Hell's Cartographers : Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers

Some Personal Histor , of Science Fiction Writers Robert Silverberg/Alfred Bester Harry Harrison/Damon Knight Frederick Pohl/Brian Aldiss BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/hellscartographeOObest hell’s cartographers hell’s cartographers Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers with contributions by Alfred Bester Damon Knight Frederik Pohl Robert Silverberg Harry Harrison Brian W. Aldiss Edited by Brian W. Aldiss Harry Harrison HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London Note: The editors wish to state that the individual contributors to this volume are responsible only for their own opinions and statements. hell’s cartographers. Copyright ©1975 by SF Horizons Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. FIRST U.S. EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Hell’s cartographers. Bibliography: p. 1. Authors, American — Biography. 2. Aldiss, Brian Wilson, 1925- — Biography. 3. Science fiction, American — History and criticism — Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Science fiction— Authorship. I. Aldiss, Brian Wilson, 1925- II. Harrison, Harry. PS129.H4 1975 813 / .0876 [B] 75-25074 ISBN 0-06-010052-4 76 77 78 79 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction 1 Robert Silverberg: Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal 7 Alfred Bester: My Affair With Science Fiction 46 Harry Harrison: The Beginning of the Affair 76 Damon Knight: Knight Piece 96 Frederik Pohl: Ragged Claws 144 Brian Aldiss: Magic and Bare Boards 173 Appendices: How We Work 211 Selected Bibliographies 239 A section of illustrations follows page 122 Introduction A few years ago, there was a man living down in Galveston or one of those ports on the Gulf of Mexico who helped make history. He did not enjoy that honour - a feeling shared by many who find themselves in that position. His name was Claude Eatherly, and at one time he was something of a legend. For all I know, he still lives down in Galveston, for all I know he still feels himself to be one of the scapegoats of history. For Major Claude Eatherly, back in 1945, piloted the weather plane which flew over Hiroshima and reported that cloud conditions were suitable for the dropping of the first A-bomb. The responsibility for the deaths which followed rode hard on Eatherly’s shoulders, although nobody until then had mistaken him for a thinking man. He liked drink, gambling, women, and horseplay, and read nothing more profound than comic books. Then he got mixed up with lethal technology. After the war, Eatherly became a misfit and eventually a jailbird, before being turned into a myth-figure by some of the dark father-figures of our time - politicians, psychiatrists, philosophers, preachers, and publicists. Even Bertrand Russell weighed in. 1 Hell’s Cartographers It was not the importance of Eatherly’s life as such. The extraordinary crucifying incident in which he was involved was what gave him significance. This volume contains brief autobiographies by six eminent science fiction writers. With only one exception, we are all within a few years of the same age. We were all old enough to appreciate the spectacle of the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are few things more vexing than modesty exercised upon someone else’s behalf, so I trust my contributors will forgive me if I say that some of our interest is, like Eatherly’s, extrinsic. For the atomic bomb meant something particular to science fiction writers and readers. Despite our differences, we held at least two items of faith unshakably. One of them was - and it is curious to look back to the forties and see how absolutely bizarre, lunatic even, was this faith then - that space travel waited just round the corner (well, so it did, and we were right, although on many of the details we were instructively wrong). The other item of faith concerned science fiction itself, by which was meant at that time magazine science fiction, disreputable stuff which has only recently been graced by such sociologists’ terms as Alternative Literature. We believed that sf was of genuine merit. More, we saw those merits as being unique. Whatever else the A-bomb meant to Eatherly and all the rest of mankind, to a small handful of us it meant vindica- tion. We who had been regarded as mad were proved dangerously sane. The Future had happened, and blown the lid off the Old Order. From then on, we wrote sf with greater confidence, treated it more seriously, and were ourselves treated by our critics with slightly less scorn and by our readers with positive veneration. Never have critics and readers in any field been more divided than they are over sf. Science fiction, to my mind, is not a matter of prediction, and never has been, although prediction is one of the ingred- ients which makes it fun. Rather, it mirrors the present in such a way as to dispense with inessentials and dramatize new trends. In my own fiction, each decade would typically 2 Introduction present some central image which differed from the one before : in the forties and early fifties, a bleak landscape cleared of people by some almost-forgotten catastrophe; in the fifties, men imprisoned in huge spaceships and technolo- gies; in the sixties, men's minds altered by drugs or engines; and now - well, maybe a great windjammer, fully automated and computerized, bearing the goods that formerly went by air, its complex rig of sails operated without the need of human crew. There’s always a new scenario round the corner. My thought was to invite the men who have been most successful in inventing such fictional scenarios to write a brief memoir of themselves. They were asked to be as frank as possible about their lives and to discuss their involvement in the world of science fiction. The result is a book of unique significance. We have been the weather men flying above alien cities, and we have not delivered our reports before. When we began to write, it seemed as if we were doomed by our beliefs to work in obscurity. Yet it turned out that there was something prod- romic in our approach to life; what we had to say proved to be on a subject with which millions of people of our genera- tion were concerned; and, as a result, our books have been reprinted and translated all round the world (not least in Eatherly’s old target, Japan, one of sf’s global capitals). We are an entirely new sort of popular writer, the poor man’s highbrows. We wrote against the grain and were accepted against it. We wrote for kicks and ha’pence. There is a certain emphasis on finance in our memoirs, and with reason; for the smaller the payment, the larger it looms. We had faith in what we were doing; individualists though we were, it transpired that the faith virtually created a movement. A lot of people needed to re -dream our nightmares. What we see today is the too-easy acceptance of sf. The sharp idiom we created has blurred to become one of the bland flavourings of mass media; the unembarrassed muse we espoused is one of the jades of television. And the younger writers now writing have an entirely different approach to their art. They have found how easy it is to rely 3 Hell’s Cartographers on formula, or how simply success can come through self- advertisement. For us it was different. Well, that’s a good motto for this volume. Where I think the difference showed in our work was that, for all our sleight-of-hand with the wonders of space-and-time, our fiction gained its power by having as unspoken topic one of the great issues of the day: the sense that the individual’s role in society is eroded as society itself becomes wealthier and more powerful. This is certainly so with novels as un- alike as Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants Silver- , berg’s The Time Hoppers, and Knight’s A for Anything. Harrison and Bester, in their most characteristic fiction, allow the individual much more latitude; their heroes can save worlds or defeat the solar system; but nobody who ever meets them is likely to forget the oppressions of the decadent society in Tiger! Tiger! or of the hunger-line crowds of Make Room! Make Room! I chose the men I did because they were friends of mine, though not always particularly close friends, since the Atlantic separates us much of the time; although it is true to say that I have danced the samba with Damon Knight’s wife, Kate Wilhelm - and (dam it) Damon at the same time, because it was one of those mad nights in Rio de Janeiro; while I have been reasonably stoned with Fred Pohl and his wife Carol in the Tokyo hotel room of our Russian pal Julius Kagarlitski; and so on. They were also chosen because I admired their innova- tions in sf. Knight published In Search of Wonder, the first book of critical reviews of sf, and it would be hard to overestimate the influence of his cool appraisals in a field over-fond of puffery. Bester was quite simply the popular writer who showed greatest verve and swagger in short stories and novels; although he does not realize it, he is something of a cult figure in England.

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