Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

“[A] tumultuous take on humanity, philosophy and ethics that is as hilarious as it is outlandish.”

—
Kirkus

“Morrow's world is one where ideas matter so much they come lurching to life as intellectual Frankenstein creatures. In
The Philosopher's Apprentice
they are wickedly hilarious—and they can break our hearts and scare us silly.”

—
Denver Post

“Morrow is even more inventive than Vonnegut and has Vonnegut's willingness to milk every sacred cow in the pasture... but
The Philosopher's Apprentice
is not just a collection of comic gestures. It can be unexpectedly moving, with scenes of great literary ambiguity.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“James Morrow's novel about early American witchcraft pulls off so many dazzling feats of literary magic that in a different century he'd have been burned at the stake.”

—
Washington Post

“This impeccably researched, highly ambitious novel—nine years in the writing—is a triumph of historical fiction.”

—
Booklist

“
Grim and gorgeous
,
earthy and erudite as well, Morrow's
Witchfinder
woos readers with a secularist vision of reason triumphant, rewarding its following richly, giving them all the world and ample time in which to enjoy it.”

—
Seattle Times

“His latest collection demonstrates that his rapier wit has lost none of its edge as it encompasses twisted scenarios ranging from Martians invading Central Park to having the fates of other worlds rest upon the scores of American football games…. All the stories manifest Morrow's penchant for exploring the dark underbelly of technological promise and extracting quirky moral conundrums. Morrow's fans will revel, and first-time readers may find his grim humor making fans of them, too.”

—
Booklist

“Far more entertaining than most of that tedious stuff you've been forcing yourself to read.”

—
Fantastic Reviews

“Amply displays [Morrow's] ability to juggle absurdity, tragedy, irony and outrage...”

—
Locus

UNCLE WONDER BUILDS A JET ENGINE

minus ten seconds and counting! Nine, eight, seven! Step lively, cosmic cadets! Six, five, four! Time to scramble aboard the space schooner TRITON! Good job, cadets, you made it! Three, two, one...BLAST OFF with BROCK BARTON AND HIS ROCKET RANGERS! Brought to you by Kellogg's Sugar Corn Pops, with the sweetenin' already on it, and by Ovaltine, the hot chocolaty breakfast drink schoolteachers recommend! And now, stalwart star sailors, let's race on up to the bridge, where Brock and his crew are about to receive an assignment that will hurtle them pell-mell into the dreaded “Coils of Terror,” chapter one of this week's exciting adventure, THE COBRA KING OF GANYMEDE!

If I were a nine-year-old kid becalmed in the cultural doldrums of postwar America, nothing would have thrilled me more than the voice of Jerry Korngold announcing an impending episode of
Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, at four o'clock precisely, this indefatigable off-screen TV host delivered the program's opening signature, exhorting young viewers to enter a sacred and forbidden zone. Follow me to the throbbing heart of the cosmos, boys and girls. Come hither to infinity.

As fate would have it, however, in the early fifties I could not accept Jerry's entrancing invitation, partly because I was no longer a child but mostly because I happened to be the head writer of
Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers
. I liked my job. Just as our show enabled kids to fantasize that they were star sailors, so did my scripting duties allow me to imagine I was a playwright, though I knew perfectly well that nobody was about to confuse a space schooner called the
Triton
with a streetcar named
Desire
.

While my primary
Brock Barton
obligation was to crank out a triad of weekly episodes, including a cliff-hanging climax for chapters one and two, I was further charged with writing and starring in a ten-minute epilogue to each installment, the popular
Uncle Wonder's Attic
segment. Cut to me, Kurt Jastrow, a.k.a. Uncle Wonder, an endearing old tinkerer in a cardigan sweater. (I played the role behind an artificial grizzled beard and equally fake eyebrows.) Nestled in his attic workshop, Uncle Wonder has just finished watching the latest
Brock Barton
chapter with a neighborhood kid, freckle-faced Andy Tuckerman. The absentminded eccentric flips off his bulky Motorola TV and chats with Andy about the episode, and before long the boy pipes up with an astute question concerning some scientific aspect of the
Brock Barton
universe. (I tried to leaven the show's bedrock implausibility with flashes of real physics and chemistry.) After rummaging around in the attic, Uncle Wonder finds the necessary materials, then proceeds to address the boy's perplexity through a science experiment.

Under normal circumstances, the Monday, November 9, 1953,
Brock Barton
chapter called “Coils of Terror” would not have lodged in my memory. It was neither better nor worse than my usual attempt to write a script poised on the proper side of the rift that separates exhilarating junk from irredeemable dreck. As it happened, though, “Coils of Terror” occasioned my first interaction with the Qualimosans—I speak now of by-God extraterrestrials, complete with crustacean physiognomy, insectile eyes, and an antisocial agenda—and so I can easily discuss that episode without benefit of a kinescope or other tangible record of the broadcast. Don't touch that dial.

Historians today call it the Golden Age of television, but for those of us who were actually there, it was nothing of the kind. Cardboard sets, primitive special effects, subsistence budgets: we were living in the Stone Age of the medium, and we knew it. True, my employer, NBC, did a classy job of informing viewers about current events—radio had taught them the art of gathering and broadcasting the news—and the network took a justifiable pride in its anthologies of dramas written expressly for the cathode-ray tube, but when it came to
Brock Barton
and other kiddie fare, the National Broadcasting Company was primarily concerned with holding down costs and sucking up advertising revenues.

That said, I was not complaining, at least not to anyone who exercised power at the network. Although the thought of spending my life writing juvenile space operas depressed me, I knew I had a good thing going, especially when I considered how far I'd come: all the way from Mom and Dad's central Pennsylvania dairy farm to New York's most celebrated bohemian enclave, Greenwich Village—an odyssey whose primary detour had found me in Allied-occupied Japan, working with my fellow U.S. Army conscripts to remind the deeply spiritual citizens of shrine-laden Kyoto that reconvening the Second World War would be a bad idea. When people asked me why I'd decided to seek my fortune in New York, I always replied, “I came for the trees,” an unconvincing answer—there are many more trees in central Pennsylvania than in the five boroughs—to which I immediately appended a clarification. “That is, I came for the greatest of all the good things trees give us, better than fruit or shade, better than birds. I speak of pulp.”

Such a savory word. Without pulp there was no
Amazing Stories
. Without pulp, no
Weird Tales
, no
Planet Stories
,
Thrilling Wonder Stories
,
Galaxy
, or
Astounding Science Fiction
. Most especially there was no
Andromeda
, la crème du fantastique, a monthly compendium of
Gedanken
experiments clothed in the regalia of science fiction. During my adolescence I must have read over three hundred
Andromeda
stories, an educational experience for which I can thank my father's bachelor brother.

Uncle Wyatt made his living teaching English at Central High in Philadelphia, and whenever Mom, Dad, and I visited his Germantown row house, I was allowed to descend into the basement and pore through his literary treasures, which included not only pulp fiction but also
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
,
The Police Gazette
, and the occasional girlie slick, featuring with what we now call soft-core pornography. My uncle's grotto smelled of coal dust, kerosene, and fungus, a fragrance that, owing to its association with his moldering periodicals, was the most exquisite I'd ever known. While the magazines devoted to ruthless pirates, fearless explorers, and daredevil pilots engaged my interest, it was the science-fiction pulps that truly mesmerized me, to the point where I decided that writing stories and novelettes for
Andromeda
must be the best possible way to earn a living. (This was before I understood that no human being had ever supported himself in this fashion.) At first my commitment to an extraterrestrial vocation was equivocal, but then one afternoon Uncle Wyatt joined me in his cave of wonders, set his palm on an
Andromeda
stack, and said, “The church of cosmic astonishment, Kurt. It's the only religion you'll ever need.”

“Church?” I said, fixing on the topmost cover, an exquisite image of a rocketship approaching a double-ringed planet, one loop paralleling the equator, the second passing through the north and south poles: dubious physics, but transcendent iconography. “Religion?”

“Indeed,” said my father's brother, laying an affirming hand on my shoulder. Eventually, of course, I would transmogrify my memories of Wyatt Jastrow into a character called Uncle Wonder. “I only wish its scripture were better written.”

My course was now set, and in time my allegiance to the church of cosmic astonishment found me boarding the fabulous streamlined Crusader in Reading Terminal, detraining in Jersey City, and taking the ferry across the bay to New York Harbor—for how better to pursue my intended career than to pitch my tent within hailing distance of Saul Silver, renowned editor of
Andromeda
? I spent the next five weeks at the Gotham Grand, a fleabag hotel on the Lower East Side, surviving at first on $100 in cash from Uncle Wyatt, then scraping by on the wages and tips I received from waiting tables in Stuyvesant Town. Among my fellow Gotham Grand tenants were two other apprentice bohemians—Eliot Thornhill, a budding actor from Delaware, and Lenny Margolis, an aspiring “cultural journalist” from New Jersey—and one day the three of us decided that, if we pooled our resources, we could rent an apartment in Greenwich Village.

When I agreed to cast my lot with the thespian and the trend spotter, I didn't realize the package would include the complete
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Lenny got for winning a national high-school essay contest. No sooner had we moved into 378 Bleecker Street, apartment 4R, than Lenny arranged for his parents to deliver all twenty-four volumes to our doorstep, a fount of knowledge from which he allowed me to drink promiscuously, especially after I taught him how to buy condoms at the corner barber shop. (Unlike most consumers of Uncle Wyatt's girlie slicks, I read the advice columns.) Throughout my years of roughing it in the Village, Lenny's
Encyclopaedia Britannica
became the college education Mom and Dad could never afford to give me.

Against all odds, Saul Silver bought the first story I submitted to
Andromeda
, “Brainpan Alley,” spun from the
Britannica
's account of Sigmund Freud's theories. A mad scientist, seeking to liberate his mind from the fetters of both moral convention and animal instinct, transplants his superego into a bronze statue of the fourth-century heretical monk Pelagius, even as he relocates his id to a stuffed orangutan in the American Museum of Natural History. As fate and plot contrivance would have it, the statue comes to life, likewise the taxidermal ape, and the two creatures spend the rest of the story alternately drubbing each other and making life miserable for the hapless genius who evicted them from his psyche.

“Dear Mr. Jastrow, you are an intellectual snob,” Saul Silver's letter to me began. “However, the scene of the monk sucker-punching the orangutan was too delicious to pass up. Enclosed please find a check for $120. Sincerely, S. Silver. P.S. Send me more.”

That night I took my roommates out for sirloin steaks and beer at Chumley's on Christopher Street. Eliot vowed to reciprocate the instant he got a part in a Broadway show, as did Lenny if and when an editor took a chance on his journalistic talents. Before the year was out, both promises were kept, for April found Eliot playing a palace guard in
The King and I
, and in June the
Brooklynite
paid Lenny $250 to write “The Celluloid Insurgents,” a feature about the phenomenon of “underground movies.” (He also got to keep the ancient Bell & Howell Filmosound projector with which he'd studied the 16mm curiosities in question.) But neither the Rodgers & Hammerstein roast beef nor the guerilla-cinema brisket had tasted half so succulent as the protein that accrued to my
Andromeda
triumph.

Two more sales followed apace. “Knight Takes Bishop” told of Ivan Gerasimenko, chess master of the galaxy, who relinquishes his title when bested by an alien-built computer. On his deathbed Ivan learns that the uncanny machine's program consists exclusively of his own preferred strategies and tactics, and so he passes away a happy man, realizing that he didn't lose the final tournament, for the winner was his cybernetic self. (Everyone was reading Norbert Wiener that year.) “The Pleistocene Spies” was my first attempt at political satire, the target being the persecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, currently on trial for espionage, as they'd allegedly given away the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. A primitive future society built on the ashes of a global nuclear war becomes locked in an arms race with an adjacent community. Two canny savages named Jurgus and Elthea are persecuted by the United River Tribes for supposedly passing the flint-spearhead formula to the Collectivized Mud Tribes. I thought my story quite clever, and so did Saul, but then the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair, an event that made orphans of their two sons, and suddenly “The Pleistocene Spies” didn't seem remotely amusing.

I sold one more story to Saul that year, an androids-in-revolt allegory called “Rusted Justice,” and then the rejection letters started arriving, not only from
Andromeda
but also
Astounding
,
Galaxy
,
Weird Tales
, and even
Planet Stories
. It was obvious that the three-way intersection of Uncle Wyatt's basement, my fevered cerebrum, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
would not reliably cover my share of the Bleecker Street rent. So I penned a science-fiction teleplay for children, outlined four follow-up episodes, and started pounding the midtown-Manhattan pavements, hoping that my
Andromeda
track record might land me an interview with some TV potentates.