Spinrad-Autob.htm ????????
bio
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Norman Spinrad
FRAME
Although it presents certain technical difficulties, maybe you
shouldn't write an autobiography until you are dead.
The story of a life, even if your own, published for the benefit
of readers, becomes, well, a story. And true or not, a good story
requires, if not necessarily a traditional beginning, middle and end,
then at least certainly some sort of structure leading to a sense of
satisfying resolution at the end of the reading experience.
But since I'm 53 years old as I write this, not exactly on the
brink of retirement, I can hardly be expected to bring this story to a
successful thematic closure in any of the usual manners.
Then too, while "write what you know about" may be the hoariest
of literary maxims and autobiography seemingly the ideal exemplar
thereof, upon a moment's uncomfortable reflection, maybe not.
Sure, you know the sequence of events better than you know
anything else, but it's no easy task to negotiate the treacherous
literary waters between the Scylla of the extended brag and the
Charybdis of a deadly dull recitation of the complete bibliography and
nothing more.
So what I've opted for here is a rather experimental form, itself
perhaps a bit of autobiographical characterization, since fairly early
on in my career I came to the realization that form should be chosen
by the requirements of content. And this particular content certainly
seems to call for something rather schizoid--a montage of split points
of view, persons, that is, in more than the usual technical sense.
So this autobiography is divided into three clearly-labeled
tracks.
"Continuity" is, as Sergeant Friday would have it, just the
facts, Ma'am, written in third person as if "Norman Spinrad" were
someone other than the author thereof.
"Flashbacks" are little novelistic bits and pieces designed to
illumine some of the events of "Continuity" with some more intimate
visions of what the character in question was thinking and feeling at
the time.
"Frame" is what you are reading now--the author and the subject,
the novelist and the literary critic, speaking to you and maybe myself
as directly as I can manage under the circumstances, and trying to
extract some overall meaning from it all.
CONTINUITY
Norman Spinrad was born in New York City, on September 15, 1940,
the son of Morris and Ray Spinrad. Except for a brief period in
Kingston, New York, he spent his entire childhood and adolescence
residing with his parents and his sister Helene in various locations
in the Bronx, where he attended Public School 87, Junior High Schools
113 and 22, and the Bronx High School of Science.
In 1957, he entered the College of the City of New York, from
which he graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a pre-
law major.
FLASHBACK
I was a subway commuter as a college student, living in the
family apartment in the Bronx, hanging out in Greenwich Village on the
weekends. My father, eldest son of a family of five, had never finished
high school, having left to earn family bread, and only after serving
as a medical corpsman in the Navy during World War II, did he realize
that medicine would have been his calling, and by then it was much too
late. Like many such children of the Great Depression, he wanted
nothing more or less for his son than a secure professional career,
ideally the one he wished he had been able to have.
So I was always under pressure, not just to perform
academically, but to follow a path towards the bankable sciences. I
passed the stiff entrance test for the Bronx High School of Science,
graduated in 1957 at the age of 16, and, at the behest of my father,
seeing as how medicine obviously actively turned me off, entered City
College as an engineering major.
This lasted about a term and a half, terminated by my
confrontation with the horrors of pre-electronic-calculator calculus.
Okay, said my dad, what about chemistry? You don't need so much math
for that. So I became a chemistry major long enough to convince me
that I had no genius for the subject and less interest in it as a
life's work.
Okay, said my dad, with less enthusiasm, what about, uh,
psychology? He seemed to view the vector from medicine to hard
engineering through stinky liquids into the murk of the social
sciences as a kind of intellectual slippery slope.
What did I want to do with my life at this point?
Hey, come on, I was about 19 years old!
Although it's common enough for one's parents and guidance
counselors to demand that one get serious and make a commitment, it's
both cruel and naive to suppose that a 19 year old kid is
intellectually or emotionally equipped to decide what he's going to do
with the rest of his life.
What did I want at this point?
I didn't really want to be in college at all. I didn't want to
be living en famille in the Bronx until I graduated. What I wanted
was la vie boheme in the Village.
FRAME
What is included here and what is left out:
Unless you've lived an extraordinarily dull and uneventful life
under a bell jar with your typewriter, and I haven't, you will have
broken hearts, had your own broken, and engaged in any number of acts
sexual and otherwise, that were politically incorrect at the time or
in hindsight, illegal, or even the sort of thing your older and wiser
self may now find immoral.
Then too, my life has intersected, in various degrees of
intimacy, the lives of many people of more than passing literary
interests--Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan
Ellison, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Frank Herbert, Michael
Moorcock, to name a random sample of a long, long list.
Some of these luminaries were or are real friends, others
acquaintances of one degree or another, I've written about many of
them extensively in various places already, and so you must take my
word for it that it's length limitations rather than ego that limits
mention of them in this compass to the effect they may have had on my
life or career.
I have been commissioned to write a short literary autobiography,
and as I interpret that commission, this is supposed to be the story
of Norman Spinrad the writer, not a juicy expose of my private life,
nor of the private lives of people who may have been involved with it.
However...
However, are times when such matters do impinge on what gets
written, and I am trying to tell the true story to the best of my
ability, so when they do, I guess I'm going to have to try to bite the
bullet....
FLASHBACK
The Village, circa 1959, pre-Beatles, the Beat Era. Coffee
houses. Craft shops. Folk music. I remember seeing a fat-faced kid
from Minnesota performing for free at a Monday amateur night at
Gerdes' Folk City. Name of Bob Dylan. A hot act was the Holy Modal
Rounders, a bluegrass group which later metamorphosed into the Fugs.
One of its members was Peter Stampfel, who is now a science fiction
editor at Daw Books. Another was Ed Sanders, who was to cover the
Manson Family trial in Los Angeles for the Free Press while I was
writing for the same paper.
But in 1959, I never knew Sanders, and Stampfel, who I did party
with upon occasion, would not remember the me of that era. They were
culture heroes, and I was just another day-tripping college kid.
Another culture hero of sorts in this space-time was Bruce
Britton, proprietor of the Britton Leather Shop. Bruce was a famous
sandalmaker. Bruce Britton was a charismatic party animal, and the
Britton Leather Shop was a major party scene. When work was done,
(and sometimes when it wasn't), it became an open house, and also a
place where you found out where the other parties were.
The Britton Leather Shop became my central week-end hangout, and
Bruce became my friend, an older role-model of sorts, and later one of
the earliest patrons of my writing career.
But I didn't aspire to a writing career at that point. Truth be
told, and my father not, I didn't aspire to a career at all. From his
point of view, what I aspired to was quite appalling, namely to spend
all my time the way I spent my weekends--as, well, a beatnik in
Greenwich Village.
FRAME
Beatniks, even teenage wannabee beatniks living with their
parents in the Bronx, did drugs. Mostly pot, which was readily
available but I was introduced to consciousness-altering chemicals
with rather stronger stuff, namely peyote, and which I had experienced
before I so much as puffed on a joint.
Ah yes, we've all committed our youthful indiscretions, why even
President Clinton has copped to tasting the Devil's Weed, though since
he didn't inhale, he didn't enjoy it. I, however, did inhale, and
therefore did get off. Often. And to my creative advantage. Nor do
I regret it.
If there's one gaping void in the story of American literary
history in the second half of the 20th century as currently
promulgated, it's the influence of grass and psychedelic drugs, not
only on the lives of writers, but on the content of what's been
written, and on the form and style too. It's hard to be critically or
biographically courageous when so much creative work was done under
the influences of jailable offenses.
In the Beat Era, however, the literary culture heroes of
bohemia--William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, & Co.--were
not only entirely up front about it, but openly advocated the chemical
enhancement of consciousness as a literary, spiritual, and cultural
virtue. And wrote much stylistically mighty work under the influence
to prove it.
Even a mainstream literary lion like Norman Mailer wrote a famous
essay called "The White Negro" extolling the Hip world of sex, dope,
and transcendence over the "Square" workaday world of the Lonely
Crowd, though elsewhere he was to correctly opine that writing final
draft stoned was maybe not such a terrific idea.
I raise this issue now because I would be lying shamelessly if I
denied that I was a devotee of this tradition or renounced herein my
belief that on the whole a bit of grass and a more significant trip
now and again is beneficial to the creative juices. Nor could the
story of the sort of writer I became make much sense in the absence of
its consideration.
For most writers of science fiction, at least prior to the New
Wave of the 1960s, emerged as writers from a formative adolescence
immersed in the hermetic subculture of "science fiction fandom,"
reading science fiction obsessive, attending science fiction
conventions, writing letters and articles in science fiction fanzines.
SF fans even have an acronym for it, FIAWOL--Fandom Is A Way Of Life.
Not my teenage planet, Monkey Boy. I didn't even know that this
subculture existed until after I had published about a dozen stories
and a novel. Yes, I read a lot of sf-- Sturgeon, Bester, Dick,
Bradbury, being early obsessions-- but I was just as deeply into
Mailer, Kerouac, William Burroughs, and their precursor, Henry Miller.
And theirs was the subculture I wanted to grow up to live in
before I even had any serious thoughts about a writing career--the Hip
world of free love, pot, psychedelics, literary and personal
transcendence--all that which, with the addition and via the medium of
rock and roll, was to call into being the Counterculture half a decade
later.
FLASHBACK
This was something I could hardly admit to my parents, the
guidance counselor, or even quite to myself at the time. And at least
being a psych major was something I found far more congenial than my
previous provisional career choices.
However two unpleasant academic satoris were to convince me that
this was not to be my planet either.
I was fortunate enough to be assigned to a section in
Motivational Psychology taught by Dr. Kenneth Clark, who, among other
things, had written part of the brief in Brown versus Board of
Education. There were no tests. You discussed texts that had been
assigned for consideration in class and you wrote three papers, and
Clark marked you on that.
At the beginning of the term you were handed a list of the books
and papers that would be discussed. In addition to the expected
scientific treatises, there was a five-foot shelf of novels, plays,
and assorted literary works. How could anyone be expected to read
through all that in a term? They couldn't. Clark believed that any
college upper classman who hadn't already read most of this stuff
didn't belong in a class on this level in the first place.
I loved this class. It was worth the price of admission. Clark
was brilliant and witty and brought out the best in his students. The
class was educational, but it was also a kind of high intellectual
entertainment.
All during the term Clark complained of the conventionality of
the papers students were turning in. Can't you give me something
original?
I admired Clark greatly and for my final paper I determined to
write something that would pay him back intellectually and knock him
out of his socks in the bargain.
I had read my way through all Kerouac, Ginsberg, and through that
on into Herman Hesse, Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, a common
intellectual vector in my Village extracurricular circles, and so I
knew quite a bit about Buddhism.
So I wrote a paper comparing Buddhism and Freudian theory as
systems of psychology.
This is brilliant, fascinating, Dr. Clark told me after he had
read it. I glowed.
"But I can only give you an A-."
"Huh? Why?"
He shrugged. Because I don't know enough about Buddhism to judge
whether you really know what you're talking about, he admitted.
And had not been willing make the intellectual effort to acquire
the necessary background.
Another required course that I had to do a term paper for was
Abnormal Psychology. I suggested to the professor that I do it on the
mental states induced by consumption of peyote. He seemed quite
interested.
"But as far as I know, there's not much source material in the
literature," he added dubiously.
"Don't need it," I assured him. "Not only do I have plenty of
primary experimental subjects to interview, I have first-hand
experience myself."
Did he gape at me as if I was some kind of crazed dope fiend?
Nope.
That wasn't what made him refuse to consider the subject
appropriate for a term paper in his course. If I could have rehashed
secondary sources and studded the paper with appropriate footnotes, no
problem. But original research in the form of direct reportage of the
mental states in question was not academically acceptable.
CONTINUITY
In his senior year at CCNY, he took two courses in short story
writing and made his first submissions to magazines. Having secured
entry to Fordham University law school, he spent the summer of 1961
traveling in Mexico with friends.
FLASHBACK
By my senior year, all I really wanted was out--out of college,
out of my parents' apartment, out from under their pressures
influences, out of the Square world and into the Hip.
But I still had it in my head that I had to get a degree to
please my parents. By this time, I had changed my major so many times
that the only way to graduate was to lump together what I had already
taken with a few more random courses, call it a "Pre-Law Major," and
bullshit it past the guidance counselors by being admitted to law
school.
One course I took, in short story writing, was formative. It was
taught by a writer named Irwin Stark who had sold fiction to magazines
and had not lost the habit of submitting. Stark, like Clark, bitched
about the conventionality of what the students were writing, and I
took another shot at taking a teacher at his word.
I wrote a story called Not With A Bang, in which a couple finds
true love screwing in a bathtub full of chocolate syrup during a
nuclear apocalypse, good enough to eventually sell to a low-grade
men's magazine about a decade later.
The look that Stark gave me when he handed back that week's
assignment was choice.
"I can't have you read a thing like that in class," he told me in
his office later.
Uh-oh.
"Why don't you submit it to Playboy?"
"Playboy...?"
"Yeah, it's a long shot, but they're the top market, and if you
to start at the top and work down, can take you the first offer you
get for a story and know it's the best you can do."
And he told me how to submit stories to magazines, stick them in
an envelope with a self-addressed stamped return envelope and a cover
letter, and drop 'em in a mailbox. If you get a check, cash it before
it bounces. If you get a rejection, submit it to the next best
market.
I submitted Not With A Bang to Playboy. They didn't buy it, so I
sent it elsewhere. And elsewhere. And wrote some more stories. And
started submitting them.
And that's how I became a writer. Not yet a published writer,
that was about three years in the future, but by the time I graduated
from CCNY, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and how one went
about doing it. You write 'em, you drop 'em in the mail, you wait.
Best advice I ever had. Best advice any would-be writer can ever
get. It's ultimately all you need to know. The Big Secret is that
there is no Big Secret. It drives me crazy how many wannabee writers
just won't believe it.
CONTINUITY
Upon returning to New York, he decided not to attend law school
but pursue a writing career instead. He rented a cheap apartment in
the East Village, secured part-time employment in a friend's leather
shop, wrote a first novel which has never been published and about a
dozen short stories, finally making his first sale to Analog in 1962.
The story, THE LAST OF THE ROMANY, was published in 1963.
FLASHBACK
Actually the thought of entering law school in the fall of 1961
was filling me with nauseous dread before I even graduated. By this
time I knew I wanted to be a writer, but what I lacked was any notion
of how to support myself while doing it, plus the courage to make such
a beatnik move sure to outrage my parents. The road trip to Mexico in
a rotten old car (never buy a car from a relative!) with two college
friends, Marty Mach and Bob Denberg, was part temporary escape from
this dilemma, part personal vision quest, part hopeful emulation of
Huck Finn and Kerouac.
When we finally managed to coax the wretched clunker back to New
York after an exhaustive education in automotive Spanish, the
Greenwich Village outdoor Arts and Craft Show was in full swing. One
weekend afternoon, I took over the Britton Leather Shop's table as
relief for an hour and moved $200 worth of goods, about what they had
done all week.
Bingo! I had a part-time job. Bruce Britton, and later, his
partner and successor at the leather shop, Ken Martin, supported my
writing ambition, and more or less let me make my own hours. And my
own wage, since what they were paying me was a commission on sales.
I found a foul little apartment in the East Village that I could
rent for $36 a month. meaning, what with food, and utilities, I could
survive on about $120 a month, and in a good week I could make $40 at
the leathershop working 20 hours.
I could survive, more or less, as a would-be writer.
FRAME
My naivete was total. I knew no other writers, I hadn't
published a thing, and my brilliant notion was that I would support
myself writing short stories while working on my first novel. I wrote
an unpublishable novel, which, years later, I was to some extent to
cannibalize in the writing of BUG JACK BARRON. I wrote stories and
sent them off to magazines, mostly science fiction magazines.
When I finished the novel, I knew nothing better to do with it
than pay my $35 to have it "evaluated for the market" by the Scott
Meredith Literary Agency, who advertised this service in various
magazines. They rejected it, as they did 99% of such fee submissions,
as I was soon to learn in another incarnation, but the "agent" who
wrote the rejection letter over Scott Meredith's signature met me in
secret, praised my talent, and wised me up to the SMLA fee-reading
scam, strongly suggesting that I not waste my money on it again.
Nor had I sold anything. And the final turn of the screw was
that Analog had been sitting on "The Last of the Romany" for an
unconscionable six months.
What I didn't know was that the reason for the delay was that
John W. Campbell, Jr., the legendary editor thereof, had discovered
the lion's share of the major science fiction writers of the last
quarter century or so by the tedious and time-consuming process of
reading his entire slushpile himself.
Needless to say, when his acceptance letter arrived in the mail
all was forgiven.
CONTINUITY
He sold several more short stories during the next year or so, on
the strength of which he secured a professional agent, the Scott
Meredith Literary Agency.
FRAME
I had been dead broke before I sold a novelette to Campbell for
the princely sum of $450, so broke that I had taken a job as a Welfare
Investigator in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a month to keep me going.
When I made my third magazine sale, I wrote a letter to Scott
Meredith, the only agent I knew, and was accepted as a client on a
professional basis.
Meanwhile, an ulcer I had developed under the pressure of
adolescent angst and no doubt exacerbated by eating all that cheap hot
stuff in Mexico landed me in a hospital for an operation. The
operation was successful, but the patient should have died. They
screwed up bad and infected me with something called toxic hepatitis,
supposedly universally fatal. I ran a fever of about 106o for days.
I lost about 25 pounds. I survived. Still running a fever and
looking like death warmed over but not by much, I took a cab directly
to the Draft Board and got myself re-classified 4-F so it wouldn't be
a total loss.
FLASHBACK
A prolonged ultra-high fever, aside from usually being fatal,
makes a 1000 mike acid trip seem like a warm glass of 3.2 beer. I was
not only hallucinating, I had...Powers.
Laboring under the hallucinatory delusion that I was being
tortured for secret rocket fuel information by spies, I had the
hysterical strength to snap the bandages tying me to my deathbed, yank
out the IVs, and hold off a squad of interns while I used another
Power on the bedside telephone.
It was the wee hours of the morning. The hospital staff must've
thought I was raving into a dead phone, understandable considering
what they were hearing on my end.
Somehow I had fixated on the name of what turned out to be a real
Air Force general. I got an outside line. I got a long distance
operator. I made a collect long distance call to said general at the
Pentagon. He had long since gone home to bed. I did...a thing. I
ordered the Pentagon switchboard to patch me through to his home
phone, validating it with a blather of letters and numbers that was my
Top Secret command override code. They did it. A bleary general's
voice came on the line.
I start babbling about spies, rocket fuels, send a rescue squad
to--
"Huh--? What the--?"
At which point, the interns jumped me from behind and hung up the
phone on the sucker.
By the next morning, my fever had broken.
And the hospital had some tall explaining to do when the Pentagon
traced the call back.
FRAME
Que pasa? I've contemplated that question ever since, my best
take on being the story CARCINOMA ANGELES, a literary breakthrough for
me which I wrote about three years later, and which, long after that,
seems to have been picked up by a doctor in Texas as a treatment for
cancer.
As on an acid trip, only more so, I think the fever warped me
into a metaphorical reality in which the disease ravaging my body was
transmogrified into a paranoid image-system overlayed on actual real-
world events. By giving that story the ending I wanted, by actually
waking up the general, I somehow was able to triumph over the
infection for which the whole thing was metaphor.
Unless you've got a better explanation.
The facts are that I survived a fatal disease, that this
experience, whatever it was, later was the impetus for the story that
was the real take-off point for the writer that I was to become, and I
don't think I was the same person afterward.
CONTINUITY
SMLA made no sales for him during the six months , and he was
economically constrained to seek full-time employment.
He answered an ad in the New York Times offering an entry level
position as an editor. When he took the test for the job at the
employment agency, he realized that the prospective employer was his
own literary agent, Scott Meredith. Armed with this knowledge, he did
very well on the test and was tentatively offered the position by the
employment agency.
FLASHBACK
As I client, I had never even met Scott Meredith. When I showed
up in the office as a job applicant, he was non-plussed. Many writers
who later became clients had worked for him, and many people who had
worked for him later became clients, but Scott had never hired one of
his own writers through the employment agency cattle-call and didn't
want to do it.
"What do you mean, you won't hire me?" I demanded. "The only
reason I need this damn job in the first place is that you haven't
sold a thing for me in six months!"
Having never confronted this argument either, Scott relented.
Voila, the 24 year old kid whose own stuff wasn't selling had a job
anonymously representing a list of something like a hundred
established writers, some of them, like Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose,
Frank Herbert, John Brunner, and Jack Vance, among others, literary
idols of mine at the time, and people who were later to become my
friends.
FRAME
The pro desk at SMLA was an excruciating experience. Scott
Meredith was a genius at squeezing work out of his peons by force of
paranoid pressure, and after a full day's work writing letters under
his name to authors, sometimes typing them over and over again until
he was satisfied, you had to read manuscripts on your own time at
home. It was like being back in school. It was nearly impossible to
get anything of my own written. And there I was, agenting stories and
novels anonymously for the very writers whose illustrious company I
longed to join myself!
On the other hand, it was a crash-course in the realities of
publishing from the inside out, and the bottom up. By the time I was
25 I had more publishing street smarts than venerable greats twice my
age, and before I was 30, found myself playing the strange role of
career advisor, father-figure even, to my own literary idols, like
Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick.
CONTINUITY
While working at SMLA in various capacities in 1964-66, he
continued to write stories, some of which sold, and completed THE
SOLARIANS, his first published novel, which appeared in 1966.
FRAME
I have always been a lousy typist, and in the end, I simply
couldn't keep up with the workload on an SMLA pro desk. Scott fired
me. He then rehired me for a part-time job supervising the fee-
reading operation, where piece-work editors wrote letters of criticism
on submissions from amateurs for a fee.
Somewhat morally ambiguous maybe, but I had time and energy to
write my own stuff again. Stories sold, including one to Playboy,
"Deathwatch." I wrote a space opera, THE SOLARIANS, which SMLA sold
to Paperback Library for $1250.
After I left the Meredith Agency for good, I never held another
job, and for better or worse, sometimes much worse, have survived on
my writing ever since.
And though I seriously suspect that years later Scott Meredith
was responsible for the non-publication of THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN,
about which later, I doubt whether I would be saying that now, if it
wasn't for the education I got in his rough school of hard publishing
knocks.
CONTINUITY
In 1966, he decided to move to San Francisco. He gave up his
East Village apartment and his by-then part-time work at the Meredith
agency, bought a $300 Rambler, loaded his worldly goods in it, and set
out for California.
FRAME
Bruce Britton and his wife Marilyn had moved to San Francisco in
the train of their psychotherapy guru, a story that was to be an
inspiration for a part of THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, a curtain coming
down on part of my life, but also friends in a state where I otherwise
knew.
And California, San Francisco in particular, for me, like so many
others, was the mythical Golden West towards which Young Men were
supposed to go, the land with no winter, North Beach, the Sunset end
of the Road, the object of a thousand and one vision quests, the
Future itself, somehow, the glorious leap into the Great Unknown.
Appropriately enough, Frank Herbert and about 300 mg of mescaline
sent me on my way.
FLASHBACK
Walking west through the Village night on 4th Street, peaking on
mescaline after reading the final installment of the magazine
serialization of DUNE, a powerful meditation on space-time,
precognition, and destiny soon to launch a hundred thousand trips, I
had a flash-forward of my own.
I would be a famous science fiction writer, I would publish many
stories and novels, and many of the people who were my literary idols,
inspirations, and role-models, and former clients, people I had never
met, would come to accept me as their equal, as their ally, as their
allies, as their friend.
And my life's mission, would be to take this commercial science
fiction genre and turn it into something else somehow, write works
that transcended its commercial parameters, works that could aspire to
the literary company of Burroughs and Mailer and Kerouac, that would
help to open a new Way....
This is what you're here for. This is why you passed through the
fever's fire and didn't die in that hospital bed. This is what you
must do. You must go West to meet your future.
The mescaline talking? An overdose of 25-year-old ego? A stoned
out ego-tripping wish-fulfillment fantasy?
Call it what you will.
Everything I saw in that timeless Einsteinian moment would come
to pass.
CONTINUITY
On the way to San Francisco, he attended the Milford Science
Fiction Writers' Conference in Milford Pennsylvania, to which he had
been invited by the organizer, Damon Knight.
FLASHBACK
Damon Knight had invited me on the basis of "The Equalizer," a
story I published in Analog. The only other science fiction writers I
had met before had been Terry Carr and Barry Maltzberg, fellow SMLA
wage-slaves, and suddenly there I was in Damon's huge crumbling
Victorian manse for 10 days of workshopping and socializing with a
couple dozen of them, a few who I had actually agented anonymously,
though considering what had habitually come down, I wasn't about to
mention that.
Damon's motto was "No Chiefs, no Indians." This was a
professional workshop and everyone invited was by definition a
professional, hence an equal, whether they were Damon, Gordon Dickson,
James Blish, Judith Merril, or one of the selected new guys like me.
What's more, I was indeed accepted as an equal colleague on a
certain level, and the sense of awed isolation I felt when I first
stepped into the house's big kitchen and met all these people who were
names on book jackets lasted maybe an hour and a half.
You can say a lot of critical things about the community of
science fiction writers, and down through the years I certainly have,
but it really is a community that not only tends to protect and
nurture its own but actually welcomes newcomers into the fold. Like
all gatherings of writers, the sf community engages in bragging,
backbiting, vicious gossip, and cruel games, but nowhere else in my
experience are established writers so genuinely openhearted to the new
kids on the block.
CONTINUITY
He became fast friends with Harlan Ellison, who was at Milford,
and was strongly attracted to Dona Sadock, who was there with Ellison,
and with whom he was to live many years later.
FLASHBACK
Harlan arrived in Milford in a flash of Hollywood street punk
ectoplasm with the tiny elfin Dona in tow. It was just one of those
weird chemical things. He hadn't been in Damon's kitchen for twenty
minutes before we were talking as if we were already old buddies
picking up a conversation that had been going on for years.
Harlan at that time was about 30, dressing and bullshitting like
the Hollywood star writer. Dona was this tiny little 20 year old
groupie, or so it seemed until she opened her mouth and out came this
preternaturally powerful voice redolent of 50 year old sophistication
and speaking for someone who seemed about a thousand years older than
that.
Instant fascination. Unrequited love that would go on for years.
The beginning of the two longest friendships of my life.
CONTINUITY
Instead of driving directly to San Francisco after Milford, he
passed through Los Angeles and looked up Ellison, who put him up at
his house for a week or so, persuaded him to try Los Angeles instead,
and found him an affordable studio apartment.
FRAME
I hadn't intended to stay more than a few days in Los Angeles.
I took a random exit on the Hollywood Freeway and called Harlan, the
only person I knew in LA. He invited me to crash in his little house
up in Beverly Glen. Before I quite knew what was happening, he was
persuading me to give LA a try, and finding me an apartment. All in a
week.
It couldn't have been a week after that when he asked to borrow
$2000, about half my net worth, this from a guy who was knocking down
a thousand a week on contract to Paramount. Just for ten days, he
assured me. How could I say no to a guy who had been so generous to
me?
Thus began a weird pecuniary relationship that went on for years.
Harlan would borrow large sums from me for a week or two, pay them
back, borrow the bread again a week later. The same few grand got
recycled over and over. No matter how much money he made, Harlan had
the creative need to ride the edge of insolvency. No matter how much
he borrowed, he always paid it back.
CONTINUITY
He stayed in Los Angeles for about six months, where he wrote,
among other stories, the now-much-reprinted "Carcinoma Angels", the
very first story purchased for Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology
DANGEROUS VISIONS. A previous attempt at a story for DANGEROUS
VISIONS turned into an outline for the novel THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE.
Doubleday gave him a contract and a modest advance, and he moved to
San Francisco to write it.
FRAME
Why did I leave Los Angeles after six months?
Why did I stay that long?
The Summer of Love, the Counterculture, might be two years in the
future on a mass level, but the tension between the Hip and the Square
from which it was to emerge was a very real identity crisis for a
young writer from Bohemia.
I had made one life-long friend in Los Angeles, I had made the
stylistic breakthrough of "Carcinoma Angels" there, and the attempt to
write THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, my take on Vietnam and professional
revolutionaries, as a novelette for DANGEROUS VISIONS had led to my
first hardcover contract, so I can't say the atmosphere wasn't
creative, but there didn't seem to be any there there. No street
life. No scene like the Village.
San Francisco, on the other hand, the chosen object of my odyssey
in the first place, was still mythical country, Kerouac's North Beach,
the Village West, the California capital of Hip. Harlan's and Los
Angeles' distant disdain for the misty metropolis to the contrary, I
had to at least check it out myself, now didn't I?
FLASHBACK
When I hit San Francisco, the first place I went was to Bruce
Britton's apartment, since I knew no one else in town. Bruce being
Bruce, and as luck would have it, he and his wife were going to what
would be one of the historic parties of the decade that very night.
Yes, I spent my first night in San Francisco at Ken Kesey's very
first Acid Test blowout in the Seaman's hall, an event often
considered the birth of the Counterculture. Thousands of stoned
people, loud music, acid in the punch, general frenzy, the whole tie-
dyed ball of wax.
What a homecoming to the Hipster community!
And yet....
FRAME
Fabulous North Beach proved to be an expensive bummer. The Beat
Scene having turned it into a primo tourist attraction, the
authorities in their infinite wisdom figured all they had to do to
make it perfect was to get rid of the dirty beatniks who had made it
famous in the first place.
The result was a depressing mixture of high rent apartments,
plastic coffee houses and topless bars, and a Hip scene that had
followed the low rents elsewhere.
Namely to the Haight.
CONTINUITY
In San Francisco, Spinrad lived on a street close by Buena Vista
park, bordering on the Haight-Ashbury. There he wrote both THE MEN IN
THE JUNGLE and afterward AGENT OF CHAOS in the space of less than a
year.
FRAME
The bohemian communities of Greenwich Village and North Beach had
had economic bases in the arts, the crafts, the tourist industry, but
Haight-Ashbury in 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, had no
such legitimate economic base at all. People like me, actually making
a living in an artistic endeavor, were rare, people with straight
nine-to-fivers even rarer.
The unfortunate result being that the economy of the hippie
community there (so named by Time in 1967) could only be based on the
drug trade. At street level, indigent connections collected money for
nickel bags of grass or crystal meth or individual tabs of LSD to from
high school kids or day-trippers, and scored ounces or lids from the
lowest true dealers, their cut amounting to $10 or so or a nickel for
their own stash. The low-level dealers bought from wholesalers in
maybe kilo quantities, and so on up the food-chain, which in those
days did not extend to Drugs Lords, narcoterrorists, or the Maf.
Not my planet either, not what ON THE ROAD had advertised as the
hip scene in San Francisco at all, though there seemed to be no other.
In the process of cleaning up North Beach, the powers that be had
created Dope City in the Haight.
Call it street smarts, or call it luck, I found myself a nice
little garden apartment on a hill just above this scene, where I could
write THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE and later AGENT OF CHAOS during the day,
and boogie in the Haight at night and weekends.
No doubt some of the nastiness in THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE owed as
much to the environment of the Haight as to the Viet Nam war which was
beginning at the time. For sure, the three-sided conflict between
Establishment, Revolution, and Forces of Chaos in AGENT OF CHAOS owed
even more to my identity crisis at the time.
I was a hipster, right, a Beat, a bohemian, these were my people,
weren't they? Weren't they? The Square world sucked, didn't it,
official reality was boring and oppressive for sure, and hey, it was
the Establishment itself that created the Haight by driving the Beats
out of North Beach. Surely I didn't want to be part of that.
But I saw things in the Haight....
I saw people smoking coffee grounds because they had nothing
better. I saw people smoking match-heads to get off on the sulfur
fumes. I saw needle-freaks shooting up with hot water just for "the
Surge." A guy said to me, "I'd eat shit if I thought it'd get me
high," and he wasn't joking.
And there were people who regarded me as a Square because I
wouldn't get involved in dealing.
I spent a long time looking for a third way. So did the country.
And maybe we're all searching for it still.
CONTINUITY
A certain deterioration the cultural milieu in the Haight
persuaded Spinrad to return to Los Angeles,
FLASHBACK
One day two girls from Texas I knew with pleaded with me to come
over to their apartment and rescue them from a couple of dealers for
whom their kid brother was a connection, and who were refusing to
leave.
I put on my White Knight suit and drove over.
Given the level of paranoia in the Haight, ejecting them was
easier than it might seem. All I had to do was glower at them
enigmatically until they started giving me paranoid looks.
"Whattsa matter, you guys think I'm a narc or something?" I
snarled defensively.
"Oh, no, man, nothing like--"
"Yeah, I think you do! Whatsa matter, I look like a cop to you?"
"Oh, no, man--"
"You think I'm a fuckin' narc, don't you?"
Sinister these schmucks were, but they were schmucks, and after
about a half an hour of this, they slithered out the door. But not
before telling a story that they found highly amusing.
They were big-time acid dealers, or so they claimed. Peace,
Love, Higher Consciousness in hundred tab lots.
"An' two out of every hundred hits are cyanide, some people are
in for a really heavy trip, haw! haw! haw!"
I left the Haight for LA the next week.
FRAME
I spent about a month living in Harlan Ellison's large new house
with Harlan and one of my main literary heroes, Theodore Sturgeon.
Both Sturgeon and I were chasing unsuccessfully after Dona Sadock, who
had arrived in LA, and it got kind of weird.
I was still trying to digest the results of what I had seen in
the Haight. The Counterculture hadn't even been born yet, but I was
already thinking 20 years ahead to what would emerge out the other
side, Ted and Harlan were both working on tv scripts, and I was
thinking about what immortality would mean as an item of commerce too,
BUG JACK BARRON was somehow coming together in my mind....
CONTINUITY
Spinrad drove to New York, where he secured a contract from
Doubleday to write BUG JACK BARRON, and then to Cleveland, where he
attended his first science fiction convention.
FRAME
The elusive Dona had fled from Sturgeon and myself back to New
York, and I did another transcontinental run, in pursuit of her and a
book contract from Doubleday. Didn't catch her, but I did cadge the
contract for BUG JACK BARRON, at a rather wet lunch with Larry
Ashmead, who had been my editor on THE MEN IN THE IN JUNGLE, then
about to be published.
Ashmead grandly assured me that there were no taboos, that I was
free to follow my literary star in writing this novel of immortality,
television, and American Presidential politics.
FLASHBACK
Harlan was also in New York, on his way to be Guest of Honor at
the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland. "You gotta go to
the Worldcon," he told me.
"Worldcon? What's that?"
"Two thousand fans of writers like us, half of them women. Need
I say more?"
I had failed to connect up with Dona once more, so he didn't.
I pictured a thousand literary groupies of the sort one might in
one's dreams encounter in a Village coffee house avid for intellectual
discourse and fornication with science fiction writers.
Instead, I had my first encounter with the subculture of science
fiction fandom--dominantly male, adolescent, overweight, and
literarily jejeune to say the least. An unsettling experience for
writers who come to science fiction from elsewhere for strictly
literary reasons. J.G. Ballard didn't write for a year after his
first and last convention. When I encountered Keith Laumer after his
first convention, he was in a state of gibbering shock.
Not my planet either, but being the venue of much publishing
wheeling and dealing, as well as places to meet your friends and
colleagues, sf conventions, I was to find, are rather seductive to
science fiction writers, bad for the head, but hard to avoid.
CONTINUITY
Upon returning to Los Angeles, Spinrad rented an apartment in
Laurel Canyon, where, in 1967-68, he wrote BUG JACK BARRON, as well as
short stories, journalism, and two scripts for Star Trek, one of which
was produced as "The Doomsday Machine."
FRAME
Los Angeles seemed a lot more like home the second time around,
or rather Laurel Canyon did, wild overgrown hills five minutes off the
Sunset Strip, inhabited by wild overgrown people, and I've never lived
anywhere else in LA ever since.
Harlan introduced me to Jared Rutter, editor of Knight magazine,
and I wrote a piece about science fiction fandom for him which led to
a monthly column chronicling the times as we passed through them,
collected in 1970 in FRAGMENTS OF AMERICA.
This was to be published by something called Now Library Press,
another line of a large porn publisher, who at this time was doing the
Essex House line of literary porn novels under the aegis of Brian
Kirby. The writers who wrote the novels--and there were some
formidable ones like Theodore Sturgeon, Philip Jose Farmer, David
Meltzer, Michael Perkins--got $1500. I got $300 to read them and
write six page afterwards justifying their redeeming social
significance.
Thanks to another Harlan Ellison connection, I wrote a piece for
Cinema magazine, and thanks to a favorable mention of his pilot for
the show therein, I was invited to write a Star Trek by Gene
Roddenberry, and then a second.
Thanks to all of the above, I managed to survive economically for
the eight months or so it took me to write BUG JACK BARRON on the
first half of a $1500 advance from Doubleday.
This was, in retrospect, the apogee of the countercultural
revolution, when everything seemed possible, when the world was being
made anew, when even Time could do a naively positive cover story on
the Summer of Love.
I was writing commentary on it all every month. I had been
invited to write Star Trek. My first hardcover had come out. I was
riding as high as the times.
So I took Ashmead at his word, sat down with my copy of
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, a lid or two of grass, and the blithe assumption
that science fiction could also be made anew, that is, that all the
commercial, political, stylistic, and linguistic strictures no longer
applied, and I let the muse, the evolutionary imperative of the time
take me where it would.
Where it took me was into a highly political tale of love, sex,
immortality, suicide, drugs, idealism lost and ultimately regained,
informed by a sexual explicitness the science fiction genre had never
seen before, though, in 1990s retrospect, relentlessly heterosexual,
and almost naively free of anything that would today be called
"perverse."
The style that seemed to move through me in a great Kerouacian
gush was curiously similar in spirit to that of Norman Mailer's WHY
ARE WE IN VIET NAM?, Brian Aldiss's BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD, and even
Robert A. Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, all of which had to
have been written at roughly the same time, and none of which could
have influenced any of the others. None of the four of us had written
anything like that sort of thing before, and none of us really ever
did again.
It may sound arch in 1993 to suggest that the spirit of the times
must have been speaking through us. But not in Psychedelic Sixty-
Seven.
CONTINUITY
Doubleday rejected the finished manuscript of BUG JACK BARRON.
Spinrad spent the next year or so trying to sell it to major hardcover
houses without success.
FLASHBACK
1968-1969, on the other hand, were, as I called them in the title
of one of my Knight pieces, "Year of Lightning, Year of Dread."
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Russian
tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Richard Nixon emerged as President
after Lyndon Johnson was driven from office, and Doubleday bounced BUG
JACK BARRON.
Not to suggest that these were events of similar magnitude, but
the nature of the clashing forces were the same in the microcosm as in
the macrocosm.
"Take out all the sex, drugs, and politics, and we'll publish the
book," Doubleday told me.
"All that would be left would be a novelette," I pointed out.
Multiply this by ten million such incidents, small and large, and
you have the transformation of the cultural awakening of 1967 into the
cultural war of 1968-72. Hip versus Square. Counterculture versus
Power Structure. Revolution versus Establishment. Sex, Drugs, and
Rock and Roll versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Me versus You.
Us versus Them.
BUG JACK BARRON bounced around New York from publisher to
publisher, rejection to rejection. The mainstream publishers rejected
it because it was too much like science fiction. And I resisted the
easy out of publishing it as a genre book.
As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm.
CONTINUITY
During this period, he took the manuscript with him to Milford,
where he met Michael Moorcock, British fiction writer, literary
theoretician, and editor of the experimental magazine New Worlds.
FRAME
In the microcosm of science fiction, the countercultural literary
trend against was called the "New Wave."
So dubbed by critic Judith Merril to describe a recondite
stylistic revolution within the genre taking place primarily in
Britain under the theoretical aegis of Mike Moorcock. But by 1968,
the term had come to include anything that its proponents considered
taboo-breaking or conservatives believed polluted the vital bodily
fluids of the science fiction genre, as exemplified by the stories in
Harlan Ellison's landmark DANGEROUS VISIONS anthology.
And of course by BUG JACK BARRON, "New Wave" by all three
definitions, and a novel that had become notorious before it even
found a publisher.
It was already notorious in part because I had already gone
public on the subject in articles in science fiction fanzine, in
appearances at science fiction conventions, even on the radio. I
definitely did not want BUG JACK BARRON published as just another
genre sf paperback, but things being what they were, I used my voice
wherever I could make it heard.
And took the manuscript with me to the Milford Conference.
CONTINUITY
Moorcock was very enthusiastic about BUG JACK BARRON, and
serialized it in New Worlds in six monthly installments. The
magazine had a grant from the British Arts Council, and when the W.H.
Smith bookstore chain refused to stock it because of their objections
to BUG JACK BARRON and the Arts Council successfully pressured them to
rescind the ban, questions were raised in Parliament, where Spinrad
was called a "degenerate."
Meanwhile, Spinrad was finally persuaded to sell the American
book rights to BUG JACK BARRON to Avon Books as a science fiction
paperback original.
FRAME
Mike Moorcock was not the only one at Milford who was
enthusiastic about the notorious BUG JACK BARRON when they got to read
a piece of it. The encouraging reception it got from writers on both
sides of the so-called New Wave controversy pulled me out of a
personal pit and dropped me in the middle of a paradox with which I
have wrestled ever since.
Ever since BUG JACK BARRON, it has always seemed to me that what
I was writing, like much else that got published as "sf," did not
belong in the sf marketing category, genre sf being commercially
targeted at an audience of literarily and politically unsophisticated
male adolescents, and what I wrote, judging from reader response,
appealing to a demographic slice that was older, more female, more
interested in literary and political matters than in the "action
adventure" formula dominant in the sf genre.
A more general audience, conditioned by decades of sf genre
packaging not to seek out such fiction within such covers, where in
fact, paradoxically, much of the best of it is fact to be found,
precisely because the writers thereof have been ghettoized therein by
the mainstream publishing apparatus, itself conditioned by the very
prejudices its own sf lines have done so much to promulgate.
Like other science fiction writers of my generation and our older
soul-mates of similar literary ambition--Ellison, Moorcock, Thomas M.
Disch, Barry Maltzberg, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delaney, Philip
K. Dick, Brian Aldiss, Leiber, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, to
name a few--I have fought to break my work out of this literary ghetto.
The paradox being that there has always been more comprehension
for this desire to break the bounds of the genre, more emotional and
intellectual support for literarily adventurous speculative fiction,
within the walls of the very ghetto from which it seeks to escape than
from without.
This being the short form of the long analyses in my teaching
anthology MODERN SCIENCE FICTION and my critical overview of the
literature and its place in society SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD,
both published quite later.
FLASHBACK
A year or so of trying to sell BUG JACK BARRON as a major
mainstream novel finally convinced me that I was banging my brains out
against a stone wall. And indeed, as soon as I gave up and unhappily
agreed to let Scott Meredith try the sf publishers, the book was
involved in a kind of half-assed auction. And after I reluctantly
sold the novel to Avon as a paperback original, I managed to secure a
simultaneous hardcover edition from Walker Books.
Still, I wanted out. Or rather, in. To larger literary realms.
And the only way to do it seemed to be to write a novel that was not
science fiction, and to do it without a contract.
This, after having had a contracted novel rejected and bounce
around for a year without selling, was scary. Though, upon
reflection, maybe not. After all, the $3000 I had finally gotten for
BUG JACK BARRON via competitive bidding was still less than what I had
made in two weeks writing a Star Trek script. And my Knight column
covered the rent.
And I had a story to tell, or rather several of them that fit
together thematically. I take a look backwards for a change, and
would write THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, relating the karmic connections
between the roots the Counterculture in the old Village bohemia, drug
dealing, psychotherapy cults, and the fee-reading operation at a
literary agency not entirely unlike Scott Meredith's.
CONTINUITY
About this time, he met Terry Champagne, with whom he was to live
for the next year or so.
After he finished THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN and persuaded Meredith
to agent it, he and Terry Champagne moved to London in 1969.
FLASHBACK
Yes, Theresa Louisa Champagne was her real name, and in
retrospect it was a relationship that was not so much doomed as
destined to be a limited run for a certain season.
Terry was still married to a friend of mine while she was chasing
chased after me, and I was too square to let her catch me until she
had resolved her situation. Terry was not into monogamy except
perhaps of the short-term serial variety. Terry was not looking for a
permanent relationship, and I was.
Or was I?
For by the time she moved into my Laurel Canyon apartment, I was
committed to moving out. All the way to London.
The American publication of BUG JACK BARRON was set, and I was in
the process of finishing THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN. I had become
something of a minor countercultural hero in Swinging London in
absentia. Who could resist? Why should I?
Hooking up with Terry didn't change my plans. Terry was an
archetypal child of the Sixties. a stone willing to roll what and
wherever. An artist, a topless dancer, a jeweler, a dealer, and when,
through me, she got to take a shot at writing stories and doing
journalism, she succeeded at that too, albeit, on her usual terms.
"It's all the same shit," she used to say to me, to my consternation.
If I had ever thought of myself as a hippie, living with Terry
Champagne disabused me of any such notion.
After finishing THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, I somehow managed to
bullshit the Scott Meredith Literary Agency into marketing it despite,
uh, certain aspects, and off we went, in March of 1969, via a flood
in LA, a blizzard in New York, and a five day barfing seasick crossing on
the SS United States, to London, to a Europe that neither of us had
ever seen.
FRAME
Neither Terry nor I had been outside of North America before, and
now here we were in London, and at first, it was all an adventure, the
scene around New Worlds, the fringes of the Countercultural
underground, Mid-Summer's Eve at Stonehenge, it was all new, even the
smell of everything was subtly different.
But after we had sublet at apartment in Bayswater and started
actually living in London, it all settled into a sort of normal
routine, something like living in New York for me, but more alien for
a California girl like Terry.
Which is to say that London in the end was more interesting to me
than to her. She was writing about as much as I was, and good stuff
too, but she was never as serious about the literary scene as I was,
or for that matter, about much of anything else.
Nor was I getting much done writing done waiting for BUG JACK
BARRON to be published, waiting for THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN to sell as
it bounced from publisher to publisher, talking literary theory with
Mike Moorcock and colleagues, playing the minor underground literary
celebrity....
FLASHBACK
After J.G. Ballard and Mike Moorcock backed out, Christopher
Priest and I were invited as the token science fiction writers to the
Harrogate Festival of Literature and Science by the noted publisher
and literary figure, John Calder. Off we went by train, Chris and his
wife, Terry and I, Chris nervous about mingling with all the awesome
literary luminaries.
Calder, quiet frantic, met the train with his humongous Jaguar
saloon, the four of us and two Indian professors stuffed ourselves
into it, and Calder started to drive out of the parking lot--
"Oh no, man!" I shouted. "You're gonna--"
Too late. Calder had already driven the Jag halfway down a
flight of stone steps, where it hung quivering on its belly-pan.
Calder, freaking, had no idea what to do next.
Somehow, this grand entrance into the literary high life ended
any trepidation I might have felt about being a 28 year old sf punk
amidst my intellectual betters.
"You stay behind the wheel and gun the engine when I tell to you
to," I told him, "and the rest of us get out and lift the rear end."
And that's how we did it, bouncing the car down the steps in
stages. It managed to get us to the hotel before all the oil leaked
out, but the repair bill was enormous.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. So it went.
The theme of the conference was the interface between science and
technology and literature, but they had one microphone to be passed
among twenty panelists, like an exaggeration of a typical science
fiction conventions. My experience therewith served me well, and I
sort of began to ooze front and center.
Then, Erich Fried, a German Marxist writer, and his attendant
groupies decided to organize a revolution. This was 1969, I was the
author of the notorious BUG JACK BARRON, and thought my heart was
surely in the right revolutionary place, so I attended his evening
strategy session in the auditorium as invited.
Fried's thesis was that the relationship between the speakers up
on the platform, and the audience down here in rows of seats facing
them, was hierarchical, therefore fascist. He would demand that the
seats be rearranged in a circle with the audience surrounding the
speakers on the same equal level. Much more democratic.
Okay....
But when I looked down, I observed that the chair I was sitting
on, like every other seat in the auditorium, was quite thoroughly
nailed to the floor. It would take a team of carpenters days to move
them all.
When I pointed this out to Fried, he scowled at me with bemused
contempt. "Hardly the point!" he sniffed.
Uh-huh.
The next day, Fried stood up in the audience and made his demand
backed up by many shouts of "Right On!" from his supporters. There
then ensued half an hour of tedious argument about seating
arrangements to the discomfort of the paying customers, and the total
befuddlement of Nigel Calder, the chairman, who had completely lost
control.
After a half hour of listening to this totally pointless
argument, I had finally had enough. I snatched the one free
microphone, and gave Fried what he wanted.
I observed none too gently that, the seats being nailed to the
floor, the argument was moot, the audience was bored with it, and it
was time to get on with the program.
"You, sir," Fried shouted righteously on cue, "are a fascist
swine and a bastard!" And stormed out of the audience at the head of
his troops, as he had obviously planned to do all along.
It was the major media event of the conference. It made all the
papers. That's how I got called a fascist swine and a bastard in
every major newspaper in Britain.
Well, not precisely. Because John Calder had spelled my name
wrong in the press kit, the fascist bastard was "Norman Spinard."
FRAME
BUG JACK BARRON had been published, THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN
hadn't sold, I was still writing my monthly column for Knight, but had
no other significant source of income, Terry was getting homesick for
California, the sublet on the London apartment was up, so, somewhat
reluctantly on my part, perhaps, after a month staggering about the
continent after the car we had borrowed from Mike Moorcock expired in
Germany, we returned to Richard Nixon's America in the fall of 1969
and rented a house in Laurel Canyon.
FLASHBACK
Coda to Harrogate:
We took the train back to London in the company of, among others,
William Burroughs. We had to change at York. Burroughs went to a
newsstand after reading matter for the trip and returned with a
handful of sleazy British tabloids.
"Look at this stuff!" he chortled. "Juicy!"
They were all full of this lurid Hollywood murder story. Pregnant
actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, famous hair stylist to
the stars Jay Sebring, and several others had been gorily murdered by
a tribe of drug-crazed hippies in thrall to some weirdo named Charles
Manson. I never paid attention crap like that, and marveled at how
someone like Burroughs could.
Little did I know how close I was to get to the Manson Family.
Too close for comfort. And soon.
CONTINUITY
There Spinrad, in 1970-71, wrote THE IRON DREAM, his satire of
science fiction, Nazism, and Adolf Hitler, which had emerged as a
concept from a conversation in London with Moorcock, during the
writing of which his relationship with Terry Champagne ended.
During this period, he was also writing political journalism,
film criticism, and the occasional book review for the Los Angeles
Free Press, America's best-selling weekly underground newspaper.
FRAME
A crazy time.
My relationship with Terry was breaking up. I was writing a
novel that amounted to channeling the consciousness of Hitler in order
to exorcise the demon of Nazism. And I had become a main man of the
Underground Press on the side.
Arthur Kunkin, founder of the Free Press, had hired Brian Kirby
as managing editor, and I was one of the writers he brought in. The
money was next to nothing, but as a film critic I was on all the
freebie review lists, as a political columnist, I developed a certain
following, and I loved the instant feedback of weekly journalism, a
welcome relief from getting inside the head of Hitler while my
relationship was falling apart.
But what I, and everyone else at the paper, could have done
without was the Mansonoids.
Kirby had brought in poet and former Fug Ed Sanders from New York
to cover the murder trial of Charlie Manson. As soon as he hit the
tarmac at LAX, Ed was writing stuff about how the Establishment was
railroading this innocent hippie tribe in order to crush the
Counterculture.
Charlie and his Family loved the coverage. They loved the paper.
They loved Ed. There were more of them on the loose than anybody not
at the Freep realized. And as the trial progressed, every stoned-out
nut in California seemed to want to join the Manson Family too...
The Mansonoids trusted Ed. They trusted him so much that they
told him about all these other neat snuffs they had done that only
their good buddies at the Free Press now knew about, hee, hee, hee....
So early on we all knew that Manson & Co. were indeed the crazed
killers the wicked Establishment claimed they were, but Kirby had to
keep on their good side, such as it was, the Freep had to hew to the
Mansonsoid line, print Charlie's poems and manifestos, or the
murderous creeps hanging around the paper might not like us any
more....
Years later, I met Ed Sanders in New York.
He told me that even there, even then, he still slept with the
lights on.
One good thing did come of it, though: one of the best front page
headlines ever.
Remember when Richard Nixon butted into the trial? "MANSON
GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES," screamed the headlines in the Establishment
papers.
The next issue of the Free Press carried a piece by Charlie
himself about the then-unfolding Watergate scandal.
"NIXON GUILTY, MANSON DECLARES," said Brian Kirby's headline.
How right they both were!
CONTINUITY
THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN still hadn't found a book publisher, and
Brian Kirby, editor of the Free Press, began an unprecedented weekly
serialization of the novel in the paper.
FLASHBACK
CONTINUITY
Ernsberger was later fired by Minton, and when the paperback of
PASSING THROUGH THE FLAME was published, the dedication to Ernsberger,
which had appeared in the hardcover, was removed. During this period,
MCA bought Putnam, and eased out Walter Minton, and Spinrad changed
agents again, signing on with the Jane Rotrosen Agency.
FLASHBACK
By the time the paperback came out, Dona and I had moved back to
New York, and I saw the first copy in the Putnam office. In the
absence of Minton, I raved on about how I was going to talk to certain
people in Hollywood who would see to it that he would be gone ere the
year was out.
It was admittedly a cheap thrill. Putnam had already been bought
by MCA, and from the experience of my friends Betty and Ian
Ballantine, I knew all too well what happened to owners who sold their
companies to such conglomerates believing they could cash the fat
check and still retain effective control.
Then too, Minton was not exactly a hero to his troops. He once
fired a couple dozen people at the office Christmas party, to give you
an idea. I was at a big publishing party when it came down. A whole bunch
of people from the Putnam office arrived, drunk as skunks, and lugging
champagne, which they proceeded to pour for me.
MCA just axed Walter Minton, they told me. How did you do it?
I just smiled enigmatically over the rim of my glass and toasted
his demise.
CONTINUITY
In another attempt to secure major mainstream hardcover
publication, Spinrad wrote THE MIND GAME without a contract. Though
the completed book seemed on the verge of being accepted by major
hardcover houses several times, something always seemed to happen
between the editorial and legal end.
FLASHBACK
Was Scientology or the fear thereof responsible? They had
certainly complained when their street-solicitor minions appeared in
my comic short story in Playboy, "Holy War on 34th Street," and had
tried unsuccessfully to get Anchor Books to edit my comments on
Hubbard out of MODERN SCIENCE FICTION.
And while THE MIND GAME was bouncing around, we did have this
rather peculiar burglary. The apartment was ransacked, but nothing
was taken. Not the stereo, not the tv, not Dona's mink coat which was
hanging in plain view, not even cash.
A search for a manuscript?
A not-so-friendly warning?
The cops said it was probably crazed dopers.
I could hardly tell them that the burglars hadn't taken my grass
either.
FRAME
Whatever the cause, THE MIND GAME wasn't selling, so I decided it
was time to write another science fiction novel, and wrote an outline
for A WORLD BETWEEN, my meditation on sex roles, feminism, media, and
electronic democracy.
My friend David Hartwell wanted to buy it, and I had been
instrumental in securing him his position, but unfortunately that
position was sf editor at Putnam-Berkley. I had recommended him to
Ernsberger, but at this time, George was already gone and Walter
Minton was still in power.
So Jane Rotrosen auctioned the outline, and the winner was Jove
Books, the hot new paperback line just started by Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. And they made a deal to do new editions of THE IRON DREAM
and BUG JACK BARRON. And bought THE MIND GAME too.
For the first time in my career, I had some significant capital.
CONTINUITY
Jove published THE IRON DREAM, but before any of Spinrad's other
books there could be published, corporate upheavals at Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich intervened. The Jove science fiction program expired, and
Jove itself was sold to Putnam-Berkley, under which corporate aegis it
finally published THE MIND GAME in 1980.
Spinrad, meanwhile, had moved A WORLD BETWEEN to Simon &
Schuster/Pocketbooks, where David Hartwell had started a new line of
books, Timescape. Hartwell published A WORLD BETWEEN as a paperback
original, but published Spinrad's next two novels, SONGS FROM THE
STARS and THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE in hardcover.
FRAME
SONGS FROM THE STARS was a post-apocalypse alien-contact story,
among other things, and I wanted the "narration" of the alien data-
packets to be, well, songs, poetry, that is. Could I pull this off?
Fortunately, David Hartwell was an experiences poetry editor whom I
could count upon to tell me whether I was making a fool of myself.
David thought the verse worked, with some tinkering, but felt
that the 40 pages or so of description around it should be in metric
prose.
"Metric prose? What's that?"
David proceeded to teach me, as we went over 40 pages of
manuscript, syllable by syllable, phoneme by phoneme.
Somehow, this learning experience, combined with a scene that had
been kicking around in my head for years without leading anywhere,
synergized into THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE, a (non)-love-story of the far
future written in a kind of "world-speak" called Lingo, my first piece
of book-length fiction in experimental prose since BUG JACK BARRON,
although in a style light-years apart.
I had written three novels since the publication of PASSING
THROUGH THE FLAME in 1975, but owing to all these publishing
upheavals, none of them were published until 1979-1980, when all three
of them were published in a space of 18 months. First it looked as if
I had had a four year writing block, then as if I had written three
major novels in less than two years!
CONTINUITY
In 1976, soon after the writing of A WORLD BETWEEN, Spinrad's
relationship with Dona Sadock ended, though the two remained good
friends. In 1980-1982, Spinrad was twice elected President of the
Science Fiction Writers of America. During this period he also began
a quarterly column of criticism for ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE, which, at this writing, still continues. In 1982, Universal
Pictures, which had previously had the book under option, bought the
film rights to BUG JACK BARRON for $75,000, the film to be written by
Harlan Ellison and directed by Costa-Gavras.
FLASHBACK
Universal was trying to get me to sell them another cheap option,
I knew that I could force them to pay me the pick-up money only
because Costa-Gavras wanted Harlan to write it. It was a high-stakes
game of chicken.
Finally, I got my long awaited $75,000 phone call. I had about
two hours to enjoy it. Then I got another phone call telling me that
Phil Dick had had a massive stroke and had lapsed into a terminal
coma.
Universal still owns the film rights to BUG JACK BARRON. To this
date, they have pissed away maybe $2 million on the project, and the
film has not been made.
CONTINUITY
During this period, he began visiting France, the first time as
guest of honor at the Metz Science Fiction Festival. On this trip, in
Paris, he recorded two tracks on Richard Pinhas' album East-West as a
cyborged vocalist.
FLASHBACK
"Me sing on a record album, Richard? Are you nuts? I can't even
carry a tune with a fork lift!"
Not to worry, he told me, just write some words to this music,
chant them into the microphone, and I, the vocoder, and the computer
will do the rest.
So we go into the studio, and I put on the earphones, and start
just chanting these simple lyrics, we do some takes like this, and
then....
And then Richard tries something. He lets me hear my own voice
being processed through the vocoder circuitry in real-time and
something happens.... I'm supplying analog input to the electronic augmentation
circuitry, I'm in a positive feedback loop with the vocoder, I'm
collaborating with it, with whatever Richard is doing, manipulating it
as it's augmenting me, and out the other end something is singing....
me, maybe, but not quite not-me either, and then....
And then, unbeknownst to me, Richard cuts the vocoder out of the
circuit like Daddy surreptitiously removing the training wheels from a
kid's bicycle.
And plays the result back to me.
"That's you," he tells me, "au naturel." And so it was. And so
it is. For better or worse, you can hear it on the album, re-released
on CD in 1992.
I wrote a piece on the experience for a magazine. And started
playing with the first little electronic keyboards. And got to
thinking....
Electronic circuitry can replace human drummers, even do whole
rhythm tracks untouched by human hands....
And if electronic circuitry can make a singer out of me, it can
make a rock star out of anyone....
And if out of anyone, why not out of no one, why not virtual rock
stars who aren't there to not show up for concerts, or get busted for
drugs, or command all that money...?
If the music industry could do this, they sure would, now
wouldn't they?
And that was to be the genesis of LITTLE HEROES.
FRAME
But LITTLE HEROES was one book in the future. I had never done a
sequel to anything before, or since, but I wanted to do a sequel to
THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE. Sort of.
THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE, narrated in his own "sprach of Lingo,"
that is, his private melange of human languages, by the Captain in
question, takes place entirely on a single space ship, and is written
in a rather hermetic Germanic sprach.
I didn't want to keep the characters, or the setting, or even the
style. I wanted to write a wider-screen, more up-beat, joyous
bildungsroman from a female point of view, and in a more Latinate,
baroque, wise-cracking sprach of Lingo.....
CONTINUITY
After the hardcover publication of THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE by
Timescape in 1983, David Hartwell had made a deal for a new
thematically-and stylistically related novel, CHILD OF FORTUNE, and
Spinrad once more returned to Los Angeles and rented yet another house
in Laurel Canyon in which to write it.
FLASHBACK
The breakup with Dona left me emotionally devastated, New York
was filled with memories, bad karma, high rents, I was getting
homesick for California, and CHILD OF FORTUNE, with its long sequence
in an alien forest of flowers seemed like a California book....
But I had friends in New York, I had plenty of money from various
books and the movie deal. So I decided to give New York one more try.
I'd make a fresh start, I'd move into a nice new apartment. After
all, I could now afford twice the rent I was presently playing for my
crappy little three room railroad flat on Perry Street.
I looked, and looked, and was finally about to give up when I saw
an ad for an apartment that seemed perfect. Double my current rent,
but I was prepared to pay it.
"Large beautiful four room apt. on tree-lined Village street,
eat-in kitchen, sunny garden view...."
Only wasn't there something familiar about the phone number...?
Indeed there was, as it turned out when I called it.
It was the number of my current landlord.
The wonderful apartment I could move into for twice the rent I
was paying was a clone of my own in the same building two floors down.
CONTINUITY
Before contracts for CHILD OF FORTUNE could be drawn up, the
Timescape line got caught up in a power-struggle between Richard
Snyder, head of Simon & Schuster, and Ron Busch, head of its Pocket
Books subsidiary. Snyder canceled the Timescape line and caused Busch
to fire Hartwell, simultaneously making a deal with Scott Meredith for
his literary agency to package a new line of science fiction for the
company.
FLASHBACK
David Hartwell used to throw Friday afternoon parties in his
office. Dick Snyder's office had a private dining room and attached
kitchen. One Friday, after Snyder had left, Dave snuck up to his
office to cop some ice from the machine in his private kitchen.
He returned with a bucket of ice cubes and a dazed expression.
Snyder's ice machine had embossed the cubes with his monogram.
FRAME
Which will give you some idea of the egos involved. But it was
corporate hardball too. Busch, not Snyder, had hired Hartwell to
start the Timescape line, and now Timescape was doing Pocket Books
hardcovers, which Snyder chose to see as infringement by Busch on his
turf. So canceling Busch's sf line, and making a deal with his good
buddy and my ex-agent Scott Meredith to package a replacement was a
ploy in a larger power struggle.
Making Busch take the public heat for a move that was directed
against himself was pure Dick Snyder.
CONTINUITY
The Science Fiction Writers of America, under President Marta
Randall, strenuously objected to this obvious conflict of interest.
Randall had been Spinrad's Vice President and his choice to succeed
him, a task she had accepted only on condition that Spinrad make
himself available if called upon by her in an emergency. During the
period when this crisis broke, Marta Randall found herself teaching a
writers' workshop on an isolated island with only a payphone as her
contact to the outside world.
FLASHBACK
So I found myself representing the SFWA in a loud national four-
cornered media battle against, my former agent and employer, and two
competing powers within the publisher of my own last three novels!
They never had a chance.
For an agency to package a line of books featuring work by its
own writers was a blatant conflict of interest that stank like a
codfish in the media moonlight. And to make my job even easier, when
Busch canceled Timescape and fired Hartwell, he had told the press
that he had done it because the literary quality of Hartwell's product
was too high. Meredith would do a much better job of providing
cynical schlock.
Guess whose side Publisher's Weekly was on? Guess how it looked
in the New York Times and the Washington Post? Guess how happy Gulf &
Western, who owned Simon & Schuster, was with Snyder and Busch as they
devoured their own feet in public print?
For about ten days, I found myself dribbling Busch, Snyder, and
Meredith in the press like a basketball, not that you had to be a
media Magic Johnson to do it.
hen they finally capitulated, Busch actually complained to the
New York Times that the SFWA had thrown its weight around unfairly,
that we had bullied poor Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, and Gulf &
Western, that I was guilty of practicing "Gunboat Diplomacy.
CONTINUITY
The winners, paradoxically enough, were the SFWA and Dick Snyder.
For the first time in American publishing history, a writers'
organization used the public press to overturn a high-level corporate
decision at a major publisher. On the other hand, while Snyder was
unable to consummate his deal with Scott Meredith, he won the power-
struggle with Busch, eventually forcing him out of the company.
Timescape, however, was still canceled, Hartwell was still fired,
and Spinrad was understandably less than confident in his future at
Simon & Schuster/Pocketbooks.
He moved CHILD OF FORTUNE to Bantam, who published it in 1985.
In 1984-86, while writing LITTLE HEROES under contract to Bantam,
Spinrad taught the novel at the Clarion West Science Fiction Writer's
Workshop in Seattle, where, in 1985, he met Nancy Lee Wood, who writes
under the name N. Lee Wood, and was there as a student. In 1986, she
moved into his house in Laurel Canyon.
FRAME
Science fiction writing workshops had proliferated, and I had
often expressed my dubious opinion thereof, much preferring Damon
Knight's old "No Chiefs, No Indians" formula to the hierarchical
structure of teachers and students, established writers and wannabees.
"Don't knock it till you try it," I was told, particularly by
Harlan Ellison. So finally, when I was invited to teach a week at the
six week Clarion West Conference, on conditions that I teach the
novel, which no one else had tried to do, the idea being to teach
novelistic structure by having the students turn an idea into an
outline.
Somewhat to my own surprise, it worked well enough to persuade me
to do it three years in a row, which had never been my intention.
Lee, a resident of Portland at the time, was one of my students
in the middle year, and showed up in Los Angeles a few months later.
We met at various events and venues in between Portland and Los
Angeles, during the next year, I went to visit her in Portland, and
she finally moved into my house in Los Angeles.
Terry Champagne had written and published while living with me,
but this was the first time I had lived with someone who had been a
writer before I had met her, and who was as serious about it as I was.
And we've actually been able to work consistently while living
together. I've written two long major novels, 100,000 or so words of
short fiction, and much else as of 1993. And Lee has written two and
three half novels and quite a bit of short fiction during the same
period.
If you don't think this is rare, you don't know that many writing
couples. Which is exactly the point--a writer has a hard enough time
living with anyone and working at the same time. For two of them to
do it sharing the same space-time, believe me, ain't smooth and easy!
CONTINUITY
In 1987, Spinrad and Wood traveled together to Europe for the
first time, to England, and then to Paris. The conjunction of their
mutual love for the city, and the political changes occurring in
Europe, caused Spinrad to conceive RUSSIAN SPRING in New York on the
way back to Los Angeles, and secure a contract to write it from
Bantam.
FLASHBACK
By this time, I had been to Paris by myself several times, most
of my books had been published there, I was popular in France, I had a
circle of friends in Paris, I had always fantasized living there at
some time, but never gotten up the nerve to do it alone.
What I had done, years earlier, while still living in New York,
was write the beginning of something I called "La Vie Continue" in
which my future self was living as a political refugee in Paris, in
which the Soviet Union had undergone a "Russian Spring" analogous to
the "Prague Spring" of 1968.... About 12 pages into it, I realized I
had the beginning of a much longer work than I had bargained for, and
it aside.
Now, years later, in Los Angeles, I owed Bantam a long novella
for OTHER AMERICAS, a collection they were going to publish, which
seemed just the right length for "La Vie Continue," so I sat down and
wrote the first draft in LA.
That's right, I wrote "La Vie Continue" before I moved to Paris.
Call it prescience. Call it a flashforward. Call it a self-
fulfilling prophecy.
FRAME
One anglophone writer living alone in a francophone culture had
always been a scary creative prospect to me, but Lee fell in love with
Paris on this first visit, and together I felt we could live in France
successfully for a protracted period, even though she spoke no French
at the time, and my French was what I had learned on my previous
visits.
Then too, I was between drafts on "La Vie Continue," scouting
locations for the rewrite, going around Paris contemplating the life
of this American exile who was myself living in the very same city,
while at the same time, thanks to Gorbachev, the future I had
envisioned for Europe years earlier in New York was beginning to
unfold here in real-time.....
The setting of RUSSIAN SPRING, the characters, the context, all
began to come together, and so too the adventure of writing it. This
would be a novel dealing with the future of Europe, the Soviet Union,
and the United States, would be primarily set in Paris, and so we had
an excellent excuse to live there for a year or so while I wrote it.
CONTINUITY
In the summer of 1988, Spinrad and Wood moved to Paris, and soon
thereafter Spinrad was elected President of World SF at a meeting in
Budapest, an international organization of which N. Lee Wood was later
to be elected General Secretary.
Shortly thereafter, Spinrad began writing RUSSIAN SPRING, and
after finishing the first draft, he and N. Lee Wood traveled to Moscow
in the winter of 1989 as guests of the Soviet Writer's Union to do
further research for the book, which was not finally finished until
about three months before the August 1991 coup attempt, and which was
published in the United States the month afterwards.
FLASHBACK
At the World SF meeting in Budapest in 1988, we had met Vitaly
Babenko, then a depressed Russian writer having a hard time getting
anything published. When we visited Moscow in 1989, he felt he had to
sneak into the Peking hotel where we were staying courtesy of the
Writer's Union, and I felt I had to be circumspect about seeing him.
By 1992, he was the President of TexT, the second biggest private
publisher in Russia, and he had brought us there for the publication
of the Russian edition of RUSSIAN SPRING. Mad, mad Moscow!
He paid me my advance in the form of a huge bag of rubles. Spend
it all before it disappears! we were told by one and all.
It wasn't easy, but we did. Like everyone else in Moscow, we
became obsessive shoppers. It was a crash course in the psychology of
inflation, believe me.
And how right they were. When I was handed the money, the ruble
was 135 to the dollar. Less than a year later it was to be about 1000
to the dollar.
Moscow is a tough, crazy town, but one of the most exciting
places I've ever been at this mad moment in history, and as we stood
atop the Lenin Hills with some Russian friends the day of our
departure, one of them gave me a strange look.
"You like it here, don't you?" she said in some bemusement. "You
could live here...."
Maybe she was right. Maybe I could.
CONTINUITY
Spinrad and Wood decided not to return to the United States as
residents, though they returned for visits, and were married on one of
them in Florida in 1990.
Norman Spinrad's latest novel, PICTURES AT 11, though set in Los
Angeles, was written in Paris where he still resides, and deals
partially with the strains of German reunification. Completed in the
middle of 1993 under contract to Bantam, it has at this writing not
yet been scheduled for publication.
FRAME, CONTINUITY, FLASHBACK, FLASHFORWARD
This close to the real-time of me sitting in my Paris apartment
writing this attempt at the closure of a story that is not yet
finished, they all finally merge.
The story of how two American writers came to Paris for a year or
so and ended up staying is certainly material for a whole novel,
several of which have probably already been written.
The historical context in which it took place is a novel I have
already written, namely RUSSIAN SPRING, conceived on a one month-visit
to Paris, developed in New York, treatment written in Los Angeles,
first draft written in Paris before Wall came down, before our first
trip to Moscow at the time of the death of Sakharov, and finally
published in Russia itself in 1992, in a society not that much unlike
what is described in the book, but which didn't exist before it was
written.
So why is Norman Spinrad still living in Paris?
The answer is not to be found in "La Vie Continue." The Norman
Spinrad in that novella is ten years older than the present writer,
and the present writer does not consider himself an American exile,
political or otherwise.
I'm not living in Paris because I don't can't bear to live in the
United States.
I'm living in Paris because I want to live in Europe.
We've been here five years now. We've braved the Russian winter.
We've walked through the Berlin Wall in the very process of its
demolition. We've both been officers in an international writer's
organization. We've made friends in France, Russia, the (former) two
Germanies, (former) Yugoslavia, (former) Czechoslovakia, Italy,
Holland, points between. We've been part of their lives and they've
been part of ours, and at a time of rapid-fire evolution that is
transforming this supposedly tired old Continent into the cutting edge
of the 21st Century.
And I'm doing another cut on one of Richard's albums via the very
instrumentalities I predicted in LITTLE HEROES.
Why would an American writer of speculative fiction choose to
live in Europe?
Why not?
Or, as I usually say when asked this question, hey, to an
American science fiction writer, Europe isn't merely another planet,
it's a whole other solar system!
Planet France, Planet Germany, Planet Russia, Planet Italy, and
other major bodies, plus untold scores of ethnic asteroids! And each
of them a world entire!
I'm 53 now, improbable as it seems to me. I've lived by my words
for 30 years. I've witnessed three decades of history in many places,
and been part of some of it. I've been rich and poor. I've been
flush and broke. I've fought the good fights, and I've won and lost.
I've achieved a certain amount of literary recognition, but not, of
course, what I consider my just share. I've had my ups and downs. I
have my good moments and my bad.
And when I'm really feeling down, I remember a 25-year-old kid
stoned on mescaline, walking across 4th Street to the Village, high on
DUNE, and dreaming those crazy prescient dreams....
He was going to be a famous science fiction writer, he would
publish many stories and novels, and the many of the people who were
his literary idols, inspirations, and role-models would accept him as
their equal, would become his allies, his friends.
And his life's mission would be to take this commercial science
fiction genre and turn it into something else somehow, write works
that transcended its commercial parameters works that could aspire to
the literary company of Burroughs and Mailer and Kerouac, that would
open a new Way....
This is what you're here for.
And so I was. And so I am.
When I look into the mirror and am appalled to see this middle-
aged guy looking back, when my latest novel fails to make the best-
seller lists, when the bills start coming in faster than the checks,
and I bemoan all that I haven't done, all the just desserts that
haven't been piled up on my plate, all I long to be and haven't
achieved....
Then that 25-year-old kid grins back at me and gives my 53 year
old self a swift kick in the psychic ass. At my age now, maybe I know
much too much to feel the same, but he's certainly got cause to feel
entirely satisfied with the story so far.
Everything he saw in that timeless Einsteinian moment has come to
pass.
Everything he wanted to be, I have become.
I look out my window onto my Paris garden. And when I finish
this, I will walk out into the summer streets of Paris, a minor
princeling of the City of Light.
Beyond the wild dreams of that 25-year-old kid!
I've become what he wanted to grow up to be and so much more.
I should be satisfied, right?
Sure.
I've spent my whole life looking forward not back. Sure, this
53-year-old has got what that 25 year old wanted.
But I'm not him, and it's not enough, and I'm old and wise enough
now to know that it never will be.
If I live to be a hundred with a Nobel on the mantelpiece, I'll
probably say the same thing.
I'll probably even believe it.
This story doesn't end here.
It begins tomorrow.
end
