Read American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Online
Authors: Gary K. Wolfe
Tags: #Science Fiction
374.1 LARRY SHAW] Lawrence Taylor Shaw (1924–1985), a science fiction author and literary agent who encouraged Blish to turn his 1953 novella “A Case of Conscience” into a novel.
377.17–18 Index Expurgatorius] Roman Catholic index of books to be censored before being read by Catholics, later incorporated into the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
, or Index of Prohibited Books, until the latter was discontinued in 1966.
382.5–6 Berkefeld-filtered] A Berkefeld filter removes bacterial and other impurities using diatomaceous earth.
384.9–10 van de Graaff generators] Electrostatic generators invented in 1929 by Robert J. Van de Graaff (1901–1967).
385.11 pteropsid] One of a large taxonomic group of vascular plants including all flowering plants and ferns.
385.21–23 ancient custom . . . half-century] Pope Boniface VIII (c. 1235–
1303) declared 1300 a “Jubilee” year, during which pilgrims could seek universal pardon; Jubilees were subsequently celebrated every twenty-five or fifty years.
387.17–18 the dream constructions . . . boiled beans.] See
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)
, a painting (1936) by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989).
390.6–7 Bois-d’Averoigne] Averoigne was a medieval French province invented by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) for a series of fantasy tales.
390.31–32 conspicuous consumption] A phrase coined by sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) in
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899) and earlier articles.
396.12 St. Simon Stylites] Simeon Stylites, fifth-century Syrian ascetic who spent some four decades on top of a pillar.
407.23 “Only upon this . . . safely built.”] See the essay “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903), by British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). 415.21–416.3 the dark blue book . . . leading to nullity.”] See note 377.23.
428.18 Pecksniffian] In the manner of Seth Pecksniff, archetypal hypocrite in Charles Dickens’s
Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44).
430.24–25 Occam’s Razor] Principle developed by the English logician William of Ockham (1285–1349) that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” and that the simplest explanation tends to be the most plausible.
439.34–35 theosophism and Hollywood Vedanta] The Theosophical Society was founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was established in Hollywood in 1930 by Swami Prabhavananda, of the order of Sri Ramakrishna.
443.12–13 Kick a stone . . . Bishop Berkeley.’] See James Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
(1791): “After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it
thus
.’ ”
448.13–14 Haeckel . . . faking the evidence] Ernst Haeckel (1834–
1919), German biologist and philosopher, author of
General Morphology of Organisms
(1866),
The Riddle of the Universe
(1899), and many other works. While Haeckel was accused of fraud in connection with some of the illustrations in his books, the case remains controversial.
449.32–33 Mephistopheles himself . . .
doloris
] Latin: Misery loves company. The proverbial phrase is spoken by Mephistophilis in Marlowe’s play
Doctor Faustus
(1604).
458.38 Venus Callipygous] Or Aphrodite Kallypygos, “Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks”: an ancient Roman statue copied from a lost Greek original.
462.25
Ah
-so
deska
] Japanese:
Ah, so desu ka
? Is that so?
466.4–5 eastward of Eden in 4004 B.C.] In 1650, English cleric James
468.33–34 the
Principia
]
Principia Mathematica
(1910–13), by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.
470.28
hnau
] A term invented for sentient, reasoning beings in C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novel
Out of the Silent Planet
(1938).
472.30 such comforters as Job had] See Job 16:2: “Miserable comforters are ye all.”
481.19 ataraxic] Tranquilizer.
481.26 Belsen] Bergen-Belsen, Nazi concentration camp in northwestern Germany established in 1943.
484.37 Ulysses stopped his men’s ears with wax] See
The Odyssey
, book 12.
486.20 Adlai E. Stevenson and Oliver J. Dragon] Adlai E. Stevenson II (1900–1965), Democratic politician who ran for president in 1952 and 1956; Oliver J. Dragon or “Ollie,” puppet featured on the children’s television show
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
(1947–57).
501.19–20 an enterprise . . . a wolf child] According to legend, Rome was founded by wolf-suckled twins Romulus and Remus; the date was assigned by Roman historians.
501.37 Burchard] Johann Burchard, papal master of ceremonies from 1483 to 1506.
504.12–13
Perche mi
. . .
alcuno?
] See Dante,
Inferno
, canto 13. 504.18–19 Schopenhauer’s vicious
Rules for Debate
]
Eristische Dialektik: Die Kunst, Recht zu Behalten
(1831).
507.3–4 Paul Klee’s “Caprice in February”] 1938 oil painting (also titled
Capriccio im Februar
).
516.9 Kierkegaard] Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher.
516.9–10 the Grand Inquisitor] Central figure of a parable recounted by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
(1879–80).
519.26
Into your hand are they delivered
] See Genesis 9:2.
530.17–18 Tannhäuser . . . blossoming of the pilgrim’s staff ] According to the German legend on which Wagner’s opera is based, the pope’s staff breaks into blossom after the departure of Tannhäuser, who is then sent for but never found.
541.6 von Braun] Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was a Nazi rocket scientist who, after developing the V-2 missile, joined NASA to design the Saturn boosters for the U.S. space program.
542.12 Yggdrasil] In Norse mythology, a vast tree at the center of the cosmos.
542.18 Dis] City comprising the sixth through ninth circles of Hell in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
(1321).
546.9–13 “AND THOU GREAT . . . INFERNAL KITCHEN] RuizSanchez’s curses come from Latin manuals of exorcism. See M. H. Dziweicki, “Exorcizo Te,”
Nineteenth Century
, October 1888, which presents a cento of quotations from the 1626
Thesaurus exorcismorum atque conjurationum terribilium
, an anthology of these manuals. Dziweicki translates the Latin curses “scrofa stercorate” and “porcarie pedicose” as “filthy sow” and “lousy swineherd.”
673.20 Mandjuria] Archaic spelling of Manchuria.
WHO?
587.24 Young Tom Edison] Film (1940) starring Mickey Rooney.
629.18–19 “Commit a crime . . . Emerson.] See “Compensation” in Emerson’s
Essays: First Series
(1841).
644.24 when the Third Avenue El was torn down] The demolition of the Third Avenue elevated railroad took place from August 1955 to February
1956.
654.6 WBZ] Originating in Springfield, Massachusetts, and subsequently based in Boston, WBZ was the first commercial radio station in the United States.
656.7 Yucca Flat] Region of southern Nevada established in 1951 as a United States government nuclear test site.
658.23 wrapped up like the invisible man?] See chapter 1 of H. G. Wells’s novel
The Invisible Man
(1897): “He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose.”
701.1 THE BIG TIME] Leiber added the following introduction to his novel for an edition published by Collier Books in 1982:
The remaining interior wall of the demolished building had on it the pattern of what had been destroyed: three floors and a stairway; grimy but with lighter rectangles where pictures had been hung on it or furniture set against it; a commanding and haunted flat expanse.
My friend Art Kuhl, author of
Royal Road
and the still more impressive novel
Obit.
(as far as I know never published) said, “What a challenge to Gully Jimson!” He was surprised to find I’d never read Joyce Cary’s
The Horse’s Mouth
and so knew nothing of the rapscallion old painter who could never see a big empty wall without feeling the irresistible urge to paint a mural on it, whether it was coming down tomorrow or not.
I respected Art. I read the book at once and also the two other novels in the trilogy,
Herself Surprised
and
To Be a Pilgrim
, which cover the same events from three different viewpoints, and was struck by their style of what can be called intensified and embellished first person: not only is each story told by one person, but he or she has a unique and highly colorful way of speaking, with all sorts of vivid little eccentricities of language—they even
think
to themselves differently.
So (although I didn’t know it at once) Greta Forzane was born, with her punning religious ejaculations and her frank, cool, deliberately cute way of speaking—always the little girl putting on an ingratiating comedy act.
I hadn’t written anything for four years, my longest dry spell. I knew from experience that at such times a first-person story is the easiest way to break silence—it solves the problem of what you can tell and what you can’t, whereas in a third-person story you can bring in anything, an embarrassment of riches, and I determined that my next story would be in the intensified first person of Joyce Cary.
I’ve always been fascinated by time-travel tales in which soldiers are recruited from different ages to serve side by side in one war—there’s something irresistible about putting a Doughboy, a Hussar, a Landsknecht and a Roman Legionary in one tent—and it’s also exciting to think of a war fought in and across time, where battles can actually change the past (one of the truly impossibles, but who knows? Olaf Stapledon wrote about swinging it)—it’s an old minor theme in science fiction; I remember stories by Ed Hamilton and, I think, Jack Williamson. I determined to write such a story and to put the emphasis on the soldiers rather than on the two (or More?) warring powers. Those would be big and shadowy, so you couldn’t be altogether sure which side you were fighting on and at the very best you’d have only the feeling that you were defending something bad against something worse—the familiar predicament of man.
To keep the focus on a few individuals, I put the story in one setting, a small rest and recreation center staffed by entertainers who were also therapists—some of them sex therapists, a concept that had rather more novelty back in 1956 and early 1957, which was when I wrote this rather short novel (in exactly a hundred days from first note to final typing finished, it counted out). The words got to flowing rather fast and fluently for me—when I start to type phonetically (“I” for “eye,” “to” and “too” and “two” interchangeable) I know I’m hot—though I rarely did more than a thousand a day. I tried the experiment of playing music to start myself off each day and this time it worked. The pieces were Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Pathetique piano sonata and the Schubert Unfinished. The book is also keyed to the two songs “Gentlemen Rankers” and “Lili Marlene” and I sometimes played those two. (The only quotation haunting me that
didn’t
get into the book was from a Noel Coward song, “We’re all of us just rotten to the core, Maud.”)
My plot was ready made. My disillusioned soldiers would try to resign from the war and set up a little utopia, like Spartacus and his gladiators, and then find out that they couldn’t, “for there’s no discharge from the war”—another familiar human predicament.
To dramatize the effects of time travel, science fiction usually asumes that if you could go back and change one crucial event, the entire future would be drastically altered—as in Ward Moore’s great novel
Bring the Jubilee
where the Southrons seize the Round Tops at the start and win the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War (and then lose it again, heartbreakingly, when the hero goes back and unintentionally changes that same circumstance). But that wouldn’t have suited my purposes, so I assumed a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course, and you’d have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going—perhaps the equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. It still seems to me a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos—a measure of the strength of the powers that be.
The energy I generated writing this novel of the Change War of the Spiders and Snakes (as I called the two sides, to keep them mysterious and unpleasant, as major powers always are, inscrutable and nasty) overflowed at once into two related short stories, “Try and Change the Past” and “Damnation Morning,” and later into two others, “The Oldest Soldier” and “Knight to Move,” but it wasn’t until 1963 that I did a short novelette with most of the same characters, “No Great Magic,” where my entertainers have become a travelling theatrical repertory company putting on performances, mostly one-night-stands, across space and time, and under that cover working their little changes in the fabric of history, nibbling like mice at the foundations of the universe— now they were becoming soldiers themselves as well as entertainers. An anachronistic performance of
Macbeth
for Elizabeth the First and for Shakespeare himself tied the story together and gave it dramatic unity, while I had to give Greta Fontane amnesia, so she could learn about the Change War all over again.
The story allowed me to draw on my own Shakespearean experiences and (once planned—it began as a modern tale of an agoraphobic young woman who literally lived in a dressing room, no Change War or science fantasy at all as first conceived) was remarkably quick in being written—ten days as I recall.
703.2–6 When shall we three . . . Macbeth] See Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, I.i.1–4.
703.13 immortal film star] Greta Garbo (1905–1990).
707.15
Gott sei Dank?
] German: Thank God?
707.20
Weibischer Engländer!
] German: Sissy Englishman!
707.22
Schlange!
] German: Snake!
712.5
Oberst
] German military rank equivalent to Colonel.
713.14–16 Last week in Babylon . . . Hodgson] From the poem “Time, you Old Gipsy Man” in Ralph Hodgson’s 1917
Poems
.
717.35
Nichevo
] Russian: “Nothing,” or “it can’t be helped.”
719.14 Passchendaele in ’17] Campaign fought in July–November 1917 near Ypres, Belgium, between Allied and German forces and ending with the capture of the village of Passchendaele.
722.13–20 Hell is the place . . . Aucassin] From the anonymous medieval romance
Aucassin and Nicolette
(c. late twelfth or early thirteenth century).
723.5
“Omnia mutantur
. . .
illis,”
] A version of the Latin adage
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
, meaning, “Times change, and we change with them,” first published in the anthology
Delitiæ Poetarum Germanorum
(1612) by Matthias Borbonius (1566–1629), who presents it as a saying of Emperor Lothair I.
728.2–5 De Bailhache . . . Eliot] See T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion” (1920), lines 67–69.
729.36
petsofa
] In the manner of Minoan figurines (c. 2700–1450 bce) from the Petsofas or Petsofa hill sanctuary in eastern Crete.
732.25–29 When I take up a newspaper . . . Ibsen] From act 2 of the play
Ghosts
(1881), by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906).
733.11 Muskrat Ramble] Jazz composition (1926) by Edward “Kid” Ory (1886–1973).
734.36–37 Svengali to her Trilby] Characters from novel
Trilby
(1894) by George du Maurier (1834–1896).
735.2
Reichswehr
] German national defense force, 1919–35. In 1935 it was renamed the Wehrmacht.
735.4 hetaera] Courtesan.
735.13 Panther Rag] Jazz composition (1928) by Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903–1983).
736.2–6 Maiden, Nymph, and Mother . . . Graves] See Robert Graves’s novel
The Golden Fleece
(1944), published in the United States as
Hercules, My Shipmate
(1945).
740.2–10 After about 0.1 millisecond . . . Los Alamos] From
A Program for the Nonmilitary Defense of the United States
, published by the National Planning Association in 1955.
747.22–23 Give me a place . . . Archimedes] Archimedes’s comment on the lever, as quoted by Pappus of Alexandria in
Synagoge
, book VIII (c. 340 ce).
749.30–31 the
Summa
. . .
Process and Reality
] The
Summa Theologica
(c. 1265–74) of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274); the Einstein field equations (1915) describing the curvature of spacetime; and
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
(1929), by English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).
752.33
Um Gottes willen
] German: For heaven’s sake.
754.29–30
zwei Herzen im dreivierteltakt
] “Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel Takt” (“Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time”) was a song in the 1930 German screen operetta of the same name; Géza von Bolváry (1897–1961) directed the film, and Robert Stolz (1880–1975) wrote the music.
757.8–15 “We examined the moss . . . Poe] See “The Purloined Letter” (1844), by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).
763.10–14 My thought . . . Macbeth] See Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, I.iii. 139–142.
768.20–26 The barrage roars . . . Sassoon] From the poem “Attack,” in
Counter-Attack and Other Poems
(1918), by Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). 773.25 W.C.T.U.] Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
773.31–35 Now is a bearable burden . . . Anonymous] A quotation probably of Leiber’s invention.
776.1–2 ‘leave not a rack behind.’] See Shakespeare,
The Tempest
, IV.i.156.
776.12 ‘Come, my friends . . . world’] See Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1833), lines 56–57.
778.27
Götterdämmerung
] Opera (1876) by Richard Wagner, the last of the four operas in the
Ring
cycle.
779.2
Kinder
,
Kirche
,
Küche
] German: Children, Church, Kitchen. A late nineteenth-century slogan defining the limits of women’s social roles. 779.35 “Loki!”] Norse trickster deity described in the thirteenth-century
Poetic Edda
, sometimes termed the Elder Edda.
780.9 “
Omnia vincit amor
.”] Latin: Love conquers all. See Virgil,
Eclogues
, X.69 (c. 39–38 bce).
781.16–19 But whence he was . . . Spenser] See Edmund Spenser’s epic poem
The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), IV.7.7.
785.28 Doré illustration of the
Inferno
] Gustave Doré (1832–1883) published his engraved illustrations of Dante’s
Inferno
in 1857. The
Purgatorio
and
Paradiso
followed in 1867.
790.22–23 black legged spiders . . . Marquis] From the poem “archy declares war,” in
archy and mehitabel
(1927), by Don Marquis (1878–1937).
793.32 Burbage] See note 12.27.
796.27–30 “Familiar with infinite universe . . . Heinlein] From Robert A. Heinlein’s novel
Between Planets
(1951).
798.38 “Tonight’s the Night”] Rock ’n’ roll song recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1956.
799.14–17 Rupert Brooke . . . Men who Understand;”] See lines
74–77 of Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” written in
1912.
801.16–23 four orders of life . . . possibility-binders] In his
Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering
(1921), Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) describes the first three of these orders; the fourth is Leiber’s invention.