doctorstrangemind

Dead Men Do Tell Tales!

In which the misdeeds of the long dead are finally uncovered.

In Peon #19, a fanzine published by Charles Lee Riddle in June 1951, Riddle reprints a most heartfelt article by Anthony Boucher in which Boucher details his experiences as an editor. In 1949 Boucher and J. Francis McComas assumed the role of co-editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In the Peon article article Boucher covers some of the pitfalls he discovered upon becoming an editor.

Anthony Boucher includes the bald-face dishonesty displayed by some individuals who sent in manuscripts for consideration among his gripes. According to him these characters would send in stories which had already been published, and which were all too often well known stories, rather than make use of their own blood, sweat, and inspiration. In other words, plagiarism plain and simple. What’s worse some of these individuals would resent their manuscripts being rejection because of their attempted deception. To quote from Anthony Boucher’s article:

‘This vehemently injured reaction is particularly typical in cases of plagiarism – which is another of your headaches. We have so far had submitted to us, in slightly rewritten form, Robert Chambers’ The Yellow Sign, Cleveland Moffett’s The Mysterious Card, W.F. Harvey’s August Heat, the Gibson’s Justice, and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. The typist of Chamber’s story even entered an extensive brief establishing that his practise was not only legitimate, but SOP in the writing profession.’

Of course it could be argued that a publication like F&SF was particularly open to to these sort of attempts, especially back in the 1950s when Boucher & McComas were fond of publishing old-fashioned ghost and fantasy stories. This is a point I’ll concede as there have always been those people who want all the glory but not at the expense of actually working for it. I can easily imagine such an individual convincing themselves that the editors of F&SF could be fooled by retyping an old story the plagiarist must surely have been hoping nobody would remember. If so then they were in for a rude shock. As can be seem from the quote above Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were connoisseurs of the sort of fiction they were publishing. Of course they were, why else would they be editors of a magazine like F&SF? It strikes me as extremely hopeful for anybody to think these two wouldn’t spot a plagiarism for what it was.

On the other hand it’s not impossible that some devious individual did manage to slip something past their watchful eyes. Nobody can be familiar with every story so copying some relatively obscure piece by one of the lesser known fantasy authors just might work. It probably never happened, but nonetheless such a deception is not beyond the realm of possibility. Slight as it is, this the sort of thing which keeps dedicated bibliographers awake at night.

Now, you might be wondering why I chose to make so much of the possibility that an undiscovered plagiarism might yet lurk in the pages of F&SF. Surely to do so is churlish in the extreme, malicious even?

Well not exactly as cases of plagiarism have occasionally been discovered in the science fiction magazines, if not specifically in F&SF. According to my long-time friend, Denny Lien, somebody who has a great interest in this topic, Anthony Boucher himself fell victim to this dishonest practise. In 1951 his short story, Nine-Finger Jack, was published in the May issue of Esquire. This was story was later reprinted in the August 1952 issue of F&SF (being editor has it’s privileges after all). That should be the end of the story, except that in the October 1971 issue of Worlds of IF appeared a short story by one Irwin Ross called To Kill a Venusian. The opening lines of that story are as follows:

John Smith’s marriage to his ninth bride, Marcia Runyon, took place on the morning of May the thirty-first. On the evening of May the thirty-first John Smith, having spent much of the afternoon pointing out to friends how much the wedding had excited Marcia and how much he feared the effect on her notoriously weak heart, entered the bathroom and, with the careless ease of the practiced professional, employed five of his fingers to seize Marcia’s ankles and jerk her legs out of the tub while with the other five fingers he gently pressed her face just below water level.

So far all had proceeded in the conventional manner of any other wedding night; but the ensuing departure from ritual was such as to upset even John Smith’s professional bathside manner. The moment Marcia’s face and neck were submerged below water, she opened her gills.

Now let’s compare that with the opening lines from Anthony Boucher’s Nine-Finger Jack as published in the August 1952 issue of F&SF:

‘John Smith is an unexciting name to possess, and there was of course no way for him to know until the end of his career that he would be forever famous among connoisseurs of murder as Nine-finger Jack. But he did not mind the drabness of Smith; he felt that what was good enough for the great George Joseph was good enough for him.

Not only did John Smith happily share his surname with George Joseph; he was proud to follow the celebrated G.J. in profession and even in method. For an attractive and plausible man of a certain age, there are few more satisfactory sources of income than frequent and systematic widowerhood; and of all the practitioners who have acted upon this practical principle, none have improved upon George Joseph Smith’s sensible and unpatented Brides-in-the-Bath method.

John Smith’s marriage to his ninth bride, Hester Pringle, took place on the morning of May 31. on; the evening of May 31 John Smith, having spent much of the afternoon pointing out to friends how much the wedding had excited Hester and how much he feared the effect on her notoriously weak heart, entered the bathroom and, with the careless ease of the practiced professional, employed five of his fingers to seize Hester’s ankles and jerk her legs out of the tub while with the other five fingers he gently pressed her face just below water level.’

So far all had proceeded in the conventional manner of any other wedding night; but the ensuing departure from ritual was such as to upset even John Smith’s professional bathside manner. The moment Hester’s face and neck were submerged below water, she opened her gills.’

I don’t think I need offer any more proof that the Irwin Ross story started life as Anthony Boucher’s Nine-Finger Jack. However, if you’re still not convinced then copies of both issues can be easily obtained. Feel free to do so and compare the two stories to your heart’s content. If you do you will have no choice but to admit I’m right.

Nine-Finger Jack is one of Anthony Boucher’s less well-known stories, which is why I assume Mr. Ross chose to plagiarise it rather than one of Boucher’s more famous stories such as The Compleat Werewolf, Snulbug, or They Bite. Anybody who intends to play this game needs to do so unobtrusively because the plagiarist who thinks they can get away with trying to claim a story as famous as Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery as their own work is a fool to themselves and a burden to others. On the other hand Nine-Finger Jack is just obscure enough that I can excuse experienced editors such as Ejler Jakobsson and Lester del Rey for not recognising it. Besides, I’m sure they experienced their fair share of embarrassment once somebody wrote in to point out their oversight. This would also explain why the ISFDB website has no entries for Irwin Ross subsequent to To Kill a Venusian. I imagine Mr. Ross received some pretty stern letters loaded with enough threat from some very upset editors that he decided not to try again.

That an author who had prevented so much plagiarism should be plagiarised himself is ironic in the extreme. Mr. Boucher would definitely not have been amused if he hadn’t already passed away in 1968.

As far as I’m aware most cases of successful plagiarism that occurred in the magazines consisted of only one or two stories. This makes sense because it can be assumed that after a plagiarised story appears in print it will be read by thousands of readers, at least one of whom is sure to be familiar with the original story. These readers then write in with the news and the editor then informs the guilty party that they’ve been caught out before the plagiarist can submit a second or third manuscript. At which point they are either scared into good behaviour or choose a new field in which to exercise their dishonesty.

However, there are known cases of serial plagiarism in the SF magazines. Not surprisingly most of these have occurred in countries other than the USA, places where until recently knowledgeable SF editors were thin on the ground.

For example in the March 1990 issue of Science Fiction Studies Sam Moskowitz claimed that in 1941 no less than 6 plagiarised stories appeared in Canadian magazine, Uncanny Tales. The publication of Uncanny Tales was a result of the Canadian Government imposing import restrictions on US magazines. If Sam Moscowitz’s claim is indeed correct then the import restrictions were a two-edged sword because with no knowledge of what was being published in US magazines the editor of Uncanny Tales was in no position to spot plagiarisms.

Another case occurred in Australia back in the early 1950s when a number of plagiarised stories were sold to the editor of the Australian SF magazine, Thrills Incorporated, Mr. Alister Innes. To date it’s unclear to me whether this was the work of a single person or several. Some sources claim that most, if not all these, were the work of a Durham Keith Garton, but nothing seems conclusive. The one thing I can be sure of is that whoever was behind all this was very busy. In Fantasy Times #126, published by James Taurasi in March 1951, Australian fan, Vol Molesworth, listed no less than seven plagiarised stories which had appeared in Thrills Incorporated.

That whoever was behind this had been able to get away with so many sales makes sense in context. Clearly the staff of Transport Publications, the company which published Thrills Incorporated, knew little about science fiction. Which is not surprising as an embargo on the purchase of US magazines had been put in place by the Australian government at the beginning of WWII and this restriction wasn’t lifted until 1958. Consequently very few Australians had seen any of the US science fiction published since 1939. Transport Publications was a company which had been publishing westerns and detective fiction until somebody spotted a gap in the market and decided to fill it. Consider the following quote from Fantasy Times #132:

“When Thrills began we had no science-fiction writers,” Mr. Innes said. “We had only a team of western and detective writers, and so we had to create a formula. Not necessarily a good one, but at least a functional one, for the writing of science-fiction. This formula – the child of necessity – was to take any story and put it forward 2,000 years, adapting the plot plot and environment as the author went along.”

Given the above it’s easy to see what a target Mr. Innes was for some sharp operator. An editor who has to have his western and detective authors convert their usual stories is going to be too thrilled to be suspicious if somebody walks in the door with a bundle of manuscripts that don’t feel like converted westerns. The only difficulty such an operator would have is in obtaining some recent US magazines to plagiarise from. And that’s no problem at all for anybody with contacts in the US. The magazines weren’t banned, Australians were just not allowed to pay for them, so all the plagiarist had to do is ask a friend to mail them a bundle of magazines as a gift. They didn’t even need a wide selection either to judge by the seven stories listed by Vol Molesworth. All of those were taken from just five different issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Marvel Science Stories, and Startling Stories.

What this person or persons didn’t know that having contacts in the US was a two-edged sword. Australian SF fans had many US contacts of their own, stateside fans who spent the war supplying friends in both Britain and Australia with their favourite reading material. Consequently the Thrills Incorporated plagiarisms were soon spotted by local fans like Vol Molesworth and Graham Stone and these fellows were not shy about contacting the publishers to let them know they had been duped.

Unlike the Canadian and Australian described above most cases of successful plagiarism involving US magazines have been limited to one or two stories. Which makes sense because US editors weren’t labouring under the twin problems of inexperience and ignorance of the US magazines. They were well placed to smell a rat if the rat was so unwise as to offer them too many publishable manuscripts. An inexperienced author might hit the mark with one two, perhaps even two, but send in any more and the alarm bells are going to go off in any competent editorial cranium.

But it turns out that even the most experienced of US editors could be duped with just the right story. Recently I discovered a long forgotten case of plagiarism in which it appears multiple magazine editors of the most experienced sort were caught out by one sharp operator.

It all began while I was looking through my run of Julius Unger’s fanzine, Fantasy Fiction Field. I was giving each issue a thorough examination in the hopes of any juicy news stories that might serve as the basis of a future article. And so it was I discovered the following in Fantasy Fiction Field #137 (published 11 August, 1943):

Now I knew Chas. McNutt was a local Chicago SF fan at the time the above was published. Not only that but he had written about visiting the Ziff-Davis offices to see Palmer on occasion so it seemed reasonable to assume he had this story direct from the man himself. (What I didn’t realise, that is until Mike Ashley & Philip Harbottle kindly pointed it out to me, was that SF fan Chas. McNutt went on to become SF author Charles Beaumont.)

Ray Palmer was well known for being quite hospitable towards fans who visited the Ziff-Davis offices during his tenure there. Thus I can imagine RAP (as Palmer was commonly known) being quite happy to pass on all the latest gossip when McNutt dropped in. However, I always take any story which originated with Ray Palmer with a grain of salt as my impression is that he was more interested in having all eyes upon him than telling the unvarnished truth.

For example I find it very difficult to believe that two private detectives were hired. It seems unlikely that Mr. Davis and Mr. Ziff, the men who owned the company and paid the bills, would really agree to such an expenditure. After all, what would be gained by such an act? Perhaps it would be to put the frighteners on William De Lisle and convince him to return the money he had been paid? Possible, but given I doubt Palmer was paying his authors more than a cent a word paying not one, but two private detective to achieve such an end doesn’t make much financial sense to me. Surely a threatening letter from the publishers warning of legal action would do the job just as well at a fraction of the cost? Further more I very much doubt the police would be willing to lock William De Lisle up. I know nothing about the legal situation in Chicago at the time, but even so common sense tells me that the boys in blue would not like their cells cluttered up over a matter of plagiarism. Surely such a matter would be the province of whatever equivalent to a small claims court existed at the time. To me these are the sort of extravagant embellishments somebody who loved attention at any cost would indulge in.

Despite which claim which all this is based upon seemed possible. In particular because it didn’t show Ray Palmer in the best possible light. If he was willing to share an anecdote in which he was the one hoodwinked then it’s unlikely to be an outright fantasy. RAP certainly wasn’t the sort to invent stories which made him look stupid, he had far too much ego for that. I had to assume there was some truth to the story so I contacted Denny Lien to see what he thought of the Palmer/McNutt claims. This turned out to be exactly the right move because Denny has a special interest in cases of plagiarism and so was keen to see what he could find.

So Denny began comparing the two De Lisle stories published in Amazing Stories with his copies of the British magazine, Fantasy. Almost immediately he discovered that the The Degenerate Mr. Smith, which had appeared in the August 1943 issue of Amazing Stories, had indeed been previously published in the September 1938 of Fantasy. The story had originally appeared under the title Valley of Doom and had been written by one Halliday Sutherland.

Dr. Halliday Sutherland was a Scottish physician and opponent of eugenics who wrote more than a dozen books on medical matters during his lifetime. How he came to have a story published in a science fiction magazine I have no idea. According to a comment by Halliday Sutherland’s grandson, Mark Sutherland, Valley of Doom was his grandfather’s only foray into SF. In which case how unlucky do you have to be to have written just the one SF story only for it to be plagiarised? Still, I suppose Halliday Sutherland and his descendants can console themselves with the thought that his story was clearly good enough to be sold to not one, but two different professional editors.

If any readers are curious about Doctor Halliday Sutherland, and he does seem to be a pretty interesting character, I suggest you go to hallidaysutherland.com, the website Mark Sutherland created in honour of his grandfather.

Now before we move on here are the opening paragraphs to William De Lisle’s The Degenerate Mr. Smith:

‘Mr. Smith, better known in State records as H.99/Flatbush—that being also the address of the house in which he lived—entered the breakfast-room at 4 a.m., punctual to the second. With its white painted walls, tiled floor and windows wide open to the fresh morning breeze, the room was in perfect state hygienically. It was furnished with a table and four chairs fashioned out of angle-iron enameled white, and the only attempt at mural decorative art was a photogravure of Mr. Huey P. Long.

On the wall between the windows was a time-recorder, and as Smith pressed the button bearing his number a white light, then a red light appeared for a second. By those signs Smith knew that the time of his arrival was duly recorded at the Bureau of Industry. His comrade, on festive occasions called Mrs. Smith, and their two children—Henry, aged twenty-one, and Jane, aged seventeen—were already standing around the table. Without further ado Smith took his place at head of the table, and in a loud voice lead the Act of Congress for the day.’

And for comparison here’s the opening paragraphs of Halliday Sutherland’s Valley of Doom, as it was reprinted in the February 1951 issue of Worlds Beyond (used because I currently don’t have access to a copy of Fantasy#2, where it originally appeared. You do get the Fantasy cover though, on the basis that I like it much more than the artwork used on Worlds Beyond:

‘Mr. Smith, better known in State records as H/99 Hampstead—this being also the address of the house in which he lived—entered the breakfast-room at 4 a.m., punctual to a second. With its white-painted walls, rounded cornices, tiled floor, and windows wide open to the fresh but cold morning breeze, the room was in perfect taste hygienically. It was furnished with a table and four chairs, fashioned out of angle-iron enameled white, and the only attempt at mural decorative art was a genuine photogravure of Karl Marx.

On the wall beside the door was a time-recorder, and as Smith pressed the button bearing his number a bell rang and a red light, then a white light, appeared for a second. By these signs Smith knew that the time of his arrival was duly recorded at the Bureau of Industry. His comrade, on festive occasions called Mrs. Smith, and their two children—Henry, aged 21, and Jane, aged 17—were already standing round the table. Without more ado Smith took his place at the end of the table and in a loud, clear voice read the Act of Parliament for the day.’

What struck me most when comparing the above openings was how few alterations William De Lisle made to Halliday Sutherland’s original. On one hand I suppose this makes sense given the whole point of plagiarism is maximum reward for minimal effort. On the other hand surely a cunning plagiarist should make some attempt to alter the rhythm of the story they’re copying.

Compare De Lisle’s work to that of Irwin Ross. When the latter copied out Anthony Boucher’s Nine-Finger Jack you can see from the opening that he trimmed the Boucher story here and there. Partly this made the story leaner and punchier, more appropriate to the market he wanted to sell it to. It also changed the rhythm of the story which in turn reduced the likelihood of a reader being reminded of the Boucher story. Why Irwin Ross didn’t also change the name of the protagonist and the origin of the alien to further disguise his theft I have no idea. Was he really so lazy that thinking up a couple of different names was too much trouble?

William De Lisle on the other hand seems to have been content to limit his alterations of Valley of Doom to deleting or changing anything which comes across as particularly British. At first glance this seems a lazy approach, even for a plagiarist, but I suspect there was a method to his madness. Britain had been at war for some years by the time he tried to sell this story and as far as William De Lisle was aware the export of US pulps to the the United Kingdom had long since been put on hold in favour of materials more relevant to the war effort. (I doubt he knew that various members of US fandom was posting parcels containing the current SF magazines to various members of UK fandom.) Consequently he had no reason to believe whichever issue of Amazing Stories ended up containing his story would be made available in that country where Halliday Sutherland’s original would be best known. Given this I can see how he would be confident that no extra disguise of the original would be necessary. It also proves that William De Lisle knew very little about the habits of SF fans if he thought none of Amazing’ Stories US readership would recognise his plagiarism for what it was.

With the origins of The Degenerate Mr. Smith revealed that left When the Darkness Came, William De Lisle’s other appearance in Amazing Stories. Initially Denny was unable to discover a match for this one despite searching through all three pre-war issues of Fantasy that T. Stanhope Sprigg edited, and a number of other possible magazines. Having exhausted what seemed to be the most obvious options Denny then tried a key word search for When the Darkness Came at the HathiTrust website and struck pay dirt. This rather unexpected match turned out to be a story called Peace, Be Still by Francis H. Sibson, published in the May 1939 issue of Chambers’s Journal (an issue which various websites claim doesn’t exist despite my having a photocopy of the story in question).

According to the Encyclopedia of SF Francis H. Sibson was a:

‘UK-born journalist and author, in South Africa from 1914 or earlier; most of his work, most of which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, consisted of technically proficient tales involving aeroplanes or the sea and ships.’

Looking at the incomplete list of Francis H. Sibson stories on the fictionmags website it appears that while Francis Sibson wrote a lot (including a story for T. Stanhope Sprigg that appeared in Fantasy #1) his sales were confined to British magazines. Which, whether De Lisle knew it or not, made him perfect plagiarist fodder as US editors would have no reason to be familiar with Sibson’s output. Given William De Lisle’s propensities Francis H. Sibson is lucky that De Lisle doesn’t appear to have had a copy of Fantasy #1, or he might have nicked that story too and offered it to Palmer.

As for Peace, Be Still, according to Denny De Lisle had gone to a little more effort with this one:

‘At a cursory look, De Lisle changed the character names, did some light Americanization (changing “petrol” to “high test gasoline” etc.) and did some abridgements of long descriptions and such, but plot and situations and such are exactly the same, and wording is maybe 80 per cent or so word for word swipes.

Sibson of course has form for other SF publications, notably his 1933 novel, Unthinkable which Famous Fantastic Mysteries reprinted, but this story seems never to have been reprinted (except in the form of De Lisle’s swipe).’

Say what you will about De Lisle, and I can think of a few choice words, he knew where to steal from. This would explain why Ray Palmer was so enthusiastic about De Lisle’s manuscripts. To quote from his September, 1943 editorial:

‘This issue was all made up when William De Lisle walked in with his manuscript for “When the Darkness Came”. And yet, you’ll find it the lead-off story on the contents page. Why? Read it for yourself and find out!’

So yes, how about you do as RAP suggests and read the opening paragraphs of De Lisle’s story as they appeared in Amazing Stories:

‘The Mad Years were reaching their climax — the logically inevitable culmination of the fantastic century that had gone before. It was if some mystic Spider of cosmic malignance had bitten the Earth; its poisoned, helpless peoples made to dance an ever quickening, ever more convulsive tarantella. Most of them had forgotten how to be still; some had never known. The last tremendous convulsion, and the coma and death beyond, could not have been far away.

How the Darkness came to the world and its civilizations, its rulers and parliaments, its cults and propagandas, its armies and navies and air fleets, its cities and its crowds: of these things I do not write in detail. In such crammed canvasses of the great mass-human forest, the individual human trees are almost lost to sight. I write of just three people, a woman and two men: Margery Doran, Alan Rogers, and Noel Sterling.

Now let’s compare that opening to Peace, be Still by Francis H. Sibson as it appeared in Chambers’s Journal (sorry, no cover for this issue, not that a cover would add much as the people publishing Chambers’s Journal were far too respectable to put anything interesting on the front of their magazine):

‘Themselves the logically inevitable culmination of the century that had gone before, the Mad Years had got very near their climax. It was as if some mystic Spider of cosmic malignance had bitten the Earth: its poisoned and helpless peoples danced an ever quickening, ever more convulsively involuntary tarantelle. Most of them had forgotten how to be still: some had never known. The last tremendous convulsion, and the coma and death beyond, could not have been far ahead.

Somehow that awful dance had to be halted, the spider-venom neutralised. God knows, the antidote was drastic. It had to be. It was kill or cure.

Some it killed, brain, body, or both: they could not bear the shock of the antidote itself. Others died in the jammed confusion of the maddened whirligig’s arrest. But the rest were saved, to struggle on and upwards with a new and clearer vision of the goal. Whether we shall ever reach it — but only God knows that. Perhaps he hopes and strives as we do.

How the Darkness came to the world and its civilisation, its rulers and parliaments, its cults and propagandas, its armies and navies and air-fleets, its cities and their crowds: of these things I do not write in detail. In such crammed canvasses of the great mass-human wood, the individual human trees are almost lost to sight. I write of just three people, a woman and two men: Margaret Egan, John Hunslet, and Robert Brand.

I can see why De Lisle tampered more here than he did with Halliday Sutherland’s story. By this point De Lisle had sold enough to know pulp editors rarely cared for the sort of flowery language Sibson indulged in. This was especially true of Ray Palmer. To quote from The Man From Mars by Fred Nadis:

‘The sort of writing that Palmer liked was, in his own words, “hack” – without poetic phrasing. That all had to be “hacked” away. He told one writer, Robert Moore Williams, “Your stories all are a lot of ‘pretty’ writing. . .If you’ll take your next manuscript, blue-pencil every phrase that you consider to be good writing, I’ll buy it.”‘

I trust you all noticed I previously specified that William De Lisle had sold to other editors before he visited the offices of Ziff-Davis? Below is a more complete bibliography for our plagiarist than what’s listed on the ISFDB website (this is due to most of his sales not being science fiction or fantasy):

Perhaps It Was the Humidity (humour) – Esquire, May 1935
Death at the Eighteenth Hole (short story) – Dime Sport Magazine, July 1935
Three Minutes to Twelve (short story) – Grit Story Section, December 27 1936
Frozen Gold (short story) – Thrilling Adventures, June 1937
The Weather-Glass (poem) – Short Stories, April 25 1940
White Magic Sales (poem) – Short Stories, July 25 1940
Blue Peter (poem) – Short Stories, January 25 1941
At the Bushman’s Water Hole (short story) – Thrilling Adventures, January 1941
The Ship’s Cat (poem) – Short Stories, March 10 1941
Suicide Pattern (short story) – Detective Tales, March 1941
Indian Boy (short story) – Thrilling Adventures, June 1941
A Lion for a Princess (short story) – Thrilling Adventures, August 1941
What Price Loyalty (short story) – Detective Tales, September 1941
Nightmare (short story) – Thrilling Adventures, November 1941
The Pale Man (short story) – Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, November 1941
A Mangrove Swamp (poem) – Weird Tales, July 1942
Bush-Mad Bwana (short story) – Jungle Stories, Fall 1942
Danse Macabre (short story) – Mammoth Detective, May 1943
Murder, Haircut and Shave (short story) – Mammoth Detective, May 1943
The Degenerate Mr. Smith (short story) – Amazing Stories, August 1943
Murder by Proxy (short story) – Mammoth Detective, August 1943
When the Darkness Came (novelette) – Amazing Stories, September 1943
The Witch (poem) – Weird Tales, May 1945

This is impressive list, containing as it does 16 stories, 6 poems, and a humour piece. In other words William De Lisle managed to sell 23 items over nearly a decade before he was caught out. I’m assuming that nothing on the above list was actually written by William De Lisle himself. Well okay, perhaps I’m being too harsh but the fact remains that every item underlined above is listed on the ISFDB website and has been confirmed by Denny as being written by somebody else. I think 5 confirmed cases of plagiarism are enough to put the other 18 under a cloud.

I’m also assuming none of the editors De Lile sold to prior to Ray Palmer discovered the stories they had bought weren’t actually written by De Lisle given that he continued to make sales. I doubt there have ever been many editors or publishers who upon discovering a case of plagiarism would keep quiet about it. No, it’s much more likely that word would get out after which no editor worth their salt is going to trust a submission from a known plagiarist.

So what’s the story behind the other three ISFDB listings I’ve labelled as plagiarisms? Well, for starters Denny managed to obtain an Adventure House replica edition of the Fall 1942 issue of Jungle Stories (which is a good thing because every copy of the original magazine I found for sale was far too expensive for my liking). He read the story and concluded that it was far too polished to be by De Lisle and so conducted a search which eventually proved Bush-Mad Bwana to previously be a story called Strong Measures by Anthony Parsons. This story had been reprinted from an unnamed 1927 source in an anthology called Stories Of Africa, edited by an E.C. Parnwell in 1930. I suspect that De Lisle lifted the story from this anthology as Stories Of Africa seems like the sort of hardcover most libraries prefer to put on their shelves.

According to the fictionmags website Anthony Parsons began publishing fiction in 1927. The website lists various stories which appeared in The Strand Magazine, 20-Story Magazine, and Pearson’s Magazine but makes no mention of Strong Measures. According to Denny Pearson’s Magazine for 1927 is ony partially indexed so most likely Strong Measures first appeared there.

In regards to the two poems that had appeared in Weird Tales I have to admit to my everlasting shame that I was certain they were both De Lisle’s own work. I thought both poems too awful to believe anybody else wrote them. Apparently Denny has a better feel for poetry that I ever will because he disagreed and soon enough proved his point. A Mangrove Swamp was actually composed by Australian poet, Frederick Spencer Burnell. It was published in The Lone Hand (1 December 1910), and in The Bulletin (7 August 1913), and also in his 1912 collection Before Dawn & Other Poems, which I assume is where De Lisle found it.

A Mangrove Swamp

Look how the slow fat bubble break in rings
As though a man were stifling underneath
The black stagnating water by no breath
Is stirred, a mirror for all evil things.
The long roots writhing upward from the mud.
Like fingers crooked in lust or pain or greed.
Have pendent tresses of putrescent weed.
Like dead men’s hair dogged stiff with their own blood.

No light of flowers nor songs of birds dispel
The silent, stealthy horror of the place.
Only a ripple o’erspreads the water’s face
At times, like soundless, dreadful mirth in hell.

Only the gray mists come and go beneath
The pallid shadows of the sickly moon;
Only dead voices in the night breeze croon
A drear and melancholy masque of death.

Then there is The Witch, a poem I consider to be even worse that A Mangrove Swamp. While Frederick Spencer Burnell describes a location that is nothing like any mangrove swamp I’ve ever encountered and he did use what strikes me as a hackneyed series of descriptive terms, I have to admit that in its predictable way it’s a competently structured piece.

The Witch on the other hand is not merely an exercise in description but is an attempt to tell a tale, which it proceeds to do so very badly. It starts with a wealthy priest instead of a baron or abbot, positions that would make more sense in terms of wealth. Neither is the reader given a more detailed reason why a farmer who can throw around gold loathed this wealthy priest. However the greatest sin of this poem is that after the witch has proved her murderous ability the farmer decides to not pay her because nothing bad has ever come of doing that, right? The Witch is in fact a poorly done retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, which adds nothing to the original folktale. This is why I was nonplussed to learn that it had originally appeared in the September 1930 issue of Fortnightly Review and is credited to one J.A.H. Ogdon. Now I don’t know what the achievements of Mr. Ogdon might be but according to sundry online sources the Fortnightly Review was a very prestigious publication, having been founded in 1865 by no less a figure than Anthony Trollope (among others admittedly). Why then did the editor of what was suppose to be such a publication think this poem worthy of inclusion in his magazine is beyond me!

The Witch

The farmer loathed the priest for all his wealth
and begged that I should take him off by stealth.

He promised gold to work such deadly harm;
he called him snouting Paul and shaveling monk
and other names. Trembling with hate he slunk
out of my hut. And I began the charm.

I called for Meg to bring the mandrake weed
that shrieks when it is dragged;
for Rennie Stump who lives by Hangman’s Common
to croon an incantation for the deed;
we gathered in the cunning herbal woman
to stew the simples: when the night was fit
a dozen gib-cats round the throat we slit.

Then sat we all beneath a westering star.
We glared with malice on his window pane;
and when we howled together for his bane
the rectory casement gently swung ajar.
He got him slowly, slowly, from his bed:
the charm went blasting home—he fell down dead.

Giles leapt for glee on his fresh-heapen mold
but when I pleaded, cringing, for the gold,
he spat and swore, and spurned me in a ditch.
Out and away—he snarled—thou noisome witch.

Staggers and glanders took his colts away;
foot-rot destroyed his ewes and lambs: one day
insane he gave his farmstead to the fire
and hanged him from a rafter in his byre.

So what have we learned so far, other than that crime does not pay? The length of this list makes clear that the William De Lisle spree was unusual. He wasn’t selling to clueless outsiders as in the Thrills Incorporated or Uncanny Tales cases, but to a whole string of experienced editors, most of whom had been in the magazine business for many years. So what gives? Well as it happens I’m beginning to see a pattern.

My current theory is that William De Lisle had realised three things; editors and readers of the pulp magazines didn’t read the British literary magazines and visa-versa, despite their superior reputation magazines such as Fortnightly Review and Chambers’s Journal often published stories and poems that could be easily made suitable for sale to the pulps, and finally, the better US libraries, Chicago’s Harold Washington and T.B. Blackstone Memorial libraries come to mind, held many British books and magazines.

Given these three points I can easily imagine De Lisle sifting through books and magazines on his day off and copying out any likely prospects. In effect I believe he managed the reverse of the serial plagiarism that occurred overseas. In Australia the editor of Thrills Incorporated and in Canada the editor of Uncanny Tales were duped because they had little or no access to US magazines and thus no way of knowing what they were paying for. What De Lisle discovered was this lack of knowledge worked both ways and thus he could sell work not his own to even knowledgeable and experienced editors. In a way his system is one of evil genius and you have to wonder if he managed to hatch any other cunning scams after he apparently ceased to be an author.

That would explain why he has a number of poems to his name. It is, after all, much less effort to copy out a poem than it is some thousands of words of prose. I also suspect that poems were an easy sale to magazines such as Short Stories and Weird Tales as the editors of these magazines found poems to be excellent space-filler. This might explain why the last item on De Lisle”s list of sales was a poem in Weird Tales. The then editor of that magazine, Dorothy McILwraith, most probably accepted the poems in 1942 or earlier and left them in a drawer in anticipation that one day she would find the issue she was assembling had a hole which needed filling. Even if she was told about De Lisle’s exposure as a plagiarist what are the odds that she would still remember that by 1945?

The fact De Lisle chose to bother with poetry also suggests to me that he was more interested in the ego stroke of seeing his name in print rather than the money earned. I suppose it’s possible he saw this as a source of pocket money that didn’t require physical labour. If this was the case then he made a bad choice because the majority of pulp magazines were not known for fast payment or high word rates. I think it more likely that De Lisle was one of those people who wanted to be a published author but didn’t want the bother of actually writing. So long as he had some published stories to show friends and family he probably didn’t care that his career was a fantasy. He certainly wouldn’t be the only example I’ve encountered of somebody who was willing to take credit for other people’s work. They even have a term for such behaviour over on Reddit.com, karma harvesting.

It also seems to me that De Lisle was shifting from target to target, selling one batch of manuscripts to Short Stories, and the next to Thrilling Adventures before moving on yet again. Which is cunning because it ensures no one editor sees enough of his work to wonder about any inconsistencies of style or how he was turning out so muchgood work so quickly. If these speculations are correct then De Lisle was running a very cunning con job and his only mistake was to not know anything about SF fans. If he had he would know that there would be those among the Amazing Stories readership who would recognise The Degenerate Mr. Smith for what it was. As Bobby Vee once sang, the night has a thousand eyes, and so does science fiction fandom.

The only mystery then posed by the above is where De Lisle obtained a copy of Fantasy #2 from as I don’t believe it was ever for sale on US news-stands and I can’t imagine any US library of that period holding pulps, even exotic foreign pulps. None-the-less he clearly found a copy somewhere and made the fateful decision to copy out Halliday Sutherland’s story. Yes, some copies were imported into the country by US fans but I imagine most of those copies were confined to the libraries of serious science fiction collectors and there is no evidence that William De Lisle was a serious collector or had any contact with science fiction fandom.

The above list also explains the discrepancy between Chas. McNutt’s claim of five stories sold and there only being two De Lisle stories in Amazing Stories. I assume that either Palmer decided to tweak the story because he thought it would sound better to a science fiction fan or McNutt misremembered certain details when he wrote to Julius Unger because the other three stories appeared in Mammoth Detective rather than Fantastic Adventures. (Mammoth Detective was named sot because the early issues were a mammoth 322 pages long.) I wish I had realised this fact a little earlier because initially I assumed the three missing stories had been published under a pseudonym in either Amazing or Fantastic. That assumption resulted in me skimming through every issue of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures published in 1943. I ended up reading a lot of terrible fiction as a result of that mistake.

That final poem in Weird Tales not withstanding it would appear certain that William De Lisle’s career, such as it was, came to a screeching halt with his sales to Ray Palmer. We now know there was only one story copied from Fantasy rather than the five which McNutt’s story implied, but I’m sure that even a single, solitary example of plagiarism was enough for Ray Palmer. That single, solitary story taints everything he was sold, in which case the only sensible conclusion was to assume every apple is bad and act accordingly.

It’s a pity there is no record of what happened next because I for one would love to know what sort of communication RAP had with De Lisle and what the latter had to say for himself, if anything. It’s possible De Lisle had convinced himself that what he was doing wasn’t really wrong. I’ve certainly encountered people who seem to think that so long as the victim doesn’t know, then they are doing no harm (not unlike the person Anthony Boucher mentioned who argued that copying stories was accepted practise).

What I do think we can safely assume is that Ray Palmer upon discovering what had happened didn’t hire any private detectives. I think it far more likely that Palmer simply wrote to De Lisle to tell him he had been rumbled. Regardless of what other action he took I assume RAP also told his bosses, Mr. Davis and Mr. Ziff, about what had happened as any competent editor would. Publishers don’t look too kindly on being conned out of money and I’ve no doubt they had somebody send out warning letters to the other magazine publishing houses. That is after arranging for a stern and threatening missive to be sent to De Lisle himself. This makes for a more likely conclusion as Palmer strikes me as the sort to send out letters to half the editors he knew, get distracted, and then forget about the matter entirely. This seems especially possible given it was 1943 and Palmer was just about to kick-off the great Shaver brouhaha in a few months, an event that would prove to be a massive distraction in so many ways.

I checked but found no further mention of this matter in later issues of Fantasy Fiction Field. Which suggests to me that RAP only told this juicy story to a handful of people before realising his willingness to trust an author he didn’t know by purchasing so many manuscripts all at once didn’t reflect too well on his judgement. He may have also realised he shouldn’t be publicising what was a potentially easy way to dupe editors. His fellow professionals would not thank him if his story gave other unscrupulous characters any ideas. Nor was this story ever mentioned in either Amazing Stories or Fantastic Adventures, but that hardly surprising as no editor is going to willingly give his subscribers such an excellent excuse to demand some of their money back. Under the circumstances it’s hardly surprising the story became buried until now.

Not that the story is done with yet. Denny Lien did sterling work in uncovering the origins of those five stories and poems but that leaves no less than 18 unexamined sales, all of which must be considered suspicious given what has already come to light. Most of the magazines William De Lisle sold to are relatively easy to obtain so anybody who enjoys a bit of detective work might like to see what they can find. For example I’ve managed to obtain copies of two of the De Lisle stories published in Mammoth Detective, Danse Macabre and Murder, Haircut and Shave. When I have the time I plan to see if I can determine if these too are plagiarisms.

In the meantime never forget, no crime is perfect, even dead men do tell tales.

P.S. I really do want to thank Denny for all the hard work he put into the research. Without his efforts none of this would be possible.

The Early History of the Hugo Awards (Part 2.)

Chapter 2: Seek and ye shall find.

Now, before I go on to examine the curious case of no awards at the 1954 worldcon I need to backtrack a little. In the first instalment of this examination, while tracing the initial creation of the Hugo Awards, I wandered slightly off course onto the topic of exactly when the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards also began to be known as the Hugo Awards.

Richard Lynch responded to my digression by pointing me to an article he had published in Mimosa #30. This had been written by Robert Madle, who had been the treasurer of the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention, the worldcon at which the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards were given out. Richard Lynch believed this article answered both who and when the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards acquired the name we’re familiar with today. However, I was unconvinced by the Robert Madle article as to my mind the story as presented seemed incomplete. To quote from the article in question:

That worldcon was the one where the Hugo Awards were first presented. The idea for the Awards was the brainchild of one of our club members, Hal Lynch. He came running over to my house one night, and said, “Hey, Bob, I’ve got a great idea! Why don’t we give awards for things like Best Novel and Best Magazine – sort of like the Oscars.”

And I said, “Gee, that’s great! We could call them the ‘Hugos’,” At the time I was writing a column, “Inside Science Fiction” for Robert Lowndes and I used that to play up the idea of the Hugos before the convention.

A Personal Sense of Wonder (part 2) by Robert Madle
Mimosa #30, Page 54/55 (August 2003)

Madle then went on to write about the actual construction of the rockets to be used for the awards. In other words this anecdote jumps from the initial suggestion to being accepted as part of the official programming. No mention is made of how the rest of the committee received Hal Lynch’s idea. Which is not to suggest they reacted negatively but rather we are told nothing about the ensuing discussion of how this bare bones suggestion was developed into a fully formed project, surely the most interesting part of the story?

In particular there is no mention of what the various committee members thought about Madle’s idea of calling the proposed set of awards “Hugos”. Neither is there any explanation as to why in all the official publications of the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention the awards are only ever referred to as the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards. All in all Madle’s anecdote struck me as a very incomplete and offered me nothing but unreliable 50 year old memories. So, with most of the story missing and no evidence offered to back up what little was there I was unwilling to accept Robert Madle’s claim on faith alone.

I guess at this point I should pause to explain that when writing about any topic on Doctor Strangemind I only consider reliable those facts that are backed up by what I consider suitable source material. That is material produced at the time of the event I’m writing about that doesn’t seem slanted towards something other than the truth. And yes, I do frequently speculate in my articles but I do try to make clear when I’m presenting something as fact and when I’m speculating.

Thus, by my standards Robert Madle’s memories are too insubstantial for me to consider them as a basis of fact without some supporting evidence. Which doesn’t mean that Robert Madle wasn’t correct when he claimed he was the first one to suggest calling the new awards “Hugos”. What it does mean is that before I can go any further I needed to see if I could locate some evidence which would prove when and where the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards began to be referred to as “Hugos”.

The obvious place to start was of course the Inside Science Fiction column Robert Madle mentioned in his Mimosa #30 article as where he promoted the name “Hugos”. Which was a bit of a problem as Madle hadn’t been any more specific than to mention he’d written the column for Robert Lowndes, somebody who had published extensively as both a fan and a professional. So for all I knew Madle’s column could have appeared in either any one of a number of fanzines or professional science fiction magazines.

However, while searching Fantasy-Times for references to the 1953 worldcon I discovered James Taurasi had mentioned this very column in a short article about the professional activities of one Robert Madle. The following appeared in Fantasy-Times #171 (February 1953):

Fantasy-Times #171 - Robert Madle

Having now realised that the Inside Science Fiction column was intended for professional publication I checked the ISFDB and there I discovered what I assume is a complete list of published instalments. Turns out instalments of the Inside Science Fiction column had appeared in nearly every science fiction magazine Robert Lowndes edited for Columbia Publications (indeed, the column jumped about so much it might hold the record for the number of different titles it appeared in). Anyway, using the ISFDB information as a guide I was able to obtain the relevant issues of these magazines and begin searching.

As Robert Lowndes had been involved with science fiction fandom for many a long year before becoming a professional editor my guess is that he was betting that a column by a well-known fan like Robert Madle would net Columbia more subscription money than whatever Madle’s columns cost (assuming Robert Madle received anything other than the honour of being published professionally). I would guess this meant that quite a few of whatever subscriptions the Columbia magazines attracted came from active members of science fiction fandom. Consequently whatever Robert Madle wrote in his column was going to carry some weight within fandom of the day.

But before I begin quoting sources a quick word about the dating of the various Columbia magazines. In the majority of issues these magazines the contents page includes a statement as to when the next issue would be available. These dates would invariably be several months earlier than the date shown on the cover of the succeeding issue. As I understand it the earlier dates were for the benefit of subscribers. Magazine publishers, in particular smaller outfits like Columbia Publications, liked subscriptions because the distributor couldn’t take a cut of the profits. Consequently it made sense to post out the subscription copies as soon as they arrived back from the printer. Meanwhile the news-stand copies would need to make their way from distributor to the news-stands. As was explained in a previous instalment of this column <On the News-stand> whoever was running the latter would rarely put issue of any magazine out on the racks before the cover date. Retailers were juggling hundreds of different titles after all and had no real incentive to get any particular magazine out on the racks early. This is why Robert Madle could write about the September worldcon as though it hadn’t happened yet in an October issue of Dynamic SF. Unfortunately this can make understanding the sequence of events a trifle difficult.

So now I’ve sorted out the dating matter let’s turn to Dynamic SF #5 (dated October 1953 but announced as being available 1st August). As can be seen below on page 59, Robert Madle, in his Inside Science Fiction column, refers to the awards to be handed out at the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention as “Hugos”. Since this matches what he wrote in his Mimosa article I’m willing to consider this sufficient evidence that Robert Madle did indeed coin the nickname “Hugo” for the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards. Interestingly though he only refers to the awards as “Hugos” despite the third progress report he mentions as being ‘just out’ only ever referring to them as the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards:

Dynamic Stories #5 - Robert Madle

Even more interestingly this issue of Dynamic Stories also contains a letter on page 83 written by Publicity Chairman Alan E. Nourse. In that letter Nourse promotes various aspects of the 1953 worldcon including the proposed awards:

Dynamic Stories #5 - Alan E. Nourse

So here we have the Treasurer (Madle) calling the awards “Hugos” and the Publicity Chairman (Nourse) calling them the Achievement Awards. Under the circumstances it’s hard not to wonder if the rest of the committee were as enthusiastic about Madle’s name as Madle was.

Adding fuel to this particular speculation there appeared in Fantasy-Times #175 (August 1953) a report on the progress of various worldcon matters written by Lyle Kessler (another member of the Publicity Committee). In this update Kessler states that the committee have no official name for the Achievement Awards as can be seen here:

Fantasy-Times #175 - Lyle Kessler

I have to wonder if Kessler’s comment about the award having no official name is a direct, if veiled, response to Madle’s calling them “Hugos” in Dynamic SF #5? If the subscription copies of Dynamic SF were indeed mailed out early in August then the timing would be right as Fantasy-Times #175 was the second of the August issues for 1953 and thus was published late in the month. If some of the committee did not care to have their awards being called “Hugos” then it would make sense for them to issue what amounts to a clarification of Madle’s use of the name as soon as possible.

I especially like the slight put-upon tone of that final sentence. At least it reads to me like Kessler is making clear that at least some of the committee didn’t really want to call the awards “Hugos”, but would if everybody else really, really wanted to do so, then fine, they would accept their awards were called the “Hugos”.

Not that I think the above reveals a major disagreement. It is possible after all for a group of people, a convention committee for example, to have differences of opinion and still remain friends and united in purpose. I certainly see no animosity in print. For example Robert Madle in Future Science Fiction V4 #5 (dated January 1954 but announced as being available 1st November 1953) on page 81 made a point of enthusiastically reviewing Kessler’s fanzine, Fan Warp. If Madle and Kessler were truly at odds I could see Madle still reviewing Fan Warp, hard for him not to since it was promoting the 1953 worldcon, but I doubt he would do so with nearly as much enthusiasm.

Also, in Future Science Fiction V4 #6 (dated March 1954 but presumably available earlier), on page 54 Madle, as part of his coverage of the 1953 worldcon, describes the awards ceremony. When doing so he describes the awards as being both the First Annual Science Fiction Awards and the “Hugos”, which strikes me as being a conciliatory gesture. He also mentions they were given out during the Sunday evening banquet, something I didn’t realise from the sparse Fantasy-Times description of the ceremony, the latter having made it sound like they were handed out as part of the afternoon programming. Madle also mentioned that he hoped Harold Lynch’s idea of giving out a set of awards would become a regular worldcon feature.

In the meantime it’s clear that the editors of Fantasy-Times had taken a liking to Madles’s “Hugos”. In Fantasy-Times #190 (November 1953) they published a follow-up story to the worldcon awards ceremony:

Fantasy-Times #190 - Ackerman

Mind you, that final paragraph is very strange given that James Taurasi, editor of Fantasy-Times, who was at the worldcon and had, presumably, witnessed Forry Ackerman’s decision to pass his Hugo on to Ken Slater (as described in the previous instalment). Why the final paragraph wasn’t written in such a way as to make clear that editor Campbell wasn’t the final recipient but was transporting the rocket to Slater is a mystery.

As it happens Ron Smith published that newspaper clipping (including the photo mentioned above) in his fanzine, Inside #5 (May 1954). Unfortunately, given the quality of the original newspaper clipping, we will have to take it on faith that it’s a Hugo that H.J. Campbell and Forry Ackerman are handling. Neither can I see Campbell’s name being incorrectly given in this article, mostly because it isn’t given at all. Poor old H.J. Campbell has to make do with being called an ‘English science-fiction editor’ (and without even a correction by Ron Smith). Talk about getting no respect:

Inside #5 P15

Now you might think that settles the matter what with the above evidence proving that Robert Madle did indeed call the awards “Hugos” twice when writing about the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards in his column. It certainly is reasonable to to accept Madle’s Mimosa #30 claim now the above evidence has come to light.

However this doesn’t mean that calling the awards the “Hugos”, either officially or unofficially, had won in the court of public opinion. There was no guarantee after all that the actual awards themselves would be anything but a one-off, a momentary blip in worldcon history like so many other experiments carried out at the early worldcons. Until another worldcon committee took up the challenge it really didn’t matter what the awards were called. One swallow does not make a spring and one award ceremony does not make an unbreakable tradition after all.

Luckily for the 1953 committee the idea of a set of annual awards did inspire somebody, and luckily for Robert Madle his idea of calling these awards “Hugos” also appealed to them. In fact it can be argued that it was not until the Clevention in 1955 that awarding “Hugos” truly became an unbreakable tradition. It was their championing of the awards and the nickname which put both on the map permanently.

But before we consider that, we need to cross the barren desert of 1954.

A Different View of the Early Hugo Awards (Part 1.)

Chapter 1: Beginnings: 1953 & Before

Now before I go any further I would like to make it clear that this and subsequent articles are not about the award winners themselves but rather how the award system has evolved. As such I’m going to spend a lot of this first installment setting the scene. Hopefully this will help make clear why the awards developed in the way they did. Crossed fingers.

The first three Worldcons were held in 1939, the Nycon in New York, in 1940, the Chicon in Chicago, and in 1941, the Denvention in Denver (which just goes to show imaginative convention naming has never been a feature of the worldcon tradition). All three were relatively simple affairs as the practise of an annual get-together by science fiction fans was novel enough in itself to satisfy the majority of attendees. At the Denvention it was decided to award the next worldcon to Los Angeles. That what had already become the highlight of the science fiction year was allowed to stay on the west side of the US for a second year in a row was something of a surprise. For a start most SF professionals lived in the eastern half of the US due to the majority of magazine publishers being based in New York and the need to deal with editors via post meant the closer somebody lived to the editorial offices the better. Thus an eastern worldcon would find it easier to attract professional attendees than one based in the west, something most active fans would unsurprisingly prefer. As to whether more active fans lived in east than in the west I can’t say, but certainly that was the perception at the time and such perceptions can carry a lot of weight, especially with fans deciding where the worldcon should be held next.

And now for a rather self-indulgent digression.

I brought up the unlikelihood of LA being awarded the 1942 worldcon because this is one of those events authors like to latch onto when writing alternate history. The reason Los Angeles was awarded the fourth worldcon was that the Los Angeles Science Fiction League (which became the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 1940) was considered to be the single most prominent and active SF club in the US. To visit the LASFS clubroom and spend time with Forry Ackerman and co was the dream of many. To quote Fred Patten’s history of Los Angeles fandom:

Ackerman was particularly active in helping the LASFL publish its own mimeographed fanzines. They were full of humorous, pun-filled reviews and parodies of current SF, as well as discussions of the LASFL’s picnics, holiday parties and group outings to scientific lectures at Cal Tech or the local planetarium in addition to the club meetings. These soon established the LASFL’s reputation throughout budding SF fandom as “Shangri-L.A.”; a paradise for young SF fans. This reputation helped L.A. fandom win the World Science Fiction Convention for 1942.

If Forry Ackerman and other LASFS members had been a little less popular, if the club had been seen as a less desirable destination, it’s possible that the worldcon would return east to be held somewhere like Philadelphia. As it was the LASFS were awarded the worldcon but long before LA could stage their event the USA was at war. Given the changed situation the LA fans felt it was necessary to canvas fandom at large to see what they would prefer happen. The LA committee offered three choices; hold the con in LA as planned, hold it in another city where the threat of Japanese air attacks was remote, or postpone the worldcon altogether until the war was finished. In the end the threat to the west coast of the US was never significantly realised (an excellent summary of the situation can be found here) but perception is a powerful force and after the attack on Pearl Harbour a similar assault on Los Angeles seemed all too possible. Eventually the committee announced that the preferred option was postponement and thus Pacificon didn’t happen until 1946.

Now if the 1942 worldcon had been awarded to a city back east or if the LA fans had decided to carry on regardless the history of the worldcon could potentially be very different. Indeed it’s not impossible that the gap between worldcons could of ended up to be much longer. If a worldcon had been held in 1942 it’s likely a lot of prominent fans and professionals would find themselves not able to attended due to being called up for service or some other side-effect of the war. In which case I could easily see it being agreed by whoever did attend to essentially put the idea into mothballs until the war was over as the problem of non-attendance was clearly only going to get worse. Even if in the unlikely circumstance the membership of this hypothetical 1942 worldcon had also chosen a city to host that eventual post-war convention whoever accepted the honour is unlikely to have had the same level of commitment as the LA fans did. After all, many LASFS members had been thinking about how to win the rights to the fourth worldcon for months prior to the Denvention and after winning it had spent more months planning their con before it was agreed to put it in mothballs. Any group selected at a hypothetical 1942 worldcon wouldn’t have the same opportunity to mentally commit themselves like LA. I doubt anybody attending this hypothetical 1942 worldcon would arrive confident that there would be another in the foreseeable future. Thus, even if some group then agreed to run a post-war worldcon they would surely have more pressing matters to attend to than a potential convention. In such circumstances I could see it very likely that the proposal would just trailing away to nothing due to a lack of commitment.

Would that mean a permanent end to the idea? I doubt it as eventually some dynamic individual would whip their local club into a frenzy of enthusiasm and put on, if not something called worldcon, then something billed as a national convention. There would surely be something like this before the end of the 50s. It might even move from city to city and hand out annual awards. Just how close a format this annual event would have to the present worldcon it would be anybodies guess.

Anyway, to get back to the story proper, as previously noted the practise of holding worldcons resumed in 1946 and in due course the committees running them decided that the worldcon needed to be a more elaborate affair. This was partly inspired by the idea that a worldcon should not be a series of lectures given by various speakers as was done with conferences for professionals. There was a feeling that science fiction fans deserved something a little less dry and a little more open to participation by fandom at large. More importantly, committee egos were at stake as many involved were keen to make their particular version of the convention as memorable as possible. And if they really lucky one of their ideas would be adopted by later worldcons and made a permanent part of the annual event. So it was that committees began to throw multiple ideas against the programming wall to see what would stick.

Thus it was that an annual set of science fiction awards was far from the only idea committees began to toy with. For example, the 1950 Norwescon proposed a cabaret style masked ball and appointed a local fan, Jim Bradley as a Teen-Age Greeter. His job was to:

…make the younger delegates feel at home and to help them to find the things of particular interest to them.

In 1951 the Nolacon decided to explore more controversial waters by announcing a Dianetics Symposium. Less controversial but more ambitious was the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention’s proposal in 1953 to have a science fiction movie premier in conjunction with the convention. In 1955 the Clevention committee announced their intention to stage a science fiction play which would be put on by a local semi-professional theatre group. They also put forward the idea of a Mystery Guest of Honour. (A rather complicated idea that I’ll not try to explain. If you want to know how the idea was suppose to work I’ve included a scan of the article explaining everything at the end of this article.) Which, if any of these ideas, came to pass I haven’t checked. The mere fact they were suggested is enough in this context.

As part of this search for immortality the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention (only later known as Philcon II) also planned to award the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards. The announcement of which appeared in the third Philcon II progress report. The fact the committee waited till this point to make such an announcement has me wondering. The fact they devote so much space to explaining the awards suggests to me that initiating them wasn’t an afterthought as I would otherwise assume. Could it be that it took so long to make an announcement because the various members of the committee couldn’t agree on what categories would be included? I really hope this was the case because that then means the fine old tradition of disagreeing about how many award categories there should be goes right back to year one. A thought which I like to imagine would put a warm glow in the heart of many an ex-worldcon committee member.

Anyway, here’s the article in question. It’s well worth reading if only to highlight how much the award changed since 1953:

1953 Awards 1

1953 Awards 2

If you have read the above announcement you’ll notice a number of interesting points. First of all the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention committee called them the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards and not the Hugo Awards. Officially they continued to be called the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards for many decades. It wasn’t until 1993 that they were officially renamed the Hugo Awards. Exactly when fans began giving the awards the nickname of Hugo I can’t be entirely sure. However, the earliest mention of the practise I’m aware of appeared in the 1955 Clevention’s Progress Report #4. In an article about the physical aspects of the award appears the following comment:

A great deal of hard work, money and time went into the project of making this “Hugo”, as some people have already dubbed the trophy.

Just who was using the term and how widespread the practise was by this point isn’t made clear in this article. It could be that committee members were aware of the nickname being used elsewhere but I suspect such usage was confined to the committee itself. After all, given that at this point the awards had only been given once and then were seemingly discontinued it seems a bit unlikely that fandom at large had decided to give something they couldn’t be certain would ever be seen again a nickname. Moreover, given that the awards are then continually referred as Hugos in the rest of the article I rather suspect some or all of the committee had not only adopted the term but also wanted to push the idea of calling it that as one way to put their stamp on the awards idea. All speculation of course but it does make for an interesting theory.

Secondly, there are an ambitious number of categories listed. Nine different categories strikes me as far too many for a new award and I think this is further evidence that the committee couldn’t agree on what to include. That there were too many categories is far from idle speculation on my part as two of the listed categories, Short Story or Novelette & Fan Magazine were not awarded at the 1953 worldcon. This wasn’t because they had proved unpopular but very much the opposite. According to this quote from Fantasy-Times #185 (published in September by James Taurasi):

There no awards for short stories, novelettes or fan magazines, as there was no clear cut vote on these; too many named with too little vote for each.

Given the advantage of hindsight I would suggest the 1953 committee made four poor choices in regards to the way they set up these awards; too many categories, not making the voting for a calendar year, making the vote first past the post, and not making this a two stage process.

Of these four mistakes it’s pretty clear to me that it was the latter two which caused the most trouble because they ensured that voting was never concentrated. Now it could be argued that a two stage system as was employed by later worldcon committees is an artificial way of narrowing the choices and ensures winners that at the nominating stage did not have majority support. However, the alternative, one fan one vote as used in the early years of the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards, is no more likely to be representative. As was apparently the case with the Short Story or Novelette & Fan Magazine categories the problem was the likelihood of the votes being divided among too many candidates for any one item to have a significant majority.

Also, because the vote was first past the post and (at least to the best of my knowledge) no details of the voting was ever released we have no way of knowing just how really popular the winners were. For example, it’s generally assumed that in 1953 the voters showed good taste in that the winning novel, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, is still considered a very good story. However, for all we know, only a minority of the votes were for The Demolished Man and it’s win came about solely because rest of the vote was split between too many other candidates. In this regard the decision to have the period of eligibility run from August to August (the period from worldcon to worldcon at the time it should be noted) could only confuse matters as without a nomination stage I think it likely there were votes cast for material that had appeared before August 1952. If Joe Kennedy could complain in his fanzine, The 1946-1947 Fantasy Review, that in regards to the polls he ran for top authors of 1945 and for 1946 some people voted on their of all-time best when that wasn’t what Joe had asked for, then it seems to me equally likely that some of the 1953 voters would be just as careless.

The above may seem to be edging towards nit-picking on my part but I think it’s worthwhile writing about these problems now because they were not going to go away and would once more come to the fore in 1955.

Before that though the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards were handed out at the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention in what seems to have been a rather low-key manner. As was normal practise at the time Fantasy-Times #185 (which was the Locus of it’s day) included a lengthy report on the convention. As can be seen from the quote below the handing out of awards wasn’t treated as something special to be commented on separately but simply mentioned as one of a series of events during the day. Heck, James Taurasi, who wrote the convention report, couldn’t even be bothered to give the awards their designated name:

The Winners of the Awards were:

#1 Fan Personality: Forest Ackerman, who turned it down and gave it to Ken Slater of England. Bert Campbell will bring it back with him and present to Slater.

Interior illustrator: Virgil Finlay.

Cover artist: A tie between Ed Emsh and Hannes Bok.

Excellence in fact articles: Willy Ley.

New SF author or artist: Phillip Jose Farmer.

Best Pro Magazine: a tie between Galaxy and Astounding.

Best Novel: The Demolished Man.

That the awards didn’t immediately light up fandom is hardly surprising. At the time I doubt the First Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards came across as much different from the various science fiction polls that had gone before. The awarding of them certainly didn’t result in any comment I’ve yet to find (though I can’t believe that absolutely nobody had something to say about who won and who didn’t)

So, as yet the awards were no more that a one-off novelty. To be any more future worldcons would need to step up to the mark, and that wouldn’t prove to be an obvious move, as I’ll explain next time.

And as a special reward for those of you who made it this far here’s…

Clevention Mystery Guest

Hoodwinked

Hugo Gernsback was a veritable fountain of bad ideas. And yet…

Gernsback Isolator 1

So here we are folks, proof positive that there is hope yet for even the stupidest of inventions. When I first saw this particular Gernsbackian brainchild years ago I mentally labelled it as one of the least practical inventions I’d seen from a man who seemed to specialise in unworkable ideas.

However, given the current state of affairs I’m beginning to warm to the idea of fitting out those office workers who can’t perform their duties from home with Isolators. Given each one of them an Isolator and enough bottles of Gernsback’s special oxygen mix and away they go!

Gernsback Isolator 2

Admittedly these suits might not prove popular with the average office worker but that merely demonstrates how little imagination most people possess. The observant among us will quickly realise that once in the Isolator it will be very difficult for the outside world to tell just what an individual is up to. With a little effort there should be enough space in the Isolator to make smoking or drinking possible if the imbiber is willing to make a few adjustments (a bottle with a straw for example). Alternatively, it will be obvious to the canny office worker that once the Isolator is donned it’s very difficult to tell who’s in it. Thus if an individual wanted the day off all they need do is pay a student in need of a little extra cash to go into the office wearing their Isolator and who would notice the impostor?

Yes my friends, the Isolator is the way of the future. If we can’t have jetpacks then why not something equally stupid bit of weird technology? Be the first on your block to build and market your own version. I dare you.

Go West (For Redemption)

Not the robot apocalypse I was expecting.

(Please note that in the following article I am only taking into account the first season of the TV version of Westworld. I haven’t watched past the end of the first season and I’m not sure I even want to given how perfect it was.)

I can certainly understand why film executives take a risk adverse attitude when it comes to remaking films. They are, after all, in the business to make money and choosing films that were successful the first time around is the low risk option. However, it also rarely results in something that transcends the original and all too often results in a less interesting version. The worst part though is that even if the remake turns out to be better than the original it’s still more of the same. So while I can understand the logic being employed I’ve no particular reason to be happy about it.

What I would prefer is for those film executives to work just a little bit harder. To search through their back catalogues for flawed films with unrealised potential. It doesn’t matter to me whether these are films which bombed or if they were hits, just so long as they are in some significant way unsatisfactory. There are plenty of such films out there, I know because I made a list of interesting but flawed films I’d like to see remade in the hopes of their deficiencies being eradicated. That list includes 1408, Conan the Barbarian, Westworld, and Mad Max, all well known films that could be so much better in my opinion.

Of those films, Westworld, that is the 1973 original directed by Michael Crichton, did very well at the box office, making $10 million on a budget of $1.2 million according to Wikipedia. However, all that proves is that even flawed films can make money because Westworld is very flawed film indeed. It’s also very well regarded if the scores quoted on the Rotten Tomatoes website are to be believed. However, I suspect that Westworld, like the original Mad Max, is mostly remembered with fondness for several striking scenes rather than for the film as a whole.

Westworld Poster 4

Just to be sure I re-watched the original Westworld recently and while the basic idea is as interesting as I remember, the way that idea is developed leaves a lot to be desired. I came up with what I consider to be four major flaws (while ignoring several minor ones):

The claimed financial viability of the theme park is entirely unconvincing.

It takes far too long for any real action to start.

Too many scenes were little more than information dumps.

The reason for the robots going on their rampage was not convincingly explained.

As you can see none of these flaws pose an insurmountable problem. Even a simple soul like myself can see how they all could be corrected without injuring the basic idea posed in Westworld. Perhaps doing so wouldn’t result in a brilliant film but it could be competent and it could potentially fix the flaws listed above (of course I can’t guarantee that doing so wouldn’t introduce a bunch of new ones).

Having given this film so much thought imagine my surprise when I discovered that Westworld was to be remade as a TV series. I was dubious about the idea to say the least because I couldn’t image where they would find the extra plot to flesh out what I considered to be a rather thin story. So imagine my yet greater surprise when I watched the first season of Westworld (to see if they did indeed find a bit more plot) and discovered it both entertaining and mostly devoid of the faults mentioned above. Imagine my yet greater surprise when I looked up the details of this TV version and discovered that none other than Michael Crichton, the man behind the film version, had been involved in scripting this version. So, let me explain what Mr. Crichton (and others) did that was so right.

Let’s start with the financial viability of the theme park. Yes, I know, I’m the only one who’s bothered by details like this but I can’t help it so I’m going to write about this at length. You have been warned.

First of all it was made clear at the start of the film version that there two main reasons for customers to spend time at one of the three theme parks, that is Westworld, Medievalworld, or Romanworld; fornication and murder. However I didn’t find it convincing that large numbers of people would pay significant sums of money for either of these given how these parks were run.

First of all there’s the problem offered by the parks offering sex. The thing about robots is that they’re complex machines which need to monitor and record what happens to them in multiple ways in order to facilitate repair and maintenance. Anybody who contemplates sex with a robot in Westworld, Medievalworld, or Romanworld will have to do so knowing that their partner will be at least partially recording what happens (much like the black box on a plane I would imagine). It seems likely to me that the majority of people willing to indulge in casual sex would prefer to believe their encounters are going unrecorded (except perhaps in an exaggerated form as part of the memories of their partners). Not only that but what guarantee do visitors have that their encounters aren’t being fully recorded? How many people are inclined to implicitly trust a corporation and the staff working for it in such intimate situations? Regardless of how much the park administration denies such practices it seems likely to me that most people would find the possibility that somebody was not only looking over their shoulder during sex but keeping a permanent record of what happened to be extremely off-putting. Sure, a minority people won’t be bothered by the idea but I doubt this group alone would be enough to provide the necessary cash flow.

The potential for violence in film Westworld doesn’t seem like something which would greatly appeal to punters either but for an entirely different reason. The problem isn’t so much that park guests knew they were in no danger whatsoever, though that didn’t help. The real problem was that every one of the staged violent encounters had no build-up and wasn’t part of any larger story. Each incident I saw in the film involved a robot challenging a visitor more or less out of the blue and with no justifiable reason for seeking such an encounter. Combine this lack of story line with the certainty of victory and I can’t imagine people flocking to hand over cash for what I can only describe as a boring experience.

The TV series mostly fixed these problems by putting an emphasis on providing story lines for visitors to participate in. So rather than visitors arriving in town and having an android announce that they don’t like their face and make an attempt to kill them, they would instead be invited to join in some sort of escapade by various androids. Guests could decline such offers and simply play tourist, wandering about and watching a fully functioning replica of the past at work. However, as was mentioned by several different characters, most of the interesting action happens far away from the arrival point and it was implied the best way to encounter that interesting action was to take up one of the many invitations.

Guests still couldn’t die but by involving them in complex plots that could last for days their visit could become a far more immersive experience. If, for example, a guest accepted an invitation to join a team of android bounty hunters and then spent several days in the saddle with this posse, by the time a gun battle erupts it’s very likely said guest will have forgotten that they can’t be killed and will bite the ground with the best of them. Given the potentially immersive nature of these plots I can see this version of Westworld being a far more satisfying experience and something which actually draws customers.

Even the sex angle seems to have been partially fixed by hinting that the world outside contained many more people who were comfortably off but bored than in our time and that for these people the potential for excitement outweighed the potential lack of privacy. Actually, for all the TV audience knows about the outside world reduced privacy might well have become the norm out there as well. The TV version also doesn’t blatantly promote the sex angle, it’s clearly there but neither does anybody turn to the camera and announce that they’re only there for the rumpy-pumpy.

What’s more, the TV series was very careful to underplay the options for sex in Westworld. Virtually the only place the possibility of sex was brought up was in the saloon where the prostitutes were based. I suspect somebody realised that we live in a less innocent world and that with an android population any sort of sex was possible. Given that sex was a prominent part of the film version the makers of the TV version couldn’t drop it entirely without the audience noticing its absence but it was certainly downplayed. I assume it was decided to skim over the whole matter in the hopes that the more unsavoury options wouldn’t occur to the audience. Which would be the best that they could do under the circumstances, as trying to explain why any illegal sex acts couldn’t occur in Westworld would only draw attention to the possibilities.

Even so, I did begin to wonder about money as the TV series progressed. With each episode the theme park was shown to be larger and the infrastructure ever more elaborate so that towards the end it did begin to seem unrealistic. By that point I could understand why one of the characters had talked about the park haemorrhaging money. I wish this had been made more of a plot point so the scale of everything could be explained, if not justified, and a more concrete threat to the park developed by revealing that the board wanted to scale back the size of the operation.

Westworld Poster 1

Okay, so moving to my next point, a quick skim of the reviews for the film version of Westworld assures me that I wasn’t the only one who thought it took too long for the real action to start. The film was nearly half done before events at the park began to go haywire and the relatively interesting chase sequence began. I blame this on the author of the screenplay , Michael Crichton, being allowed to also direct. Crichton was clearly in love with his theme park idea and wanted to explain how it all worked. This level of background detail can work in a novel where pacing doesn’t need to be so tight but a film, especially an action film like Westworld, needs to keep advancing the plot in order to stay interesting. What’s worse I didn’t find Crichton’s theme park especially well thought out so as far as I’m concerned I didn’t find those scenes worth the time spent on them. He also failed to develop any of his characters into very interesting people. Which of course meant that even once the action started I didn’t much care what happened to them.

The TV series also began slowly, so much so that it took until the fifth episode for the story to get really exciting. This wasn’t a problem as it was in the film though because the TV version very quickly set up a series of questions. Every character was clearly up to something, but exactly what only became clear in the second half of the season. Developing these mysteries made the early episodes a bit slow as we had to follow multiple characters who were up to who knows what, but this was more than compensated for by the fact the various plot threads were clearly building to conclusions the viewer could enjoy speculating about. In fact it turned out that the threads which made the most sense early on proved to be dead ends and the less comprehensible scenes built into the main, and quite interesting, story line.

Besides which, even when it wasn’t clear what was going on some of the performances were quite fascinating. In particular Anthony Hopkins acting like a slightly stoned David Attenborough was mesmerising in its surrealness. Even if it did make me wonder why the board of directors running Westworld hadn’t already made serious efforts to shuffled him off to a retirement home.

In short, unlike the film version the slow start to the TV series was worth it because the early episodes were dominated by the mystery of how the story would get from its starting point to the assumed robot holocaust.

Westworld Poster 3

The next problem I had with Crichton’s directing was that too many scenes were designed to be little more than information dumps. For example, the film begins with the guests being driven to their various destinations. I could see no point to this other than as an excuse to have recorded voices repeatedly tell the guests they could do whatever they wanted and they would be perfectly safe. Given that anybody who saw any of the posters for the film knew that things were going to end badly this seemed like a very clumsy way of heightening the surprise when things began to end badly. Besides which, I can’t imagine any company, even back in the 70s before the health & safety craze took hold, thinking this would be a good message to pound into their customers given it encourages stupid behaviour. It made no sense and was clearly only there for no other reason than to contrast how the theme park was intended to operate with just how out of control events would later become. (I was amused when later in the film one of the head technicians says that it’s ‘inexcusable to endanger a guest’. Pretty rich coming from a senior employee of a company which keeps telling these same guests that they don’t need to take any care in regards to their actions.)

Another example of clumsy foreshadowing is a scene in which a lot of time is spent having one of the main characters explain to his partner that the guns in Westworld couldn’t work on living creatures. This was an especially stupid scene as it asked the viewer to believe that the people running the park didn’t bother telling customers about this basic fact on arrival. Again, this was only there to reinforce the surprise when guns did begin inexplicably working on people. Equally absurd was the reveal that the technicians operating the park all worked in an air-tight room fitted with electrically operated doors. Thus when the electricity failed all the technicians asphyxiated in a surprisingly short time. It was never explained why they worked in an air-tight room or why there was were no manually operated means of escape. I assume the audience, not knowing much about computers, was suppose to assume the room needed to be kept dust free because computers could break down if dust was present. If so, then this was complete rubbish as the computer wasn’t in the room, only terminals connected to it. Besides which in one scene which cut back to the control centre we hear a technician order scrambled eggs, bacon, and cinnamon toast and then ask the kitchen to send it down to consul three. Why guard against dust if you’re going to let cinnamon toast crumbs waltz right in? No, the only reason for this silliness was to ensure nobody was left alive who could help the surviving main character as he was chased by the robot gunman.

That the TV show was able to avoid replicating this sort of obvious foreshadowing is impressive given it had to be assumed the audience knew for a fact that eventually there would be a robot rampage. Putting the emphasis on the mystery of what the various human characters were up to was a wise cunning ploy. It allowed the growing danger of what the androids were capable of to be pushed into the background. In hindsight all the clues were there but so casually inserted that I imagine most viewers didn’t question any of them.

Finally, the explanation for why the robots went out of whack in the film was totally unconvincing. The basic idea of multiple robots developing a fault was entirely reasonable but why this should be so is never explained. All the audience is given is the suggestion that the robots are breaking down in a manner analogous to the spread of an infectious disease. Audiences back in the 70s, who were after all unfamiliar with computer technology, apparently found this sufficient explanation, but it’s entirely unsatisfactory to anybody more knowledgeable. Even adding in additional references to other equipment faults doesn’t help as the cause of these breakdowns aren’t explained either. It was such an easily fixable problem too, for example all Crichton needed to do is have a couple of technicians talk about some sort of upgraded command processing device that they had been inserting into the robots and have one of them mention that it seemed to be having unexpected side-effects. That way we have an understandable cause and effect for robots beginning to kill, even if the cause is glib sounding gobbledegook.

(Just as an aside, I’ve been blaming Michael Crichton for all these faults because he did write the script and he did direct the film but I have to be fair and acknowledge that a film is a pie made by many cooks. For all I know studio interference caused some of these faults, such things have been known to happen after all.)

How the TV version eventually handled this was far more believable and far more interesting. Actually I didn’t catch on to what was going to happen until nearly the end despite the evidence pointing in that direction. It’s very easy to become so distracted by all the sub-plots that the single thread which ignites the the final sequence can be easily overlooked. In fact by the halfway point of the first series I’d begun to wonder if they hadn’t decided on a totally new ending. I thought it very impressive how the TV version turned one of the main weaknesses of the film into a strength.

All in all I would rate the first TV season of Westworld as a vast improvement over the film. It is a rare, if not unique animal, a remake that surpasses the original. If only we had more of those.

Westworld Poster 2

In the Beginning

Before there was ‘major talent’, there was ‘complete unknown’.

It’s not hard to assume in today’s world of tomorrow that our best and brightest always appear to us first in novel form (and if you don’t find imagining your favourite author as a a small block of compressed wood pulp to be at least a little bit novel then you have a far wilder imagination that I will ever aspire to). I doubt matters are quite so cut and dried, that at least some currently well regarded authors served a short story apprenticeship before entering the dominant ecology of the paperback novel, but even so such an apprenticeship no longer seems to be de rigueur.

Of course aspiring authors of the 40s and earlier had little choice but begin in the magazines. But even as recently as the 60s, the decade when the science fiction magazine finally went underground, it remained common for new authors to scuttle about in the short fiction undergrowth like small mammals as they built sufficient reputation to tempt a paperback editor into taking a risk on them.

It is a pity that this lost world didn’t have some sort of science fictional David Attenborough creeping through the publishing undergrowth to breathlessly describe everything and anything he encountered. However, we do have on occasion the next best thing, that being the contemporary reviews of an emerging author’s earliest published works.

Contemporary reviews are always worth comparing with the way the work of a particular author is later viewed. When we read an early story by a somebody who has gone on to bigger and better work we tend to do so with our perceptions coloured by everything that has come since. A contemporary review of that story on the other hand is unencumbered by reputation and what somebody back then has to say about the early work of an author who today has a significant reputation can be surprising to say the least.

Take for example consider the following comments by US fan, Earl Evers, who reviewed the contents of the April 1964 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination in his fanzine, Zeen #2 within weeks of it hitting the shelves. In the process of reviewing this magazine, story by story, he had the following to say about what was one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s earliest published stories:

Le Guin

And just in case you find the scanned text a little difficult to read:

‘The Rule of Names by Ursula K. Le Guin

A Tolkien imitation and as such a type of story I think we could use more of. Not that anyone can successfully imitate Tolkien, but even imitations short of the mark are better than anything else around. This story doesn’t really capture the Tolkien spirit though it uses most of his devices of language, naming, plotting, etcet. As a matter of fact, some of these copies are a little too close for my taste – the hero takes the pseudonym of ‘Underhill’ and the dragon is identical with Smaug and his compatriots. The surprise ending spoils what effect has been built up throughout the story – any Tolkien imitation requires a sense of Fate and a mythic awareness; a surprise ending always kills them. But I hope the reception to this slightly botched Tolkien imitation doesn’t sour the editors on the type.’

Now I don’t know about you but I certainly never expected to find a phrase like ‘slightly botched Tolkien imitation’ to be used in connection with the author of the Earthsea books. However, while it’s a blunt assessment I can see why Evers thought what he did and I can’t really disagree with him. On the whole it was certainly for the best that Le Guin didn’t continue writing about Earthsea in this way. On the other hand, given some of the fantasy trilogies which were to come in the 80s I have to shudder slightly at the hope for more Tolkien imitations.

Oh, and in regards to the interlineation in the scan above, according to my research smog is a term that dates back to at least the early 1900s it’s not unreasonable to wonder if Smaug is a pun based on the term. I rather doubt it though as Tolkien’s etymology of Middle-Earth is, or is as far as I’m aware, based on far older languages and words. Still, was an interesting guess.

Taking Care When Biting the Bear

Some days you might bite the bear…
But take care or the bear may bite you…

Bear Eating

It has often been said, and rightly so, that there is little value in an author complaining about what others say about their work. No matter how wrong-headed an author might think such opinions, in the normal course of events complaining about them rarely does the author much good. The problem for any author who feels slighted is that we all form opinions about everything we experience and few of us will happily accept being told our opinions are worthless. Thus when an author uses the argument ‘that X did not understand what I was trying to do’ most of us feel our hackles raise in empathy with the critic.

To argue about anything but clear errors of fact (as Jack Vance once did in response to James Blish) is risky business for this very reason.

Now, true as this might be there remain lines best not crossed. None of us can afford to pontificate in a thoughtless manner if we value our hides. If pride goeth before a fall then such arrogance goeth before a public stoning.

Even offering up an ill-conceived but otherwise relatively harmless review can be especially fraught with danger. No author cares to sit still and be told their work is flawed if the party doing so cannot present a well thought out explanation as to why this is so. Consider the following review written by somebody hiding behind the childishly rude pseudonym of K.U.F. Widderershins (really, only a young teen would think that name clever). Harmless as this well meaning but exceptionally clumsy review is it’s hard to fault the author in question, a notoriously touchy individual as it happens, for making reply. The initial review appeared in Australian Science Fiction Review #5, (published by John Bangsund in December 1966):

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the revamped Impulse* is Keith Robert’s series of stories set in an alternative England. Admittedly, apart from the first issue of the magazine, they have appeared in lacklustre company, but even by themselves the Pavane stories are pleasant reading.

The stories would never have been published in Unknown. The trouble is that although Roberts has gone a long way to construct a believable England, he hasn’t quite reached the standard of logical necessity which Campbell, for example, would have required. Although the author says that the Church has good reasons for suppressing inventions, none of these reasons emerges from the stories. Accepting this fault, however, we can investigate what Roberts has to say.

Pavane itself simply reveals something about the world Roberts dreams of. The Guild of Signallers is a good idea, but one obviously worth expansion to novel length, as perhaps are many other ideas in this series. For no apparent reason, Roberts uses a flashback technique which only serves to confuse the reader slightly. The end of the story is not at all clearly resolved, with two entirely contradictory endings appearing consecutively. Doubtless this has something to do with the unexplained ‘people’.

The other stories – The Lady Anne, Brother John, Lords and Ladies and Corfe Gate – deal with an episode in the history of Robert’s England. They cover a couple of generations, and each of them suffers the fault of appearing to be truncated; for each the resolution is unsatisfactory. It is as though the author himself didn’t really want to finish off the story. Sometimes, as in the case of the original ‘Anne,’ the character is removed in a subsequent story in a way entirely at odds with the character’s previous behaviour. This makes the overall impression rather unsatisfactory, too.

The last story, Corfe Gate, is obviously intended by Roberts to be the best, with characters overflowing with life and reality.

As the series now stands, many questions are unanswered: who are the ‘people’? is Brother John the same man as Sir John the seneschal? (and if not, why not?) We may never discover now the secrets of Cordwainer Smith’s world, but let us hope that Keith Roberts will reveal, in time, just what makes his delightful world tick.

As you can see this is a review which was meant to be a positive one, but with certain reservations. Trouble is the various comments Widdershins offers are too little fleshed out to be useful or even to always make much sense. Widdershins repeatedly commits the sin he accuses Roberts of in that each of his points is truncated to the point of being unsatisfactory. For example Widdershins write that the Guild of Signallers is an idea that deserves a novel-length treatment. Which would be all well and good except he doesn’t go on to explain why he thinks that or if this means Roberts failed to use this idea properly. So Widdershins’ comment feels like nothing more than a random musing left hanging. All in all this review reads like some semi-coherent notes which Widdershins had made in order that he might write a proper review at some future date.

It is hardly surprising then that an acerbic reply appeared in Australian Science Fiction Review #9, (published by John Bangsund in April 1967). Before reading the following letter from Keith Roberts I suggest you put on some sarcasm proof goggles:

I’d like to take this opportunity of thanking you for sending me the various copies of ASFR in which my work has been discussed; I’ve found them informative and excellently produced and thoroughly enjoyed reading them through. BUT, I feel I’ve just got to take exception to the Widdershins report, or review, or whatever he calls it, of Pavane in issue five.

Whoever is lurking behind that noxious pseudonym really should have his head immersed in a vat of treacle, or sheepdip, or whatever bizarre fluid comes most readily to hand Down There. I’ve read bad reports of my work and I’ve read downright vindictive ones but I’ve never come across such an absolute masterpiece of misunderstanding; I’m well aware that widdershins traditionally go backwards but this is really too much. I’ll stress I’m in no way miffed, the thing’s too daft to be taken seriously, but I would like to straighten the poor confused chap out just a bit.

Taking his points in the in the excitingly random order in which he presents them, I’ve said quite clearly at umpteen places in the book just why my postulated Church behaves the way it does. I could I suppose arrange some critic’s copies where a little light comes on or a bell rings when the reader gets to the Author’s Message, but I this might be going a little far. The novel has a post-nuclear setting, embodies the elderly notion of repeating time-cycles, and poses the even more hoary question of the validity of scientific progress; see Brave New World, &c &c &c. Maybe it would have helped Maybe it would have helped Mr. Widdleskin if I’d hyphenated some of the longer words. I’m sorry the stories wouldn’t have been good enough for Unknown, whatever that is, but as I didn’t write them for it I’m not as distressed as I otherwise might be. As a matter of fact I don’t think the quarterly journal of the Ear, Nose and Throat Practitioners of Kuala Lumpur would have gone much of a bundle on them either.

However Mr. Ditherspin successfully confuses the whole issue, with I must admit great skill and economy, before moving on to What I Have To Say. (Armed, one imagines, with deerstalker, calabash and king size magnifying glass.) His first conclusion emerges with lightning-like rapidity; The Signaller is not a novel. This would seem to be a fatal flaw. It could, he growls, have been Expanded. Well, I’m sorry; but sometimes I write novels, sometimes short stories. Authors do that sort of thing. This is exactly the type of critical remark that drives one to a clucking fury; if Mr. Withershin had devised an apparatus for, say, polishing the outer husks of Bomongo nuts, he would be quite justified in losing his temper if I turned around and pointed out that it wouldn’t whitewash pigruns. Signaller was devised as a short story, part of an interlocking set; I never wanted it to be a novel, it never will be a novel; can’t he be more constructive than to pick at it for the thousand and one things it isn’t? He also becomes disturbed at my use of flashback; this, I learn, leaves the reader slightly confused. While manfully repressing the suspicion that Mr. Diddleshin started out just slightly confused, I would still like to know how in the name of ten thousand devils can a death-dream, which is what the whole thing is, flash in any other direction but backwards? If he would lay out for me, in detail, the more logical and polished treatment he no doubt has in mind, I promise to study it with fascination.

To cap it all I discover the story is not after all clearly resolved, with “two entirely contradictory endings appearing consecutively.” Here is the one point at which I rally could emit short bursts of steam from the ears. Does Mr. Hitherthin actually imagine I was so vapid and so totally idle as to be unable to finish the piece? That I – and my editor – simply stuck on a pair of likely ends and left the reader to choose for himself? Did it not cross his mind, even briefly, that he might have missed out somewhere, that he hadn’t in fact understood the first damn thing about the story? The rest of his remarks merely verge on the cretinous; that crack is downright bloody impertinence. He has of course shown himself unable to grasp the central point of The Signaller at all, though I would have thought it was crystal clear; I don’t frankly see how I could have underlined more firmly the parallel between the death of the god and the half-sacrificial death of the boy. Possibly he has never heard of the Baldur myth; that’s fair enough, but I did put down a full version within the story to sort of help him along. Maybe he missed that bit. I would suggest a short course in comparative mythology, kicking off with the Epic of Gilgamesh, working through Venus and Adonis, &c &c, and not missing out on Christ. It wouldn’t take more than three or four years.

And the rest of the stories were unsatisfactorily truncated because I’d got fed up with them. Well, I just couldn’t have realized how bored I was when I was working on them; funny how one can never appreciate one’s own state of mind. I thought I was enjoying myself. And, oh dear, I never did get around to explaining about the People. That’s just my whole trouble, Mr. Sniddlepin; always leaving nuts and bolts off things. But didn’t you ever believe in fairies? Not even when you were a little moron? What a horrid dull life you must have had, I’m so sorry. I’m afraid you sound a bit like a chap I once knew who sent Picasso a ruler and compasses so he could get his lines straighter. And though I’m really pleased you find my little world delightful I’m not going to tell you what makes it tick, I positively decline. You’ll just have to sit out somewhere with an icepack and a nice cool drink and fret about it. I will give you one tiny clue though, since you were really quite nice and jolly about everything. Brother John isn’t the same as Sir John the seneschal.

Why the blue hell would he be, you nit!

Yes, I will admit that Mr Roberts overreacted, his letter clearly reads as more annoyed than he initially claimed to be (or perhaps he found putting the boot into Widdershins too much fun to hold back) and went on at far more length than the review deserved. (“Oh, you don’t say. Thank you for pointing that out,” reply the more sarcastic readers.) However, because the review in question is so frustrating incomplete the normally self-defeating argument ‘that Widdershins did not understand what I was trying to do’ made by Roberts fails to raise reader hackles for once. I imagine most bystanders would be content to stand back and watch Widdeshins being mauled.

However there are worse sins than merely writing a clumsily and carelessly worded review, much worse. Let’s consider the case of James Blish, writing as William Atheling Jr., in Sky Hook #16, (published by Redd Boggs in the winter of 1952/53). In an installment of his column which appeared in that issue Blish commented on (among other things) an Isaac Asimov novel which had just been serialised in Astounding:

The conclusion of The Currents of Space leaves us with another reasonable but dull Asimov novel on our hands, the three installments of which coincided with the three months under review here.

Blish then spent the rest of that paragraph explaining that while The Currents of Space was a very solid novel he, and unnamed others, still felt let down at the end. Naturally Blish has a theory as to why this should be so:

The main reason is stylistic. Asimov is a highly circumstantial writer, sharing with Heinlein and Norman L. Knight the ability to visualise his imagined world in great detail, so that it seems lived-in and perfectly believable. He does not, however, share Heinlein’s lightness of touch; instead, he more greatly resembles Knight in writing everything with considerable weight and solidarity, turning each sentence into a proposition, a sort of lawyer’s prose which is clear without at any time becoming pellucid.

This kind of style is perfectly suited for a story which is primarily reflective in character, such as Asimov’s recent robot yarns. It is also just what is required for a story in which history is the hero and the fate of empires is under debate. What Asimov has been writing lately, however, beginning with Tyrann**, has been the action story, to which he seems to have turned more or less at random after his long Foundation project reached its culmination. And the action story cannot be written in that kind of style. Why? Because a style that ponderous, that portentous, constantly promises to the reader much more than even the most complex action story can deliver. The tone of The Currents of Space justified any reader in expecting that in the last installment Asimov would at the very least rend the heavens in twain. The plot provided no such encouragement, but the style did. Instead, Asimov blew up one sun under circumstances which could hurt no one but one man who wanted to die, and we are left wondering why this very workmanlike novel “somehow” didn’t satisfy us, why it “let down at the end.”

Now while I don’t agree with James Blish as to why The Currents of Space is a rather dull novel (and I have to wonder just what he meant by calling Asimov a ‘circumstantial writer‘), I can’t fault him for expressing the opinions quoted above. Describing The Currents of Space as ‘dull‘ may seem harsh but whether you agree with such an assessment or not Blish does go on to defend his assessment without getting personal. Reading these comments may be a bitter pill to swallow if you happen to be called Isaac Asimov but nobody could say that Blish has been dishonest in regards to what he wrote.

So far, so good but then in a subsequent installment of the William Atheling column (which appeared in Skyhook #20, Winter 1953/54) Asimov receives another mention, but not in regards to a newly published story. While writing about a Randall Garrett parody of the executioner’s song from The Mikado that had appeared in the November 1953 issue of F&SF Blish has this to say about Isaac:

Garrett can, of course, do absolutely nothing for about writers like Asimov, who are (1) too likely to bleed at the slightest harsh word to profit by any sort of criticism, and who are (2) still being solicited by editors to carry on their series projects, even in the face of the evidence that the readers have had enough, and even that the writers have had enough, too… My point #1 was intended to apply primarily to Isaac, who is one of the two or three most easily hurt people in our universe; why, I couldn’t say, but there’s good evidence for it.

While I find Blish’s second point a contentious claim it’s obviously the first one that concerns me here. Regardless of whatever he knows about Asimov, or believes he knows, to make such a claim without presenting supporting evidence to back it up is at the very least both reckless and tactless. Even with clear evidence personal attacks such as this rarely reflect well upon the accuser, so to make such an accusation and back it up with no more than a claim that good evidence exists, but then not present any of it, is little more than cutting one’s own throat.

Of course the wisest response to such calumny is none at all but if the victim must reply it’s best to seize the moral high ground. Something which Asimov, with the support of Anthony Boucher, does to excellent effect. Let’s see how these two gentlemen respond to the Atheling accusation of literary haemophilia.

First Boucher:

I must protest Atheling’s description of Isaac Asimov as “too likely to bleed at the slightest harsh word of criticism…one of the two or three most easily hurt people in our universe.” As a professional reviewer I know the type described, and have a by no means little list of people with whom my personal relations will vary according to the tone of my last review. Asimov is emphatically not among them. I have disliked a number of Isaac’s books in front of (according to the latest ABC figures) 585,725 people, and carried on a perfectly friendly correspondence with the author all the while. I have personally ribbed him about infelicities and received good-humored replies; as an editor I’ve torn a story to shreds and got back a long and sincere thank-you letter. Conceivably Asimov may have displayed irritation at some imperceptive remark of Atheling’s; this, after all, could happen to anybody. But in my own records he goes down as an unusually well-balanced and tolerant professional.

Then Asimov:

I feel sadly moved to answer William Atheling’s statement that Asimov is “too likely to bleed at the slightest harsh word of criticism” and that Asimov is “one of the two or three most easily hurt people in our universe.” I say “sadly” because it seems obvious that argument with Atheling is a losing proposition.

Concerning Randy Garrett’s satire “I’ve Got a Little List” which criticises me, among others, and which Atheling fears can do nothing for me because of my objections to criticism – may I say that when I toastmastered the Philcon on Labor Day eve 1953 I referred to that very poem with great approval, and sang it in full, as well. Several hundred people were there and will bear witness, I have no doubt, that I did not bleed.

As for criticism in general: Mr Atheling’s criticisms are pretty small beer, after all. Now I’ve had comments from gentlemen like Campbell, Gold, and Boucher-McComas, whose barest word of criticism sometimes means the loss of a thousand dollars because it comes in the form of a rejection. I hereby, with the greatest of respect, offer these gentlemen as character references. I will rest my case, sound unheard, on what they have to say concerning my attitude toward criticism. I understand that Mr Boucher has already, of his own unsolicited free will, seen fit to make comments in this matter.

Then why do I bother to answer Mr Atheling if I am not sensitive? Oh, but I am sensitive. Not to literary criticism, to be sure, but to personal criticism on the part of people who do not know me and can scarcely form proper judgements.

Blish is lucky this all happened before the Internet. If such an exchange occurred today I’ve no doubt there would be an impressive dog-pile and I suspect that most of those piling on would be on the side of Asimov.

Call a novel bad and you will certainly get an argument, but unless your opponents are dishonest in their views (and I will grant that such types are hardly uncommon) they will concede that you have a right to your opinion, no matter how wrong-headed they may think it is. Make your comments personal on the other hand and soon enough every hand will be raised against you (well unless you have acolytes willing to defend any and all of your pronouncements, and again I will grant that such are common enough) because any honest third-party will recognise that making personal attacks is hardly playing on a level field. If I were to besmirch the good name of George R.R. Martin by describing him as a theodolite, a coelacanth, a kakemono you would be entirely justified in thinking less of me for making such claims. For how can you know if the inestimable Mr Martin is really any of these things, or if I know the gentleman well enough to make such claims? Simply put, you don’t, and will rightly resent being asked to accept such claims without good and adequate proof. So even if I truly believed George R.R. Martin to be a theodolite, a coelacanth, a kakemono it would be unfair of me to bring such claims into a review of his work. (For the record, I do not think George R.R. Martin is any of these things. Furthermore I will admit to being myself, a coelacanth. However I doubt this will much surprise anybody already familiar with my writings here.)

However, such suicidal behaviour need not be confined to personal criticism. Sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy, especially if it means being honest about practises that are difficult to defend. In Cry #184, (published in the mid-September, 1969 by Vera Heminger, Elinor Busby, and Wally Weber) there appears a report on the 1969 worldcon, the St Louiscon penned by Wally Weber himself. At one point Webber described a Saturday afternoon panel on editing that took a wrong turn:

The conversation was drifting towards prose anyway, so a new panel convened consisting of Lester del Rey (who moderated immoderately), Terry Carr, George Ernsberger, Don Benson, Ejler Jakobsson and Ed Ferman. Both the panel and audience behaved very well until the subject of how much rewriting an editor should be allowed to do on another person’s story. The editors suddenly became politicians, mumbling about “improvements” and cleaning up minor errors in grammar and spelling, and “suggesting” changes to authors. Then Lester made the unfortunate admission that while an editor should never rewrite, he must often shorten or lengthen a story to fit the number of pages the story must fill in a magazine’s format. He referred to a 10,000 word story he had lengthened to 15,000 words for this purpose. From the audience came a bone-chilling moan previously never heard outside the torture pits of hell. That terrible sound had come from Bob Silverberg and it set the mood for what may become known as Lester’s Last Stand.

I have seen Lester in many debates, but never have I seen him fall apart and be so mercilessly inundated with abuse. Authors rose from their seats and shook their fists and screamed through their beards. Lester’s pleas about what must be done in the line of duty and how writing in another author’s style is the most difficult work in the universe only increased the new waves of hatred focused upon him. I suspect that he was even being attacked by the author within himself. Even Harlan, who you must admit has listened to some pretty awful things and believed them, said, “I hear all this in disbelief and horror.”

This was madness.

Most jobs have a downside. Usually it’s merely a matter of soul-destroying tedium but sometimes it involves unsavoury practices best not talked about. Nobody wants to hear about these unsavoury practices. How many lovers of bacon want to dwell on where their sliced pig comes from? Or even that it involves pigs being sliced up? Of course not, most people don’t want to hear about the nasty stuff, even if not knowing is to their detriment.

I suspect most of the stories Lester del Rey was slicing up as per editorial need were by unpublished authors, innocents so thrilled to receive a cheque in return for their work that it never occurred to them to closely examine the published story. And even if they did and noticed that their work had been altered they were unable to do much about it other than send Lester a letter of condemnation rather than any further manuscripts. A gesture unlikely to bother a thick-skinned editor like Lester del Rey.

Unsavoury as this practise is, given the magazines Lester had been editing I doubt he had much choice but to do as he did due to the twin problems of limited budget and a set number of pages to fill. I don’t want to absolve him of all blame but I do want to make the point that if he felt he had no choice but to do this then common sense surely dictated that he do it as little as possible and be very discrete when he did.

If your job involves practices that other people might not look upon favourably then surely it’s obvious that you not tell them about them. For an editor like Lester del Rey to reveal his worst professional sins to a crowded room full of published and would-be authors makes no sense whatever. Lester didn’t just invite the bears to have a nibble, he lathered himself with honey and tried to crawl between every set of jaws that he could find.

Sheer. Utter. Madness.

In conclusion, while there may be little value in an author complaining about what others say about their work, that doesn’t mean the rest of us can write as we like. We do not perpetually hold the high moral ground. Poke the bear too hard my friend and you’re on your own.

* Impulse was a science fiction magazine published as a companion to New Worlds.

** Later retitled as The Stars Like Dust.

The Next Big Thing

Had we but world enough, and time.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Eternal Champion

Even though I was never an avid follower of Game of Thrones I still couldn’t help but be aware that this particular Next Big Thing had drawn to a close. So while the vast majority of you mourn an absence of dragons in your lives I’ll try to cheer you up by writing about what I’d like to see be the Next Big Thing.

Now while I believe there are a number of Game of Thrones spin-offs planned I will confidently predict that none of them will be anywhere near as popular as the original series. That curious beast, the general public, doesn’t like to graze in the same place for too long. For example I’ve been assured by a number of people that the Breaking Bad spin-off, Better Call Saul, is a great show. This may be so but as far as I can tell it has never reached the Must Watch level of popularity that its progenitor enjoyed.

Given the fickle tastes of the general public it surprises me not in the least that no two Must Watch shows of recent years have been alike in setting. Series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad which have taken up the Next Big Thing torch have certainly had aspects in common. All of them have been gritty shows about the dark underbelly of society and the currency of violence that fuels it. On the other hand each series employed quite different setting and and casts of characters which in turn has ensured the plot dynamics of each show be not quite like the others. Superficially the criminals portrayed in each series might resemble each other but try to turn a typical episode of one into a typical episode of another and you will find it much harder than it might seem at first glance.

This is why Game of Thrones, which on the surface seems an unlikely successor to the likes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, managed to grasp the Next Big Thing torch. That the story had a fantasy setting rather than being set in the real world didn’t matter since it was still all about what the ruthless will do to satisfy their lusts. The fact of the matter is that dynastic struggles are very like gang wars and the sort of terrifying people we have an eternal fascination for watching from a safe distance invariably become players in both.

What I’m getting at here is that if the coming Next Big Thing is to be a fantasy or science fiction epic it has to have a number of attributes in common with what has come before. First of all there needs to be a story big enough to fill multiple seasons of plot. For example Lord of the Rings is a big story while The Hobbit is not. The former easily filled three films with material left over while the latter was not able to repeat this feat. The story needs to, at the very least, partially focus on the dark underbelly of society and do so in a visceral manner. Mad Men not withstanding boardroom style drama is no longer as popular as it was back in the days of Dallas and Falcon’s Crest. Audiences are more interested in seeing characters get down and dirty in the streets with guns and knives than as grey suited executives attempting to manipulate each other from behind desks. It should not require expensive locations or settings, or at least these should be mostly kept to establishing shots. The source material needs to be capable of being tailored to fit modern sensibilities. I would assume this is not a concern in regards to recent fiction but since I’ve not read much of recent vintage I couldn’t honestly say. On the other hand hand I do know older stories would need tweaking to a greater or lesser extent. However, it should be noted that such tweaking isn’t always due to older material containing problematic attitudes. Sometimes it’s a matter of adding problematic modern features such as excessive darkness of plot, excessively gritty world-building, gratuitous nudity, and that visceral violence I mentioned earlier. And finally a potential Next Big Thing should not feel too much like what has come before. Bit of a tall order, eh?

Of all the requirements listed above clearly it’s the first one which is the most difficult to satisfy. I can think of a great many science fiction or fantasy stories that would make a great movie but which simply could not be stretched to fill multiple series of a TV show. For example, I’m certain that The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers could be made into an extremely interesting film but I don’t think the novel contains sufficient material for anything longer. (Also, unfortunately, I suspect this and Powers other novels aren’t the sort of stories which have sufficiently wide appeal to even be considered by film studios.)

I’m not sure that even book series such as Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern or Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga would work (even though I’m sure many people would be excited if they did, I’d certainly like to see the latter). Though both series consist of multiple novels I don’t think the stories contained within each individual book are linked together sufficiently to work as a multi-season TV show. Besides which I think the central characters are a bit too noble and nice to carry a TV show attempting to emulate Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Plus, the major threat in McCaffrey’s Dragonrider books, the thread, lacks something as a threat. The thread, being in essence a non-intelligent natural disaster, doesn’t allow for the same degree of dramatic tension a conscious, reactive threat poses.

So after much thought I’ve only been able to come up with a single collection of novels which might work if translated into television terms, this being Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion universe.

Mad God Amulet

At this point I imagine those of you familiar with Michael Moorcock’s work have already raised your eyebrows and begun to frame a series of objections. Foremost among these I suspect being whether Moorcock would allow his work to be turned into a big budget TV show at all. However, since this is an article of speculation I think we can safely set this argument to one side.

There are other reasonable objections to to using the Eternal Champion universe of course, the foremost among these being the books themselves, or at those of them I’ve read, being on the short side. I have to admit that if a novel like The Hobbit doesn’t have enough enough meat in it for three films then the slender volumes in trilogies such as The History of the Runestaff or The Chronicles of Count Brass are hardly going to stretch any further. However, according to John Clute, writing in The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy (edited by John Clute and John Grant), Moorcock ‘…constantly revises and retitles his texts and because he habitually reshuffles the order in which those texts appear…’ which suggests to me that even greater liberties could be taken with pre-existing plots and characters of the Eternal Champion universe without incurring any more than the standard level of outrage. (I was going to describe this as viewer outrage until I realised that waiting to view the completed project is hardly necessary when it comes to outrage).

So what do I mean by taking even greater liberties? Essentially choosing one avatar of the Eternal Champion and expanding their story so that other avatars, and perhaps parts of their own stories, can be introduced into the chosen plot. There’s already precedence for multiple avatars coming together to perform a task in The Quest For Tanelorn so that’s clearly not going against the rules of the universe. Admittedly I don’t recall the various characters interacting with each other much but if it’s permissible for multiple avatars to perform some task together then I don’t see why there can’t be some (by which I mean a great deal of) drama between them. There is the problem that as far as I recall the majority of the Eternal Champion avatars are a bit on the bland side, being primarily sword-wielding action heroes, but a little tweaking of personalities should solve that. Again, there’s precedent for this in the form of Elric of Melnibone, who is already an introspective, treacherous, angst ridden individual who’s also in thrall to his soul-drinking sword, Stormbringer. Now if the other avatars could be made half as interesting as that we might have something.

Count-Brass

Which brings us to the question of in what part of the Eternal Champion universe should our story begin? Well, I think that’s obvious, it has to start with Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Coln. The books about Hawkmoon are set in an alternate science-fantasy version of Europe which is under threat by the insane warriors of Granbretan. This choice has a number of advantages as I see it.

For starters the warrior tribes or clans of Granbretan would make an excellent evil threat as they’re always described as being a bit on the insane side. Which I believe means they have the potential for every sort of scenery-chewing possible (and perhaps a few not yet invented) ranging from cold, sneering contempt to incoherent rage, with a bit of Brian Blessed style exuberant bellowing in between. In short the Granbretan leadership should be able to reduce Europe to rubble by force of their over-the-top acting alone.

Secondly the Europe of Dorian Hawkmoon is set in world that I would describe as science fantasy. (Just as an aside I’ve seen these books described as steampunk, a term which I consider inappropriate here. There seems to be a tendency to label any story which mixes technology with anything else as steampunk. As far as I’m concerned this is stretching the definition of steampunk too far. Steampunk as a term should be reserved for non-magical worlds where technology has been developed in advance of the rest of society.) What this means is technology exists in this world but is present in a far from universal manner and that it’s not always clear whether a particular piece of technology operates using science or magic. Thus the Granbretan army has helicopters but not rifles and that some of the weapons used by their opponents are almost certainly magical. All this adds an exotic flavour to the familiar, so that for example we might see what looks like the Eiffel Tower being built in the alternate Paris only to discover that it is intended as a platform for Granbretan helicopters.

Moorcock used a particularly baroque style of visuals which would make a TV version of it particularly interesting. For example the warriors of Granbretan all wear helmet-like masks designed to look like whichever animal each tribe uses as a totem, wolf, boar, etc. Their helicopters are also designed to look like insects, prey-mantises as I recall, which would look impressive on TV.

Finally, every avatar of the Eternal Champion has been chosen by fate to help maintain the cosmic balance between law and chaos. However, Dorian Hawkmoon, unlike many of the other avatars of the Eternal Champion clearly can’t defeat his enemies without significant help so the idea of assembling a team to save his homeland seems reasonable. In the books he went searching for the Runestaff in order to do this but it wouldn’t take much tweaking to add a few fellow avatars to Dorian’s shopping list. The advantage to this change is that it would ensure there were two competing teams, with endless drama plaguing both. On one side the leaders of Granbretan would be in disagreement as to how best to hunt down and eliminate Dorian Hawkmoon and his companions. Meanwhile relationships between the various avatars of the Eternal Champion would be strained to say the least given most don’t understand their role in the universe and would resent the burden of it if they did. Dorian Hawkmoon would find them a very difficult group to keep from each other’s throats and focused on his goal.

With any luck the end result would be a weird mix of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Dirty Dozen. I’d certainly watch that if somebody would care to make it.

Tales Too Good To Forget #4

Precious story manuscript,
How I wonder who has it.
I sent it out for lasting fame,
But where it went I cannot name.

Printshop

I’m sure that anybody familiar with the history of science fiction publishing knows that in the USA the rise of the paperback steadily occurred during the 40s and 50s. Prior to about 1955 most science fiction was still first appearing in magazines dedicated to the genre but after that the science fiction magazines steadily declined in importance.

However, even if you are aware of all this I wonder if you have ever really considered the implications of this piece of history. Between 1926, when Amazing Stories first appeared, and 1955 there were a lot of magazines published which were wholly or partly devoted to printing science fiction. Secondly, for reasons I won’t go into today the the majority of this fiction was composed of shorter stories rather than novels. There were quite a few novels serialised in the SF magazines over the years but that total is still dwarfed by the number of shorter pieces published (it should also be noted that a good many stories that were described on magazine covers and title pages as novels were really too short of deserve the description). Last, but certainly not least, all these published stories began their lives as manuscripts which had to be physically delivered to an editor for consideration, either by the post or by hand. So what this implies is that at any given time there were thousands of manuscripts in circulation between authors and editors. That may seem a lot but keep in mind only a small fraction of those manuscripts ended up being bought and published. For every story published there were probably scores of never to be sold efforts clogging up post offices around the world.

Now the obvious question to ask then is, was this a perfect system? And the equally obvious answer is that no, it was not. If nothing else the sheer quantity of manuscripts in circulation ensured that some of them went astray. This is not to put the entire blame on the postal services either. Even if they did manage to lose some manuscripts on their own initiative, I doubt getting every item of mail to the right address was the easiest of tasks in the era of hand-written addresses (and that’s not even considering how many of those addresses had been copied down incorrectly in the first place).

However, sometimes problems occurred even after the postal services had successfully delivered a manuscript. Consider this extract from Rich Elsberry’s column, Nothing Sirius:, which appeared in Odd #8 (a fanzine published in December 1949 by Duggie Fisher Jr):

Some time ago, Poul Anderson sent a story in to JWC, Jr. A short time later Poul received a check for the story. Everything seemed fine till two weeks later when he received the story back from Standard Publications with a rejection slip. It was easy to deduce that something was fouled up somewhere. The story hadn’t been sent to Merwin. How did he get it? And how did it get out of JWC’s office? Poul decided to wait and see what would happen. It didn’t take long. Comes a letter from from JWC asking Anderson if he can send along the carbon, he’s lost the original somehow. Poul sent the original back to JWC but he still didn’t know how it got into Standard’s office. Noel Loomis had an answer tho; he’d had the same thing happen to him once. He figured that an agent must have come to JWC’s office and left a bunch of scripts for Campbell to look at. Later when he came back to pick up the slush pile, Poul’s story must have gotten mixed in accidentally. Later, when Merwin found the Anderson manuscript on his desk he probably checked with the agent and found out that he wasn’t handling Poul. Since it wasn’t his he must have had Merwin send it back to Anderson. While it still isn’t certain that this is the way it happened, JWC must have been pretty happy to get his story back.

The JWC, Jr. mentioned here was of course John W. Campbell, long time editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, which was generally considered to be the leading science fiction magazine at this time. Merwin was Sam Merwin, Jr., who was editing Thrilling Wonder Stories & Startling Stories for the Standard Magazines Group. By this point it’s generally considered that Merwin had raised Thrilling Wonder Stories to a level just below that of Astounding. I think it can be safely assumed that John W. Campbell was a competent editor not normally given to losing important pieces of paper within the confines of his office. So you can see that sometimes even the best had trouble with their paperwork.

However, the detail I find most interesting in regards to this story is that Noel Loomis, an author whose fiction appeared in the magazines nearly 30 times during the 40s and 50s, had experienced something similar happening to him. It certainly makes me wonder how often manuscripts went astray in the various editorial offices. Not a daily occurrence I’m sure, but given it was normal practise was for a title page containing only the names of the story and author to be attached to the front of a manuscript I suppose it would be easy for somebody to mistake one sheaf of paper for another. In which case it’s possible that in the average busy office manuscripts went missing several times a year. Now there’s a thought to send shivers down the spine of any old-time author.

No doubt you will be thinking well good riddance to that then. In today’s world of tomorrow we don’t have to send our manuscripts out as bulky bundles of paper in order to lose them, we can lose them much faster digitally. The upside to that being how much easier it is (and I’m assuming here) to locate stories sent digitally that somehow went astray. Now that’s all well and good but sometimes there are mistakes made that I suspect even the highest of hi-tech can’t thwart.

Consider for example the mysterious error described below by August Derleth under his H.H. Holmes pseudonym. This appeared in Rhodomagnetic Digest V1 #2 (published in August 1949 by George Blumenson for The Elves’, Gnomes’ and Little Men’s Science-Fiction Chowder and Marching Society). Just how the following error was made I can’t imagine but I do wonder if this makes early copies of Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction especially collectible:

The Monster From Everywhere
by H.H. Holmes

In the last number of these proceedings, Dr. J. Lloyd Eaton pointed out that the story, The Monster From Nowhere, by Donald Wandrei, reprinted in Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction, does not in the least resemble the story, The Monster From Nowhere, in The Eye and the Finger, the Arkham collection of Donald Wandrei short stories, and added an explanation from Wandrei via August Derleth that the Conklin version was “an old, discarded draft.”

Meanwhile the situation has been further complicated by the appearance of Gnome Press’ collection of Nelson Bond stories, The Thirty-First of February, which contains a story, The Monster From Nowhere, by Nelson Bond – word-for-word identical with the story in the Conklin anthology.

Mr. Derleth now writes, “Crown wrote us for permission to reprint Wandrei’s tale in the Conklin Best, and paid us on receipt of permission and the copyright form to be used. The book came out with Bond’s story under Wandrei’s name. I queried Don, saying that the story was entirely different. Without looking at the book, he concluded that somehow Conklin had got hold of an earlier discarded draft of the story, which had been lost in editorial New York, and used it. It was only later that Nels discovered his tale with Don’s byline, and Crown made the necessary adjustment.”

One trembles at the thought of the financial complexities implied in the three last words. Late printings of The Best presumably carry the correction; collectors please note this as a “point.”

I have forwarded a copy of this note to Mr. Conklin, and hope in a later issue of the Digest to reveal his explanation of what brought about this most chaotic mystery of modern bibliography.

The Donald Wandrei story appeared in 23rd November issue of Argosy while the Nelson Bond story appeared in the July 1939 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Now I understand some confusion is possible when both stories have exactly the same title but even so how does a mistake like this happen? I would assume that when Groff Conklin drew up a list of stories to be copied out for the printer to typeset he included the titles, author names, and where each story was originally published. Did Groff Conklin misremember the source and list the wrong magazine? I can’t see how whoever physically assembled the manuscript would even know the wrong story existed and include it otherwise. Unfortunately the next issue of Rhodomagnetic Digest I own is the fifth issue so if Mr Conklin tendered an explanation I don’t have access to it.

There is another layer to this mystery by the way. I’ve checked The Internet SF Data Base and not only is the Wandrei story not listed as appearing in The Best of Science Fiction but the Bond story is. Did Conklin end up sticking with the mistake because fixing it would be too hard? I assume August Derleth is to be trusted when he states that the Wandrei story was the one suppose to be in that collection so why does ISFDB claim otherwise? Could it be that whoever entered in the relevant data did not know about this mistake? If so and if the ISFDB entry was composed by somebody working from an early copy of The Best of Science Fiction then all is explained. After all, who in their right mind is ever going to question something like this without good reason to. I’m sure it’s not a mistake any of us expect editors or publishers to make.

Publishing, apparently more complicated than the word suggests.

Ray Bradbury & The Unguarded Moment

I shot an arrow into the air. Where it fell, I know not where.

It’s true that in this modern world of today the Internet and social media have elevated the social gaffe to unprecedented frequency. However, there’s nothing new under the sun and thus, even before people had Twitter and Facebook to help get them into trouble, it was possible to offer up an opinion and only then pause to consider whether it was something you truly wanted on the record.

I’ve already written about how unexpected the results can be when an author decides to kick off their inhibitions, “You want to know what I really think? Well here you go, bucko!” However, what follows here isn’t in quite the same category as the Philip K. Dick article I previously posted about . Regardless of how surprising his opinions might be to somebody not familiar with the man, Dick was still consciously writing for publication. Regardless of what the article he gave to Terry Carr for publication contained, and regardless of whether he truly believed what he wrote (rather than just messing with us) you can be sure it contained nothing he wasn’t comfortable with sharing with the whole wide world.

On the other hand the subject for consideration here and now is an article titled Ray Bradbury Speaks, which was published in a fanzine called Guts (the magazine with intestinal fortitude). The piece in question appeared in the fourth issue which was published in September 1968 by Jeffrey & Robert Gluckson. At first I wasn’t entirely sure that the piece was even by Ray Bradbury. Not only did it jump erratically from topic to topic with each new paragraph, something which seemed unlike the typical Bradbury article, but many of the individual sentences struck me as too poorly constructed to be the work of an author of Bradbury’s reputation I did hope however that it was genuine though as various of the opinions expressed in it are unguarded to say the least.

Luckily that good fellow, Denny Lien, pointed out to me that Robert Gluckson was still contactable. So I wrote and received confirmation that Ray Bradbury Speaks was in indeed by Ray Bradbury. According to Robert Gluckson the article was assembled from an interview granted to him and some other teenagers in 1968. Apparently Bradbury had asked to review his material before publication, but the editors of Guts were in too much of a hurry to publish and didn’t allow him the opportunity. The fact that Ray Bradbury Speaks is a transcription of off-the-cuff answers to various questions asked him by the boys, questions they did not choose to include in the article for some reason, certainly explains the disjointed nature of the piece. It also explains the general clumsiness of the prose because few of us, Bradbury included, can speak as well off-the-cuff as we can write.

More importantly I can see now why some of Bradbury’s comments were more than a little unexpected. In an informal setting it’s not surprising that Bradbury might make a few unguarded observations, in the heat of the moment as it were. Which would be why he asked to review the interview before publication. I imagine that if Bradbury had been given such an opportunity some of his statements would be toned down or altered as he thought better of them.

That he wasn’t given the chance to do this is all for the best as far as I’m concerned. Crotchety ol’ Ray Bradbury is more fun to read than any other kind.

Now, before I go any further I need to mention that I’ve only quoted the more interesting replies and rearranging their order to suit my own train of thought. Given the source material is a series of answers to undisclosed questions rather than an article in which the parts make up a greater whole I don’t think this alters Bradbury’s opinions in any way.

So let’s start with something that’s not too controversial but does nicely illustrate my own view of Bradbury as an author:

The movie The Cat & the Canary scared the hell out of me. I love being scared – we all do. Every kid I’ve ever known loves to be scared. So I wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes to do what? To scare the hell out of myself. I knew if I could do that, I could scare all the kids; and if I did, I’d have a classic on my hands. And it’s turning into that. A lot of kids are really getting scared – and I love it.

This makes sense to me because I prefer to think of Ray Bradbury as more of a writer of horror stories who occasionally made use of science fictional settings than an author of science fiction who also wrote a couple of fantasies as he has generally been portrayed. I would argue that even a classic SF novel like Fahrenheit 451 is as close to having a classic horror plot as it’s possible for pure science fiction novel to do. Even some of his best known and loved short SF; The Veldt, A Sound of Thunder, & There Will Come Soft Rains all strike me as being essentially horror stories that could easily have been written by Robert Bloch and published in Weird Tales. (Incidentally, according to The Collectors Index To Weird Tales by Sheldon Jeffery & Fred Cook, Ray Bradbury had no less than 25 stories published in Weird Tales between 1942 and 1948, so the horror connection isn’t as unlikely as you may be thinking.)

On the other hand I don’t put much faith in his sweeping generalisation that ‘kids’ want to be scared given he completely fails to specify what age group or level of fear he’s referring. I can’t speak for anybody else but I can assure you that as a thirteen-year-old I discovered a number of horror anthologies in my high school library. Out of curiosity I read a couple of these anthologies (which included The Small Assassin and The Foghorn by one Ray Bradbury), but decided to swear off doing so when I begun to have vague but disturbing dreams every night. Something Wicked This Way Comes I will concede contains an appropriate level of scare for younger teens but that doesn’t mean they’re ready for adult Bradbury.

So let’s get a little controversial:

I’m not a big Batman or Superman fan. The difference them and Prince Valiant is Valiant is human, and I really believe in him. In other words, if he gets into a fight, he has to get out of it through his wits, or his talent, or his imagination. But Superman and Batman get into a fight, and really, there’s no context. Everything is pre-ordained, and it’s no fun. So who cares. You know Superman can always out, but you know if Prince Valiant gets into such a situation, he can get beat up pretty bad, and almost die. If he gets into a situation with a witch, giant, or an ogre, he will then find a way to terrify, in turn, that giant or ogre by disguising himself as a bat – suspending himself by a rope in an ancient castle. It’s all beautifully illustrated, and very logical. The things that he does, you and I could do, if we wanted to spend the time on it – if we wanted to train ourselves. There’s nothing done in Prince Valiant that most of us couldn’t do if we trained ourselves as Valiant did. We’re superman in different words.

Again, an interesting but hardly controversial opinion, but perhaps only because it’s one that I agree with. On the other hand fans of superhero comics/movies might not be so sanguine. I think Bradbury is right on the money when he suggests that everything was pre-ordained in regards to the Superman and Batman of the 40s and 50s. Characters such as those were such power fantasies that they simply over-matched their opposition with inevitable regularity. However I would add that it wasn’t the inevitability of victory that was the real problem. As Bradbury himself implies Prince Valiant, and characters like him, could also emerge victorious time after time. It is after all difficult to build a continuing series if the main protagonist keeps being defeated. (Actually, I believe that in one of the British anthology war comics there was a series of stories featuring a German soldier who served during WWII. Given the inevitability of the Germans losing every encounter in a British war comic I can’t imagine he was an easy character to write for, or that serving with this fellow was anything but a suicide mission for his comrades.)

The real difference between a Superman and a Prince Valiant was the suspense created by not knowing how the inevitable victory was to be achieved. With Superman and Batman back then there was little suspense in this regard. Their abilities were well known and how they could use them to steamroller any opposition. Of course what Bradbury fails to mention is that such characters can still be made interesting by giving them problems to solve that can’t be overcome by sheer brute strength. To be fair to Bradbury though he was speaking in 1968 when Superman and Batman were perhaps still being featured in less nuanced plots (I was never into superhero comics so I have no idea how much Superman and Batman had evolved by the late 60s).

And now for some real controversy:

I have one tempera I did which is travelling around the country with a benefit for cerebral palsy, called the Halloween Tree. It’s a huge tree filled with cut pumpkins; I’m writing a film on this too. It’s going to be a cartoon, by Chuck Jones, who did The Grinch, and has done Road Runner cartoons for years. A wonderful man to work with. It’s a history of Halloween in cartoon form. It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun, and it’s going to be much better than The Great Pumpkin show by Charles Schulz. I thought The Great Pumpkin was just dreadful. So mean. It was so dreadfully mean, to anticipate The Great Pumpkin arriving for a whole half hour, and when it was all over , my kids sat there, and they were depressed. And so was I. We finally got angry, and we wanted to kick the set. I thought it was just dreadful for Mr. Schulz not to know that you can’t build up this kind of need in people, to see The Great Pumpkin, and not have him show up, one way or the other.

I was more than a little surprised by Bradbury’s reaction to this TV special. I don’t think Bradbury grasped what Charles Schulz was trying for when he created The Great Pumpkin. To me Linus’ belief in The Great Pumpkin is all about Schulz introducing the idea of faith to his readership. If the Great Pumpkin makes an appearance then this would sabotage Schulz’ promotion of faith because faith isn’t necessary when there is clear physical proof that the thing you believe in actually exists. I’m quite surprised that Bradbury couldn’t see that.

And then we have further evidence that Bradbury wasn’t really a science fiction author:

I’ve never been a predictor of the future. I’ve left that to other people. The easiest thing you can do is predict certain developments in the future. You think of one machine, and think of what it’s going to be like in thirty years. You could’ve predicted, in 1910, that the country would be full of automobiles to the point where it would start to destroy the entire country. The automobile is our biggest problem, and it is at the center of our culture, dominating it. Ten years from now, L.A. will be totally devastated. It’s so easy to predict this. We’re doing nothing to prevent it. New York is being destroyed by the automobile. We’ll have to ban the car. Downtown in L.A. looks like Hiroshima right now. This is so easy to predict – it’s no fun. It’s the easiest thing in the world to say.

It was wise of Bradbury to deny he was ever in the prediction game given how his claim that the automobile was about to destroy city life has turned out to be a big swing and a miss. However it wasn’t so wise of him to claim that predicting the future was so gosh darn easy given how his claim that the automobile was about to destroy city life has turned out to be a big swing and a miss. (Well, okay, you can make a case for the automobile degrading, and thus ‘destroying’ city life, but my impression is that Bradbury meant that the car would make cities uninhabitable, and that has manifestly not come to pass.) In an answer to another question (an answer not included here) Bradbury mentioned recently witnessing an accident in which a pedestrian was hit by a car and I suspect this coloured his response more than a little. Even so I suspect his claim that cars were destroying everything was more wishful thinking by an author in love with the idea of small town life than well considered prediction.

Back to the controversy:

I’m much more interested in moral attitudes. I’ve never predicted, I’ve only expressed myself in moral situations. Given television as a fact of life: how do we raise our children; how do they raise us; what does this do to personal relationships; how does this change our lives? What does it do to the family; what does it affect? Will it destroy us? Will it weaken the bonds in the family – or will it strengthen them? What will it do to our reading habits? Well, we find out it’s increasing them. Librarians were all worried when TV came out. They were all running around and bleating like a bunch of chickens, afraid that libraries would close down, books wouldn’t sell any more, people wouldn’t read. Well, the reverse has happened. The doomsayers were wrong. The TV has only made us more curious about the world. If there could be only a little texture… we need books to tell us what we really must know, because TV can’t give it to us. It can only give us pictures, and this is the beginning of knowledge. And then we have to move on from there.

Now I was under the impression that Ray Bradbury had a low opinion of television based on quotes such as this; ‘The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.’ For that matter I thought he had a high one of librarians based on quotes such as this; ‘Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.’ Perhaps given when he said all this it’s possible he was still positive about TV and only grew more negative later on. More inexplicable is his negative comment about librarians. Bradbury is noted for his support for and identification with librarians so to find him saying this was more than a little unexpected.

But wait, it gets better:

There’s a strange story behind R Is For Rocket and S Is For Spaceship – I wrote those two books to go into libraries. The librarians of America are too dumb to take my books from the grown-up section and move them over into the children’s section of their libraries. The kids have to go over to the adult section to get my books. Librarians are too dumb to know that kids are hungry for certain books. So I was forced into writing these two books which are nothing more than stories from some of my adult books. I get a few pieces of mail over the years saying that I am a fraud, a cheat, and a liar. The thing is. They shouldn’t blame me, they should blame the librarians. If they would just bring my books over to the children’s section, I wouldn’t have to do this. I have to put out S Is For Spaceship and R Is For Rocket, which say on the “For Young Readers”. Then they have enough brains to put them on the shelf. I have this sort of nonsense with librarians so often, it drives me up a wall. That is why the two books exist.

Wow, just wow. So much for Ray Bradbury, friend of librarians, eh? I guess his high regard for the office of librarian depended on them falling into line with his desires. Again, it would also help if Bradbury had been a little less vague in his terms. What age group was he referring to when he mentioned ‘kids’ and just which stories of his did he think they should be reading? Given my previous comments about encountering Bradbury as a young teenager I think that on the whole I’m with the librarians in this matter.

And now here’s my favourite Bradbury response to a question:

Look at all the imitations of the Martian Chronicles that have come out – it’s still holding its own. I find that I write a number of stories in a number of fields , and they manage to stick around anyway. The bad stuff vanishes after awhile – it’s just not good enough. There’s a guy named Bradbury writing books over in England, and having them published. They’re science fiction-fantasy, like John Carter – Warlord of Mars; and a whole series of Martian books by a guy named Edward P. Bradbury. I know his publishers are hoping that people will mistake him for me. It doesn’t work that way. He’s not good enough. If he were better, I’d be in trouble; but I’m not. I think excellence finally wins out. The really good writers will stay around – Sturgeon, Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Fritz Leiber; and eight or nine others, and myself. We’re good. We’re very good. That’s the first thing you learn: how to tell quality from something that has no quality. You’re not going to get any false modesty from me. I don’t believe in modesty. I don’t believe it’s a virtue. I believe you know what you want to do, and that you should grab onto it, and run with it, and have a ball with it, and have great fun, and love it very much. Then you’ll do good work. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

To properly appreciate the above you need to know that Edward P. Bradbury is a pseudonym of Michael Moorcock. Now as it happens Moorcock was, and possibly still is, a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan who had for some years as a teenager edited Tarzan Adventures, a Burroughs themed magazine. As far as I’m aware the Edward P. Bradbury trilogy was a tribute to Burroughs, in particular his Mars series. Now while I’ve never seen any explanation as to why he chose the pseudonym Edward P. Bradbury I doubt it was a deliberate attempt to leach off Ray Bradbury’s fame. If nothing else these books were Burroughs imitations and nothing about their packaging ever hinted at a connection with the author of Fahrenheit 451. If the the blurb writer had claimed ‘In the tradition of Something Wicked This Way Comes‘ I would concede that Bradbury had a point but as far as I recall the British paperbacks at least screamed Burroughs. As to why Moorcock decided to use a pseudonym at all, well I suspect he didn’t want the Edward P. Bradbury books to be confused with the various series set in his ‘Eternal Champion’ universe as those books had a very different tone and somebody expecting Elric of Melnibone style adventures might be disappointed by a Burroughs tribute.

This also raises the interesting question of whether in 1968 Ray Bradbury knew Edward P. Bradbury was a pseudonym, and if so who the pseudonym belonged to. It’s quite possible that he had no idea at the time because I’m not sure he was moving in science fiction circles much outside of Los Angeles. Still, even if he was aware perhaps it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I have no idea what Bradbury thought of Moorcock’s fiction (assuming he had even read any in 1968) but it wouldn’t surprise me if he hated characters such as Elric of Melnibone and Jerry Cornelious and wasn’t adverse to giving their creator a hotfoot with his Edward P. Bradbury comments.

And in conclusion:

I’ve often said, if some young man wanted , one hundred years from now, to take out his chalk and mark on my tombstone, I would like him to mark on it “Here Lies a Teller-of-Tales”. That’s a good honorable thing. I’ve always been intrigued with stories that I’ve heard about Baghdad, ancient Persia – the market places. Even today, if you go down a side street in some of these small, Mid-Eastern, dessert towns, you’ll find magicians and the tellers of tales. It’s an ancient heritage, and a very wonderful one. I belong on the street of the tellers of tales – and that’s the only place I want to be. I’ve no more pretension than that.

And finally here we have Bradbury trying to be humble in the same interview that he claimed not to be humble or modest. You need to pick one Mr Bradbury, either you’re one of the elite band of excellent authors or you’re a humble teller of tales with no more pretension than that. I don’t think you can lay claim to both.

And this gentle ready, is the danger of the unguarded moment. I don’t think Bradbury said anything irredeemably offensive but yes, I’m pretty sure if he had seen the transcript there are a few comments he would have been happy to tone down or qualify.

You know what the road to Hell isn’t pave with? Second thoughts. Something we could all do with remembering before pressing enter.