Alfie Bester was a good friend. When I came in from overseas I’d go and stay with Alfie for the weekend and drink, of course. He liked to drink and I don’t think he knew how much he drank. He had gallon jugs of vodka planted around the house, with the lids off. As he was walking around the house he’d pick up a jug, balance it in the crook of his elbow, and glug, glug, glug. Then he’d put it down and walk around and do it again with another one. How could he know how much he was drinking? The answer was a lot.
I also knew him through magic. He was the writer, editor, and publisher of a magic magazine for amateur magicians. He wrote the whole thing himself, and through him I met Orson Welles, who was another amateur magician.
He wrote science fiction for fun, a little bit here and there. He made his money writing comics and radio, and later as an editor of Holiday magazine. He wrote some impressive stories, including one great one for Astounding called “Adam and No Eve.” He never wrote very much SF, but it was all very good.
But back to Rio, a city of superlatives and designed for a science fiction convention.
We were expected and, happily, coaches were waiting, each destined for a different hotel. Normally, an opportunity for fannish confusion—but not in Rio. Toothsome, uniformed ladies had lists to see that we boarded the correct transport. Room keys were waiting at our hotels, along with program guides and meal vouchers for healthy sums, as we discovered when we looked at the prices on the menu. Not only that—the vouchers were good in the bar. Possibly a mistake; we hoped not. The healthy size of the vouchers worked out making the prices acceptable.
There were receptions, panels, and press conferences, which we loyally attended. There were lots of films, which we could avoid. When they were golden oldies, though, there were a few of us who positively embraced the golden age of old. At night Copacabana was a busy road of hookers and pimps, particularly the shore road, Avenida Atlantica. All the clubs were open for business from passing trade. I assume that business slowed by dawn, though I wasn’t hanging around to find out. But it was midmorning that proved a winner. The knocking shops became beer bars, open to all. Brian Aldiss, Jimmy Ballard, and I sipped our beers and watched the passing parade. First to pass was Forry Ackerman, fan deluxe. I hailed him.
“Where are you going, Forry?”
“To see a film. Forbidden Planet.”
“Haven’t you seen it before?”
“This is my thirty-fifth time.”
“Forry, I want you to meet some friends of mine you may have heard of. Forry, this is Brian Aldiss and Jimmy Ballard.”
“I’ve read every word these guys have written. Would love to talk but…”
“We know—art before pleasure.”
Before Jim could finish scribbling a note for an article he had been commissioned to do, a large form passed on the pavement. “Hey, Van, a moment please. A. E. van Vogt, two friends of mine, Brian Aldiss and James Ballard.”
“I’ve always wanted to meet Mr. Ballard.”
“The same from me. I’ve been told that at your Dianetics Institute you can cure various kinds of cancer.…”
I will give you this much for the English—both Brian and Jimmy were able to keep straight faces and nod and say, “Oh, I say, is that true? That’s very interesting.…” Van talked for about half an hour telling us how Dianetics was curing cancer, and neither of them broke up pissing themselves as they should have.
“Gentlemen—I must interrupt for an old friend, Bob Heinlein.…”
I did quietly ask Heinlein if he’d read Bill, the Galactic Hero. He said, “No, I never read other authors’ novels.” But after that he never talked to me again, so maybe someone read it to him.
Harlan Ellison—no, he was too quick for us. But Poul Anderson … Bob Sheckley … Damon Knight … Phil Farmer … It was that kind of a day and a place.
That afternoon was free and we all made for the golden sands of Copacabana, which was simplicity itself. We crossed the road in front of the hotel and spread out in the sun. The waves rolled in, large and thunderous, running far up the beach. They had rolled free the thousands of miles from Africa and had a wicked look about them. A few of the more foolhardy risked their pink flesh to the ocean’s mercy. Brian Aldiss and I, both strong swimmers, found ourselves tumbled and half drowned, and staggered back to the beach and the security of the golden sands. Poul Anderson had found a shrinking sort of half-sized surfboard. We warned him that this was a wicked ocean—but his Viking genes took over and he plunged in.
“He’ll drown,” Brian gloomily predicted.
I looked at our fellow authors and saw salvation. Bob Sheckley was there, a strong body surfer and Poul’s salvation. But he wasn’t wearing his glasses and couldn’t see if Poul was in trouble. The solution? We issued instructions: Phil Farmer, with eye of hawk, would alert Bob and send him to the rescue. Plans made and well in hand, Brian and I could get out of the sun and have a chope or two, the lovely local beer.
The sunburned swimmers trickled back to the bar, including an unhappy Poul. “I was all right,” he said. “The lifeguard didn’t have to come get me.” His hand belied his words, shaking so hard he could barely lift his beer. Lifeguard? Drowning? What of our best-laid plan? Alas, it had gone awry—Phil, with his eye of hawk, had been watching the wrong swimmer!
* * *
The air of cultivated madness passed right through every function that we attended. The American reception was held in the museum of modern art. Not by chance, the film selected for the opening was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Keir Dullea himself was shaking hands right next to the guy passing out large shots of Chivas Regal. Other than the nationality of the drinks being glugged down it was a pretty American affair.
It was early yet so we decided to see what other joys embassy alley held. The Italians were next and they proved their worth. The ambassador himself greeted each caller. He was a short and rotund man, his sparkling white shirt crossed by an elegant red, white, and green ribbon. We passed on from him to a waiter holding an immense tray of little pizzas.…
Clutching our drinks—a most acceptable red—we strolled out onto the balcony that overlooked the garden, where a string orchestra was playing some lachrymose Puccini. Tears in eyes, we resumed our ambassadorial stroll.
We ambled along, supping at the slowly decreasing edibles, until we reached the last—the Yugoslavian embassy, the poor man of Europe—and proving it. The curtains by the open door needed cleaning; the welcoming flunky gave us a wave of greeting and pointed at the drinks table. There were trays of glasses of mixed size and shape filled with some indefinable liquid substance that tasted as foul as it looked. One of our company spilled his drink on his shirt—which made a hideous stain. Some months later he reported neither smell nor stain could be removed; he had to burn the shirt.
It was still a paradise. When midnight approached we still had food vouchers left so we gathered at the bar, where the knowing washed down Beluga caviar with ice-cold Russian vodka. After a week we most reluctantly made our exits. We left with warm memories of a country and of a film conference we knew would never be repeated. The rickety 707 was an old friend now, the food just as good. The fact that we had actually survived one passage across the jungle meant we were old hands. Good-bye, Rio, good-bye.
17
In the mid-’70s, Joan and I left San Diego for England and were going to buy a house in London, but there were problems with the purchase. We decided to take a break and go to Ireland, to visit Annie McCaffrey and other friends. We spent two weeks there, laughing and drinking. The sun shone, we met a lot of people, and we had a lot of fun. Anne was already based in Ireland. On one of my annual visits to England I had stopped over in Dublin. I wrote an article for the Science Fiction Writers of America about being a writer in Ireland, and Annie read it and moved there on the strength of the article. She was the first of the science fiction writers to move to Ireland. More came afterward.
The deal to buy the house in London fell through. Many y
ears later we did eventually buy a flat in Victoria, in Ashley Gardens, and kept that for god knows how many years, so we always had a foot in London. It was pretty tiny, but it was right down behind the Westminster Cathedral. And after going to Ireland for that short break, we weren’t sure whether we wanted to move there or not. We found a furnished place on the shore on the other side of Dublin, and by the time the year was up we’d found a house in a condo. The first co-op in Ireland—that went bankrupt, of course, the week after we moved in. I spent years as chairman of the tenants’ committee trying to get this thing back because no one could sell or buy. But it was very modern and very nice. It was on the shore at Sandycove, overlooking the harbor in Dalkey—the Forty Foot and the Martello Tower—I could see it right outside my window. James Joyce’s Ulysses opens there. I could look at it from my balcony every day and be inspired.
* * *
Before I went to Ireland I worked on Skyfall in London. We had rented a furnished place for four or five months, down the road from Gloucester Road tube stop. We were trying to figure out what to do next. The book had been sold to Faber & Faber, a very prestigious publisher. In it I needed to have a spacecraft crash into a specific place and blow up. I knew sod all about orbital mechanics, but I found a man who did, Gerry Webb. He was an engineer then on the British rocket program, which used American rockets from a Norwegian base for British packets. Very British, I thought. Gerry now runs a very successful business out of Moscow with Russian partners, selling packages for experiments on Russian rockets.
Skyfall involved American rocket guys and Russian rocket guys, training together, going up in a ship, a few little problems, and at the right time drop it in such a way that it would hit this one spot I wanted it to hit on the Earth. It wasn’t too complex. But Gerry never uses one word when he can use forty-five! He was around for a couple of months—we were only there for a couple of months—and he was the world authority on high-altitude physics at the time. He gave me the plot device I needed for the whole thing. It was very simple: a proton storm—they hit the Earth, they disrupt communications, short out wires in the high-tension cables. What I didn’t know—and what no one knew at that point except Gerry Webb—was that when they hit the upper atmosphere, which is very thin, tenuous, they are very powerful electrons, and would rise up to thirty or forty miles in five seconds. If a spaceship is coming around, and dawn comes, and the photon storm hits, it’s like hitting a brick wall. So I could time exactly when I wanted to hit the “wall” and drop exactly where I wanted on Earth. Great, that was exactly what I needed from Gerry.
I also worked with Malcolm Edwards on a nonfiction book, Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction. I’ve known Malcolm for a million years; I knew him as a fan. The first time I met him was when he invited me to Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate. He organized the SF society there. I was a guest speaker. I was living in London, and they paid my car fare. I took the train up to Cambridge, and had a room in one of the colleges, with a bed and a chair and a light, and that was it. I asked Malcolm what he was reading at Cambridge, and he said, “Science fiction!”
He ran a convention a number of years later, in Coventry, and I was guest of honor. I hadn’t been to Coventry before that. I went to see the cathedral there that got bombed in the war. It was a nice convention. Malcolm was always a superfan. He eventually quit academia and went to work in publishing, ending up as an editor. But before that he wrote this book, Spaceships in Fact and Fiction, and hawked it around, but no one wanted it. They said they would buy it if he had a collaborator who was a named science fiction writer. I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to collaborate on it. It won’t be my usual fifty-fifty, because I didn’t write anything of it, but I’d have to read the book if you don’t mind, and make sure it’s correct.” I found the usual errors and things, and I changed the artwork where he had a diagram about how a thrust works to make a ship move in space—it was wrong, so I redrew that. That was our collaboration—I put my name on the cover. Why not? It wouldn’t have been published otherwise and I got a bit of lolly out of it.
Around the same time I did some work for a publisher called Phil Dunn. He had found this artist, Jim Burns, who had done one magazine cover, in colored crayon of all things! But it was very good. And Jim had a great sample book. Phil recognized his talent and offered him a contract to do an illustrated book. The idea was to have an illustration on every other page, and I would write a story for him to illustrate. I suggested a couple of ideas. Phil was a railroad fan and I think Jim was too, and I said, “How about a railroad on an alien planet?”
I’d been an art director and an artist, and wrote a book I knew Jim could illustrate. I changed every chapter to a new scene to give him something new to draw, and wrote continuity between them. I wrote it like an adult comic book. I put in poo-bombers, and I made it mildly pornographic, with Styreen Fome undoing her zipper.… Jim used different media for the paintings and did a great job. It was called Planet Story and it was remaindered the day it was published, or soon after.
Phil was a sharp publisher and had a deal with a publisher in Hong Kong or Singapore for very cheap color printing. They would print by going five times through the presses, three colors plus black but without the actual text. The fifth pass prints the type in either English, French, German, or whatever. He had publishers lined up in each country and he sold them the book as a complete package, twenty thousand copies or whatever. The problem was that between signing the contract and the time of publication, the print costs would go up, and he’d lose a little bit of money. And every time he did a new book he’d charge a little bit more to try and recover his losses. Eventually his company went belly-up, but it was a great idea.
Jim Burns also got involved with another project I was working on. I wrote a screenplay for a film based on stories from Heavy Metal magazine. It was going to be animated by Halas and Batchelor. One of the stories featured a gorgeous nude woman, and a test animation was drawn. John Halas was one of the most skilled animation producers of all time—remember Animal Farm?—and he was not pleased with what he saw on screen: “Her breasts swing back and forth like two pendulums on a clock,” he said. They needed an expert, and Jim was called in. He drew a three-second loop of her brushing her hair back over her shoulder with one hand. Her breasts rose and fell in what can only be described as a most attractive manner.
The film as we planned it was shelved: I got a “blow-off” check for a hundred and fifty dollars. The Heavy Metal movie that was made bore no resemblance to the one we had painstakingly envisioned.
* * *
We had been living in Ireland for a while when people said to us, why are you living in Ireland and not living in the country? We were living on the shore, only a few miles from Dublin—and we should have stayed on the shore. I was doing TV work, we had a lot of friends there, went to a lot of parties, and there was a lot of excitement going on. Then we moved out into the country to Avoca in County Wicklow, which was later used as the town for the television series Ballykissangel. I don’t know how many years we were at house Kestrel Ridge, but Joan said, “We either move or I blow my brains out.” It was a large and beautiful house set in the hilly countryside and was a perfect writer’s retreat, but there was absolutely nothing going on there. Out above the Vale of Avoca, you could watch the water going by, and a train went by down there a couple of times a day. There were a couple of nice pubs, which we frequented, including one that still had a dirt floor. They pulled the pints from barrels. And when you wanted to go for a pee the guy opened the back door and it opened onto a field: there you are, a hundred acres, take your choice of anywhere to pee. That was probably the most traditional Irish pub I’ve been in.
But there was nothing happening—until it became Ballykissangel and then they’d come down in tour buses, but we’d gotten out by then. We bought a flat in Dublin, in Ballsbridge, near the rugby ground. There was a great Indian restaurant right around the corner, a relative novelty in Dublin in those days.
My daughter, Moira, had moved to a farm in Cornwall in 1984, when she was twenty-five, and had a small cottage attached where we spent our summers, or what passes for summer in Cornwall. Mostly it rained. A few scant months after buying the working farm, Moira was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. They took her to the hospital, and she called Joan. When a girl calls her mother and says, “Mum, I want you to come over and see me, I’m ill,” she’ll be out the door. Tell a Jewish mother that, and … I remember there was a knock on the door. Everyone knows not to knock on the door when I’m working. Joan came in all dressed up in her coat—“I’ve called the postmaster’s wife to fetch me, I’m going to Cornwall.” She had the plane booked, and all she needed was some cash. She said, “Moira called…” Bye-bye, she was gone. I went over in three or four days and joined her. We started spending the summers on the farm a couple of weeks later.
We always kept a place in Ireland, because I had family roots there and because the tax man there was kind to writers.
World SF—I can remember clearly just how the whole thing started. I was living in Ireland in the very modern apartment overlooking Bullock Harbor in Dalkey. I was sitting on my balcony, at ease with the world, relaxed, reading the London Times, and a news item caught my eye. It was just a few column inches about a literary event. It seemed that the Mystery Writers of America, the MWA, were meeting with their crime counterparts, the Crime Writers Association in London. Interesting but almost certainly dreadfully boring. I had been to meetings of both organizations and had found them a little on the dull side, nowhere near as much fun as a science fiction writers’ function. As I read the report I thought, idly, that an international meeting of SF writers would be something I would very much like to attend. I wished that someone would organize it, but who was stupid enough to volunteer to stage such a worthy enterprise? I looked in the mirror, turned away. No chance.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 23
