Hell's Cartographers: Inside The Minds Of Six Legendary Sci-Fi Authors
256
Hell's Cartographers: Inside The Minds Of Six Legendary Sci-Fi Authors
256eBook
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Overview
In the introduction, Brian W. Aldiss observes, "Never have critics and readers in any field been more divided than they are over science fiction." Aldiss goes on to define his concept of the difference between fiction and nonfiction in "Magic and Bare Boards." His coeditor, Harry Harrison, reminisces about his bookish childhood in "The Beginning of the Affair."
"Ah, science fiction, science fiction!" sighs Alfred Bester in "My Affair with Science Fiction." He notes, "I've read it all my life, off and on, with excitement, with joy, sometimes with sorrow." Other heartfelt and insightful contributions include Robert Silverberg's "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal," Damon Knight's "Knight Piece," and Frederik Pohl's "Ragged Claws."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486831404 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 06/13/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 941 KB |
About the Author
Harry Max Harrison was an American science fiction author, known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat and for his novel Make Room! Make Room! The latter was the rough basis for the motion picture Soylent Green.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Robert Silverberg:
sounding brass, tinkling cymbal
'... and even Silverberg, who sometimes, with all his skill and knowledge and sophistication, does tend to the androidal. ...'
John Clute in New Worlds 5
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
I Corinthians, 13
At last to speak of one's self. An odd temptation, which mostly I have resisted, in the past, maintaining that I'm not yet ready to ·undertake a summing up, or that fm in the midst of some intricate new transition still not fully understood, or that I'm bored with myself and talking about myself. Yet I have granted all sorts of interviews, and spoken quite explicitly, all the while protesting my love of privacy; the one thing I've never attempted is explicit written auto-biography. I manage to hold all poses at once, modest and exhibitionistic, esthete and man of commerce, puritan and libertine: probably the truth is that I have no consistent positions at all. We'll see.
Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal. Very well. The essential starting point, for me, is the confession (and boast) that I am a man who is living his own adolescent fantasies. When I was sixteen or so I yearned to win fame as a writer of science fiction, to become wealthy enough to indulge in whatever amusements I chose, to know the love of fair women, to travel widely, to live free from the pressures and perils of ordinary life. All these things have come to me, and more; I have fewer complaints to make about the hand destiny has dealt me than anyone I know. Here at what I assume is my midpoint I feel a certain inner security, a self-satisfaction, which I suppose borders occasionally on smugness. (But not on complacency. The past is unchangeable and the present delightful, yet the future still must be regarded warily. I live in California, a land where the earth might literally open beneath my feet this afternoon; and I've already once had, in my pre-California incarnation, the experience of awakening before dawn to find my world in flames.)
Because my life has been so generally satisfactory, and because I'm a literary enough man to know the dangers of hubris, I sometimes affect a kind of self-deprecatory shyness, a who-me? kind of attitude, whenever I am singled out for special attention. This pose gets more and more difficult to maintain as the years go on and the accomplishments and money and awards pile up; by now certain objective measures of achievement exist, for me, and there's an element of hypocrisy in trying to deny them purely for the sake of trying to avoid the fate that chops down the boastful. Ten years ago, or even five, I probably would have refused the opportunity to contribute to this book, claiming that I was unworthy (ad privately fearing that others would say so if I did not). To hell with that now.
I am the youngest of the six contributors here: the youngest by nearly a decade, I suspect, since as I write this I'm still more than a year short of my fortieth birthday, and my companions, I know, all cluster around the half-century mark. A familiar feeling, that one. I was always the youngest in any group, owlishly precocious, a nastily bright little boy who was reading at three, writing little stories at six, spouting learned stuff about European dynasties and the sexual habits of plants at seven or eight, publishing illegible magazines at thirteen, and selling novels at eighteen. I was too unruly and too clever to remain in the same class at school with my contemporaries, so I grew up two years younger than all my friends, thinking of myself as small and weak and incomplete. Eventually, by surviving, I caught up with everyone. I am the oldest in my immediate circle of friends, with a beard alas now tinged with grey, and I am as tall as most and taller than many, and within the tiny world of science fiction I have become something of an elder statesman, and the wounds I received by being fourteen years old in a universe of sixteen-year-olds are so well sheathed in scar-tissue now that I might as well consider them healed. And yet it still is strange to be included as an equal in this particular group of writers, since three of them – Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl – were among my own literary idols when I was indulging in those adolescent fantasies of a writer's career twenty-odd years ago. A fourth, Harry Harrison, had not yet begun writing seriously then himself, but he was the editor who first paid me for writing anything, in 1953; and only Brian Aldiss, the originator of this project, played no part in shaping me in my teens, for I had never heard his name until I myself was an established writer. Yet I make no apologies for being here among my elders. Here we all are: professional writers, diligent craftsmen, successful creators – artists, if you will. And good friends as well.
I am an only child, born halfway through the Great Depression. (There would have been a sibling, I think, when I was about seven, but it miscarried; I often wonder what pattern my life would have taken had I not grown up alone, pampered, self-indulgent.) My ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe, and my grandparents, three of whom survived well into my adulthood, were reared in Poland or Russia in villages beyond my easy comprehension. My father was born in London in the first year of this century, and came to the United States a few years thereafter. My mother was born in Brooklyn, New York, and so was I.
I have no very fond recollections of my childhood. I was puny, sickly, plagued with allergies and freckles, and (I thought) quite ugly. I was too clever by at least half, which made for troubles with my playmates. My parents were remote figures; my father was a certified public accountant, spending his days and many of his evenings adding up endless columns of red figures on long yellow sheets, and my mother taught school, so that I was raised mainly by Lottie, our mulatto housekeeper, and by my loving and amiable maternal grandmother. It was a painful time, lonely and embittering; I did make friends but, growing up in isolation and learning none of the social graces, I usually managed to alienate them quickly, striking at them with my sharp tongue if not my feeble fists. On the other hand, there were compensations: intelligence is prized in Jewish households, and my parents saw to it that mine was permitted to develop freely. I was taken to museums, given all the books I wanted, and allowed money for my hobbies. I took refuge from loneliness in these things; I collected stamps and coins, harpooned hapless butterflies and grasshoppers, raided the neighbours' gardens for specimens of leaves and flowers, stayed up late secretly reading, hammered out crude stories on an ancient typewriter, all with my father's strong encouragement and frequent enthusiastic participation, and it mattered less and less that I was a troubled misfit in the classroom if I could come home to my large private room in the afternoon and, quickly zipping through the too-easy homework, get down to the serious business of the current obsessional hobby.
Children who find the world about them distasteful turn readily to the distant and the alien. The lure of the exotic seized me early. These were the years of World War II and real travel was impossible, but in 1943 a friend of my father's gave me a subscription to the National Geographic Magazine, and I was off to Zanzibar and Surinam and Jamaica in my imagination decades before I ever reached those places in actuality. (Typically, I began buying old National Geographies with lunatic persistence, and didn't rest until I had them all, from the 1880's on. I still have them.) Then, an hour's journey from home on the subway, there was the American Museum of Natural History, with its mummies and arrowheads, its mastodons and glyptodons, above all its brontosaurs and tyrannosaurs; Sunday after Sunday my father and I made the pilgrimage, and I revelled in the wonders of prehistory, soberly lecturing him on the relative chronological positions of Neanderthal and Peking and Piltdown Man. (Yes, Piltdown, this was 1944, remember.) From dinosaurs and other such fantastic fossils to science fiction was but a short journey: the romantic, exotic distant past is closely tied to the romantic, exotic distant future in my imagination.
So there was Jules Verne when I was nine – I must have taken that voyage with Captain Nemo a hundred times – and H. G. Wells when I was ten, most notably The Time Machine (which promised to show me all the incredible eons I would never live to know) but also The Island of Dr Moreau and War of the Worlds, the myriad short stories, and even an obscure satire called Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, to which I often returned because Mr Blettsworthy encountered living ground-sloths. There was Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which also I read repeatedly. (How early my fascination with time travel emerged I) I dabbled in comic books, too, and I have gaudy memories of Buck Rogers and Planet Comics. But somehow I missed Edgar Rice Burroughs altogether; and it was not until early 1948, when I was already a veteran of scores of hardbound science fiction books, that I even knew such things as science fiction magazines existed.
The magazines mostly repelled me by their covers and their titles. I did buy Weird Tales – my first one had an Edmond Hamilton novelette about the Norse gods, which delighted me since I had gone through whole libraries of Norse mythology in early boyhood. I bought Amazing Stories, then the sleaziest representative of the genre, because it happened to publish an uncharacteristically respectable-looking issue about then. I bought John Campbell's dignified little Astounding Science Fiction, but found the stories opaque and unrewarding to my thirteen-year-old mind. Because I was rather a snob, I would not even open magazines with names like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Startling Stories, especially since their covers were bright with paintings of hideous monsters and scantily clad damsels. (Sex was very frightening to me just then, and I had sworn never to have anything to do with women.) More than a year passed before I approached those magazines in what was by then an unquenchable thirst for science fiction, and discovered they were publishing some of the best material of the day.
Then there were the books: the wondrous Healy-McComas Adventures in Time and Space, the big Groff Conklin titles, Wollheim's Pocket Book of Science Fiction, and the other pioneering anthologies. My father was more than a little baffled by my increasing obsession with all this trash, when previously I occupied myself with decent books on botany and geology and astronomy, but he saw to it that I bought whatever I wanted. One collection in particular had enormous impact on me: Wollheim's Portable Novels of Science, published in 1945 and discovered by me three years later. It contained Wells' First Men in the Moon, which amused me; Taine's Before the Dawn, which fed my always passionate interest in dinosaurs; Lovecraft's Shadow Out of Time, which gave me that peep into unattainable futures that originally led me to science fiction; and above all Stapledon's Odd John, which spoke personally to me as I suppose it must to any child who is too bright for his own good. I was up almost till dawn reading that book, and those novels marked me.
I was at that time still talking of some sort of career in the sciences, perhaps in botany, perhaps in paleontology, perhaps astronomy. But some flaws in my intelligence were making themselves apparent, to me and to my teachers if not to my parents: I had a superb memory and a quick wit, but I lacked depth, originality, and consistency; my mind was like a hummingbird, darting erratically over surf aces. I wanted to encompass too much, and mastered nothing, and though I always got high marks in any subject that caught my interest, I noticed, by the time I was thirteen, that some of my classmates were better than I at grasping fundamental principles and drawing new conclusions from them. I doubt that I would have been of much value as a scientist. But already I was writing, and writing with precocious skill – for school newspapers and magazines, for my own abominably mimeographed magazine, and, without success, for professional science fiction magazines. Off went stories, double-spaced and bearing accurate word-counts (612, 1814, 2705). They were dreadful, naturally, and they came back, usually with printed rejection slips but sometimes – when the editors realized they were dealing with a bright child of thirteen or fourteen and not with a demented adult – with gentle letters suggesting ways I might improve my style or my sense of plot. And I spoke openly of a career in writing, perhaps earning my living as a journalist while writing science fiction as a sideline.
Why science fiction? Because it was science fiction that I preferred to read, though I had been through Cervantes and Shakespeare and that crowd too. And because writing science fiction allowed me to give free play to those fantasies of space and time and dinosaurs and supermen that were so gratifying to me. And because I had stumbled into the world of science fiction fandom, a world much more comfortable than the real world of bullies and athletes and sex, and I knew that my name on the contents page of Astounding or Startling would win me much prestige in fandom, prestige that I could hardly hope to gain among my classmates.
So, then, the stories went forth, awkward imitations on a miniature scale of my favourite moments out of Lovecraft or Stapledon or Taine or Wells, and the stories came back, and I read textbooks on the narrative art and learned a good deal, and began also to read the stories in the science fiction magazines with a close analytical eye, measuring the ratio of dialogue to exposition, the length of paragraphs, and other technical matters that, I suppose, few fifteen-year-olds study as carefully as I did. Nothing got published, or even came close, but I was growing in skill.
I was growing in other ways, too. When I was about fourteen I went off, for the first time, to summer camp, where I lived among boys (and girls) of my own age and no longer had to contend with being the youngest and puniest in my peer-group. I had always been known as 'Robert', but at camp I was speedily dubbed 'Bob', and it seemed to me that I was taking on a new identity. Robert was that spindly misfit, that maladjusted, isolated little boy; Bob was a healthy, outgoing, normal young man. To this day I wince when some stranger presumes on my public persona and addresses me as Robert – it sends me rocketing backward in time to the horrors of being ten again. Although I sign my stories Robert for reasons of formality, my friends know me as Bob, and my parents managed the transition fairly gracefully at my request (though my father sometimes slips, a quarter of a century after the change), and when I occasionally encounter some childhood friend I let him know, rapidly, the name I prefer and the reason I prefer it.
This new Bob was able to cope. He grew to a reasonable height, halting just a bit short of six feet; he became a passable athlete; he discovered how to sustain friendships and how to manage conversations. For a few years I led a split life, introverted and lonely and secretive at home, open and lighthearted and confident during the summers; and by the time I was about seventeen, some integration of the two lives had begun. I had finished high school (where I had become editor of the high-school newspaper and was respected for my skill as a writer) and, by way of surrendering some of my precocity, had declined to go immediately into college. Instead I spent a few months reading and writing, and a few months working in a furniture warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, among rough, tough illiterates who found my cultivated manner a charming novelty rather than a threatening intrusion, and then I went off to the summer camp, not as a camper but as an employee. In the autumn I entered Columbia University with old slates wiped clean: I was no longer morbidly too young, I was free of the local playmates who could never forget the maladjustments of my childhood, I was able to begin in the Bob persona, without hauling the burden of my past problems.
I lived away from home, in a little apartment of my own. I manifested previously unknown skills for drinking and carousing. I discovered that women were not really very frightening after all. I plunged myself into new worlds of the mind: into Aquinas and Plato, into Bartok and Schoenberg, into Kafka, Joyce, Mann, Faulkner, Sartre. I continued to read science fiction, but dispassionately, with the eye of one who was soon to be a professional; I was less interested in visions of ultimate tomorrows and more in seeing how Messrs Bester, Pohl, Knight, Sheckley, Dick etc, carried off their tricks. One of my stories was published – for a fee of $5, I think – by an amateur magazine called Different, operated by a poetess named Lilith Lorraine. Harry Harrison asked me to do an article about fandom for a science fiction magazine he was editing, and I turned in a competent journalistic job and was paid $30. That was in September 1953. I sent a short story called 'Gorgon Planet' off to a magazine called Nebula, published in Scotland by Peter Hamilton, and in January 1954 he notified me that he would use it, and sent me his check for $12.60.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hell's Cartographers"
by .
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