The idea of the “It” comes from Georg Groddeck’s The Book of the It and The Unknown Self. On the self-damaging tendency I found some useful speculation in Theodor Reik’s Masochism in Modern Man; but here, as in so many other connections, far and away my greatest debt is to Dr. Edmund Bergler’s jolting analysis of aggression and pseudo-aggression in his The Battle of the Conscience, The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism, and Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex. Starting from Freudian premises, but with enough openness of mind to expand or revise them as new clinical data appeared, Dr. Bergler has, in his many books and technical papers, made an immensely valuable contribution to psychiatry by developing the view that the “basic neurosis” is “psychic masochism,” which he traces to the drives and thwartings of the oral phase; and his analysis sheds much new light on man as an “injustice-collecting” animal. For purposes of this book I have assumed that, by the mid-sixties, analytic thought has pretty much come around to the ideas and emphases worked out by Dr. Bergler. The table entitled “Aggression: True and False” (page 424) is from The Battle of the Conscience, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.
The sketches on pages 294 and 299 were done by Fred Segal, the one on page 292 by Nanno DeGroot; for the expert draftsmanship on page 292 the author himself is responsible. The doodles on pages 291 and 300 are from Tristram Shandy.
Limbo makes it sufficiently clear, I think, that many of the things it satirizes are, in the opinion of its author, to be found in even more obnoxious abundance in Soviet culture than in American; but those who specialize in the fine fabulist’s art of quoting-out-of-context overlook such details. I want, therefore, to make this point:
After writing a book that deals pretty harshly with my own country I found no difficulty whatever in getting it published—exactly as I wrote it. The book is now in circulation, and so am I; nothing worse has come my way than a royalty (not loyalty) check. What would happen to a novelist anywhere behind the Iron Curtain who conceived such a book about his own world and offered it for sale, or was discovered scribbling it simply for his own amusement on the backs of menus? He would, it hardly needs saying, promptly find himself shorter by a career and a head.
Anybody who “paints a picture” of some coming year is kidding—he’s only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then, is a rather bilious rib on 1950—on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.
I am writing about the overtone and undertow of now—in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications. What 1990 will really look like I haven’t the slightest idea. Nobody can train his mind to think effectively, without vertigo, in terms of accelerations and accelerated accelerations—and nobody can foretell Clio’s pratfalls. On the spurious map of the future presented herein, on the far side of the pinpoint of now, I have to inscribe, as did the medieval cartographers over all the the terrifying areas outside their ken: HERE LIVE LIONS. They could, of course, be unicorns, or hippographs, or even giraffes. I don’t even know if there’s going to be a 1990. Neither does ENIAC—I keep telling myself.
Also by Bernard Wolfe:
Really the Blues (with Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow)
The Late Risers, Their Masquerade
In Deep
The Great Prince Died
The Magic of Their Singing
Come On Out, Daddy
Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up
Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer
Logan’s Gone
Lies
Trotsky Dead
About the Author
Bernard Wolfe (1915–1985) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked as a military correspondent for a number of science magazines during the Second World War, and began to write fiction in 1946. He became best known for his 1952 SF novel Limbo.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Bernard Wolfe 1952
Introduction Copyright © Harlan Ellison 2014
Introduction Copyright © David Pringle 1985
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The right of Bernard Wolfe to be identified as the author of this work, and Harlan Ellison and David Pringle to be identified as authors of the introductions, has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2016 by
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This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 21248 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Limbo Page 51
