A Bit More on a Frequent Subject

[Originally posted to my newsgroup, July 26, 2007]

I've been ruminating about that sub-genre of stories that I'm such a pest about: stories that use fantasy tropes as part of a real world story involving characters having fantasies.

If I were doing, say, an academic thesis, a course syllabus, or an academically oriented collection of stories on this theme, one thing I'd be doing is to try to trace back the origins of the form. But there it gets tricky. One can, for example, read many Bible stories that way, with the result that, for example, the story of Abraham and Isaac gets very creepy. Kierkegaard, got a whole book, Fear and Trembling, out of that one.

Alternately, many folk tales, myths, legends, etc. are examples of "magical realism," where miraculous and magical things take place and the characters accept them as real and realistic, albeit perhaps a bit extraordinary. By contrast, people having fantasies is very ordinary, and those fantasies affect their behavior, in ways ordinary and extraordinary.

The first short story that I can find where a character's fantasies dominate the narrative is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." That's typical, since Poe did almost everything first.

This sort of storytelling is quite common in cinema, so common nowadayds that it barely registers when we are given glimpses of a character's internal landscape. One can easily trace such conventions back at least to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which takes place almost entirely in the mind of a madman, with the audience not privy to that fact until near the end of the film.

By contrast, we're told at the outset of Don Quixote that the poor fellow is crazed, and we are seldom shown more than a glimpse of how the world looks to him. Come to think of it, that might make a good story.

In "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the fantasies rarely have an effect on the character's external actions, save for the implication that his inner landscape is either an escape from his drably normal life�or the cause of it. In "That's What Happened to Me," by Whitt Burnett, the very grandiosity of the events described tell us how sad the life of the narrator really is. In The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, the last chapter is set in the character's fantasy world, a world now so bizarre and changed that the reader can only guess at the final circumstances of J. Henry Waugh.

But notice the jump of centuries between Quixote on the one hand, and Caligari and Mitty on the other. What exists in between? One very trite example is the "it was only a dream" stories, elevated only if the dreams are of high enough quality (Alice's Wonderland, Little Nemo's Slumberland), and we don't really see the exterior world sufficiently to judge the effects of the fantasies. By contrast, Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" is rife with repercussions.

A more difficult trick is to write a story where both the fantastic and the mundane interpretations are equally valid. The tour de force of this is Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm, or maybe that's just my interpretation. All other reviews I've ever seen of the book (and Lindholm's own comments on it) indicate that readers generally believe that the fantasy dominates and that the "mundane" sections are simply magical attacks (of some sort) on The Wizard. Still, one reads the books one reads, and not the ones that others read.

Rand Contra Bush – I

The "rule of three" for celebrity deaths is, of course, a bogus concept, created in part by the expectations generated by the "rule of three." Two celebrities die close together, and everyone is waiting for the third. Nevertheless, we play the game anyway, like trying to see cloud castles, or making up a story about the pictures shown by a psychiatrist.

I was talking to Dick Lupoff in early 1982, when he pointed out a recent trio of celebrity deaths that seemed somehow intriguing:

Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917-February 17, 1982)
Ayn Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982)
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982)

Later, I had an idea, one of those whimsical notions that I'm pretty sure I'll never get around to doing, about doing a sort of one act play, with the three of them sitting around in the waiting room for the afterlife. Monk, of course, would simply be playing piano, but Ayn Rand and Phil Dick would get into a heated discussion about the nature of reality and other philosophical notions. Rand would be having difficulty with the idea of an afterlife in the first place; she was a pretty militant atheist. But then again, there she'd be. Perhaps she would be arguing that she was hallucinating, with Dick perhaps agreeing, but insisting that it was a shared hallucination of some sort, since he'd be relatively certain of his own existence. Relatively.

Rand would also be playing Scrabble, as she was addicted to it later in life. I never figured out what sort of nasty tricks the game would be playing on her, but I know that it would be doing something to mess with her head. On the other hand, for parity's sake, there should be something messing with Dick, but I never got a handle on that one.

Finally, after a lot of philosophical jibber jabber, with Rand arguing for extreme rationalism and P. K. Dick arguing that mysticism at least has a place in the grand scheme of things, Thelonious Monk would stop playing, turn to them, and whisper, "They're ready for us now," and lead them through the door. That would be the heavy hand of the author noting that music is more in tune with the universe than is philosophy and the arguments therein.

In order to even imagine writing such a work, I'd have to try to get inside the heads of both Ayn Rand and Philip K. Dick, as task that I hubristically imagine myself capable of doing, given that both have vast troves of writings to draw from and I'm a pretty sharp guy. The entire project would require a great deal of effort, though, and I'm also a pretty lazy guy, so for now I'll just settle for thinking about it every now and then.

As for the "getting inside the head of Ayn Rand," I will note that the biggest difficulty is figuring out where she'd depart from rationality and slide seamlessly into rationalization. Still, there were some pretty obvious basic prejudices in her life and works, and those would be the starting points.

She would, for example, have hated George W. Bush with a righteous passion, and despised everything about him and what he stands for. But I'll leave that little analysis for the next time I visit the subject.

[The title of this essay is taken from "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," wherein Friedrich explains just why he broke with Richard Wagner, and how Wagner's philosophy of life offended him. Rand, of course, never knew George W. Bush, but many people who have been, at one time or another, enamored with Rand, are now Movement Conservatives, a philosophy that Rand always despised. It's worth asking how this strange state of affairs came about.]

Linwood

Linwood Vrooman Carter, aka Lin Carter, was a complicated man paradoxically composed of many simple, albeit sometimes ill-fitting elements. This is often the result of self-invention, and Lin was nothing if not self-invented.

Aside from his own flair for the dramatic and self-promotional extravagance, Lin’s greatest component was that of scholar, reader, and fan of fantastic literature, which included science fiction. That was what I found most attractive about him: the breadth and depth of his knowledge and appreciation for the history and literature of fantasy. He was also a natural storyteller, and more than once I read a work of fantasy that he’d described and summarized, only to be mildly disappointed in the actual work, since Lin’s summation had caught the essence of it and had improved on the presentation.

After he dropped out of advertising (yes, advertising) to become a full time writer, he made a good living for quite a while churning out pastiches of the popular “classics” of fantasy: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Kenneth Robeson. In the literary sense, he was least successful with Dunsany and Smith, both brilliant prose stylists, which Lin was certainly not. He was most successful, again in the literary sense (and this would be my own, probably idiosyncratic opinion), with his series featuring Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, which managed to be both a pastiche and parody of Doc Savage, a finely walked line that required a near perfect tone. Commercially, I’m sure that the Burroughs and Howard pastiches were most successful; Lin caught the Conan wave at exactly the right time, and that humorless barbarian was easy to clone (the Thongor series) and money in the bank.

I’ll also mention one final attribute of Carter as a writer of fiction, one that was usually given short shrift, owing to the pastiche nature of most of his work: Lin could write humor. The only works where this really shines are in his two Thief of Thoth books (one of which contains one of my favorite bullshit lines of all time: “In n-space you don’t go any faster, you just cover more distance in less time.”) and the Almaric the Mangod story in the Flashing Swords #1. The latter contains the not unreasonable notion that an immortal adventurer must be rather dim in order to not go insane from the memories that accompany extreme age.

Lin’s first significant book of scholarship, Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings also came at an opportune time, and it and others paved the way for Lin to become the editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Lin knew that it was only a matter of time before the Tolkien clones arrived, but rather than himself leading that charge, he took advantage of a window of opportunity to republish the classics of fantasy. If he managed to only bring Cabell and Dunsany back into print his contribution would have been enormous; that he managed to reprint practically every major and minor work of classic fantasy is an achievement so magnificent as to deserve secular sainthood.

Lin was one of the first science fiction and fantasy celebrities that I came to know well, another being Barry Malzberg a combination for which I must credit two members of the Albany Science Fiction Fan Federation (more or less originating at SUNY Albany), John Howard and Ben Sano. Ben was/is a Cabell and Dunsany fan, and Johnny would quote Malzberg’s writings back at him (Note to would be social climbing fans: writers love this. It’s almost as good as being young, attractive, and of the opposite sex).

As an aside, I’ll note that, owing the strange discovery of having mutual fans, Carter and Malzberg became friends, even at one point discussing a collaborative project of mutual interest, pornographic in nature. Go ponder what that would have looked like.

The Albany group, which Lin referred to as “The Albanians,” was an exemplar of fan behavior generally. At one party at Lin’s the toilet was malfunctioning, the handle mechanism having previously broken. Toward the end of the party, Lin confided to me, “Most of the fans I’ve had over here would have made jokes about it or just complained. You folks taught each other how to move the lid and use the coat hanger to reach the chain and flush it.” A little while later, he discovered that one of us had just fixed the mechanism.

His home at its zenith was a collector’s dream, not just for the books and artwork, but also the antique collectables such as the Japanese temple dagger, and the Enzenbacher sculptures. A good fraction of that left when Noel, his second wife, left him, but even after that, “Carter Manse,” was filled with interesting oddities which, of course, included the proprietor, his dog, the Mighty McGurk and sundry other pets, including a goldfish/carp that liked to gum fingers.

Lin tended to live extravagantly, as befitting his self-created persona, and when his luck turned, his extravagances did not serve him well. Similarly, his years of self-promotion had stepped on a toe or two (or twenty), and as money tightened, substantial portions of his collector’s paradise were liquidated, a sad end to yet another artistic vision. His precarious finances also had a hand in the complicated ending of the Gandalf Award, which I have written about elsewhere.

I saw him only a few brief times in his final years; Ben and other members of the Albany crew saw him a bit more often. I have heard from some who say that he became more irascible and impolite toward the end, as might be expected from someone disfigured by surgery and in constant pain, but I’ve not heard from any in the Albany group who ever found him to be anything but courtly and polite. I can’t speak for the others, of course, but I considered him to be a friend, and I believe it was reciprocal.

Lin died in 1988, of cancer of the mouth and throat, almost certainly caused by a lifetime of artful smoking, at the age of 57. This essay is in the nature of a memoir and a belated eulogy. My real tribute to Lin may be found here, and in my story “The Emperor of Dreams.” Godspeed, Lin, wherever that may take you.

Imagination

In 1784, a special Royal Commission of the King of France conducted a series of tests to determine the therapeutic utility of the use of “animal magnetism” also called “Mesmerism” on human health. The study itself is generally credited as being the first placebo controlled blind clinical trials. The Commissioners concluded that Mesmer's animal magnetism had no existence and that imagination, imitation, and touch were the true causes of the observed effects in the Mesmeric salon.

One of Mesmer's students, Armand Puysegur, later transformed Mesmer's ideas into what we now know as hypnotism. The reasons for the effects of hypnotism continue to be debated today, with some still holding the entire matter to be the effect of imagination and imitation.

Imagination is powerful stuff; I’ve noted before the insidious judgmentalism of the phrase “mere imagination.” Imagination is seldom “mere,” but it’s often misunderstood.

It’s also easy to overestimate the power of imagination, or even its nature. One gets all sorts of fallacious arguments in philosophy and political science that begin something like “I can imagine…” Imagine, for example, a zombie that behaves exactly like a real human being, but who lacks self-awareness and self-consciousness. That’s a real thought experiment that I’ve seen proposed. The problem is that I can’t imagine such a thing, and I don’t believe anyone else can, either. I can, however, imagine someone imagining that they imagine such a thing.

Imagination has all sorts of powers—in our imagination. But pinning down those imaginings, that’s something else again. Making imagination real, even as real as a work of fiction, that can involve some heavy lifting.

Moreover, most of our imaginings are second-hand or worse, composed of bits and pieces of pop culture images, forgotten memories, things we’ve seen or read, fairy tales told to us when we were young, and the sea spray of foam that has bubbled up from the id. Imagination rarely gives us a new primitive; try imagining a new emotion, or a new color, texture, or smell. I’ve described such things, or at least written words about such things, but I’d hate to be the movie art director given that charge.

Still, imagination is based on experience and that includes both real-world experience and the experience of being exposed to the imagination of others. A writer’s first attempts at fiction are almost invariably directly influenced by someone else’s fiction, usually a single someone else’s fiction. It’s only as we gain more experience that we learn to avoid flagrant copying by stealing from several sources. When we finally learn to steal from real life and make it sound as good as fiction, ah, then there’s progress.

There are those rare cases that seem almost sui generis. That narrative seems most often to follow the arc of the lonely child (though in the case of the Pangborn’s it was the lonely children), who begins to create an entire fantasy realm, a life-long work that consumes all life experience that is fed to it. The strange world of Henry Darger is one such example. Nearer to home is Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith, whose Instrumentality stories took decades to tell.

Of course the “lonely child retreating into fantasy” is the story of many lives, most especially including science fiction and fantasy fans. There are, I think, few among us who do not attempt to create our own original works, but the task of writing fiction requires much more than imagination itself, just as the work of being a professional writer of fiction depends less on the quality of the fiction itself and more on perseverance and self-promotion. But that just says that, like everything else in modern life, success is primarily dependant on marketing.

I suspect that the popularity of role-playing games has a great deal to do with lowering the imaginative barriers-to-entry. It’s a lot easier to play a round of World of Warcraft than it is to write your own fantasy trilogy, or even a short story. Whether this adds up to a net plus or minus in the imagination department is an argument similar to whether television’s destruction of the radio play did a disservice to imagination. Eventually somebody gets to longing for the days of the bards, no matter what I happen to think.

But this is all rumination on the high side of imagination; I think it’s safe to say that anyone reading me is likely to have an above average fantasy life, just because of who reads this stuff and how they get here. But there is always another tail of any distribution.

In The Racist Mind, Raphael S. Ezekiel describes his ethnographic study of neo-Nazis and Klansmen in the late 80s and early 90s. He got to know a number of his subjects very well, a tribute to Ezekiel’s dedication to the anthropological approach to his work. He describes the “mental landscapes” of those he got to know as severely limited. Most of them were of low ambition and expectation, and had trouble conceiving of themselves in better circumstances. This echoes a review by SF Chronicle movie critic Mick Lasalle on “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” the film debut of rapper 50 Cent:

“[T]he movie adopts no distance or irony, and has no point of view about life in the 'hood except Marcus' own. That perspective is limited. At one point, Marcus drives home in a new Mercedes he bought from dealing crack, as 50 comments in voiceover, "I had it all, but something was missing." He had it all? What did he have? He had no career, no purpose, no family, no education, no morality. He had a car.”

Stunted imaginations come from the same source as stunted bodies: the impoverishment of circumstances. We know a lot about physical nutrition, but we know little about what nutrients the imagination needs. It’s easy to imagine how a brutalized childhood can fill a child’s imagination with images of brutality, images that most children will try to shut down and deny. Their interior landscape becomes a desert, and only a rare few walk out of the desert with a higher calling.

But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that brutality is limited to the physical and that impoverishment of the spirit is synonymous with monetary poverty. There are wealthy people who are as sick and twisted as any crack baby’s mother, and there are plenty of ways to brutalize that leave no marks.

So a sturdy few find themselves despite the aridity of their surroundings. Others make for the thin crack of light offered by the narratives available to them; they escape by talent, luck, and a tenacious grip on opportunity. The rest are easy prey for those selling soma, pleasant dreams, or at least a respite from the nightmares. They will follow other people’s dreams, substitute others’ wills for their own. I think that this is an important root of authoritarianism in our time, with those of stunted soul following the vampires that feed on them.

An overly poetic image perhaps, but then, I was lucky. My mother read to me when I was very young.

As Beauty Does

Turning to short stories, James Killus' "As Beauty Does" is essentially a 1930s story in 90s guise. A mad scientist, er, a physicist, invents a serum, er, builds an accelerator, that can never be duplicated and that is blown up at the end anyway. In this case, the accelerator emits "aestheton" particles that makes ugly things appear beautiful. A seriously ugly female grad student turns the beam on herself. Killus tries for tragicomic commentary on beauty in today's society, but the uneasy mixture never gels.--Steve Carper’s Tangent Reviews

The phonon is a particle used in quantum mechanics to describe the propagation of sound in a crystal matrix. It’s not a “real” particle, in the sense of having an existence independent of the crystal, but it’s real in the sense that it describes a property of the medium and can be analyzed by the same kind of equations that are used on particles having independent existence.

J. B. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind was published in 1937, and it set off a wave of ESP stories in science fiction. The first of Kuttner and Moore’s “Baldy” stories appeared in 1945, for example. Of course, telepathy, clairvoyance, and related subjects had existed in fantastic literature probably as long as fantastic literature has existed, but Rhine put a newly scientific sheen on the subject, regardless of the criticisms that Rhine received from the scientific (and especially the statistical) community.

John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, later renamed as Analog, fell in love with ESP, and renamed it Psi in the mid-fifties, introducing such novelties as the Hieronymous machine, a device that supposedly worked just as well when its innards were replaced by schematics, an entirely believable claim for something that did basically nothing.

By the late fifties, the Psi stories were coming thick and fast, not just in Astounding, but in the other magazines that, pretty much of necessity, found that many submissions were Campbell’s rejects. There were also the “reply stories,” stories that were written as part of the ongoing intellectual dialog in SF. The one that I always think of here is Ted Cogswell’s “Limiting Factor,” which observed that, even if ESP and Psi existed, they would still have biological limitations, whereas machines have no such limits and will therefore always eventually win a competion.

The view that human consciousness is somehow related to basic physics is resilient and perennial, especially among physicists and anyone else who has internalized the modern scientific status hierarchy, which places particle physics at the reductionistic apex. I believe the unconscious syllogism goes:

• Particle physics is the most important knowledge
• My consciousness is the most important phenomenon
• Therefore my consciousness must be a product of particle physics

Some physicists/amateur philosophers use quantum mechanics instead of particle physics, which amounts to the same argument, but does add “mysterious” to “important” in the argument. Besides, particle physics and quantum physics are inextricably linked.

All of which is to say that my story “As Beauty Does” is actually a fifties retro reply story, not a thirties retro story. If consciousness is based on quantum particle physics, then aspects of consciousness, what we perceive as goodness, courage, faith, hope, and, yes, beauty, should have pseudo-particles associated with them, just as the phonon exists in a crystal lattice.

My original version of the story was a downer. After it bounced a couple of times, I remembered that John Campbell always wanted Astounding stories to have solutions. It wasn’t enough to set up the problem, you had to solve it, according to Campbell. So I wrote a version that used a trick (stimulated emission, in fact) to purge poor Marge of her aestheton charge and save the day.

That version bounced a few times also. Then, when I sent it to A. J. Budrys, he sent a response letter suggesting some changes that I realized was actually a request for the original version of the story. I sent it to him and he bought it for Tomorrow SF.

I don’t consider it a “tragicomic commentary on beauty” because I don’t actually find anything funny about it.

My friend and fellow writer Dave Smeds read the original story soon after it was written and found the “beauty vampire” aspect of it sufficiently interesting that he requested my permission to write a fantasy story based on the idea. That became “The Flower that Does Not Wither,” which appeared in Sword and Sorceress IX and got an Honorable Mention in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror,1993. It can be found, for a fee ($0.75), on Fictionwise.

But here at Crazy Jim’s we just give them away.

Because I like you guys so much.

The Heat Death of Science Fiction

I haven't yet read all the stories in Helix #6, nor even properly digested the ones I have read, but I'm going to go on a bit about John Barnes' essay, "Reading for the Undead." In it, Barnes suggests that genres tend to last about 70 years, vaguely about three generations, and he describes the dynamics of the origin, development, and final flowering of a genre, until it becomes, in his phrasing "undead," a fixture on the cultural landscape that still moves from time to time, but which isn't growing, breaking new ground, or even becoming more artistically interesting, because all the tropes have been explored and exploited, to become merely familiar.

The "70 year lifetime of a genre" caught my attention right away, because my friend Dave Stout has been saying that for quite a while, and he derived the time span from pondering the history "picaresque novel," which had a lifespan of about 70 years. So we've been talking from time to time about the nature of genre lifespans for quite a while around our house.

I myself tend to use more of a combustion metaphor, with a genre beginning from kindling, moving to tender, then burning up most of the available fuel. So my word for the phenomenon that Barnes describes as "undead" is "banked." That's less provocative, but then, Barnes has more reason (and greater stature) to be provocative than I do.

But there are exceptions that test the rule ("test" being the original meaning of "prove"), and it's instructive to look at a few of them.

The "puzzle" form of the detective story, discounting Poe, can be dated from Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes had a number of well-know imitators. Eventually, many of the tropes became codified in the "drawing room mystery," where all the suspects eventually wind up in the drawing room and the Great Detective explains to one and all whodunit. A period of 70 years from 1887, and the 70 year rule would place its death somewhere around 1960. Agatha Christie was still wringing the last few drops out of the handkerchief at that time, but it's true that the drawing room mystery was largely a banked fire—at least in its literary incarnation.

But as a pop culture artifact, we had yet to see Columbo, MacMillan and Wife, Murder, She Wrote, and Monk, to say nothing of the other various lesser cop shows, detective shows, etc.

Literary snark would now claim that this is further proof, not just of Barnes' concept, but of his terminology. What can be a better indication of "undead" than TV Zombieland? Moreover movie and TV tie-in books will tend to crowd out any valid attempts to revive the literary genre, something that has indeed occurred in science fiction, where Star Trek and Star Wars novels routinely outsell the "serious stuff."

Something very similar happened to the Western. Born in the Dime Novel era, circa 1875, the climax practitioner, Zane Grey, died in 1939. But 1950s television was dominated by Westerns, just as motion pictures had been dominated by the genre just a few years before. Then, practically in a puff of smoke, the genre evaporated, almost vanishing from pop culture entirely (Heaven's Gate certainly helped remove it from the motion picture landscape), leaving only Louis L'Amour to tend to the embers, and the occasional Silverado homage, and Rustler's Rhapsody spoof to hold the motion picture fort.

But notice that I wrote "puzzle form" of the detective story up above. The drawing room mystery was still going strong when the "hard-boiled detective" came on the scene, and while a Black Mask story might very well feature a puzzle mystery, and even, occasionally a gather-all-the-suspects-into-a-room scene, those were not the dominating tropes. For hard-boiled detectives, it was the action, the social commentary, the atmosphere, and a different blend of characters than you find in the drawing room,

Then hard-boiled got even darker, tougher, and noir came along, a bank shot off of motion pictures, where B movies were cranked out of the studios aging black and white units, quickly written, even more quickly filmed, and verging on experimental in their art direction. Cue the cigarettes, the gunfire, and black, black blood. On the literary side, the original paperback novel was invented, and suddenly Mickey Spillane was the best selling novelist in the English language.

In the 1960s, the spy novel broke out of its genre and became a fad, and anyone who missed the connection between hard-boiled noir and the nihilistic secret agent was simply not paying attention (Spillane paid attention; he began writing spy novels). The fad finally culminated in parodies of spoofs of satires, like Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. A plethora of parodies is often the signal of the end of a fad; genres tend to go less willingly.

The spy novel is usually considered to have originated in the early 20th Century. By the 70 year rule, the spy fad of the 1960s was its swan song. But the Cold War was still in operation, and the spy novel refused to bank down. It also gave rise to the "techno-thriller" which often used spy novel tropes.

Back at the detective novel, after noir came the procedural, whose origin is usually dated from the post-WWII period, i.e. a similar time frame to noir. The 70 year rule would suggest that we are now seeing the final flowering of both, unless noir is just a refinement of hard-boiled, in which case it's dead already. That would mean that I'm hauling two dead genres with Dark Underbelly.

So now let's consider a sci-fi subgenre: superheroes.

The superhero comic has dominated that field for quite a while, being the almost the sole reason for comics to exist as a medium for a considerable period, say from 1960 to 1990, barring the brief explosion of the Undergrounds. Moreover, Odd John and Gladiator notwithstanding, the superhero originated as much in comics as in science fiction, with Superman and Slan being approximately contemporaneous, 1938 and 1940, respectively. Intriguingly, Superman's creators, Siegel and Schuster wrote a fanzine story in the early 1930's, entitled "The Coming of the Superman," featuring a Slan-like (telepathic mind control) character.

The 70 year rule would suggest that superheroes are nearing the end of their run, which may be true, given the ongoing colonization of television and motion pictures by the genre. But notice that the superhero genre began as a sub-genre of science fiction. SF conventions used to be where comics fans could meet; now Comicon attendees vastly outnumber Worldcon attendees. Moreover, gamers are the real growth demographic.

But let's not forget the external dynamics here. Comic books are a natural precursor to motion pictures and television because of basic mechanics: a comic book is substantially like a story board. By contrast, novels are dreadful movie precursors, because a novel is much too long a form to translate to the screen. The amount of story in an average movie is approximated by a novella. Even given that most novels these days are at least 50% padding, there is still a mismatch. By contrast, game-based movies tend to be heavy on the glitz of special effects and martial arts choreography, but the stories tend to suck.

The short story itself had an economic lifetime of close to genre length (by "economic lifetime," I mean that the time given to writing a short story paid its own way, so that it was actually possible to make a living as a writer of short stories). But the short story flowered because a combination of the pulp magazine (the low end, with a low sales price) and the mass circulation magazine (the high end, with a heavy advertising base). Both markets sputtered and largely died in the 1950s, owing to external forces (television sucking away the mass advertising dollar and the death of the pulp magazine distribution network). The short story form is hardly dead, or even undead, but it's no longer a paying proposition. If the venues came back, there would be plenty of both readers and writers, but lack of venues is due to a different market dynamic than a loss of readership.

All of this may seem a bit far a field from science fiction as such, but it's worth noting, as a friend of mine recently said, that the "science fiction" section of his local bookstore is still growing. Part of that may be simple book bloat, but I rather suspect that it's because other genres are encroaching. Epic fantasy was revived after decades of ember tending by writers like Fritz Leiber and Henry Kuttner, but The Lord of the Rings and the Frazetta Conan put it back on the shelves and fired up the genre. Can we count on 70 years of elves and magic starting from 1965? If not, then who originates, Howard or Lord Dunsany?

Similarly, vampires, werewolves, urban and gothic horror, all seem to be churning right along, yet there was a time when such stories had to masquerade as science fiction to find an audience. Now it's often the other way around.

What we may in fact be witnessing is the great hybridization of fiction. Something similar has been underway in music; it's not uncommon to hear a fugue riff in a hip-hop number, or a salsa variation of a hot jazz piece. Similarly, most literary fiction now has a pop culture awareness, so a showdown with ray guns becomes just another bit of wallpaper.

A genre is a literary form where the willing suspension of disbelief is aided by an appeal to the conventions and tropes of the genre itself. When categories break down, the number of unacceptable things declines, while at the same time, the opportunities for theft, er, I mean, "influences" or "homage" or "pastiche" increase. Ultimately the real question is the same as it always was.

"How can I make money off of this?" –Jim Turner, "The Brain that Wouldn't Go Away"

Helix is at:

http://www.helixsf.com/index.htm

Be nice. Toss some money in the tip jar.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom by the sea, the Emperor decided to buy a new wardrobe for the annual procession.

It may seem odd that the Kingdom had an Emperor, but his father had been ruler of a small Kingdom, and his mother the ruler of another small Kingdom, each claiming one of two valleys nestled between the mountains and the sea. When the two kingdoms were merged by marriage (a fine, traditional, arranged union), "King" no longer seemed grand enough, or so their most powerful advisor said. So at the suggestion of the advisor, whose own title was simply "First Minister," the ruler of the land became the "Emperor."

The people of both Kingdoms rejoiced, since it is ever so much grander to be an Empire than a Kingdom. And the Emperor and Empress ruled grandly until they both died (far too young, all agreed), and then their only son was elevated to the throne.

The newly crowned Emperor loved beautiful new clothes. His only interests were going to the theater or in riding about in his carriage where he could show off his new clothes. He had a different costume for every hour of the day.

You might surmise from this description that the Emperor was at least mildly vainglorious, and susceptible to the flattery and blandishments of his advisors. This was perhaps true, but you should remember that the Emperor had never in his life heard anything but flattery, and had never seen anything that would tell him that there are more important things in life than appearances. So his only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes, and he changed clothes almost every hour to show them off to his people. He never heard anything from his people save appreciation and admiration.

Word of the Emperor's refined habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrels who had heard of the Emperor's vanity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind.

"We are tailors and weavers who have dressed the aristocracy of the many European capitals. After many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it is almost invisible. In fact it cannot be seen by anyone who is too stupid to appreciate its quality."

The Chief of the Guards heard the scoundrels' strange story and sent for the court Chamberlain. The Chamberlain notified the First Minister, who went to the Emperor and disclosed the news. The Emperor's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see the two immigrants.

"Your Highness, this cloth will be woven in colors and patterns created especially for you. Its beauty will be in direct proportion to the intelligence, refinement and taste of the observer." The Emperor gave the two men a bag of gold coins in exchange for their promise to begin working on the fabric immediately.

"Just tell us what you need to get started and we'll give it to you," said the Emperor. The two tailors asked for a loom, silk, and gold thread. Then they set to work. The Emperor thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to getting a new extraordinary suit, he would discover which of his subjects were stupid, incompetent, or lacking in refinement and taste. A few days later, he called the First Minister.

"Go and see how the work is proceeding," the Emperor told him, "and come back to let me know."

The First Minister was welcomed by the two weavers.

"We're almost finished, but we need more gold thread. Here, Excellency! Admire the colors, feel the softness!" The old man bent over the loom and looked at the fabric that was not there.

"What a marvelous fabric," he told them. "I'm sure it will do the job. I'll certainly tell the Emperor."

"We are happy to hear that!" said the two weavers. The Minister inquired about the colors and the unusual patterns. As the weavers described them, the Minister listened closely so that he would be able repeat what they said when he reported back to the Emperor.

Finally, the Emperor received the announcement that the two tailors had come to take all the measurements needed to sew his new suit.

"Come in," the Emperor ordered. Even as they bowed, the two men pretended to be holding large roll of fabric.

"Here it is your Highness, the result of our labor," the unscrupulous men said. "We have worked night and day but, at last, the most beautiful fabric in the world is ready for you. Look at the colors and feel how fine it is." At first the Emperor did not see any colors and could not feel any cloth between his fingers. But he strained his eyes and after a while he felt like fainting. Luckily the throne was right behind him and he sat down. As his vision swirled he saw a few spots and convinced himself that they were where the fabric should be.

"Ah," he said at last. "It is quite marvelous work."

Once they had taken the measurements, the two began cutting the air with scissors while sewing with their needles an invisible cloth.

"Your Highness, you'll have to take off your clothes to try on your new ones." The two scoundrels draped the new clothes on him and then held up a mirror.

"Yes, this is a beautiful suit and it looks very good on me," the Emperor said trying to look comfortable. "You've done a fine job."

Then it was time for the grand procession.

The Emperor summoned his carriage and the ceremonial parade was formed. A group of dignitaries walked at the very front of the procession and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the people in the street. Applause welcomed the royal procession.

The Emperor rode beneath a beautiful canopy, and all the people in the street and in their windows said, "Goodness, the emperor's new clothes are amazing! What a perfect fit!" No one wanted to admit to seeing nothing, for then it would be said that he was unfit for his position, or that he was stupid, or that he lacked refinement and taste. So each person sang the praises of the Emperor's New Clothes. Indeed, none of the Emperor's clothes had ever before received such praise.

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's New Clothes! They are beautiful! What a marvelous train! And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see the clothes, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the two scoundrels had predicted.

A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.

"The Emperor is naked," he said.

"Fool!" his father reprimanded, running after him. "Don't talk nonsense!" But the boy's remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again. And soon the remarks were reported to the First Minister.

"Please excuse me, sire," said the First Minister. "There is something I must do."

The First Minister found the boy and his family where they were being held by the Chief of the Guards and several of his men. "Is this the boy who cannot see the Emperor's New Clothes?" asked the First Minister? His men nodded.

"We must nip stupidity in the bud," said the First Minister. "Put out his eyes and remove the tongue of anyone who repeats what he has said."

So the First Minister returned to the procession. By the time he had rejoined the Emperor, the praise of the Emperor's New Clothes had grown much louder, and more poetic. All who watched vied with their neighbors to vehemently assert their admiration for the fineness of his garb.

The procession was a great success. Soon, the tailors had their own clothing shop, where they prepared clothes for the aristocracy of the Kingdom. Word of the fashion soon spread and tourism flourished. Visitors came from all parts of the world to marvel at the magnificent clothing worn by the Emperor and his subjects, especially the younger subjects, who learned to dance and cavort for the entertainment of foreign audiences. Much money was thereby added to the Kingdom's coffers.

And so has our Kingdom flourished, and all are happy and content, even, we think, those eyeless, tongue-less waifs whose moans caress the darkness and who do so help us dream and sleep at night.

Dragon Blood

[Crossposted from WAAGNFP]

OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.
–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle

There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.

Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.

Sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.

The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.

In the early 1980s, I had my heart broken by a woman who had no idea at the time that she was doing it. That can happen when you carry a torch in sufficient secrecy for long enough.

It was hardly the first time I’d had my heart broken. If you’re still single in your thirties and haven’t had your heart broken a few times, you’re really not trying very hard at life. Still, this particular one felt different. It didn’t have the feeling of failed infatuation, for one thing. It didn’t damage my self-confidence that way a humiliating heartbreak does. Rather, there was a deep sense of loss that I couldn’t fully plumb, and a feeling that my future had somehow changed. It was some combination of freedom and being adrift.

Maybe it’s only hindsight, but I also had the feeling that I was in for some trouble. Or maybe that I was about to go looking for trouble.

When you really want to get into trouble, (and by “you” I mean “me”), the best enabler is usually a woman. That’s my drug of choice anyway. It only took me a few months to find the right one. I’ll call her June, which is obviously not her name at all; I’ve never dated a June.

Okay, here, massive generic evasion. I am not going to give any specific details about why June was trouble. I’ll note that, between the first time I met her, and the time we’d agreed to have lunch, something really bad happened to her, so she missed our first lunch date. I’ll also stipulate that you aren’t likely to figure out what that “really bad something” was, so don’t bother trying to guess. Just realize that, when I heard about it, I knew that the danger content of knowing her had just gone up by several orders of magnitude, and that we were going to become lovers, and that it would end badly.

There is an absolutely brilliant sequence in Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic Watchmen, concerning Dr. Manhattan, who is the only character in the book with truly superhuman powers. Okay, Ozymandias can catch bullets as a bit of a trick, but Dr. Manhattan can teleport, transmute elements, and be in several places at once. He also experiences time, his own personal history, all at once, so he can foretell the future. At one point, he takes his girlfriend to Mars, and makes a reference to a time, several minutes in the future, when she surprises him with the information that she’s having an affair with another hero.

Then, several minutes in the future, she mentions the affair, and Dr. Manhattan is surprised. He knew what was coming, but he was still surprised when it happened.

He has to be surprised sometime, and that was the time, even if he knew about it in advance.

So I knew it was temporary and that June was going to dump me at some point; I even told that to a close friend when she asked me about the relationship (out of concern for my well-being, bless her). Furthermore, I’ll even suggest that whatever attempts I’d made to cushion that eventual blow, made the breakup even worse, because it added to the degree to which I was culpable, and it meant that I’d not been as good a person as my own ego ideal would like to believe. Some of the attraction had been that I was playing white knight, and instead I seemed to have a bit of dragon blood in me, as it were.

And it hurt. It really, really hurt. All the pain and humiliation that I hadn’t felt with the original heartbreak, well, I made up for it when June dumped me. And, just as an indication of the original, obvious danger content, it wasn’t a clean break, and couldn’t be, because circumstances meant that I still saw her on a regular basis.

Pretty good job of it, eh?

Okay now, the bit of philosophical payoff that I referred to earlier.

I’ve been following various feminist discussions on the net for quite a while, from even before what is now called teh blogosphere. And one of the issues that comes up frequently is the “nice guys don’t get laid,” discussion, also known as “Why do good girls like bad boys?” (from the song by Angel and the Reruns, in the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party). There are plenty of snarky things said about guys who say this, and rightfully so. The gist of the rightful snark is that being shy and insecure is not the same as being a “nice guy” and exactly why is being “nice” supposed to be rewarded by sex? That expectation, in fact, sounds like something other than “nice,” doesn’t it?

As a critique of male hypocrisy, the argument is spot on. I’ll stipulate that I agree with it.

However, after the episode with June, after the initial acute pain and humiliation wore off, I found myself in a state that combined pain and anger. Neither of those was intense, and I was raised well, and I’m a polite fellow. But there’s plenty of psychic energy in both pain and anger, and the mix is potent.

And I was catnip to women. They sat down next to me at lunch counters and struck up conversations. They latched onto me at parties and invited me home. They asked me to walk them to their cars from bars and they gave me their phone numbers. They invited me up to their rooms at conventions.

Okay, I was also in my early thirties, employed at a good, high status job, and I’d been practicing Aikido and doing weight training, so I’d filled out an astonishingly thin (in college I was just over 6 feet tall and weighed 130 lbs) with an extra 15-20 lbs of muscle. I was blond with dark black eyebrows and dark beard (since gone to gray) and had a sardonic look. So it wasn’t as if I’d somehow gone to sleep one night as a pimply geek and woke up the next as some sort of hunk. I’d never been unattractive physically, and I’d been complimented on my appearance before, and I wasn’t anything approaching a “30 year old virgin.”

But this was new, and I found it very easy to take advantage. Moreover, there were at least a couple of occasions where I was, by my lights anyway, something of a bastard. And it was expected of me, as nearly as I can tell. The women expected it, and, for all I know, would have been disappointed if I hadn’t acted that way.

It wore off after a while. The pain and anger faded, and I’m not very good at the bastard part anyway. But I can’t say that I didn’t have fun, because I did. And I hope that the women involved enjoyed it half as much as I did, because then it was worth their while as well. They got to play with what was, when all is said and done, a pretty tame monster, to no lasting damage. I suspect that’s the purpose, in fact. We all like to think that we can tame the monster, and there’s really only the one door. It leads to both the Lady and the Tiger, and they are one and the same.

Night Slaves

I’ll give a spoiler alert here, though I seriously doubt that anyone would ever care much about it. The number of people who are going to go and read a 1965 novel by a relatively obscure author isn’t large.

Jerry Sohl was a not entirely unsuccessful science fiction writer; his books include The Haploids, Costigan's Needle, The Transcendent Man, The Altered Ego, The Mars Monopoly, and The Odious Ones. He largely gave up writing science fiction in the late 1950s, and moved on to become a not entirely unsuccessful scriptwriter, mostly for television, but with a few motion picture credits to his name, including one for “Frankenstein Conquers the World.” He also wrote a few Star Trek scripts, including “The Corbomite Maneuver” and “This Side of Paradise” (the “Enterprise Crew gets high on alien spores” episode).

He also wrote the TV movie adaptation of his novel Night Slaves, which is mostly faithful to the original, with one important difference. That’s the spoiler part.

Sohl published Night Slaves in 1965, several years after the next most recent SF he’d published, and after he had made the transition to television. The made-for-TV movie adaptation appeared in 1970.

The plot of Night Slaves is pretty familiar. The gimmick is the guy-with-a-metal-plate-in-his-head, one Clay Howard. He’s married to Marjorie, who is in love with another man, but doesn’t want to leave Clay while he’s recovering from the auto accident that put in the metal plate, and killed the woman in the oncoming car.

So Clay and Marjorie come to a small town for Clay to rest up. Then the fun begins. Clay wakes up in the middle of the night and the town is empty; everyone is gone. He stays up the next night and follows Marjorie, only to see the whole population of the town line up at midnight, climb into trucks, and leave.

Well, okay, long story short, they’re being used as workers by mind-controlling aliens, and Clay is immune because of the metal plate thing. One of the aliens is the beautiful Naillil, with whom Clay falls in love. Hurray for interstellar romance!

Clay tells Marjorie about this, but she is a bit skeptical. Pretty odd, she thinks, that the alien woman’s name just happens to be “Lillian” spelled backwards, and wasn’t that the name of the woman in the oncoming car? The one who died?

Fooey on you, says Clay. Naillil and I are soul mates. I’m running away with her. Which he does. In the book, he does this by slitting his wrists and dying.

Say what?

Yes, dear friends, the book version of Night Slaves ISN’T SCIENCE FICTION! Clay Howard is suffering from a paranoid delusion, induced by guilt over his having killed the woman, Lillian, in the automobile accident. Every single SF element in the story is the delusion of a sick mind.

Then, to cap the whole thing, when Sohl used it as the basis of a teleplay, he omitted the subversive ending and turned it into a standard SF story, rather like the edited for TV version of Brazil ended before you get to the part about the protagonist having retreated into fantasy under torture.

I have to say, my hat’s off to Jerry Sohl. As I note in my essay “Sleeping in Fritz Leiber’s Bed,” I’ve long been interested in stories that aren’t fantasy per se, but are rather about fantasy. Sohl’s Night Slaves was one of the first such stories I encountered, though I probably didn’t notice it as such at the time. You need several examples to generalize, after all.

It’s also interesting to consider the marketing of it. Night Slaves, the novel was sold as science fiction, and for good reason. Only SF readers would really understand its subversive aspects. On the other hand, most of us probably hated it, because it violates a basic rule of the genre: if you protagonist has a metal plate in his head, he’s the one who is right and everyone else is wrong.

Or something like that.