Decimated. Jack Dann
learning the blood and bones of writing.
Then we got good. Well, much better.
But time to have fun again. Here in this collection, never before collected as one, with a chance to get some of the real praise on the record. As Woody Allen has said, “Success is mostly just showing up.”
On to the stories, where we have a few more things to say.
* * * *
Jack:
Yes, I think at that time of our lives—those distant, blurred salad days of exuberant youth—it was enough just to show up. After all, we were certain that everything was ahead of us; all we had to do was sit down in front of George’s (really Pam’s) old rat-tat-tat Smith Corona manual (and in those days manual meant manual!) typewriter and smash the hell out of those keys. Something rare and wonderful, something unmatched in genius and inspiration would magically and inevitably have to appear on the mint-white corrasable bond paper. Of that we were certain.
Well, perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that I was certain. George was further ahead in terms of craft. I was still at the stage where I believed that inspiration would somehow magically transform the electric-shocked thoughts in my head into coherent sentences, comprehensible plots, and characters that didn’t behave as if they’d just discovered that the strange digital appendages at the end of their arms were called fingers.
So I’d sit down in front of that old Smith Corona in George’s high-ceilinged, book-cluttered apartment in Binghamton, New York (Rod Serling’s home town) and clatter away until there was a small stack of typed pages beside me. I’d then show the brilliant outpouring to George, who would shake his great blond head as if he was in pain and proceed to turn ravings into story. Slowly, arduously, I started to learn the rudiments of craft...something I’ve learned one never stops learning. After having written or edited over seventy-five books, I still feel like I’m a raw beginner every time I stare into the grey-white flickerings of my laptop.
But, as George said earlier, those faraway, sunlit days were filled with joy. The very idea of being writers was enough: it was as rich and intriguing and glamorous as becoming ace fighter pilots, James Bond spies, or Kerouac(ian) Dharma-bums. We were writers because writers wrote. Nothing could be as noble, exciting, or as important. We were going to change the world by dint of the sheer power of thought.
And so we wrote and talked through the nights until dawn. George “knew stuff”, and I had the great talent of being an enormous sponge, greedily soaking up everything. Then I’d write some more, sure that every day’s acquired knowledge of craft, life, philosophy, literature, and science would transmute my awkward, leaden efforts into golden prose.
That didn’t even begin to happen, but what did happen was a complete story, and then another, and another...and George—that driven optimist who would have been groomed to be a shaman in another culture—took our stories to a science fiction convention and actually sold two of them then and there. He did exactly what I tell young writers never to do: buttonhole an editor at a convention. But, then, again, other writers aren’t George.
So now I was a published writer, a real writer, whatever the hell that meant. For me, it meant total immersion in craft, something that has never changed. The idea of being a writer? Well, that doesn’t mean much to me now. Writing is something I do, not who I am. But forty-three years ago it was definition itself.
George mentioned the time I wrote what I then considered a legitimate piece of prose, one sentence that is in “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star,” a sentence that now amuses the slightly embarrassed author of The Memory Cathedral, The Silent, and The Man Who Melted. But thirty-nine years later, as I stare into the laptop screen, I can still remember the line: “A fused mass of beryllium fled from Deneb.” George was very kind; he celebrated my creation of a sentence written in the active voice. (Another win for Strunk and White’s irreplaceable little guide The Elements of Style.)
Ah, those were the days. My pretension reached heights I hope I never climb again. I remember starting a story (which sold to a publisher, alas) with the line “Postulate one monad.” Ach! But George had made the mistake of introducing me to Leibniz’s Monadology, and...off I went.
George once said to me that if you weren’t born a genius, you could just push your way through to being one. George is a true polymath: the proverbial dog with a bone, or rather many bones. He just kept gnawing away at every subject that took his interest—philosophy, science, history, literature, film, genre fiction—until he gained the kind of understanding that would allow him to make real contributions to the great conversation of ideas. And I’ll be damned, but he did turn himself into a polymath genius: a genre Nabokov, a Sartre of reasoned optimism, a Polish Stanislaw Lem cum Isaac Bashevis Singer who publishes his work in Nature as easily as in Analog.
By the way, George is Polish. Born at the end of the war, he speaks the language fluently and in collaboration with his partner, award-winning author Pamela Sargent, makes the best bigos I’ve ever tasted! When he read my original note, which mistakenly noted that he was born in a concentration camp, he wrote:
My parents were taken as slave labor and worked on Austrian farms before being liberated. They were not reprehensible enough to be taken to the death camps, to be worked to death after the war was won by Hitler.
My bio-father was earlier taken with his high school buddies to shovel out the death trains as they came out of the facilities, but when his stomach was ruined by the disinfectant chemicals he was also sent to Austrian farm work.
He met my mother after the liberation; he joined the allied armies as a guard, and so my mother and I got to go to England as “allies.”
I was not born in a concentration camp, but as a privileged character in a Villach, Austria hospital, the son of “DPs”—displaced persons (liberated slave labor), who narrowly avoided forced repatriation to Poland, as Stalin had demanded, saved by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, passed just in time and written by Eleanor Roosevelt and H. G. Wells. I met Mrs. Roosevelt at the Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC in the early 1950s, where I was also operated on in 1959. Also met Hopalong Cassidy there.
God almighty!
So now to those early stories of ours. I haven’t read them in years, and it is with joy, nostalgia, and, yes, a little trepidation that I approach them again. I’ll add my notes to George’s after I read (well, re-read!) each story. I suppose, in a sense, this is a trip back to the future...what the late, great Isaac Asimov (may he rest in peace) called “antique futures.”
We’ll see....
TRAPS
The continent below him was covered with lush jungle except for the sandy plateau twenty miles in diameter. A moment earlier his instruments had picked up the other ship sitting near the southern edge of the tableland. The sandy surface of the plateau was fairly regular and Rysling decided to bring his own craft down on automatic, as close to the other ship as possible. He sat back in his contour seat and waited, his senses alert. Was someone else trying to beat him to his job?
His small exploratory vessel was now three thousand feet above the plateau and coming down fast on secondary jets. The primary landside jets cut in with a roar at five hundred feet and the sleek vessel settled slowly to the sand. When all had quieted the displaced sand made a crater-like perimeter around the silver hull.
Rysling made sure the double safety on the star-drive was secure, cut in the double safety for the landside rockets. Through his forward screen he saw that the other ship and also both suns were up. The yellow star was high in the dark blue sky, near its noontime. The red giant was near the horizon, just above the green jungle which surrounded the barren plateau. Rysling released the strap from around his waist. He stood up slowly and stretched. Nothing about the other ship was moving.
As yet the planet had no name, only a number: 3-10004-2. The gravity was only slightly higher than Earth normal. The atmosphere was nearly identical in composition to Earth’s. For all practical purposes the planet was ready to be colonized. But Earth Authority was picky. It wanted a complete classification of the land animals. That was why he was