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey never wanted to write anything else. Sturgeon found his text after the fact. What he wrote reflected this. It made the field first attractive and then possible for many of us.
* * *
The fiction writer, locked up with the sound of his own voice, the science fiction writer locked up with the sound of his own voice propagating megalomaniacal or solipsistic visions imposed upon his persona, the
full-time
science fiction writer who professionally does little else . . . contrast these visions with the alienation, isolation, anonymity and impotence which constitute the condition of the American writer—
Taking it all on balance it can be well understood why alcoholism, divorce, depression, fragmentation, and a rich history of lunacy characterize science fiction writers and why it was Alfred Bester’s considered opinion in the early fifties, after meeting the crowd for the first time, that all of them were brilliant and all of them had a screw loose someplace. (Bester, who wrote radio and television scripts at the time, considered himself at least nominally representative of the Outside World.)
But one does not want to prejudice the case. There is another side and another opinion. John W. Campbell, who must have thought about this too in his time, put it this way to one of his writers in the forties: “People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction
editors
, well—”
A long Campbellian sigh.
Silence.
1980: New Jersey
Give Me That Old-Time Religion
S
CIENCE FICTION DOES NOT—PERHAPS IT CANNOT—
depict the future. What it does, as A. J. Budrys pointed out back in 1969, is to offer sentimentalized versions of the past or brutalized versions of the present transmuted into a template of the familiar. The future cannot by definition be portrayed; it will require a terminology and ethos which do not exist. Perhaps true science fiction, an accurate foreshadowing of the future if such a thing were at all possible, would be incomprehensible. It is important to point out, however, that as futurologists not only our devices but our credentials are miserable.
It is true—a notorious example—that as late as 1967, no science fiction writer had understood that the landing on the moon would be tied into the media and that it would be observed by several hundred million people including that long-distance station-to-station caller, Richard M. Nixon. None of us. The closest any came was Richard Wilson in a short-short story, “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer,” in a 1965 issue of
Galaxy
, which speculated that the first landing on Mars, witnessed by most of the population of this planet on Intermedia, would expose the astronauts to the hypnotic and mind-shattering powers of the Secret Martians, who would turn the minds of most of us to jelly.
Not such bad thinking for fifteen hundred words, this story, and handled with Wilson’s customary lucidity and
élan
(he is a charter member of the science fiction club larger than Hydra and even more filled with bitterness: Underrated Writers, Inc.), but it had very little to do with the conditions that NASA and the networks were jointly evolving, and the question of mass audience was strictly for the subplot, a means of setting up the satiric point. Wilson takes the NASA-CBS I Saw It Coming Award but only by default, and since the award pays only in honor (of which NASA and CBS have offered us little), Wilson will have to be content with his membership in the club and 1969 Nebula for “Mother to the World.”
For the rest of us—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, and the sixties visionaries too, the movers and shakers who were attempting to write Street (as opposed to Street & Smith) Science Fiction—no honor whatsoever and no excuse. That a genre built upon visionary format whose claim to public attention through the early decades had been based upon its precognitive value should have utterly failed to glimpse the second or third most significant social event of the decade is—one puts on one’s tattered prophet’s robes—quite disgraceful.
Pointless to blame the readership. The readership may not be interested in the visionary, the dangerous, the threatening, or the difficult, that is true, but their expectations have been formed by what has been given them. Great writers
make
great audiences. The solemn truth is that as NASA and the networks conspired to reduce the most awesome events of the twentieth century to pap between advertisements and other divertissements, most of us were in the boondocks, slaving away on our portions and outlines and our little short stories, trying to figure out what new variation of Eric Frank Russell we could sneak by Campbell, what turn on a 1947 plot by van Vogt out of a 1956 novel by Phil Dick might work this one last time for Fred Pohl’s
Galaxy
. While we slogged on through the mud of the sixties, bombs bursting in air, recycling the recyclable for one thousand dollars in front money, the liars and technicians were working ably to convert the holy into garbage and a damned good job they (and we) made of it too. The liars and the technicians put the space program out of business by the mid-seventies. Perhaps it might have been different if we had stayed on the job . . . but then again we all know that science fiction has almost nothing to do with the future so why feel guilty? I don’t. And “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer” is still around somewhere for proof that we had a handle on it, so there.
No guilt at all. I was just one of the boys.
1980: New Jersey