Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  16

  As well as writing and editing, I used to give lectures in the United States. I’d get five hundred dollars for a lecture. I had an agent, and I went from college to college—he’d line up three or four or five who were interested, and they’d put a lecture on and charge a dollar a head, and I’d get five hundred. It was the same lecture, on science fiction—I honed it, gave it a fine polish. It was full of gags and lightweight stuff and it almost killed me. It’s very hard to get up in front of five to eight hundred people and give them a talk with jokes and everything else. The lectures were given at state colleges in the Midwest, and I used to drive from college to college, and I’d do four or five of these things. I’d go to one of the chain motels, which are all the same—when you got up in the night you knew where to go to pee. I’d have a bottle of gin, and a bottle of tomato juice, and I wasn’t eating at all or sleeping at all. I’d have a hamburger or something and I’d try to sleep and then go on to the next one. I’d come off it really crashed, but five hundred dollars times five was more than you got for writing a goddamn book! I once gave a talk on international income tax to the American Society of Women Accountants. I was an authority! The chairman was my cousin, Debbie. They were all ex-army or ex-navy, working for H&R Block, which is a mass production company there, and people were retiring to Mexico. I gave them plenty of tips on how to do it, how not to do it.

  I also began teaching, because I needed money. Greg Bear put me in touch with a guy called William Rupp, a young teacher. He wanted to run a course for high school kids with my help. We planned the course, but it fell through. But I had the whole course outlined, so I raised it up one notch to college level. There was one guy there who was taking it for graduate credit. I was doing a graduate credit course, and I’d never been to college at all! That tells you a lot about college education in the United States.

  The students in my class were all high school teachers, so they all had a higher degree of some kind. And if you’re going to have a course, you have to have a definition of it. To get over that one, I got them to come up with their own definitions. I gave them a book to read every week and they complained—a book a week? I said, “Yes, this is not philosophy, this is science fiction. Kids read it because they want to read it.” So in the very first week I gave them The Time Machine—I figured anyone can read that, it’s fifty thousand words. That was the first one, to drag them into reading it, and the second one was Galactic Patrol by “Doc” Smith. I figured that was what they really needed, a good dose of what science fiction is! The guys read it all the way through, and the women screamed and hated it and didn’t read it. We came to the conclusion, after a lot of discussion, that the readers of “Doc” Smith were all prepubescent little boys, and not only that, but the Gray Lensman was also a prepubescent little boy—you take down his zipper and it’s smooth, there’s nothing underneath it at all! E. E. Smith had a PhD—he worked as a chemist in a donut factory. He was a fat guy with big daughters—I’d met them at conventions in the Midwest—he was a nice guy too.

  I had authors come in to give talks to my class—I grabbed anyone who came through town. Philip José Farmer, James Gunn, Willis McNelly, and Fritz Leiber used to stay with me when he was down there. These were old friends coming through town who needed a bed for the night, and I made sure I got a lecture out of them. In those days they were all half bust—instead of going to a motel, you’d grab a friend’s house, and you’d get free drinks that way as well! Greg Bear monitored the whole class. He kept saying he would pay; he never paid! I nudge him every once in a while, Greg do you remember…? It wasn’t that much—twenty or thirty bucks, I don’t remember. I made him work for his money. One of the books in there was Odd John by Olaf Stapledon, and Greg is a great Stapledon fan, so I had him give a lecture on Stapledon.

  I couldn’t offer the course for college credit until I had one guy, an engineer, who wanted to be a writer. He thought you had to go to college and get a degree to become a writer. Every week he’d come to class and he had a short story. It wasn’t too bad. He gave me the short story to read, and I’d take it home and read it, and return it the next week corrected and he’d take it away and work on it, and after about five weeks he had the final copy. I said, “Why don’t you send this to Damon Knight? It’s the kind of thing he likes. I wouldn’t buy it myself, I don’t buy that kind of story.” Damon bought the story. And the guy almost quit the class! He said, “I came here to learn to write, and now I’m a writer!” I said don’t go, don’t go. I made him stick around to get college credit. That’s how we got a credit course.

  The final examination was a party at my house and anyone who attended—and survived—passed with 100 percent. I think I did the course twice at least, maybe even three times. It’s a lot of trouble getting a course together, but it’s easier to repeat it.

  * * *

  There was a circle of young writers—neo-science fiction writers—learning in the “Harrison school of writing.” There were two or three who had sold stories. There was a magazine being published out of an address where they were all living, in the Bay Area. There was one guy, Bruce McAllister—I put one of his stories in the Year’s Best, and it was his first story. He lived in the Bay Area, and he sent me a letter saying he wanted to come round and see me. So I said sure, come on round, and he came with his mother and his father, who was an admiral. The next time he came without his parents. He ended up doing editing for me, on the Year’s Best. He asked me how to do it. I simply said, “You read the stories as they come out in the magazine and you read the first ten words, and if you say ‘This is shit,’ then you turn it down and move on. We’re looking for the best. You’ll find out when you read these magazines that the editors have a very different idea of what makes a good story than I have, or Brian.” Bruce had never read all of the magazines before, but he soon realized that so much of it was shit.… He was my first reader, and I really needed him.

  Todd’s teacher, Carol Pugner, wanted to do a science fiction course, so I worked with her on it and we wrote A Science Fiction Reader, a book for high school teachers to teach science fiction. Carol brought this girl, Joan, around to a party of ours. At the same party was Vernor Vinge, and she met him there. They got to know each other and eventually got married. My wife Joan was always trying to matchmake and was normally unsuccessful. This match had limited success as it didn’t last forever—she went to New York and married an editor.

  There is one anecdote that is almost too awful to print—a personal tragedy. There was a group of young science fiction writers there. One of them was a writer called Robert Taylor, who was a pretty good writer—this was during the Vietnam War when the draft was on—one day he said his problems were solved: he was volunteering. I said: “You’re volunteering?”

  He said: “I want to be a teacher and they’ve promised to send me to school and then I can teach in the military school.”

  “No,” I said, “they’re lying to you. It’s the military: didn’t you read Bill, the Galactic Hero?” I couldn’t talk him out of it. I got a couple of letters back from him—he was in a bad emotional state. They lied to him and put him on the front line. He had a nervous breakdown, was cashiered out of the army, and it destroyed his life completely. That was one time when I couldn’t say “I told you so.” I may have exaggerated a little bit here and there, but I didn’t lie about the military. It happened exactly like I said it would, but I hate being that kind of prophet.

  I got a card recently with messages from fans, and one of them said “Best wishes, Harry, your book kept me out of the army.” He wasn’t the first to say that. I was at a convention and a fan said to me, “I had my papers for enlisting in the army, and that night I read Bill, the Galactic Hero and I tore them up.” I said, “I saved your life, kid!” So it was a power for good in the world. I was at one convention and a combat marine came up to me, bad eye and an ugly-looking face, and he said, “Are you Harry Harrison?” I said yes. He said, “Did you write B
ill, the Galactic Hero?” I said yes, looking for the door to make my escape. He said, “That’s the only book that tells the truth about the military.” That from a career military man!

  Another of the things I did back then was to edit Amazing—I was editor of the magazine that started it all! I did it for the money. The publisher who owned it then, Sol Cohen, didn’t have any great respect for science fiction. I knew him from my days in comics. He wouldn’t believe I was an artist, so he sat me down in a room and gave me a penciled page and said, ink it. He should have stayed in comics. He was one of the more desperate publishers. When the bastard bought the rights to the magazine Amazing—the oldest SF magazine in the world—he got bound copies of the whole magazine, and he would tear stories out to put in for reprints. Fantastic Science Fiction, Great Science Fiction, and Thrilling Science Fiction were all reprint magazines from stories torn out of Amazing.

  As an editor I was the first to buy a story from James Tiptree, Jr. “Fault” appeared in the August 1968 issue of Fantastic, which I was editing at the time. John Campbell also bought a story from her and his monthly publication schedule meant he was able to publish it first. But she was my discovery! I corresponded with her, not knowing that “James” was a she. I had her PO box number and nothing more. We corresponded for some years and I even got her an agent. Her secret was finally revealed when some fan noticed that the mother of Alice Sheldon had died, and that her address was the same address as this science fiction writer’s mother.

  When I got out of it, I’d been corresponding with Barry Malzberg, and Barry wanted to edit a magazine, so I said, “Why don’t you edit Amazing while I’m in Europe?” I put him in touch with the publisher, Sol Cohen, and Sol contrived behind my back to throw me out completely and hire Barry.

  The only thing I didn’t do for money back then was write porn. I didn’t join the Silverbergs and Malzbergs and all the others who wrote porn back then. I was asked, but I can’t write fast enough. They would take two or three days for a book. They were only about forty thousand words. I forget the guy’s name—he wanted me to go to work for him, and I was dying for money. At the time my mother was in a nursing home that was eating up money faster than I could earn it. This guy told me that most of his porn was written for him by middle-aged women. They would come down to the office and turn their work in. He said that the worst thing was that none of them could write—and he wanted to hire me to go through the first few pages of each manuscript and clear it up a bit, put in a few jokes or something and make it readable. It was a good offer. I told Joan about it when I went home, and I said: “Isn’t that interesting?” And she said: “No!” I tried to argue for a bit. She said: “NO!” I couldn’t get her to say anything except no. A couple of years later the guy who’d called me got arrested, and he didn’t go down but his editor went down for a couple of years, for sending porn in the mail. Joan was right with that one word. I later heard from the children that they spent quite a lot of time teetering on ladders trying to reach the sample porn books that he sent me to read.

  When I had moved over to the West Coast, I met an old friend who had been a publisher in Chicago. He was still interested in science fiction, and he took me out to lunch, and asked me about his old friends. Almost half the guys he asked about had been working for him doing porn, allegedly including Bob Silverberg. I didn’t write porn, but I did write about sex in science fiction. Many years later after we had left California and moved to Ireland, a mad English publisher called Phil Dunn was originating books, and he knew I had been an artist and he said: “There is sex in science fiction illustration, but it’s always subliminal in the pulp magazines.” I thought about it and said: “Yeah, you’re right.” He said: “Why don’t you do a book about it, sex in science fiction illustration, and call it Great Balls of Fire!” How can you refuse an offer like that? It was a lot of fun to write and to research, digging out things like old Krafft-Ebing.

  Previously I’d done a lot of research at the British Museum but I discovered that every publisher has to send a copy of every book published to each of several “deposit” libraries—the British Library, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and, happily for me, Trinity University library in Dublin. It was great because there was hardly anyone doing any research there. I went down there to look for a book I had read many years ago that I knew I had to get hold of, called Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, this horrible old mad Swiss who did research into symbolism, sexual depravation, and laying off sexual drives through mad fetishism. There was one mad glove fetishist who so loved gloves that he wore this great overcoat and when he opened it up he was nude underneath and he had about eighty pairs of leather gloves in there! He actually walked down the street with gloves on him. And if you ever wondered where the rubber fetish comes from … Krafft-Ebing has got all those things in there.

  I needed to get hold of a copy, and I went to the shelves in Trinity for whatever the Dewey number is for sex books, and there was a big gap there! I thought they must be changing the shelves, reordering them or something. I went up to the guy at the desk and said: “I’m looking for a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis but it’s not on the shelves, do you have it back in the stacks?” He said: “No, no, it’s here.” He reached under the counter and retrieved the book. I said: “Who gets to look at them? Undergraduates can’t? You have to have gray hair?” He said: “I can’t talk to you about that!”

  It’s great stuff. If you start looking at science fiction illustration, some of it’s pretty obvious—there was a cover of Galaxy of a great big statue carved on a planet, with a guy in a spacesuit looking up at it, and the statue is of a woman sitting in a chair holding a great big rocket ship in her lap: it doesn’t take Krafft-Ebing to figure that one out! And I found sadomasochistic torture and all kinds of things in those SF pulp illustrations. But the stories themselves were pure as driven snow.

  Science fiction conventions were always a big part of my life and also the family’s. The memories flood in. I have been invited to—or have attended—conventions in more than thirty countries: at a very rough estimate. At these cons I have talked with new writers, old friends, local SF writers. A movable feast indeed!

  When talking about cons, with endless high points and very few low ones, the name Rio de Janeiro instantly springs to mind. This one had everything going for it. It was a science fiction film festival that had been tacked onto a world-renowned film festival. In addition to watching the films in Rio, we were going to have the pleasure of meeting SF writers who had been invited from all over the globe. Our plane fare was to be paid—first class!—which was a type of transportation unknown to most of us. On top of that we would have vouchers for our meals in a city that is filled with wonderful restaurants. It was almost too good to be true.

  Which turned out to be correct—it wasn’t quite true. The whole thing was a con arranged by two mad SF fans in Rio, one of them Austrian, Fred Madersbacher, the other Brazilian, José Sanz. They had talked the large film convention into tacking on the science fiction film festival. They thought they would just rent a few films, then invite a few guests. It wouldn’t cost very much. Then, unbeknown to the main festival, these two organizers had gone overboard and invited every writer of note in science fiction. How could we not accept? We did, we did!

  However, after the first rush of correspondence, not much seemed to be happening. Letters went unanswered, desperate phone calls were not returned. Then at the very last moment, just days before the festival, we all received cables to pick up our tickets at the flight desk in the New York terminal. The show was on! Only much later, when the convention was in full swing, did I discover what had happened. This was over a few drinks with Fred Madersbacher. It appears that he and his coconspirator had first invited all of the authors—then had presented their bills for plane tickets to the horrified festival officials. It quickly became a matter of international importance. The festival would lose face and respectability if it didn’t pay the invitees. We were not dead and we
were expected. Latin honor quavered and gave in. The con was on!

  From the very beginning the entire affair had a surreal air about it. I, and other American writers, met at the desk of Aerolineas Argentinas at Kennedy Airport in New York. There were enough of us to fill first class, a very good start! Until we saw our transport, the world’s oldest 707—so bedraggled and oil stained that it wasn’t allowed next to the terminal and we had to be bussed out to it. As we filed through its ancient portal, smiling stewards served large drinks and things began to improve. However once we took off the pilot greeted us and informed us happily that our next stop would be Rio. Rio? An instant vision of the American hemisphere filled my mind. We would be heading southeast over open ocean for thousands of miles. Then the first land we would see would be the jungles of Brazil.… If we didn’t plunge into the ocean, the Mato Grasso was slimily waiting. Would our ancient aircraft be up to this? We discussed this in gloomy voices and ordered more drink.

  Dinner cheered us a bit; lovely steaks, prime Argentinean beef grilled over a charcoal grill in the nearby galley. At forty thousand feet! I reached for another drink. It was an adventure. One I was beginning to feel that I just as well could have lived without. Every seat in the plane was taken. That was fine for first class—but what about tourist class? Don’t ask. We drank more, seeking oblivion, knowing that we would wake up dead or in Rio.

  We groaned awake in the first light of a new day, still alive; bladders bursting. There was a long line for the single toilet. Alfie Bester seemed to be in extremis and I suggested there might be more toilets in the back of the plane. He opened the curtains and stood, paralyzed. Every seat contained a crunched passenger who was eating from a plastic container, forks going up and down—since there was no space for sideways movement of the arms. Glassy-eyed, Alfie drew the curtains shut and said hollowly, “They’re feeding the animals.…”