Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (4 page)

“The things with one leg,” Isabel said. “I mean, they must have all been wiped out.” She began to sob. Stan comforted her. “I wonder why it’s a different way for everyone who goes,” he said. “Freezing. Or the oceans. Or the sun blowing up. Or the thing Nick and Jane saw.”

“I’m convinced that each of us had a genuine experience in the far future,” said Nick. He felt he had to regain control of the group somehow. It had been so good when he was telling his story, before those others had come. “That is to say, the world suffers a variety of natural calamities, it doesn’t just have one end of the world, and they keep mixing things up and sending people to different catastrophes. But never for a moment did I doubt that I was seeing an authentic event.”

“We have to do it,” Ruby said to Mike. “It’s only three hours. What about calling them first thing Monday and making an appointment for Thursday night?”

“Monday’s the President’s funeral,” Tom pointed out. “The travel agency will be closed.”

“Have they caught the assassin yet?” Fran asked.

“They didn’t mention it on the four o’clock news,” said Stan. “I guess he’ll get away like the last one.”

“Beats me why anybody wants to be President,” Phil said.

Mike put on some music. Nick danced with Paula. Eddie danced with Cynthia. Henry was asleep. Dave, Paula’s husband, was on crutches because of his mugging, and he asked Isabel to sit and talk with him. Tom danced with Harriet even though he was married to her. She hadn’t been out of the hospital more than a few months since the transplant and he treated her extremely tenderly. Mike danced with Fran. Phil danced with Jane. Stan danced with Marcia. Ruby cut in on Eddie and Cynthia. Afterward Tom danced with Jane and Phil danced with Paula. Mike and Ruby’s little girl woke up and came out to say hello. Mike sent her back to bed. Far away there was the sound of an explosion. Nick danced with Paula again, but he didn’t want her to get bored with him before Tuesday, so he excused himself and went to talk with Dave. Dave handled most of Nick’s investments. Ruby said to Mike, “The day after the funeral, will you call the travel agent?” Mike said he would, but Tom said somebody would probably shoot the new President too and there’d be another funeral. These funerals were demolishing the gross national product, Stan observed, on account of how everything had to close all the time. Nick saw Cynthia wake Henry up and ask him sharply if he would take her on the end-of-the-world trip. Henry looked embarrassed. His factory had been blown up at Christmas in a peace demonstration and everybody knew he was in bad shape financially. “You can charge it,” Cynthia said, her fierce voice carrying above the chitchat. “And it’s so beautiful, Henry. The ice. Or the sun exploding. I want to go.”

“Lou and Janet were going to be here tonight, too,” Ruby said to Paula. “But their younger boy came back from Texas with that new kind of cholera and they had to cancel.”

Phil said, “I understand that one couple saw the moon come apart. It got too close to the Earth and split into chunks and the chunks fell like meteors. Smashing everything up, you know. One big piece nearly hit their time machine.”

“I wouldn’t have liked that at all,” Marcia said.

“Our trip was very lovely,” said Jane. “No violent things at all. Just the big red sun and the tide and that crab creeping along the beach. We were both deeply moved.”

“It’s amazing what science can accomplish nowadays,” Fran said.

Mike and Ruby agreed they would try to arrange a trip to the end of the world as soon as the funeral was over. Cynthia drank too much and got sick. Phil, Tom, and Dave discussed the stock market. Harriet told Nick about her operation. Isabel flirted with Mike, tugging her neckline lower. At midnight someone turned on the news. They had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The President’s widow was shown visiting the last President’s widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the time-trip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation’s number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something besides the end-of-the-world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for Congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can’t imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn’t delivered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally anticipated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all their drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.

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Copyright © 1972 by Agberg, Inc.

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Barry N. Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.

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Views expressed by guest or resident columnists are entirely their own.

FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT

by Barry Malzberg

The Sine Curve

I gave a brief eulogy at Robert Sheckley’s funeral (12/12/05); and concluded, after a quick precis of that anguished, thoughtful, scattered, thoughtless life and its wreckage: “But this can be said: he was the best-loved writer of the best-loved magazine through the run of science fiction’s best-loved decade. That isn’t bad.” Of course his four children (from three marriages) might have had something to say on the question of “best-loved.”

But that is another essay in another time. There is much to be written on Old Sheck, who was also, probably, best-loved and imitated by plagiarists, influences and derivatives to a degree which would have infuriated him if he were not, ultimately, so detached and emotionally repressed. The “another essay in another time” of which I am thinking is
The Fifties
, a summary of that decade I wrote in 1978 for the
Analog Yearbook
and which has probably gotten around more than any other segment of my short nonfiction. I was perhaps the first to argue that our field’s most visionary, inventive, signatory period was that decade, that in the 1950s science fiction had become at its peak and in the collective work at its strongest an instrument of beauty and precision, the flame that cuts, knife that burns. The magazine editors were shaping science fiction then, the book market was almost entirely derivative and Gold, Boucher, McComas, Shaw, Mines, and Merwin knew in their various ways what they were doing and what they wanted. Campbell had gone half-mad in the wake of Dianetics but was still the editor who essentially discovered Walter M. Miller, Jr., and who published Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” Boucher knew that science fiction was integrally literature and used Matheson, Oliver, Margaret St. Clair, Shirley Jackson and fifty others to prove it. Horace Gold, that madman and stupefying genius, was a flaming transgressive masquerading as Ben Hibbs. (“I want
Galaxy
to read as if it were
The Saturday Evening Post
fiction of the 22nd century.”) Bester, Wyman Guinn, Phil Klass, Damon Knight, Pohl & Kornbluth, to say nothing of Sheckley (as serious as Voltaire), burned the page. Fred Pohl wrote of that decade, “The only venue in which you could find the truth of mid-century America was in the science fiction magazines.

The stereotype, the received wisdom, the canonic teaching at the time I published that essay, was that the visionary ’40s of Campbell, and the rebellious ’60s of Moorcock and Ballard, Ellison and Brunner were the more crucial decades, but in my essay I presented a different view. Coming on to 40 years later, I believe that it is my case which has edged close to the canon of received wisdom and as these dreadful post-Tolkien, post-
Star Wars
, post-
Avatar
and post-
Blade Runner
consequences shape our latter destiny, I am surer that if there are any miserable graduate students writing theses on the true and terrible history of science fiction, those unhappy scholars will be ever more reliant upon my argument and ever more dedicated to its substantiation.

Meanwhile, the ever fewer who remain dedicated to what James Blish more than 60 years ago deemed “The True Quill” find ourselves on Malcolm Arnold’s vast and darkling plane, surrounded by elves and wizards who clash by night and soar the paved spaceways in the more eternal dark.

The True Quill, science fiction as seen through James Blish’s lens, has become a subsidiary, perhaps a minor appendage to fantasy or corrupted versions of the corrupted science fiction of the post-
Star Wars
period. (I would like to affix responsibility equally to
Star Trek,
which has ten years of seniority and in the past did so but have repented; there is no fair comparison of the two properties.
Star Trek
, an earnest, sentimental ’30s Civilize-The-Galaxy procedure, was a failed television series which carried its influence largely to the already-convinced and it recycled a lot of familiar plots as it gave employment to recyclable science fiction writers like Sturgeon, Ellison or Spinrad.
Star Wars
had its corporate and engineering fix on the widest possible audience from the outset and it blew up the Foundation Series and the Lensmen into gaudy, gas-filled dirigibles that soared over the cities the way that our current travelers soar those old paved, blackened, decomposing spaceways.) “Science fiction has become a small special interest at science fiction Conventions”, Spinrad said thirty years ago (I have quoted him to distraction), and science fiction Conventions have, with few exceptions, become fantasy Conventions with just enough rocketry on the panels and in the dealer rooms to put a bit of sheen on decomposition.

Decadent. That is what has happened to the True Quill to the degree that the TQ survives in
Asimov’s, Analog,
and the suburban reaches of Tor Books. “Arcane” might serve just as well in the way it describes the inaccessibility of an output which seems—to those not wholly familiar with the field—to be written in a kind of code. Horace Gold had Ben Hibbs (and for all we know the Tractor series and Mr. Moto) as a kind of aspiration. Maybe not everyone liked that stuff but at least a third of Hibbs’ readership of ten million would read it. Meanwhile, who reads Stross and McAuley or Stephen Baxter? Who reads the non-collaborative Bruce Sterling? Making no judgment of the considerable skills and fierce intelligence of these worthies, exactly who is their audience? And, stipulating that such an audience exists, what are its dimensions? Can it sustain careers beyond the enthusiasm and commitment of the few editors still defending and propitiating science fiction? (Everyone in the business knows that even for the small and specialty presses, science fiction is a charitable enterprise. The routine fantasy novel by a little-known or unknown writer will outsell an equivalent science fiction novel by at least fifty percent. “Why should I publish science fiction?” the revered Judy-Lynn del Rey asked me almost thirty years ago. “It’s like short story collections. I only publish it to lose money.” (Which in fact, she did. Publish me. Lose money. Judy-Lynn could not completely sequester her tender and vulnerable heart.)

We are in trouble, folks. We have been in trouble for a long time. The science fiction that the aged among us loved, which shaped and darkened and exploited and framed us, that science fiction has become a decadent and marginal form of human activity. In
The Engines of the Night
I self-quoted a phrase which I had spoken on a panel in the late seventies when asked from the floor to define “decadence.” “When form overtakes and suppresses function,” I answered reflexively. (Sometimes an angel can whisper into your ear.) That is modern edge, cutting-edge science fiction. Form has not only suppressed but has, in terms of most of the audience, stomped on function and has left it like a smashed-flat cartoon character, like a decapitated Roadrunner.

There are of course those who would disagree. I won’t live long enough to apologize to them if they are right, so I will only write now: I am on your side. Cassandra
knew
she had a crappy job.

Next time maybe: Willie Stark’s advice to Jack Burden in Penn Warren’s
All the King’s Men
. There is always something on everybody. Even George Lucas.

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- February 2013: New Jersey

Copyright © 2013 by Barry Malzberg