The Engines of the Night (16 page)
Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
September 1973: What I Did Last Summer
W
HAT I DID LAST SUMMER.
I did many things last summer. I wrote three novels in the Berkley
Lone Wolf
series. I did some short stories. I did a novelization of the Lindsay Anderson film
O Lucky Man!
but it’s never going to be published, unfortunately, because Lindsay Anderson wants to do his own version with stills from the picture. Boy was I mad! Not as mad as Warner Books, though, who are out twenty-five-hundred dollars. I’m not giving it back, Jack. Those are some of the things I did last summer. I went to Saratoga with my family and lost three hundred dollars. I got a new Calais Coupe and drove it all over Bergen and Rockland counties looking for a way out. (No luck.) But the important and memorable thing I did last summer was to write a science fiction novel.
It is called
Tactics of Conquest
and Pyramid Books will publish it in January. I have already seen it in galleys; it is what they call a rush job. A copy editor called me last week to check a certain term and to ask if I had ever heard of Bobby Fischer, adding, “By the way this is a very good novel, not at all like science fiction.” Was it exciting to hear that! But of course it is
just
like science fiction. I wrote it in four days for a four-thousand-dollar advance. It is fifty-five-thousand words.
Here is how I got to write the novel: an editor named Roger Elwood got a contract with Pyramid Books to deliver twelve science fiction novels and he called on me to do one. Whew! Before I had even said yes he handed me a contract and it called for two thousand dollars right then. I didn’t even have to offer any material. Or a plot outline or synopsis or anything. Just sign the contracts in June promising to deliver the novel by August 1 because Roger Elwood needed to deliver his first book fast. I was proud. Two thousand dollars for signing your name makes you proud. But then I knew that I had to write a whole novel in less than a month by the time the two thousand dollars came into my hands and I got scared. I never write anything until the money gets into my hands. That is the smart and shrewd way to deal when you are mostly working in paperback original.
It sure is scary writing a novel on a one-month deadline. But I knew what to do. Even though it is only six and a half years since my first sale to
Galaxy
, I am an experienced science fiction writer with a lot of novels to my credit and the first thing you need is to write a novel fast, particularly in science fiction, where you can’t fill up the pages with fornication like in the other stuff, is to have something to base it
on
. It is always easier to rework something already written. For one thing it reminds you that you got the thing done once somehow and can do it again, and for another it gives you something to hang on to.
So I decided to expand a twenty-six-hundred-word short story I had written last November called “Closed Sicilian,” which I sold to
Fantasy and Science Fiction
for eighty dollars. It was a chess story describing a fool’s mate in four moves from the point of view of the fool, who is so arrogant that he doesn’t know what has happened to him, even at the end. I based the story on the world chess championship matches during the summer of 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Bobby Fischer, who beat poor Boris Spassky, struck me as being an interesting character for a short story narrator since he had no insight at the same time that he was megalomaniacal. Also I had spent all this time staring at the television where they got the moves in from Iceland one by one and had experts talking about them. I had to do something to justify all of that staring, right? Because science fiction is the only thing I know how to sell (other than mysteries and pornography and novelizations that Lindsay Anderson won’t let go through), I framed it as a science fiction story, so I had my narrator and opponent playing for the fate of the universe with the aliens as referees. I have done this kind of thing before and dealing with aliens controlling the fate of the universe gave me a warm, comfortable feeling as I sat down at the typewriter on Tuesday afternoon, August 2 or 3 it must have been. “What are you going to do now?” a neighbor had asked me a few minutes before while I was standing outside looking at the trees as if for the last time. “I’m going to write a novel in four days,” I said. “You don’t mean that,” the neighbor said and giggled. I could tell that she thought I was crazy but that didn’t bother me. Everyone here where I live who has heard that I am a science fiction writer thinks that I am crazy, except those who think I am really a criminal or dirty movie distributor. After all, none of them have ever seen my books. I mentioned the story length.
Now you may think that you would have trouble expanding a twenty-six-hundred-word story into a fifty-five-thousand-word novel. You would be right. My oh my did I pad and overload! Sentences became pages, paragraphs became chapters. Megalomania became grandiosity with lots of examples. Whole flashback chapters were devoted to his life as a chess champion: scenes in Berne and Moscow and Philadelphia, the traveling life of the chess master. Also some sex scenes, but within good taste because this is the science fiction market. It turns out that the narrator has really had a secret homosexual relationship with his opponent for years but it is said in a subtle way.
Roger Elwood, when I delivered the novel, wanted the narrator and his opponent to be the same person but I said nothing doing. I have my integrity. I did write the epilogue he wanted, though, where the world gets destroyed. For four thousand dollars you don’t get sticky. It is the biggest advance I ever got in my life.
I wrote the novel in four days filling in all of the background and details that the short story implied. I smoked many cigarettes—I know this is bad and I’ll cut down soon—and drank ten ounces of scotch a day, five before lunch and five before dinner. Also beer. It helped me not to vomit when I ate and did I eat! When I finished the novel, it was late Friday; I said to myself, you’ve worked four days and made four thousand dollars. That is smart. That is good. Who makes a thousand dollars a day in Bergen County? Not even shrinks or crime bosses make a thousand a day. At least, not consistently.
I was so proud. I had shown the world what a fine writer I was and Roger Elwood and Pyramid Books how quick. I knew they would appreciate it. I mailed the novel to Roger and he called me and said he liked it so much he would like me to do
another
Pyramid novel. So now I am thinking of what I can do. I think I will expand my story “A Galaxy Called Rome,” which I also wrote last summer. I can fill in on that too, and this story is nine thousand words, not twenty-six hundred, which makes it easier to bloat. Roger only wants to pay me thirty-five-hundred dollars for this one though because
Tactics of Conquest
and the new program at Pyramid have to prove themselves in the market. I think I’ll take it. That is still almost nine hundred dollars a day and who in Bergen County is making nine hundred dollars a day? I am smart and shrewd and doing better than almost any thirty-four-year-old in Bergen County. That is what I did last summer and what I will do this fall, and
next
summer too until I make so much money that I can stop doing all of this and really enjoy my life. I know that I will enjoy my life once I can relax but first I have to do this “Galaxy Called Rome” thing, and then I will get back to the
Lone Wolf
stuff. I am going to end this composition now because I am very tired and you only asked for fourteen hundred words on what I did last summer and here they are and I hope my fourteen-dollar check will be payable on receipt because I really need the money. I really do. I always will. I’ll make sure of it.
1980: New Jersey
The Cutting Edge
E
VERYONE PLAYS WITH TEN-BEST LISTS;
science fictioneers are no exception,
32
but here is a modest proposal: the ten best science fiction stories of all time. Whether it is possible to define a ten (or even a hundred) “best” is arguable; the qualifications and criteria of the compiler are pressed every step of the way but that the job should be done for the short story too is
non disputandum
.
Science fiction, at the cutting edge, has always flourished in the short story. Perhaps the genre by definition will sustain its best work in that form; here a speculative premise and a protagonist upon whose life that premise is brought to bear can be dramatically fused with intensity. Novels tend to be episodic or bloated; even novellas tend to say too much or too little, but the short story—traditionally defined as a work of prose fiction of less than fifteen thousand words—has from the outset comprised as a body most of the best work in this field. While science fiction in its modern inception has produced possibly ten novels that might be called masterpieces, it has given no less than several hundred short stories that would justify that difficult and presumptuous label. Henry James defined the short story as in its purest state being about one person and one thing and it is within that compass that science fiction achieves rigor and its proper form. (It should be noted that almost all of the disputed masterpieces that would appear on most of the ten-best-novel lists were expanded or assembled from short stories . . . Budrys’s
Rogue Moon
, Miller’s
Canticle for Leibowitz
, Sturgeon’s
More Than Human
, for instance. Although one is dangerously surmising author intention, it would be a fair guess that these were originally conceived as short stories and only worked
obiter dicta
into novels, lending further justification to the view of science fiction as a short story form.)
Too, it is in America in the twentieth century that the short story has reached its apotheosis; our one great contribution to world culture might be the American short story, which has become a wondrous and sophisticated medium. The confluence of the American short story and that uniquely American form modern science fiction would result in a ten-best list with which anyone would reckon.
Herewith this list with the usual qualifications and cautions: The stories themselves are not ranked in order of descending merit (it is foolish enough to find a top ten without going on to arrange them) ; the judgment is based upon literary excellence (seminal stories such as Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” as influences upon the genre have had far greater effect than most of the stories on this list, but the work is being judged
sui generis
) and, of course, as a single informed opinion it is liable to provoke challenge and dispute, not least of all from the list-maker himself, who a year or two from now might want to change three quarters of it . . . or ten years from now might agree that work yet to be written has displaced several of these stories. Whether or not our
best
work is ahead of us, a lot of good work is still ahead:
1) “Vintage Season,” by C. L. Moore (
Astounding Science Fiction
, 1946). Published as by “Lawrence O’Donnell,” the second most important (after “Lewis Padgett”) of the Kuttners’ pseudonyms, this story is now known to have been one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone. The vision of future cultural decadence imposed (through time-traveling researchers who specialize in attending plagues, torment, and disasters of history) upon an earlier (undefined) period that in its own decadence
foreshadows
this version of the future, its languorous pace, concealed but artful, and manipulated erotic subtext and stylistic control probably distinguish it as the single best short story to emerge from the decade. It has been rewritten endlessly and has directly influenced hundreds of short stories and at least two dozen novels, but none of its descendants have improved upon the basic text. Its only flaw—as Damon Knight pointed out twenty years ago—is a denouement that carries on too long between the revelation and the flat, deadly last line; it is bathetic and overextended and for the sake of good form should have been severely cut. It is not a serious flaw because it enables the reader only to marvel at the spareness of this eighteen-thousand-word story to that point; it has the density and emotional impact of a novel.
2) “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever,” by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) (
Final Stage
, 1974). The judge must plead his own problem at the outset and throw himself on the mercy of a higher court: I commissioned this story for an original anthology co-edited with Edward L. Ferman and published it first.
Final Stage
was a written-to-order anthology in which various writers were asked to write a story on one of the great themes of science fiction, Tiptree (Sheldon) was asked for an End of the World story and delivered one of the very few masterpieces that did not originate with the writer. (Editorial involvement or the assignment of theme often results in good stories and sometimes improves good stories to better-than-good, but masterpieces almost necessarily have to self-generate and will themselves through.)
This postapocalypse story in which the end of the world becomes a metaphor for the shocks and injuries of existence which prefigure and replicate death (and make the state of death their eternal reenactment) is almost unknown today; it appears only in the out-of-print
Final Stage
in hardcover and paperback and an out-of-print Tiptree collection,
Star Songs of an Old Primate
. It will reward the most careful study, and Tiptree’s afterword to the story—also commissioned, as were all of the afterwords in the collection—is a brief but beautifully written essay on the real meaning of science fiction on whose ideas I have based the title essay of this book.
3) “Particle Theory,” by Edward Bryant (
Analog
, 1977). The protagonist, a physicist, is dying of cancer, his emotional life is in decay and the astronomical phenomena which he observes clearly foreshadow the end of the world . . . all three levels of destruction here fuse, echo one another, are bound together in a story of astonishing excellence which fully meets the criteria of a great science fiction story: its science and scientific premise are locked into the text and grant the emotional force; without the scientific element the story would collapse, yet it is this speculation’s shift into individual pain and consequence which clarify it scientifically. The seventies were science fiction’s richest decade in the short story; although more good stories were published in the fifties, the top 1 or 2 percent of the latter decade’s output far exceeded the equivalent top percent of the fifties, and in this decade Bryant’s story might have been the best.
4) “The Terminal Beach,” by J. G. Ballard (
New Worlds
, 1965). Rejected by every American market of its time as eventless, internalized, and depressing, this mysterious and beautiful work was the key story of its decade, the pivot for science fiction; its importance lay not only in its depiction of “inner space,” the complex and tormented vistas of the human spirit in the post-technological age, but in its use of science fiction technique to convert its ambiguous landscape, and by implication our century, to “science fiction.”
5) “Private Eye,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (
Astounding Science Fiction
, 1949). A puzzle story, a futuristic mystery (how can the protagonist make a premeditated murder look accidental when the forensic pathologists and the prosecution have time-scanning devices that can follow him from birth and put him on stage all the time?) that in its horrid denouement indicates exactly where the Kuttners thought the paraphernalia and technological wonders of the future would take us and why; cleanly written, paced to within an inch of its life, and although still anthologized, it is nonetheless always underrated as the masterpiece that it is.
6) “Sundance,” by Robert Silverberg (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1969). A complex, multiply voiced, shifting point of view (employing among other technical devices, second-person narration for a time), the story would have been self-conscious, a display of virtuosity for its own sake, were it not for the pain of the American Indian protagonist attached to a genocidal mission and the clarity of its plot development, which not only justify but incorporate all of the stylistic trickeries and make them implicit in the theme. It is the most brilliant of many Silverberg excellences in the short story form between 1968 and 1975, and in its subtle fashion is one of the most powerful anti-Vietnam, antiwar stories of the period.
7) “Anachron,” by Damon Knight (
Worlds of If
, 1954). A story which, because it did not sell the top magazines of the period, fell into obscurity, although it does appear in the recent
The Best of Damon Knight
. A time-paradox story of the most elegant construction, it sets up and explodes its desperate conclusion with a remorselessness and rigor characteristic of the very best of the
Galaxy
school of science fiction, of which Knight in turn was the best and most rigorous example. Naturally Horace Gold rejected it, but “Anachron” was only one of many distinguished stories published by James Quinn in
Worlds of If
. Quinn was an editor who—by the standards of science fiction perhaps rather foolishly—asked first that a story be literate and readable and only second that it be suited for the nebulous “science fiction audience.”
8) “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” by Alfred Bester (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1954). Bester is best known for his two fifties novels which appeared first in
Galaxy
,
The Demolished Man
(1952) and
The Stars My Destination
(1956), but in that period he published no more than a dozen stories in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
which are generally thought to be the finest and most consistently brilliant body of shorter work by any writer in the history of the form; here is Bester using the device of the time paradox to destroy the time paradox and some of the shibboleths of science fiction itself (“
you
are your past . . . each of us lives alone and returns alone”); the many-voiced, restless, surgically probing style is beyond the level of the best “literary” writers of Bester’s time. (It was the late nineteen-sixties before the so-called mainstream in the persons of Robert Coover, a latter-day Norman Mailer, Donald Barthelme, Robert Stone caught up to Bester by finally evolving a style which crystallized the fragmented, tormented, transected voices of the age.)
9) “Fondly Fahrenheit,” by Alfred Bester (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1954). Silverberg has called this perhaps the single finest short story ever to come from science fiction; it may be. It certainly is, with due respect to “Sundance” (which was written a full decade and a half later!), the most technically brilliant: an alternating first and third person, a maddened protagonist and the crazed robot who has become his alter ego and
doppelganger
, perfect demented control and a trapdoor ending. There has been nothing like this story in modern American literature; that it was published over a quarter of a century ago and is still unknown outside of science fiction is an indictment of the academic-literary nexus, which in the very long run, if there is any future for scholarship at all, will pay heavily.
10) “E for Effort,” by T. L. Sherred (
Astounding Science Fiction
, 1947). A. J. Budrys writes that Campbell published Sherred’s first story on its astonishing merit, spent the next ten years thinking about it and decided that he didn’t like what it really meant at all. A viewer which enables its possessor to see anyone at any time in history, once seized (as it would inevitably be) by the government, will be so obviously dangerous to all other governments that war will be started as soon as the word gets out; technology in its purest form will always be appropriated for the purposes of destruction. Sherred has published only a scattering of short stories and a forgotten novel (
Alien Island
, 1968) over succeeding decades; his reputation on the basis of this story remains as secure as that of any writer in the history of the genre.
The second ten, all close runners up to be sure, are listed again in no order and with the understanding that any or all could be traded in for any or all of the top ten:
“Baby Is Three,” by Theodore Sturgeon (
Galaxy
, 1952); “Live at Berchtesgarden,” by George Alec Effinger (
Orbit
, 1970); “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To,” by Alfred Bester (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1961); “The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs,” by Carter Scholz (
Universe
, 1977); “The Eve of the Last Apollo,” by Carter Scholz (
Orbit
, 1977); “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” by James Tiptree, Jr. (
New Dimensions
, 1976); “The Children’s Hour,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (
Astounding
, 1944); “Timetipping,” by Jack M. Dann (
Epoch
, 1975); “The Big Flash,” by Norman Spinrad (
Orbit
, 1969); and “Party of the Two Parts,” by William Tenn (Philip Klass) (
Galaxy
, 1955).
1980: New Jersey