The Way the Future Blogs

 

When I was writing The Last Theorem with Sir Arthur Clarke, I found it necessary in the story, for plot purposes, to have the hero, Ranjit Subramanian, spend a prolonged period in a jail, in solitary confinement.

The obvious way to get that to happen was to have Ranjit get tangled up in the Sri Lankan civil war between the governing Sinhalese, who had been in the habit of keeping all the positions of power for themselves, and the rebellious Tamil Tigers, who wanted to share in the governance. (Both Sinhalese and Tamils were uninvited immigrants from India. The Sinhalese, however, had arrived earlier.)

The war was ongoing and bloody,and it dovetailed nicely with my general plans for the novel, so I happily wrote some ten or twenty thousand words embodying that material. I got quite a few pages further along in the story, sending twenty- or thirty-page chunks on to Arthur as I finished them for his comments, suggestions and approval.

By then Arthur was beginning to be ill. He still read everything and gave me feedback, but it took him longer. I was running fifty to seventy-five pages ahead of his reading, but I didn’t worry; since I knew that what I was writing was pretty good stuff.

It was, however, the wrong pretty good stuff.

Arthur’s next letter was longer than usual and much more alarmed. Had I forgotten (he asked) that he was a guest in the country of Sri Lanka, and his permanent-residency permission could be revoked at any moment when the government came to think of him as an embarrassment?

Well, actually I had forgotten, and not because I hadn’t been told. As far back as the 1950s when we were touring Japan together — maybe even earlier — Arthur had let me see how precarious he thought his residency was. There was never a suggestion that the Sri Lankan government had made any threats or issued any warnings. If anything like that had ever happened, Arthur didn’t mention it to me. As far as I could see, the problem was that Arthur loved Sri Lanka, had made it his permanent homeland and was worriedly aware that a couple of bureaucrats in Colombo could kick him out of the land he loved at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all.

If I didn’t give that the importance Arthur did — if I let myself forget about it in writing that draft of the novel — it wasn’t that I had truly forgotten. It was simply that I couldn’t believe that the Sri Lankan government would ever consider antagonizing the man who, through his books, was the finest press agent and ambassador that any struggling Third World country could ever imagine having.

On the other hand, I could readily believe that governments as a class are all too likely to shoot themselves in the foot, doing stupid, self-harming things. Arguing from principles of reason and common sense didn’t pay when you were talking about governments. And anyway it was Arthur whose ox would be gored, and thus his decision to make, not mine.

So, not without a few tears, I threw away some twenty thousand words of perfectly good copy about the Sri Lankan civil war and replaced it with (as I now believe) some actually rather better words about 21st-century high-seas piracy and the American custom (especially during the disastrous reign of America’s worst president, ever, George W. Bush) of farming people you wanted to make disappear into the penal systems of democracy-challenged countries.

That’s how collaboration works, my children. You get to have the literary skills and talents of your collaborator working for you, which is a useful thing. But sometimes you get unexpectedly ambushed by his (or her) hang-ups as well. That can be a serious pain in places where you don’t want a pain. But sometimes it can all work out for the best.

 

After the war — that’s World War II, I’m talking about, what did you think? — I went to work as copywriter for a tiny Mad Ave. advertising agency called Thwing & Altman. It wasn’t a boring job, and one of the things I liked about it was that one of my favorite over-the-top novelists, Tiffany Thayer, was among my predecessors in holding it. But I turned out to be good at that kind of work, and they weren’t paying me particularly well, so before long I was studying the Help Wanted pages in the Times again.

It was still a boom time for the unemployed. Jobs were begging for people to fill them as America got back in the business of business. There was one particular listing which seemed to be addressed to me almost by name — I no longer remember what it was in the specifications that seemed to bear my initials, but the moment I saw the ad I lusted for it. The ad had been placed by an employment agency, so I called them up, made an appointment, sneaked out of the office with some of my roughs under my arm and laid them proudly before the man who had agreed to see me.

“Um,” he said. “Not too bad. Have you made a resume?” Of course I had, but when I handed it to him he looked puzzled. He gave me a dubious glance, studied the resume one more time and then said, “It doesn’t name the college you went to.”

At times in the past I had wondered if that question might ever handicap me in my chosen career. But no one who ever hired me for anything had ever asked about it before, so his comment rather surprised me. “Óh,” I said, “I never went to a college. I dropped out of high school as soon as I was seventeen.”

That got a reaction out of him. He gave me a scowl of repugnance, stuffed all my papers back into their folder and said, “You’ve wasted my time. This is a good job with a very important publishing company. Naturally they’re not going to hire anyone without at least a bachelor’s degree.” And I crept out of his office in humility, hardly daring to look at even the receptionist out of my high-school-dropout eyes.

But the ad was still in the paper on the next Sunday, as well as the as the Sunday after that. Moreover, although there were plenty of other jobs on offer, there weren’t any that seemed to be calling me by name, so I got back on the phone. “I called,” I said, after identifying myself and feeling the temperature drop when I did, “because I noticed that ad was still running, and I wondered — ”

“Mr. Pohl,” he said severely, “I told you that you’re simply not qualified for a job of this caliber. If anything comes up that might suit you I’ll keep you in mind. Goodbye.”

I hung up, meditating violence. But time passed and I cooled down. And, more important, the ad continued to run. So a few weeks later I called again. My account executive was beginning to sound tired of the subject, but he admitted they had run out of candidates. “All right,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would hurt anything if I let you try your luck. It’s the Popular Science Publishing Company, on Fourth Avenue around 28th Street. The man you want to see is their advertising director for circulation and books, and his name is George Spoerer. I’ll give him a call to say you’re coming — ”

“Well, no,” I said. “Let’s not do that. I’ll call him for an appointment myself. And, don’t worry, I won’t forget about your commission on my first week’s salary.”

I had been worrying a little myself about what this hard to please Mr. Spoerer might be like, but on the phone he sounded like a reasonable human being and when I got to his office he looked and acted that way too. Not only that, but, when I showed him some of the house ads I’d written at Popular Publications, he revealed himself as at least a part-time science-fiction fan. And when George Spoerer had decided I could do the job he walked me into the office of his boss, the Circulation Manager of the company, Eugene Watson, and he wasn’t bad either. And twenty minutes later I had the job.

I didn’t know how my account executive at the employment agency would take that news. When I phoned he just sighed a long sigh and began reminding me that, under New York law, their commission was a collectible debt and they would expect weekly checks from me until it was paid off. “All right,” I said, and hung up.”

I had intended at least to say “thank you,” but it no longer sounded appropriate.

 
I forgot to mention that, as I was leaving, George said, “Did I tell you about your other jobs?” And when I said an apprehensive no he said, “Don’t look so apprehensive. One is Subscription Fulfillment Manager, and all that requires is that you let Old Jim tell you what’s going on in that department so you can answer any questions the higher brass might ask. That’s where we have twenty-five young girls to type out the addressograph stencils that make labels for subscribers. Old Jim is the actual boss of the department because he’s too old and too religious to cause any trouble with those twenty-five young girls. But he’s hopeless when he tries to talk to a vice president.”

As I had never talked to a corporate vice president myself I crossed my fingers and went on to the next point. “And the other job?”

“That’s no sweat, too. The title is Book Editor for books published by our two magazines, Popular Science and Outdoor Life. We make a good thing out of mail-order books for home handymen and sport fishers. Since the magazines buy all rights we take material that appears in the magazines and retread it for how-to books.

“You don’t do that work yourself, of course. You hire an editor to do it, and you just make sure it’s done right — I’ll show you how it’s done over the table at the Gramercy Park, if you’ll have lunch with me on Monday.”

“A week from Monday, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I’d like to give Mr. Altman a little notice.” And a week from Monday it was.

Continue reading ‘My Life as Book Editor for Popular Science’ »

Campi Flegrei (Photo by Donar Reiskoffer).

The whole of Yellowstone National Park is basically the gigantic caldera of a super-volcano, the kind that can mess up the whole world’s climate when it blows. The Yellowstone one is pretty regular about how often it does blow, too, and at the moment it’s about 6,000 years overdue for its next ka-boom. One of the postulates — the “big lies” that an author is permitted to tell to set up his story — in my latest novel, All the Lives He Led is that sometime before the story gets going Yellowstone did blow sky-high, covering much of the country with volcanic ash and dust and thus converting the U.S.A. from the richest country in the world to something with approximately the Gross National Product of Liechtenstein.

This means our hero can’t make a decent living in America. Therefore he goes to Italy, where he gets a job in the theme park the Italians have made out of the 2,000-year-old ruins of Pompeii.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, as it happens, during World War II I was stationed in Italy for a time with the U. S. Army Air Force, first with a B24 group on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, then with AAF/MTO (translation: Army Air Force, Mediterranean Theater of Operations headquarters) in Caserta, near Naples. What I am getting at, in my perhaps unfortunately highly discursive way, is that for a long time I have been interested in (a) supervolcanos like Yellowstone and (b) the region of the Italian coast around Naples.

And I have — alarmingly — recently discovered that those two areas of interest have become one.

 
You see, the whole territory around Naples is what the old Romans called the Campi Flegrei (meaning “the burning fields”), and Lake Avernus was described by Virgil, in his Aeneid, as the entrance to Hell. Modern observers have not confirmed that identification, but what they have established is that the lake is actually the water-filled crater of a dormant, but not necessarily dead, volcano.

Like Yellowstone, the area is marked by fumaroles (vents of steam), pots of boiling mud and, most disconcertingly, irregular raising and lowering of ground level in some places by as much as eleven feet, which has not been good for some of the constructions on those sites; a hospital and many, many homes have been destroyed. There is a big difference between the Yellowstone caldera and the one for the Phlegrean Fields, though. Most of the Phlegrean territory is underwater, stretching from the famous Isle of Capri to the less celebrated island of Ischia and including much of my dear unkempt city of Naples. (Another difference is population. In winter, at least, Yellowstone is inhabited largely by bears, while the Phlegrean Fields area is home to four million human beings,)

So how dangerous is the situation? Well, no one exactly knows. It would take quite a lot of drilling down into the worrisome ground to get the evidence to predict just what is going to happen there.

That drilling seemed about to start a while ago, because Giuseppe De Natale, the search director for Italy’s National Observatory for Geophysics and Volcanology, was prepared to get it started with a $14 million course of drilling. That didn’t happen, though Critics reminded Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino of what happened in Indonesia in 2006 when a mud volcano erupted after similar drilling was done, killing a few people and rendering tens of thousands homeless. Mayor Iervolino took no chances. She stopped all drilling until somebody could prove to her that it was safe.

(By the way, people who have been to Naples and seen Mt. Vesuvius puffing its ominous little trail of steam on the horizon may wonder what part this other volcano plays in the Phlegrean Fields scenario. The answer is none at all. Vesuvius, which destroyed three little cities in one 48-hour rampage back in 79 A.D., is just too trivial to worry about when considering the threat posed by the Phlegrean Fields.)

Here are the answers to last week’s Bible quiz:

Sodomite?

1. a and c. As for stoning on a father’s doorstep, that is the fate of non-virgin brides. (Deuteronomy 22:13.)

2. b. Read the Song of Songs and blush. It also serves as a metaphor for divine relations with Israel or with humans.

3. a, b and c. We forget that early commentators were very concerned about sex with angels (Genesis 6, interpreted in the Letter of Jude and other places) as an incorrect mixing of two kinds.

4. c. “Sodomy,” as a term for gay male sex, began to be used only in the 11th century and would have surprised many early religious commentators. They attributed Sodom’s problems with God to many different causes, including idolatry, threats toward strangers and general lack of compassion for the downtrodden. Ezekiel 16:49 suggests that Sodomites had “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

How’d you do? If you didn’t get at least one right, go to the nearest bookstore, pick up a copy of Rev. Knust’s book and study, study, study.

And have a thought for all those poor Tea Party legislators, currently holding back on approval of the raise in the federal debt limit unless great cuts are made in programs meant to aid “the poor and needy.” They probably don’t even know that they’re Sodomites.

Oh, and by the way, have you noticed that Booklist Online’s latest list of the ten best science-fiction and fantasy books of the year and, oh, my goodness, Number One on the list is All the Lives He Led by You Know Who. (Number Two is old friend Larry Niven’s The Best of Larry Niven and the third begins with a D, but let’s not hear any loose talk about alphabetizing lists of titles around here.)

 

Well, maybe it isn’t exactly your Bible, because we’ve got a multiple ethnic world these days, but probably you know which Bible we’re talking about. Or what Rev. Jennifer Wright Knust is talking about, anyway, because we’ve borrowed some extracts from her new book, Unprotected Texts.

So here are four questions for you, all multiple-guess to make it easy, because by the law of averages you should get at least one right:

1. The Bible says of homosexuality:

   1. Leviticus describes male sexual pairing as an abomination.
   2. A lesbian should be stoned at her father’s doorstep.
   3. There’s plenty of ambiguity and no indication of physical intimacy, but some readers point to Ruth and Naomi’s love as suspiciously close, or to King David’s declaring to Jonathan: “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (11 Samuel 1:23-26)

2. In the Bible, erotic writing is:

   1. Forbidden by Deuteronomy as “adultery of the heart.”
   2. Exemplified by “Song of Songs,” which celebrates sex for its own sake.
   3. Unmentioned.

3. Among sexual behavior that is forbidden:

   1. Adultery,
   2. Incest.
   3. Sex with angels.

4. The people of Sodom were condemned principally for:

   1. Homosexuality.
   2. Blasphemy.
   3. Lack of compassion for the poor and needy.

All right, pencils down, but wait for the answers until next week when they will probably appear in this space,