REFLECTIONS
Robert Silverberg | 1560 words
REREADING PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
There had been rumblings all through the spring of 1952 that Startling Stories was going to publish something special that summer, a truly startling story indeed, a taboo-smashing novella by a brilliant newcomer named Philip José Farmer. Startling Stories had emerged in the previous few years as one of the leading SF publications, having transformed itself from the juvenile action-adventure magazine of the wartime years into a serious contender for the top rank. Its special feature was a policy of running a lengthy lead novella—thirty-five thousand to sixty thousand words—complete in each monthly issue. I was a teenage fan at the time, yearning for a career as a science fiction writer; I read all the magazines, I studied the news of the field intently, I kept alert for all the latest trends. Oh, yes, the advance word about this man Farmer and his game-changing novella caught my attention. It certainly did.
The first hint of something special ahead came in the April 1952 issue, when Startling's editor Samuel Mines called for greater sexual frankness in science fiction. Not for "exploitation," Mines pointed out. He would never ask a writer to "put some sex" into a story. But "if his story deals with people of different sexes, and they get themselves into a spot where a certain amount of sex interest is likely to spark between them, we see no reason why that should not be admitted.... There's the beginning of a policy for our science fiction. Let's print stories about people as real as our authors can make them. Let's deal honestly with their problems, their characters, and motives—and be limited only by good taste."
Modern readers, accustomed to graphic sex scenes and four-letter words in fiction, can have no idea how radical this statement of policy was in 1952. Federal laws prohibited the distribution of such strongly erotic works as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the novels of Henry Miller, and a brief upsurge of "spicy" pulp magazines in the 1930s had led to a program of official suppression that left all American magazines that published fiction as clean as Peter Rabbit. What, then, was Sam Mines leading up to here?
The June 1952 Startling gave us the answer: "We have just bought a story which came in cold—unheralded, unsung, unagented. It is called The Lovers, by a name new to science fiction, Philip José Farmer, but it is a story, we think, which begins the career of a fine new talent. It is fresh, vital, shocking, etched with acid. Your reaction to it is apt to be violent, one way or another."
I couldn't wait. And didn't. When the August 1952 issue of Sta r tling that featured "The Lovers" appeared, I began reading it at once. And read on and on, awed, overwhelmed, even, by the vigor of its prose, the ingenuity and inventiveness of its concepts, the headlong energy of Farmer's storytelling, and—yes—the unabashed frankness of the erotic content.
And now, after sixty years, I've reread Farmer's pathbreaking story—the original magazine novella, not the novel that he made out of it long afterward. I was afraid it wouldn't stand up to my youthful memories of it. But it did. It certainly did. It's not subtly or smoothly written, something I may not have been capable of noticing in 1952. But why should it have been? Farmer was a novice then, a brilliant novice but a novice nevertheless. And throughout his long, distinguished career he never hesitated to push his way headlong through a scene that he needed in order to establish a plot point or a chunk of world-building background, even if it brought forth some fairly awkward prose. So the novella is a bit awkward. It's also quite astonishing. This time around I found it exceedingly hard to believe that it was a beginner's work.
Farmer drops us down in a strangely altered future universe where Israel and a Bantu-Malay federation seem to be the major powers on Earth. Everybody else seems subject to a fiercely puritanical new religious cult that is pushing humanity out into the stars to conquer and convert the natives of all inhabited worlds, of which there are a multitude. A little of this background material he tells us straightforwardly, in expository chunks, but he leaves most of it for us to pick up as best we can as we go along. It's a story marked by remarkable intellectual generosity: the amazing abundance of invented speculative material, held in back-story reserve and gradually released to the reader with unusual skill for a new writer, makes "The Lovers" a rich feast for readers who admire the workings of a cunning extrapolative mind.
To find out why so much of the back-story is kept from the reader, I dug out a 1953 essay Farmer wrote for a little magazine called Fantastic Worlds and discovered that the original manuscript had been much longer—too long for Galaxy, the leading magazine of the day (and the top-paying one), which Farmer hoped would publish it. "So I cut hell out of it," he wrote. About a third of the story ended up on the cutting-room floor. And so what remained of it is unusually sophisticated in technique, a dazzling demonstration of Robert A. Heinlein's path-breaking practice of letting background information in a story be revealed by action rather than by exposition. It might not have seemed so sophisticated had Farmer not felt impelled to slice his novella down to fit a magazine's arbitrary thirty thousand-word space limit.
But Galaxy, though it prided itself on its indifference to taboos, rejected the story anyway. Had the sexual content been too strong even for Galaxy's editor Horace Gold? No, as it turned out. Farmer himself explains, in that 1953 article, that Gold had no problem with the sex, but objected to Farmer's use of a dictatorial far-future society that had developed as an outgrowth of Judaism. "Whatever my attitude toward minorities might be," Farmer wrote, "the story itself was dangerous [in Gold's view]. It, in effect, justified discrimination because minorities might, if they ever achieved domination, become dictatorial." Gold had wanted the story rewritten to eliminate the link to Judaism. Farmer found Gold's objection far-fetched, and he balked at another suggestion of Gold that he move the setting of the story to Earth, thus eliminating the carefully delineated alien background Farmer had so lovingly invented. "To carry that out would have meant wiping out Ozagen, Fobo, the tavern beetles, etc.," said Farmer. "I wasn't a world-wrecker. I couldn't do it." He thanked Gold for his input, sent the story in its cut-down form to Sam Mines of Startling, and his career was launched. As for all the background material he had slashed, it wound up in the lengthy sequel to "The Lovers," "Moth and Rust," which Startling published the following year, a much less successful work that has been reprinted now and then under such titles as A Woman a Day and Timestop.
"The Lovers" is a whale of a story, a very special kind of love story, a trailblazer, a pioneering work. That was how I found it in 1952, and how it still seems to me more than sixty years later. It's sexy, yes, and certainly that caught my teenage interest back there in 1952, but it's the way the story is sexy that matters most.
It's not just a tale of "people of different sexes" who had generated "a certain amount of sex interest between them," as Sam Mines put it in his editorial. The "sex interest" involves a human man and an alien woman, a form of miscegenation that was astonishingly daring in an era when state and federal legislation still governed who could go to bed with whom. And Farmer's description of the sex act is something that never before had been seen in the pages of a science fiction magazine. "She insisted on keeping her eyes open, even during the climax," we are told. Climax? Very clinical talk indeed; such sex as there had been in the spiciest of the old pulps had been nothing more than an embrace and a line of asterisks. The boldest of the SF writers of the 1950s—Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon—had approached Farmer's degree of sexual frankness, but had never quite reached it at that time.
Farmer had an even bigger surprise in store. She keeps her eyes open in that big moment not merely to provide Farmer's readers with a bit of titillating detail, but because Farmer has worked out a perfect science fiction rationale for keeping her eyes open—and when he comes to his explanation of it, he uses words like "intercourse" and "orgasm" that surely had never been seen in the pages of a science fiction magazine before. I can't possibly communicate the impact that those words had for the
SF readers of 1952. And, just as Mines had promised, the sexual content of the story is in no way exploitative: everything that happens between Farmer's two protagonists had a rationale splendidly grounded in speculative biology, a magnificent science fiction invention. When it ends, it ends tragically, and the tragedy too is not extrinsic to the plot but grows organically out of Farmer's startling SF premise.
Quite a story, yes. It earned Farmer a Hugo in 1953—the year that the first Hugo awards were given out—as Best New Writer, which is certainly what he was, even against the tough competition (Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, and more) that that boom-time year provided. The science fiction field was never the same after "The Lovers." With his very first story Philip José Farmer had launched a revolution.
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NEXT ISSUE
292 words
MARCH ISSUE
Two masterful science fiction writers, Mike Resnick and Ken Liu, combine their formidable talent to bring us the March 2014 lead story. While transitioning to their new life on a space station, an older couple whose past has included some very hard choices find that "The Plantimal" may not make their new decisions any easier.
ALSO IN MARCH
2012 Nebula and World-Fantasy Award nominee Cat Rambo returns to our pages with a brutal tale about a woman whose life is coming undone amid "All the Pretty Little Mermaids"; in Peter Wood's first story for Asimov's, an inventor stops for a moment out of time to watch the first crewed Marslanding on TV and have a "Drink in a Small Town"; Jay O'Connell takes a look at rough justice in "Solomon's Little Sister"; Dominica Phetteplace's malfunctioning "Through Portal" produces terrifying consequences; new Asimov's author Sean Monaghan reveals the desperate measures a brother will take to give his troubled sister "Walking Gear"; another new Asimov's author, Genevieve Williams, sets a commanding pace in her tale of "The Redemption of Kip Banjeree, and the Hugo-and Nebulaaward-winning Asimov's stalwart James Patrick Kelly composes a modern "Declaration."
OUR EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg's Reflections demonstrates why the passion and violence aroused by some of today's teams and sporting events tend to pale when compared to Byzantium's sixth century "Blues and Greens"; James Patrick Kelly's On the Net gives us the "Good (and Bad) News from Outer Space"; plus we'll have Paul DiFilippo's On Books and an array of poetry that you're sure to enjoy! Look for our March issue on sale at newsstands on January 21, 2014. Or subscribe to Asimov's (in paper format or in downloadable varieties) by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com . We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle and Kindle Fire, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebookstore.sony.com's eReader, Zinio.com, and from magzter.com/magazines!
COMING SOON
new stories by Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Swanwick, Matthew Johnson, Sandra McDonald, Ian Creasey, Joe M. McDermott, Sylvain Jouty, William Preston, James Van Pelt, Will McIntosh, and many others!
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ON BOOKS
Peter Heck
By Chris Moriarty | 2997 words
GHOST SPIN
Spectra, $16.00 (tp)
ISBN: 978-0-553-38694
This concluding volume of Moriarty's "Spin" trilogy blends space opera with cyberpunk elements (the other volumes are Spin State and Spin Control ). The trilogy portrays a future where a significant fraction of the population is most accurately described as "cyborgs." One of them is Catherine Li, who in the previous books solved a series of murders— which of course have much wider implications—while teamed with a powerful AI known as Cohen. Actually, "teamed" is too neutral a term—the two are effectively married.
This third book starts with a bang, as Cohen, on a mysterious mission to a gritty industrial world, New Allegheny, blows his own brains out one step ahead of being taken prisoner by the local authorities. But there's a catch—he's leaving behind fragments of his identity that are going to cause more trouble than he himself could have caused had he been left alone. When Li takes off to discover what really happened, the trouble gets worse.
There are complications, of course, many growing out of their previous careers. For one, Li is considered a war criminal in some circles. For another, the stations that make FTL travel possible are starting to break down. Li is forced to risk being "scattershot" to the colony where Cohen died—transformed to data and sent out for anyone to pick up—and, as it happens, several people do so. One copy ends up at New Allegheny, where she gets involved with a policeman investigating a string of murders that appear related to Cohen's death. Another is revived aboard a spaceship that is taken by pirates led by a former naval officer, William Llwelleyn—who, as it turns out, has got a version of Cohen in his head, having acquired him as a navigation AI. And not surprisingly, both of them end up trying to recreate the Cohen they knew from the fragments they find.
With numerous copies of the two main characters in play at once, the plot takes on an unusual degree of complexity, aided by the fact that Moriarty is interested in pushing the shaky boundaries between the computer-assisted human and the emergent AI. To raise the stakes even more, Cohen isn't the only computer intelligence in play here. Llwelleyn is haunted by Ada, the half-mad AI running the naval vessel that he formerly commanded—and that is now hunting him across the spaceways, under the command of his former first officer. But an even bigger AI awaits them all, a massive alien "data-trap" that seems to exist in more than one universe—and that may hold the key to Cohen's ultimate design.
Moriarty is having fun with big ideas— such as Universal Turing Machines and the point at which AIs become "people"— which were among the main pleasures of space opera, even in the days of Doc Smith and his compatriots. The genre is even brainier these days. There are points at which the novel's physics or astronomy seems to be made up out of whole cloth—but nobody, maybe not even the scientists working on it, really understands this stuff. So it's not surprising she resorts to some smoke and mirrors to explain her version of FTL travel; everybody else in the field has to do pretty much the same, given that the smart money still says you can't get anywhere faster than the speed of light. She also shades into mystical territory as she nears the end, pretty much a time-honored response to the deeper waters of quantum physics and cosmology, from Smith to Arthur C. Clarke and beyond.
But she more than compensates with the ability to turn a smart phrase, and a canny perception for human relationships—often weak points in space opera. The entire trilogy is well worth picking up, if you enjoy big-screen adventures with well-drawn characters and mind-stretching ideas.
THE BEST OF CONNIE WILLIS
Award Winning Stories
By Connie Willis
Del Rey, $27 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-345-5406405
During the first Nebula Awards ceremony I attended, someone at my table looked at the list of finalists, which had a Connie Willis story in all three short fiction categories. They said, "It's a good thing she doesn't write novels, or she'd win that one, too." They were just a tad premature; when she got around to publishing novels, she quickly added a few more awards to her trophy shelf.
So the subtitle here is no exaggeration; every one of these stories won a Hugo, a Nebula, or both. And, as readers of Asimov's know, Willis covers the emotional gamut from wildly funny to deeply poignant, all the while keeping an eye on important social issues, particularly those related to gender expectations. An introduction tells about her own discovery of the genre, tipping her hat tothe wonderful writers who brought her into the field—and taught her, by their example, how to write it.
"A Letter from the Clearys" starts in a matter-of-fact way with a girl, Lynn, and her dog Stitch doing errands in town. Details slowly accumulate to give the picture of a world not quite as mundane as the opening scene suggested. The family is doing a sort of subsistence farming, without much luck, and the girl's father is worried about her leaving tracks as she returns from town. Willis deploys more details and the reader slowly comes to see
the pattern they describe—which becomes clearer as Lynn reads the letter, which she's found in the post office, to her family, and even clearer in their reactions to it. The story is as good an example as you could want of Willis's trademark ability to use the trappings of everyday life as we know it to create a far stranger—and in this case, much more chilling—reality.
With "At the Rialto," Willis takes a radical change of direction—a screwball comedy set at a quantum physics conference in Hollywood. The semi-random conversations of the characters—especially the airhead hotel desk clerk, Tiffany—seem to be entangled in the same quantum uncertainties that the scientists are studying. Willis plays cleverly with the trope. Her protagonist—Ruth Baringer, one of the physicists—lapses into physics metaphors to explain mishaps with luggage. She spends much of the story trying to dodge a fellow physicist, David, who wants to see the Hollywood sights instead of the conference events, and who insists that the sights are actually good examples of quantum theory. Logic gets left behind early, and the story wends its way to—what else?—a happy ending.
Those are just two of the choice items on display here. There's "Fire Watch," a time travel story partially set during the London Blitz, which served as the seed for three of Willis's later novels. There's "Death on the Nile," which comes as close to horror as Willis gets—with allusions to Agatha Christie along the way to the final descent into the dark. "All Seated on the Ground" is a Christmas story, with aliens. "Even the Queen" is a story about a future in which some of what are politely called "female problems" have been solved—but not everybody's happy about that.
In addition to the stories, the volume includes afterwords to each of them, mostly explaining the inspiration for the tales. Also, there are three speeches: her Guest of Honor speech from the 2006 Worldcon; her acceptance speech when she was chosen as Grand Master by SFWA, and an alternate version of that speech, which appears here for the first time. All show her trademark wit and her love for the field and the people in it, and in an important way, they show the personal side of Connie Willis. They're worth the price of the book even if you've long since read all the stories. And if you haven't, you've a real treat waiting for you.
Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 Page 18
