Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Scattershot Again

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

1) Harold Ross's major selling point for The New Yorker whose first issue he published in February of 1925 was that his magazine was definitely "Not for the little old lady in Dubuque." But of course it was. Just as Raymond Chandler described Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer as "A small guy's idea of a tough guy," The New Yorker was a Dubuque guy's idea of New York City. The magazine was not only for the population of Dubuque, it was edited by people from places symbolized by that city. A provincial publication. Still is, for all of Tina Brown's four-letter words during her tenure in the 90's.

The best historical example of this: Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery." Published in 1948, the story incited more mail—most of it furious—from its readers than anything published before or since. The story, sixty years later, is still so well known that I doubt if a synopsis is necessary but, very quickly: A rural town somewhere (unspecified) conducts an annual lottery; all adults must draw a card. One card bears a black mark and the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, draws it; she is stoned to death. The reader is never given a rationale for the lottery (it just is) or a historical explanation. "It isn't fair, it isn't right!" the woman screams as the crowd advances upon her. I suppose that the story can be considered as against a general background of pointless, random persecution as a metaphor for the Holocaust, specific revelations of which were much in the news at that time.

The readership was scandalized. "I think you people have sick minds," one reader wrote. "Can you tell me what the point of this story is?" many asked. "It just seems to want to be horrible." "Please cancel my subscription," hundreds wrote. "Do you think this kind of thing is entertainment?" others wanted to know. And so on. Waves of confusion and fury surged through the magazine's offices for months.

I read it, unscandalized, in early adolescence and found it to be a work of utter clarity, beyond that little to note. Over the years I have read it several times and it is a well-crafted, economical, mildly visionary story. It was only about ten years ago—which was the last time I looked at it—that I realized that had it been published in Weird Tales, Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder it would have been utterly unremarkable. The audience would have assimilated it as Shirley Jackson intended and the lettercols no doubt would have given Miss Jackson much egoboo. If John Campbell had published the story in Astounding (*unlikely but 1948 was the year he did publish the equally painful Judith Merril debut story, "That Only A Mother") it would have fit seamlessly. Two years later, when Fantasy & Science Fiction was into its second year, Anthony Boucher would have taken it without a raised eyebrow. So would Horace Gold for the about-to-be inaugurated Galaxy, “The Lottery” in its deadpan sadistic pessimism and cruelty can in fact be seen as the kind of story which typified Gold's magazine.

In the provincial New Yorker and to its provincial readership "The Lottery" was bewildering, audacious and scandalous. Meanwhile, the scruffy science fiction audience so despised by Harold Ross, E.B. and Katherine White, Edmund Wilson (if they were to even acknowledge that audience) would have nodded, shrugged, and turned the page. Who's the little old lady here?

Science fiction editors and readers were always many years ahead. This is a single example; you can find your own. Acquire a copy of the annual Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction anthology from any point in the late fifties and measure it against the same year's O. Henry Prize Stories. Case closed.

2) Alice Sheldon (of "James Tiptree, Jr." fame) and Alfred Bester share one important aspect of biography (they also, of course, share excellence; I think that everyone reading this would agree that they would both rank on anyone's list of the twenty best science fiction writers). They entered science fiction feeling superior to the genre and its practitioners; it was a game for them, and their colleagues a group of interesting, uncaged exotic animals. Bester felt himself to be Madison Avenue and television's ambassador to this crazy little world ("I never knew a science fiction writer who didn't have a screw loose," he wrote in a mid-seventies short memoir) and Sheldon, a serious reader in her childhood, found science fiction an enchanting, bizarre world populated by bizarre, secret friends with whom she could role play in a created identity just as Terry Carr twenty years earlier had played at being "Carl Brandon." Very strange and interesting people, she wrote an academic mentor, and of course she was keeping the true identity of James Tiptree, Jr. from everyone except him and her husband. Science fiction for these two great writers was an imaginary world. "Fun and games" as my wife says when talking of misfortune.

And science fiction—the act of being science fiction writers—destroyed them both. The monster, their laboratory playmate, broke its bonds (with their willing assistance and ate them alive. Take a look at The Deceivers, Bester's last novel. Take a look at "Slow Music" by Sheldon. One is a masterpiece and the other a disaster but both are virtually clinical documents of damage.

I'm not proposing that these two great writers didn't have other problems. In fact science fiction might have been seen by them (at least at the beginning) as a kind of salvation. But what was a game became deadly serious and then they were eaten whole.

You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger and you don't mess around with Jim.

3) Theodore Sturgeon's well-known description of Horace Gold's editing: "Horace could make a poor story good. And he could make a great story good." Nods and sympathetic laughter from a generation of contributors to that.

But Gold knew what he was about. He was aiming at an absolute unity of voice. His editing, often savage, was an attempt to publish a magazine which would appear to have been written by a single writer, a sardonic, savage, poisonously bitter, occasionally wildly comic presence. In the magazine great writers like Phil Klass or Damon Knight were stylistically indistinguishable from Winston K. Marks, Margaret St. Clair, Jerome Bixby. The 1950-1956 Galaxy was the most stylistically and conceptually unified magazine in the history of consumer publication.

It all fell apart for him, of course. It always does. Writers lost patience; Horace, unchecked, became ever more idiosyncratic; other markets welcomed his contributors and made it possible for many of them to flee. And the audience itself came to tire of the unchanging, sardonic syntax.

But oh boy he had some good years there. The period from the first issue (October 1950) to the issue of December 1954 may be the greatest run a fiction magazine ever had, at least on a level with the 1942-1946 Astounding. And Campbell wasn't heavily editing his contents to get there as Gold felt he must. "The great task of a magazine editor," he wrote at the time, "is to produce a publication better than the individual contents offered him."

I wonder though if I could have put up with it.

—September 2008, New Jersey