The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  I once read him an account of a baffling murder, committed ninety years ago. “Oh,” he said, “well, that’s obvious,” and proceeded offhandedly to offer a simple and likely explanation for both the murder and the clues the police were at a loss to explain. He has an engineer’s mind that takes things apart to see how they work and then puts them back together.

  I have known Gene for almost twenty-five years. (I was, I just realized, with a certain amount of alarm, only twenty-two when I first met Gene and Rosemary in Birmingham, England; I am forty-six now.) Knowing Gene Wolfe has made the last twenty-five years better and richer and more interesting than they would have been otherwise.

  Before I knew him, I thought of Gene Wolfe as a ferocious intellect, vast and cool and serious, who created books and stories that were of genre but never limited by it. An explorer, who set out for uncharted territory and brought back maps, and if he said, “Here There Be Dragons,” by God, you knew that was where the dragons were.

  And that is all true, of course. It may be more true than the embodied Wolfe I met twenty-five years ago, and have come to know with enormous pleasure ever since: a man of politeness and kindness and knowledge; a lover of fine conversation, erudite and informative, blessed with a puckish sense of humor and an infectious chuckle.

  I cannot tell you how to meet Gene Wolfe. I can, however, suggest a few ways to read his work. These are useful tips, like suggesting you take a blanket, a flashlight, and some candy when planning to drive a long way in the cold, and should not be taken lightly. I hope they are of some use to you. There are nine of them. Nine is a good number.

  How to read Gene Wolfe:

  1. Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.

  2. Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It’s tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.

  3. Reread. It’s better the second time. It will be even better the third time. And anyway, the books will subtly reshape themselves while you are away from them. Peace really was a gentle Midwestern memoir the first time I read it. It only became a horror novel on the second or the third reading.

  4. There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking grayly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire wolves of old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against grizzlies.

  5. Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It’s a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn’t mind. Gene is throwing the knives.

  6. Make yourself comfortable. Pour a pot of tea. Hang up a DO NOT DISTURB sign. Start at page 1.

  7. There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.

  8. He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night.

  9. Be willing to learn.

  * * *

  This was written for the program book of The World Horror Convention 2002, at which both Gene and I were guests of honor.

  * * *

  Remembering Douglas Adams

  I met Douglas Adams toward the end of 1983. I had been asked to interview him for Penthouse. I was expecting someone sharp and smart and BBCish, someone who would sound like the voice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was met at the door to his Islington flat by a very tall man, with a big smile and a big, slightly crooked, nose, all gawky and coltish, as if, despite his size, he was still growing. He had just returned to the UK from a miserable time in Hollywood, and he was happy to be back. He was kind, he was funny, and he talked. He showed me his things: he was very keen on computers, which barely existed at that point, and on guitars, and on giant inflatable crayons, which he had discovered in America, had shipped to England at enormous expense, before learning that they were, quite cheaply, available in Islington. He was clumsy: he would back into things, or trip over them, or sit down on them very suddenly and break them.

  I learned that Douglas had died the morning after it happened, in May 2001, from the Internet (which had not existed in 1983). I was being interviewed on the phone by a journalist (the journalist was in Hong Kong), and something about Douglas Adams’s dying went across the computer screen. I snorted, unimpressed by such nonsense (only a couple of days before, Lou Reed had gone onto Saturday Night Live to put to rest a round of Internet rumors about his death). Then I clicked on the link. I found myself staring at a BBC News screen, and saw that Douglas was, quite definitely, dead.

  “Are you all right?” said the journalist in Hong Kong.

  “Douglas Adams is dead,” I said, stunned.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “It’s been on the news here all day. Did you know him?”

  “Yes,” I said. We carried on with the interview, and I don’t know what else was said. The journalist got back in touch several weeks later to say that there wasn’t anything coherent or at least usable on the tape after I learned that Douglas died, and would I mind doing the interview again?

  Douglas was an incredibly kind man, phenomenally articulate and amazingly helpful. In 1986 I found myself knocking around his life an awful lot while I was working on Don’t Panic. I’d sit in corners of his office going through old filing cabinets, pulling out draft after draft of Hitchhiker’s in its various incarnations, long-forgotten comedy sketches, Doctor Who scripts, press clippings. He was always willing to answer questions and to explain. He put me in touch with dozens of people I needed to find and interview, people like Geoffrey Perkins and John Lloyd. He liked the finished book, or he said he did, and that helped too.

  (A memory from that period: sitting in Douglas’s office, drinking tea, and waiting for him to get off the phone, so I could interview him some more. He was enjoying the phone conversation, about a project he was doing for the Comic Relief book. When he got off he apologized, and then explained that he had to take that call because it was John Cleese, in a way that made it clear that this was a delighted name dropping: John Cleese had just phoned him, and they’d talked professionally like grown-ups. Douglas must have known Cleese for nine years at that point, but still, his day had been made, and he wanted me to know. Douglas always had heroes.)

  Douglas was unique. Which is true of all of us, of course, but it’s also true that people come in types and patterns, and there was only one Douglas Adams. No one else I’ve ever encountered could elevate Not Writing to an art form. No one else has seemed capable of being so cheerfully profoundly miserable. No one else has had that easy smile and crooked nose, nor the faint aura of embarrassment that seemed like a protective force field.

  After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas. I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist, not really, despite having been an internationally bestselling novelist who had written several books which are, a quarter of a century later, becoming seen as classics. Writing novels was a profession he had backed into, or stumbled over, or sat down on very suddenly and broken.

  I think that perhaps what Douglas was was probably something we don’t even have a word for yet. A Futurologist, or an Explainer, or something. That one day they’ll realize that the most important job out there is for someone who can explain the world to itself in ways that the world won’t forget; who can dramatize the plight of endangered species as easily (or at least, as astonishingly well, for nothing Douglas did was ever exactly easy) as he can explain to an analog race what it means to find yourself going digital. Someone whose dreams and ideas, practical or impractical, are always the size of a planet, and who is going to keep going forward, and t
aking the rest of us with him.

  This is a book filled with facts about someone who dealt in dreams.

  * * *

  My Foreword to Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, by M. J. Simpson, 2005.

  * * *

  Harlan Ellison: The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

  I’ve been reading Harlan Ellison since I was a small boy. I have known him as long, although by no means as well, as his wife, Susan—we met in Glasgow in 1985 at the same convention at which he first met and wooed his better half.

  I interviewed him then for Space Voyager, a magazine for which I had written for the previous two years, and which had, until that point, appeared perfectly healthy. The issue of the magazine that was to contain my interview with Harlan went to press . . . and the publishers pulled the plug on it, with the magazine half-printed, and fired the editor. I took the interview to an editor at another magazine. He paid me for it . . . and was fired the following day.

  I decided at that point that it was unhealthy to write about Harlan, and retired the interview to a filing cabinet, in which it will sit until the end of the world. I cannot be responsible for the firing of any more editors, the closing of any more magazines.

  There is no one in the world in any way like Harlan. This has been observed before, by wiser and abler people than me. This is true, and it is quite beside the point.

  It has, from time to time, occurred to me that Harlan Ellison is engaged on a Gutzon Borglum–sized work of performance art—something huge and enduring. It’s called Harlan Ellison: a corpus of anecdotes and tales and adversaries and performances and friends and articles and opinions and rumors and explosions and treasures and echoes and downright lies. People talk about Harlan Ellison, and they write about Harlan, and some of them would burn him at the stake if they could do it without getting into too much trouble and some of them would probably worship at his feet if it weren’t for the fact he’d say something that would make them feel very small and very stupid. People tell stories in Harlan’s wake, and some of them are true and some of them aren’t, and some of them are to his credit and some of them aren’t . . .

  And that is also quite beside the point.

  When I was ten I had a lisp, and was sent to an elocution teacher called Miss Webster, who, for the next six years, taught me a great deal about drama and public speaking, and, incidentally, got rid of the lisp somewhere in year one. She must have had a first name, but I’ve forgotten it now. She was magnificent—a stumpy, white-haired old theatrical lesbian (or so her pupils assumed) who smoked black cigarillos and was surrounded at all times by a legion of amiable but rather stupid Scottie dogs. She had a huge bosom, which she would rest on the table while she watched me recite the tongue twisters and dramatic pieces I had been assigned. Miss Webster died about fifteen years ago, or so I was told by another ex-pupil of hers I met at a party some years back.

  She is one of the very small number of people who have told me things for my own good that I’ve paid attention to. (There is, needless to say, a very large number of people—including, now I come to think of it, Harlan—who’ve told me perfectly sensible things for my own good that I’ve, for one reason or another, ignored completely.)

  Anyway: I got to be fourteen years old, and, one day, after a particularly imaginative interpretation of a Caliban speech, Miss Webster leaned back in her chair, lit a cigarillo with a flourish, and said, “Neil, dear. I think there’s something you ought to know. Listen: to be eccentric, you must first know your circle.”

  And I—for once—heard, and listened, and understood. You can fuck around with the rules as much as you want to—after you know what the rules are. You can be Picasso after you know how to paint. Do it your way, but know how to do it their way first.

  I’ve had a personal relationship with Harlan Ellison for much longer than I’ve known him. Which is the scariest thing about being a writer, because you make up stories and write stuff down and that’s what you do. But people read it and it affects them or it whiles away your train journey, whatever, and they wind up moved or changed or comforted by the author, whatever the strange process is, the one-way communication from the stuff they read. And it’s not why the stories were written. But it is true and it happens.

  I was eleven when my father gave me two of the Carr-Wollheim Best SF anthologies and I read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and discovered Harlan. Over the next few years I bought everything of his I could find. I still have most of those books.

  When I was twenty-one I had the worst day of my life. (Up to then, anyway. There have been two pretty bad days since. But this was worse than them.) And there was nothing in the airport to read but Shatterday, which I bought. I got onto the plane, and read it crossing the Atlantic. (How bad a day was it? It was so bad I was slightly disappointed when the plane touched down gently at Heathrow without bursting into flames. That’s how bad it was.)

  And on the plane I read Shatterday, which is a collection of mostly kick-ass stories—and introductions to stories—about the relationship between writers and stories. Harlan told me about wasting time (in “Count the Clock That Tells the Time”), and I thought, fuck it, I could be a writer. And he told me that anything more than twelve minutes of personal pain was self-indulgence, which did more to jerk me out of the state of complete numbness I was in than anything else could have done. And when I got home I took all the pain and the fear and the grief, and all the conviction that maybe I was a writer, damn it, and I began to write. And I haven’t stopped yet.

  Shatterday, more or less, made me what I am today. Your fault, Ellison. And again, quite beside the point.

  So: The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, to which I bid you welcome.

  My copy’s the 1979 Pan (UK) edition: On the cover of this paperback, Blood’s a purple thing that looks like a housecat; Vic, behind him, is apparently a boy in his forties, and is, I think, hopping about on one leg. Still, most of Harlan’s British covers had spaceships on them, so I mustn’t grumble. And the back cover calls Harlan “the chief prophet of the New Wave in science fiction,” attributing the opinion to the New Yorker.

  Definition time, primarily for those of you born after 1970. The New Wave: a term almost as unproductive as cyberpunk would be fifteen years later on, used to describe a motley bunch of writers working in the latter half of the sixties, loosely orbiting but not exclusively confined to New Worlds magazine in the Moorcock era and the original Dangerous Visions anthology, edited by the author of this collection. (If you want more information than that, go and find a copy of the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and check out the New Wave entry.)

  Harlan may well have been a “prophet of the New Wave,” but his foremost prophecy seems to have consisted of pointing out, in the introduction to this volume, that there was no such thing, just a bunch of writers, some of whom were pushing the edge of the envelope.

  I never noticed the New Wave as anything particularly distinct or separate, when it was happening. It was Stuff to Read. Good stuff to read, even if it sometimes skirted the edge of incomprehensibility. I read it as I read all adult fiction, as a window into a world I didn’t entirely understand: found Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron a lot of fun, Moorcock’s A Cure for Cancer addictive and curious. Ballard was distant and strange and made me think of stories told over the tannoy in far-off airports. Delany showed me that words could be beautiful, Zelazny made myths. And if they were the “New Wave” I liked it. But I liked most things back then. (“Yeah, that’s your trouble, Gaiman,” said Harlan, when I chided him recently for suggesting that someone I like should be sprinkled with sacred meal and then sacrificed. “You like everyone.” It’s true, mostly.)

  I’ve digressed a little.

  Fiction is a thing of its time, and as times change so does our take on the fiction. Consider the Reagan section of “Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.”; consider Reagan’s final smile “like a man who has regained that innocence o
f childhood or nature that he had somehow lost.” Scary, in a way Harlan never intended, writing about the pompadoured governor of California. Yet in another few years Reagan and his smile will have begun to lose meaning. He’ll lose significance, become a name in the past for the readers, an odd historical name (I’m just old enough to know why the Spiro Agnew gag was funny), just as the who and the what and the why of the SF New Wave fade into the black. In a couple of his books James Branch Cabell footnoted the famous of his time, something that was viewed as (and was perhaps partly) an ironic comment—after all, who, today, would bother with an explanatory footnote of John Grisham* or John Major† or Howard Stern*? But Cabell’s ironic footnotes are now useful information. Time passes. We forget. The bestselling novel in 1925 was (I am informed by Steve Brust) Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs. Huh? And who? Still, “Santa Claus . . .” works, and will keep working as long as there are B-movie spy plots to deconstruct; and as long as there is injustice.

  It’s true of the rest of the tales herein. They remain relevant; the only thing in the anthology that feels dated is the introduction, as Harlan grooves to Jimi Hendrix and points to Piers Anthony as an underground writer. But hell, no one reads introductions anyway. (Admit it. You’re not reading this, are you?)

  And along with Spiro Agnew and A. Hamilton Gibbs and Howard Stern, the anecdotes and tales and the Legend in His Own Lifetime stuff about Harlan (most of which is, more or less, true-ish) and all the Gutzon Borglum stuff (and I ought to have given Gutzon, who carved presidential faces into Mount Rushmore, his own footnote), will also be forgotten.

  But the stories last. The stories remain.

  “To be eccentric,” says Miss Webster, dead for fifteen years, in the back of my head, her voice dry, her elocution perfect, “you must first know your circle.” Know the rules before you break them. Learn how to draw, then break the rules of drawing, learn to craft a story and show people things they’ve seen before in ways they’ve never seen.