Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Terminal Error

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

From a recent letter to Todd Haines, Artistic Director of the Roundabout Theater in New York City:

“Mark Saltzman's new Tin Pan Alley Rag is very promising, neatly staged, but the play rests upon an historical inaccuracy which undercuts seriously, and I am surprised that neither the playwright nor someone in the Roundabout chain of command failed to spot it. The play is set in 1916 and much is made of Joplin's important role in the composition of Berlin's breakthrough, Alexander's Ragtime Band, but of course that was composed in 1911 when Berlin was 23, and was his first great success. In fact that song is the reason Berlin was the prosperous music publisher who in the imagined central event of the play receives the importunate and pauperized Joplin.”

That is a serious flaw. It unseats the premise. As a science fiction writer of a good many alternate histories, I assure you that one of the most important rules of that subgenre is that a speculative or fantastic premise must have an underlay of genuine, verifiable fact. You can, for instance, write a story in which JFK survives the assassination (and many of us have), but you can't get away with placing the assassination attempt in Houston.

That altered or unresearched fact is, for me, enough to sink the play. Haines' response might be that I represent the only playgoer at the performance who knew this and the rest of the audience will find the play entirely satisfactory, but then again there might be no response at all. Or, as my daughter with her long history in retail might observe, Haines might say to his assistant, "Send this guy Nut Subscriber Response Letter Number Four." I don't expect script changes.

Saltzman and Haines might in any case—knowingly or unknowingly—be proceeding from the three principles adopted by mainstream folk to science fiction when they attempt to write it (he presented them in In Search of Wonder over half a century ago:

1) You just make up this stuff as you go along.

2) Only kids read it anyway, so what the hell.

3) When in doubt, give them the old malarkey.

It worked pretty well in 1956, it worked just as well in 1970 when I swiped Knight's principles (with attribution) for a magazine review of a dismal collaboration, and it will probably work for Mark Saltzman here. The play is in preview as I write this, to open in one week . . . I'll let you know if any reviewer picks up on the point.

Science fiction, alternate history, fantasy, mainstream fiction for that matter, operates—or should operate—on a rigorous basis; you are allowed one unlikely premise from which to build. Your protagonist, like Hammett's Flitcraft (that offstage figure so memorably evoked in The Maltese Falcon can be near-decapitated on the first page of a story in a way which utterly changes his life. He cannot have a near-decapitation on page 17 of a story which utterly resolves his life. Coincidence or untruth cannot be used as resolving, only as precipitating factors.

(The one consistently successful and practicing exception to this iron law is much of the work of Cornell Woolrich. His hapless characters get hit by falling beams and stray bullets quite often. Brides lose their husbands-to-be on the wedding day; two young people who might have met and loved never do because on the way to a meeting one of them is killed by a hit-and-run driver. The only explanation or comment on that aspect of Woolrich's technique is not to try this at home.)

Saltzman is allowed to