Jack L. Chalker - Dance Band on the Titanic

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Dance Band On The Titanic

Jack L. Chalker

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and

simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Portions of this text were originally published in various magazines and anthologies: "Dance Band on the

Titanic" was originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and World's Best

Science Fic-tion 1979; "In the Wilderness" was originally published in Analog; and "In the Dowaii

Chambers" was originally published in The John W. Campbell Awards Nominees, Vol. 5.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to re-print previously published

material:

Chapdelaine and George Hay from The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. 1. Reprinted by permission of

A.C. Projects, Inc.

The Mirage Press, Ltd.: annotated bibliographic material by Jack L. Chalker from A Jack L. Chalker

1977 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random

House, Inc. Stuart David Schiff. "Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker from Whis-per II by Stuart

David Schiff, Doubleday, 1979. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91885 ISBN 0-345-34858-3

Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition: July 1988

Cover Art by Darrell K. Sweet

This book has to be dedicated to Ben Bova, Harry Brashear, John W. Campbell Jr., Judy-Lynn del

Rey, Martin L. Greenberg, George R.R. Martin, Mark Owings, Stuart David Schiff, George Scithers,

Suzy Tiffany, and Bob Tucker, all of whom had something to do with these stories in one oblique way or

another.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE WRITING GAME

NO HIDING PLACE

WHERE DO YOU GET THOSE CRAZY IDEAS?

FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE WILDERNESS

DANCE BAND ON THE TITANIC

STORMSONG RUNNER

IN THE DOWAII CHAMBERS

ADRIFT AMONG THE GHOSTS

MOTHS AND CANDLE

AFTERWORD: ON TRANSFORMATIONS AND OTHER LAST WORDS

THE OFFICIAL JACK L. CHALKER HANDOUT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES FOR THE INTERESTED

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Conde Nast Publishing Co. for Analog, July, 1978.

World's Best SF 1979 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Ar-thur Saha, Daw Books, 1979.

Vol-ume 5, Blue Jay Books, 1984.

George Hay, from The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1, AC Projects, 1985. Reprinted by

permission.

Official Jack L. Chalker Handout Bibliography, Mirage/TCC. By permission of The Mirage Press,

Ltd.

INTRODUCTION:

THE WRITING GAME

WHENEVER ONE OF THOSE LITTLE FORMS COMES IN for credit or information or

whatever, under "occupa-tion" I invariably write "novelist" in the blank because that's what I do. Not

"writer" or "author" (except the latter on immigration forms when going to other coun-tries since it gets

you nicer treatment), because I am ba-sically a novelist. I think long; I'm generally much more

comfortable with novel lengths and beyond than with the short form. This might be because I'm a veteran

ham and former teacher and don't like to be restricted to short takes, but whatever the reason, I am far

more comfortable with unrestricted space.

I'm probably best known as an author of series, although some of my editors say "serials." I have only

three sets of related books that I think of as series-that is, each novel is complete by itself but all concern

the same characters in the same basic universe-and these are the Well World books, the Dancing Gods

books, and the G.O.D., Inc. books. Even the Well World books don't quite fit; there are five of them but

there are only three novels, the second and third volumes being one continuous narrative and the fourth

and fifth another. These were broken up due to the vagaries of the publishing industry-it's more profitable

to sell two $3.50 pa-perbacks than one $4.95 paperback-on direct order rather than by my design or

preference.

There are also serials, which means one humungous book broken up into a bunch of smaller books

for the same reasons as above. These include Four Lords of the Diamond, The Rings of the- Master,

the Soul Rider books, and the Changewinds books. Most of those indi-vidual volumes do not read

independently but are part of a continuous narrative. An aside: The Rings of the Mas-ter is not my title;

my title was The Malebolge Rings, but editors ordered that changed since they argued that readers

wouldn't know how to pronounce Malebolge and still make it a great sounding title but would read it

instead as Malebolge in which case it sounds idiotic. You do know how to pronounce it, don't you?

Well, do you at least know why you should know?

The difference between writing short fiction and writ-ing novels, even half a million word novels, is at

least as great as the difference between being a champion bil-liards player and a world-class pool player.

Both billiards and pool are played on the same sized table with the same cues and balls, but while the

object of one is to put specific balls into specific pockets, the other game doesn't even have pockets.

Very few champions at one can be equal champions at the other. When I grew up in Maryland, bowling

meant duckpins; that other game that was scored the same but had the huge balls and the equally huge

scores was tenpins and was played by ham-handed dolts who couldn't appreciate the subtler duck-pin

game. A world champ tenpin bowler is lucky to get eighty in ducks; a duckpin champ often can't break a

hundred in tens. They are scored the same and look somewhat the same (although you get three balls per

frame in duckpins and it still doesn't help) but they are totally different games requiring totally different

skills.

By the same token, there are born novelists and born short fiction writers in the sense that authors

tend to be far better at one form than the other. The watchword of the short story is economy; it is built

around a central idea or concept and has no room to stray from it, and if characterization is required it

must be developed with an economy of words during the course of getting to the object of the story itself.

This is one reason why most short fiction masters do, at best, mediocre novels. The novel is not a big

short story; it is an entirely different form requiring pacing, a broad structure, interrelated sub-plots, and

often a multiplicity of themes. A good novel is not an expanded or "long" short story but must be crafted

differently to work. The short story author trying a novel all too often tries building it along a short story

structure (that is, around a single theme or idea that can not justify the length) or gets lost in all that

verbiage and pads and plods.

Now, a novelist is used to thinking of multiple themes and tracks and painting on a broad canvas;

when writing short, the novelist tends to feel restricted, limited, the mind seeing endless possibilities for

going this way or that and feeling uncomfortable with the limitations the short form imposes and the

comparatively large amount of time it takes to craft a work that is generally no longer than a single

chapter. Often he or she feels like a mural painter asked to engrave the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the head

of a pin. The short story is extremely difficult to do well, since a tremendous amount must be

accomplished with just a few well-chosen words and with little or no margin for error.

There are, of course, rare individuals who do both equally well, but even for them, the one who is

essen-tially a novelist will gravitate to the long form quickly while leaving the short form only for those

ideas that must be developed but can not stand the extra length. The short story writer may have one or

two novel suc-cesses but, after that, failures. In earlier days, the short story was king and there were

literally hundreds of mar-kets for it; these days, outlets for short fiction are few and far between while the

novels have large markets and it's the novelists who make the real money. Writers must eat; novelists eat

better. This is something of a tragedy, because any talk of the superiority of one form over another is

nonsense. Both are art, just as billiards and pool and duckpins and tenpins are all valid sports, and both

accomplish different and equally important ends. I wish there were more opportunities for short fiction

writers these days because I miss the real bulk of fine writing produced in the form of decades past, but

it's tough for a short story writer to be living on beans while watching the novelist dine on Dom Perignon

and caviar. Now, it is true that short fiction writers win more awards, but that's because there are fewer

markets and far less com-petition and only the best get published, but it's damned tough to eat awards.

Thus, every short story writer I know today is a prof-itable hobbyist-they get paid for short stories but

they do something else for a living. The lucky ones also write for their "real" money, but they tend to write

for Hollywood and often under mysterious pseudonyms so you, the readers, and The Critics won't find

out. It's astonish-ing, though, to find the number of familiar names bylin-ing episodes of He-Man: Master

of the Universe and Challenge of the Go-Bots. Hollywood is not all Twilight Zone and The

Hitchhiker, but it pays well. It is even more amazing to discover some of the familiar (and mostly male)

names behind those flowery pseudonyms on popular romance novels.

I originally started in the short form, as you'll see, but with only encouragement and no sales. Of

course, I wasn't very ambitious in the writing game when young, and rarely aggressively tried to sell

anything that I wrote. I never got a form rejection slip-it was always one of those nice letters of

encouragement (one of which is reproduced elsewhere in this book), although once I actu-ally got a bill

(see my introduction to "No Hiding Place").

I've been an editor, a publisher, and a packager of SF and fantasy, as well as a bibliographer and

creator of novelties. I've been around this field and in this atmo-sphere since I was thirteen, even though

my first original fiction sale wasn't until I was almost thirty. When I did turn to writing seriously, starting

with a novel, I sold it the first time out. Since then, I've had a couple of ideas that never became books

either because editors didn't like them or mostly because editors demanded massive changes that made

the ideas no longer interesting. You might call these (all two of them) the Lost Novels, although elements

of them are in several other stories of mine-all the good parts-and two parts of one are here.

As I write this, I have thirty novels, book-length or longer, under my belt, but this book you hold

contains my entire professional short story output. Short fiction comes hard to me; it's far more work than

it seems and for far less money than it should pay considering the sweat and labor. There is also the

concern of the marketplace. A writer writes to communicate with a vast and largely anonymous public. A

short story might take weeks or even months to craft well, go to a magazine, then be published there and

have a store shelf life of just under one month. Then, unless the story is anthologized or continually

reprinted, it's gone. Again, at this writing, only one of these stories is currently or even recently in print,

while every single book-length work I have ever written is in print and available-and earning money and

communicating. Thus, I turn to short stories only when a concept or idea demands the short form.

I don't write merely because I hate to get up in the morning; I write because I have things to say, and I

hope I reach the people capable of understanding them. Pub-lishing this way is a scattershot approach,

but it reaches a vast audience and is no more scattershot than teaching. Novels sell well and have very

long lives; short stories sell relatively poorly and even some of the greatest lapse into obscurity very

quickly. I get paid an awful lot of money for my novels because they sell so well; I get paid a pittance for

short fiction in comparison because the sales aren't heavily influenced by the short story names inside a

magazine or anthology. If I want to both commu-nicate broadly and long and live in a very comfortable

manner, novels are the way to do it. I once had a winner of many Nebulas and Hugos dispute that on a

panel and brag that one short story of his made fourteen thousand dollars including a TV sale. But it was

his only story that made that kind of money, the sum was made over a pe-riod of years, and if that same

sum were offered for a novel of mine, my agent would laugh and then say, "Now, seriously..."

I am constantly besieged by requests to do another Well World book or another Four Lords book

or sequels to many of my independent novels. Many if not most of my readership get to know and like

the characters, themes, and worlds that I have created, which is gratify-ing, and want more. On the other

hand, I have seen tal-ented careers go down the toilet as good authors, lured by money and an automatic

market, write volume twenty-five of a good three-book series. Now, some have lots of money and a few

even have fan clubs or conven-tions devoted to those series, but they are not writing the good books

they are capable of, and all the time and energy devoted to those hack series of endless novels means

they are really at a self-imposed creative dead end.

Since attaining some degree of fame and financial se-curity, I have rigidly held to the principle that a

story takes as long as it takes and that's it. If it takes only 6000 words, that's how long it takes. If it takes

40,000 words, that's okay, too. If it takes 100,000 or 500,000, so be it. I have had offers from some

editors to expand some of the stories herein into novels, but I have been unable to jus-tify it. I could

lengthen them, but I could not improve them or add anything by so doing. Indeed, while I'm certain there

must be some, I can not offhand think of any examples of a really fine short story that was ex-panded to

novel length where the longer version was preferable or superior or added anything except money to the

author's pocket.

And yet, the few stories here are important to me. My sometimes collaborator on nonfiction works

and occa-sional alter-ego, Mark Owings, calls these "the good stuff." They range from my earliest

surviving attempt at fiction writing ("No Hiding Place") to my own personal favorite of all the words, long

and short, that I've written to date, ("Dance Band on the Titanic"). I do a number of readings of "Dance

Band" since it's not only my personal favorite but also reads well aloud in under an hour, and I find in

every audience that there are at least a few people who had read the story initially and remember the

story fondly because it touched them in just the ways it was intended to-only nobody remembers that I

wrote it. I very much dislike the idea of communicating anony-mously; I spend far too much time cooped

up alone in my office with a CRT screen and keyboard to deny the little recognition due me when a story

works.

If anyone wants to know why I don't spent more time on short fiction, the low pay, relatively short

public availability, and anonymity even when the story works are the main reasons. Another is the

tendency to be typecast (see my notes on "In the Dowaii Chambers") so that the people for whom the

story is intended simply do not read it. And, of course, I have discovered time and again that people read

and like a short story but do not remember the author, while those who purchase novels know exactly

who they are reading. And, then, there is also you out there-you don't buy short story collections very

much (and I expect even this one will be among my smaller sellers) or anthologies, either. This is not the

way to encourage more short fiction output nor support such work.

And that brings me to the subject of you.

For someone who grew up in this field, I often wonder just who you all are. Few SF critics even

bother to review my works at all, although I'm generally vilified when they do. One SF editor who began

as I did in the fanzines and who wanted to be a Big Name Writer but had only one good story in him,

stood up at a gathering of SF writers out west a few years back and vilified and mocked me as well as a

couple of other very successful SF/fantasy writers by name. I and the others he mocked were not there; I

myself was three thousand miles away at the time. I'm told a number of people in the audience laughed

and applauded. I figure it must be tough to be eaten alive by the knowledge that, no matter what a

person's accomplishments, he is a failure at what he dreamed of doing most while others attained his

goals, so that he has to do things like this to people he wishes he was. I always thought it sadder still that

so many in that professional audience were in the same state of frustra-tion and envy as he. When great

success eludes some writers, they try to settle for critical acclaim; when even that fails, there is nothing left

but bitterness.

The fellow spent seven years gratuitiously attacking me in person and print. Not long back he

dropped dead, and I received a number of requests for tributes to this beloved figure. He was a good

editor and nobody should die that young, but he was a sad case and an asshole when he died and death

did nothing to expunge that. I loathe hypocrisy and attack it in my writings; I could not indulge now. One

still might learn from it, though. He's still being praised as a great editor, and perhaps he was, but that

wasn't what he wanted to be or to be remem-bered for. Such is life.

Still, I've also received some wonderful letters and comments from some of the giants of our field, the

very authors I held and still hold in awe and wonder as a reader of their works, telling me how much

pleasure I have given them. Those are worth more than a hundred good reviews or a thousand Hugos.

I've won a number of regional awards, but the only major one wasn't an SF award at all but a

prestigious mainstream award-the Gold Medal of the West Coast Review of Books. Somebody out

there buys incredible numbers of my books in this and many other nations and languages, yet I've never

been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula for my writings, even in the popular vote awards. That's not any

angle to nominate me, it's just a commentary. It appears that my vast readership out there comes

primarily from outside the established SF readership. Mainstream critics have generally liked me, while

SF critics who bother at all tend to either hate my guts or dismiss me as inconsequential. I have some

theories on why and we'll get to them in a moment.

But when you remember that neither Cary Grant nor Alfred Hitchcock, among a host of others, ever

won an Oscar, and Steven Spielberg can't even get nominated, you realize that in the end those awards

mean very little. It is, after all, hard to take most critics seriously anyway. They tend to be, on the whole,

failed writers or frus-trated ideologues left behind by their contemporaries' in-tellectual growth.

One critic said he'd read Web of the Chozen and A Jungle of Stars and that was enough. For

somebody with my output, that's like judging Shakespeare entirely by Coriolanus and Henry VIII. It is

probable that the vast majority of you who read this book won't like all the stories in it. I would be almost

disappointed if you did, since I think they represent a very broad range, from simple gimmick tales and

technological problems to some pretty complex and downright artsy stories. There was no attempt in

writing them to create this range; these stories were created in the deep corner of my mind that I cannot

consciously touch, and they are as they are because they had to be that way.

Tom Disch, another critic, one of the failed writer's school but so beloved of the literati, called the

Soul Rider books "better-written Gor novels." That got me to thinking of a comment the late Judy-Lynn

del Rey said to me when I tried something very fancy in a book. "Jack, take it out or you'll regret it. The

science-fiction readership is smart but terribly naive and unsophisti-cated. They're incapable of divining

complexities not spelled out for them. All you'll do is wind up with them not understanding a word you're

saying and crucifying you for it."

I took her advice on that one but not on many other books since. From the mail and comments I get,

I'm not at all sure she was right in her evaluation, but she sure was right about the SF (as opposed to

mainstream) critics. For example, let's say I was around in 1923 and studied and discovered a

tremendous amount about the beliefs and personalities of an obscure and laughable right-wing

revolutionary group in Germany whose leader had just tried to revolt in a beer hall and been slammed in

jail. I note, for example, the virulent anti-Semitism that the Vienna-bred leader has and promotes to his

fol-lowers, and I see it going down quite well with the Ger-man population who always used Jews for

scapegoats.

So I sit down and write this near-future SF novel about how this (disguised) leader and his party

somehow manage to rise from the ashes and take over control of a major industrial nation, and, after the

usual purges and dictatorial set-ups, begin rounding up the millions of Jews in his country, as well as

gypsies and anybody else he didn't like, maybe fourteen million people or more, confiscating everything

they had to the cheers of the population, and sending them all-men, women, chil-dren, no difference-to

slave labor camps where vast numbers are eventually gassed and the party leaders in charge make

lampshades from the skin and sift the ashes of the crematoriums for gold from the fillings, etc., while

feeling no particular guilt, going back to their homes, listening to Beethoven and Brahms, and arguing the

aes-thetics of Impressionists over chess and fine wine.

Many would have laughed and sneered and accused me of writing voyeur fiction-I certainly couldn't

have been published in a "proper" way and might well have been banned. At best, I would have been

attacked by critics within this field as someone indulging in sadoma-sochism, sexual depravity, you name

it, and perhaps even attacked as advocating what I was trying to expose.

Well, I'm a historian, specializing in ideologies in theory and practice, so I read all the obscure

theoreti-cians, and I look at the dogma of religious sects and the like, and then I create my models, set

them up, and let them run. Interestingly, if I choose an Ideologically Cor-rect set of victims there's nary a

peep from anybody. To give one example, when I have super-women dominating men who are kept as

sex objects for breeding purposes, that's okay, but when I use women in the subservient role, that's Gor.

But, you see, for the purposes of ex-ploring dangers and dangerous minds and people, women work

better right now than men because women are the large group just attaining a solid role in the workplace,

just attaining full rights, and just getting their con-cerns addressed-it's women's rights, not men's, that are

under the most constant assault. New Eden was a construct of three blended ideologies using their

com-mon denominators. These are real and have some power and each has literally millions of followers

right now (no exaggeration). One is middle eastern, one is Oriental, and the third is an established

American religion. A lot of people delved beneath the surface and addressed the hard points I was trying

to make. That was who I was writing for from the start.

Our world today is full of people willing and eager to surrender their minds to rigid leadership. The

United States is awash in cults and cult leaders and those who drank Kool-Aid with Jim Jones were

people very much like your neighbors and mine. It sometimes seems that whatever part of the

upper-middle-class young the reli-gious cults don't snare, the radical left and radical right do. The current

intellegensia seems hell bent on stuffing any and all new drags into their systems without regard for

consequences to their minds and bodies, while at the same time dismissing all medical claims to the

contrary and still pushing macrobiotic foods, telling how bad habits like smoking and a lack of jogging are

for you. Go some time, if you dare, to that part of your city where the young girls dress scantily and try to

make tricks on the street corners so they can turn the money over to their pimps and get their fixes in this

modern, liberated day and time and then tell me how outlandish New Eden is.

Forget the American/European ethic and look at where the bulk of human population is in this world

and see how most of them live and what they believe. Even the ones living in relative affluence do not live

in the same reality as you and I. We have enough advocates for the western bourgeoisie; I like to deal

with the bulk of humanity you never think about but is all around you.

Tom Disch saw only the surface and thought they were variants on Gor novels.

But, you see, the literati of today's SF are in fact very surface-oriented. Their themes are simplistic,

their mes-sages obvious. That's not what it's all about. You see, New Eden isn't Ideologically Correct. It

does not clearly and obviously convey the Right Political and Social Messages as We Have Determined

Them. The funny thing is, the messages of that big novel are (unusually for me) more or less Ideologically

Correct, but I approach human problems as highly complex things requiring hard and complicated work

made all the more difficult by im-perfect analysis and solutions. Figuring out the messages requires work.

Far too many critics mistake an ability to use and understand big words for intellectual activity. This is a

familiar retort of the educated idiot; true art, for them, is measured not by its message and content but by

its inaccessibility to the masses.

I'm sorry, but the world and the human race isn't at all simplistic and God help me if I ever wind up

being consistently Ideologically Correct. Once you surrender your common sense and reason to a

snobbish intellectual elite, you're on the road to surrendering everything. This sort of elitist outlook has

been with us for as long as commercial publishing and it is composed of the

'Intel-lectuals"-self-styled-who, by their insistence on con-formity to their standards and their ideology

and their agenda, are in fact the very antithesis of intellectual.

This attitude, it's always seemed to me, stems from a need on the part of some people to be superior

in something to everybody else. In its own way it's no more different than the whites of the Confederacy

and the pre-war South who didn't need slavery economically (and, in fact, most didn't own slaves in the

antebellum South) but desperately needed some race or class to look down on. The plantation owner's

grandfather was probably a con-vict sent to Georgia and so superiority of blood, in the European sense,

was denied him.

This intellegentsia of today, in fact, consistently iden-tifies more with European things, with the

European sense of social class. Come to think of it, the bulk of critics in Britain and on the Continent are

products of class structure but are not upper class themselves. It is a bit sad to think of someone

becoming a critic as a wedge into a class structure. Much contemporary European in-tellectualism has

been aimed at redefining class structure to include the intellectuals rather than eliminating the structure, no

matter what their self-deluding rhetoric claims.

Some of this is Lenin's fault. Lenin forever perverted Communism by writing that Marx was wrong;

that the proletarian masses were too ignorant to revolt and re-quired an educated, intellectual elite to

guide them and teach them the true path. And thus the bourgeoisie became the Party, led by the very

bourgeois Lenin and Trotsky; the aristocracy of blood represented by the Ro-manovs became the

Commissars; and the masses re-mained where they were. The Russian Revolution did not eliminate class,

it merely redefined it, as has virtually every political revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I once wrote a book called The Identity Matrix. It contained, by the way, the only definition of

freedom that is meaningful freedom is the right to be wrong. All other concepts of freedom go back to

that premise or they are false. Any other idea is simply a demand for a choice of oppressors.

The Identity Matrix was, unusually for me, very well reviewed and well received by editors and by

academia as well as by a number of mainstream reviewers. Science fiction critics, however, reviewed it in

the main as a sex change novel and found it wanting. If it was a book about man becoming woman, I

would agree, but it's not. That is what happens on the surface, but it's not what the book is about. The

book is about mind control and about containing scientific genies in bottles. The SF reviewers don't like

what the lead character becomes in the end; the more astute reviewers understood that this was not a

woman but rather an individual whose mind had been completely edited and rewritten up to three times

by a bunch of men. If you couldn't figure that out, then you couldn't understand the book. SF reviewers,

in they're doing. It shows how phony such critical com-mentaries can be, though, when you think it

through. Of course, thinking is simply not something the bulk of con-temporary SF critics are all that

good at doing.

Some people seem upset with me simply because I'm popular and successful, as if this had anything to

do with it. There are some very fine writers who are neither and never will be, and others who are who

don't deserve to be. Again, there is little correlation between the two. Whether there should be is beside

the point; there never has been and never will be.

Also, thanks to you out there, whoever you are, I don't have to spend any thought at all trying to

please or match the kind of "standards" that the self-styled critics of any age have always tried to impose

on an ignorant and benighted public that's usually far from ignorant and far more discerning than any of

these elitist guardians of art. Nor, of course, are high sales and popularity rele-vant, either-if they were,

the highest literary artists of the eighties would be Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Har-old Robbins, Janet

Daily, and maybe Danielle Steele, and our greatest artist would be Jim "Garfield" Davis.

Success itself is anathema to many critics. I recall how they all fawned over Gene Wolfe until Wolfe

com-mitted the serious compound sin of writing a five-volume serial novel and then having it be popular

and successful. All of a sudden Gene wasn't their darling any more on anything at all. Did his big project

now make all the works they once liked somehow bad? Regardless of whether or not you liked the

five-volume work, it did not negate any past or future accomplishments nor make something good

bad-yet that is indeed the inference. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

The art, the universality, shows through if and when it's there, and mere craft and mediocrity comes to

the fore as well. Lillian Hellman was the toast of the literati of her day, even though she hung around with

that writer of cheap thrillers. I checked five big bookstores last week. Not a single word of Hellman's

was available (ex-cept her introductions to Hammett collections) but every word of that writer of cheap

thrillers, Dashiell Hammett, was there. The recent revival of A Watch on the Rhine was very dated even

as a period piece and highly stilted and awkward. It didn't hold up and it folded before dwindling, bored

audiences. Now go read or even watch The Thin Man.

The incredibly influential critics of the Algonquin Round Table called Hellman an artist for the ages and

barely tolerated Hammett's presence while tolerating his writings not at all. They were the arbiters of

taste, the ones who said what art was. Quick, now-name the members of the Algonquin Round Table.

Some of you might have managed to name one or two since a couple were wonderfully quotable, but I

bet you're stuck now, and the rest of you never heard of them in the first place. But I'll bet all of you have

heard of Dashiell Hammett.

So, I find myself on the outside looking in, yet with all of you out there really getting a charge out of

what I write. I hear from you in letters and meet you occasionally out there in the real world. I'm at peace

with myself and at war with pretension, elitism, snobbery, and pater-nalism. Hopefully the comments here

and elsewhere in this book will clearly show that one needs perspective in this business. Hammett shorted

himself out worrying about the fact that he wasn't producing great art, only potboilers, and that's a shame.

It seems to me that art is possible in a tightly restricted society (El Greco comes to mind, as well as

Michelangelo and Da Vinci) but it has a better chance when the artist can create what he or she wants to

create. I have that freedom, and I'm not going to surrender it to anyone for an award or a good review.

I'll certainly take an award or a good review, but those are not factors entering into what I write. You

make it all possible. I often wish I could yank Hammett forward in time and show him those stores and

liberate him. What other great books we might have!

A recent critic of our field who's also a well-known writer suggested that Picasso was a true artist

while Norman Rockwell was nothing more than a brilliant technician and that the standard was that

Picasso could do what Rockwell did but Rockwell couldn't do what Picasso did. This is nonsense. Each

was creating from a different background and perspective and each set dif-ferent goals for himself. Both

attained those goals. Pi-casso had the luxury of family money which allowed him time to develop;

Rockwell was forced to come up through the commercial art marketplace. There is really no evidence to

support the concept that either could have done what the other did, but much evidence to in-dicate that

neither wanted to. The false implication of the statement above is not that Picasso was one thing or

Rockwell was another, it is the implicit argument that we must choose-Picasso or Rockwell. I am forced

to re-spond, "Why must we choose when we can have both?"

Another writer and critic recently was excited by the assertion that our field could produce a book

fully as great as Moby Dick. I never thought that this was in doubt. I mean, we have already done it. The

book is called Moby Dick, and it meets every standard for fan-tasy I ever heard of. It is, indeed, the

fantasy element that makes it great. Ahab's madness is not that he lost a leg and wants that whale; Ahab's

madness is that he knows just what supernatural forces he is facing and is conceited, even mad, enough

to believe that he can beat them with a harpoon.

That article, in a major SF magazine and by an author who is not major, is asking the question of

whether SF/fantasy can ever produce art to stand with the classics. Considering that about half the

classics that have already stood the test of time are fantasies, it's an ignorant con-cept. It also implies a

number of pretty idiotic ideas. First, that nobody in our field has achieved such status, which betrays true

ignorance, and, second, that all of the writers of the past in this field were somehow inade-quate, with not

a single artist among them, an assertion I find particularly insulting especially from a writer in this field

writing in an SF magazine. But the third and most revealing assumption he makes is that he and the

writers he mentions in his piece are, according to him, the first and perhaps the only ones at the long end

of the evolu-tion of SF and fantasy capable of achieving this level of greatness.

There are only two things I can guarantee you about this field, assuming the human race survives and

there is at least one society left where writers can write freely, and the primary guarantee is that we will

see not just one but many truly great works of literature published in SF or fantasy (more likely the

latter-it doesn't date like even the best SF).

The other absolute guarantee is that those works will not be written by anyone who sat down to

create a great work of literature by design.

I remember the time of the New Wave in the late sixties, a movement that's never completely died in

Britain. I also remember Roger Zelazny being appalled when he read himself labeled as a New Wave

writer. (Aside: the last thing a failing movement does before collapsing is try to find a couple of successes

to embrace for legiti-macy's sake). "But the New Wave is style over substance!" Roger noted. "My aim

is substance with style." He achieved it-and that's why he's so successful and still very much around. It's

also why the New Wave collapsed.

Moby Dick is just a whaling story with a supernatural McGuffin at its center, but it's the character

studies, the gritty atmosphere of the period, and the universality of its characters seamlessly mated to that

story and that supernatural menace that makes it great. Moby Dick is not a great novel because of its

style. It's not even very good taken that way. Moby Dick is a good, but not great, novel with its

substance and without style. What makes it great is substance with style.

Consider, for example, another character study with a supernatural McGuffin-Hamlet. Hell, the plot's

old. Shakespeare ripped it off, really. Why does his version alone survive to great acclaim? Substance

with style. But which is most important? Shakespeare always had style. Even Henry VIII and

Coriolanus have style. But they would have vanished into the obscurity of most of Shakespeare's

contemporaries had they not been dragged along by the strength of so many truly great plays. Plays with

substance.

At this writing the big new thing in SF circles is something called "cyberpunk." The leader of this new

move-ment, anointed by the critics against his will and finding the term uncomfortable, is an affable young

writer named William Gibson. His current status is really based more on a first novel than a career but

one suspects he will have a decent career, maybe even a spectacular one, judging from how he's

managing his instant superstar status. Neuromancer is actually well within the old line mainstream of our

field. The plot is about equal dollops of Budry's Michaelmas and the motion picture Tron with a bit of

the movie (not the book) Blade Runner thrown in. One local veteran SF fan called it "A standard

com-puter thriller but written as if it were done by MTV." So, in other words, what we actually have is

something old being done in a new way-with a new and unique style. Substance with style.

Others lumped into this movement include a couple of pretty damned good writers like Greg Bear and

Bruce Sterling, neither of whose works are very much like Gibson's or each other's until the critics get to

work building a unified cyberpunk field theory that is as much fantasy as any of their books and not

nearly as well constructed. They are smart enough to take the labels and use the acclaim (which will be

fleeting) to build their careers.

Now whole bunches of would-be writers will try to imitate Gibson and many will get his style down

fairly well, but virtually none will have any substance.

SF writers are supposed to predict, so here's a prediction that you can check out. The cyberpunk

wor-shipers, like the New Wavicles, will have (somebody else's) style and yet be lousy or incompetent

storytellers. They will sell a few stories to the critics building inevita-ble anthologies of cyberpunk stuff

and to the cheapest-paying paperback publishing houses whose editors are trying to ride a trend, but

they will then vanish into well-deserved obscurity. Norman Rockwell did create art; a legion of painters

perfectly imitating Rockwell did not.

The same goes for those imitators of van Gogh, Rem-brandt, da Vinci, and, yes, Picasso. So did

N.C. Wyeth -who was dismissed in his time as a cheap commercial illustrator and is only now being

appreciated-as well as his son Andrew and grandson Jamie.

In other words, producing art means being uniquely yourself. Hack work means attaching yourself to

someone else's success and, by imitating their style or struc-ture, attempting to some share of glory.

Gibson, Bear, and Sterling each do unique things and follow their own, not each other's, compass. Those

who have now jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon will do neither, yet that is just what this fellow is

talking about when he talks about a new school of writing. Indeed, the very concept of a "school" of

writing is at the heart of the problem, whether it be New Wave, cyberpunk, or anything else. This fellow

is urging the writers of the present and future to become imitative hacks. Some will follow, will be highly

praised by the critics, and maybe win awards, but they won't be artists, and their works won't last.

The eventual problem that Gibson and Sterling in par-ticular will have down the pike is that such

critical move-ments have short lives. If they continue along the same paths that are now bringing them

acclaim, they will be dismissed as "formula" and "old hat." If they take risks and do things stylistically

different than their prior work, they will be viciously attacked for selling out or deserting the movement.

Ask Zelazny or Ursula LeGuin, to name just two, about that. If they shrug it off and continue to write as

and what they must, they will continue to be artists.

And there's the more insidious problem. If you want to make a career of writing and you aren't

independently wealthy, you find yourself eventually between a rock and a hard place, between

commercial and artistic considera-tions. It's a delicate balancing act and sometimes you don't make it

with a particular work, which falls more to one side or the other. Another thing that a writer faces is that

stylists rarely make it on style alone. Substance, or just telling a good story, wins over style every time. If

you can attain both, you have a potential for something greater than its parts, but if you must lean, then

you must lean on story first or you will not make a living in this business. I make no bones about being a

storyteller first and foremost; it is an honorable and ancient profes-sion. Good storytellers are

occasionally executed but they never starve. Poets starve.

And yet, I am an artist, a creator of things that never were and some that never could be. I interpret, I

create, I entertain, and I teach. Whether or not I'm a good artist is up to you and your children and

grandchildren. I am not pretentious, and some of these self-styled arbiters of taste and art can't stand

that. Dostoyevsky wrote fast and furiously to cover his gambling debts before his book-ie broke all his

bones. Dickens, Dumas, Shakespeare, Twain, and many other "commercial hacks" of their day wound up

being recognized as the great artists they were because they still communicate to us today. The critics of

his day vilified Dickens as a weaver of tripe, a teller of episodic serials designed to sell handkerchiefs. He

did, after all, write a chapter a week like clockwork and send it up to Fleet Street to be published. Even

the length of the work was set by the popular reception to earlier chapters. They saved their praise for

true artistes like Edward Bulwer-Lytton (you know, the fellow who actu-ally started a novel "It was a

dark and stormy night" and who once set Pontius Pilate in a novel fifty years after he was governor of

Judea), after whom annual contests in bad writing are named.

My own role models have been writers like Evan Hunter and Louis L'Amour who have been

producing three books a year for decades, some of them really fine works of art. Within the SF/fantasy

field, there's Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and many others.

The fact is, most of the selections of the Book-of-the Month Club since I started writing novels are

out of print and unobtainable now, probably permanently. All my books are in print and all are still selling.

No artist can ask for more than that. And, with the publication of this volume, all my short orphans will be

gathered together as well for new eyes to see.

Cliff Simak once said that for years he was going to write the Great American Novel; he started it

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