The Way the Future Blogs

Blonde Dr. Betty

Visiting the SFWA suite at MidAmeriCon seemed worth a try, so we tried it. Unfortunately giving it a try meant quite a lot of walking, which meant a lot of competition for body space as the eager mobs of fans, famished for PARTYPARTYPARTY! wandered the halls, now a crawling mass of fan flesh. It was prime room-party time.

And, I discovered, I was getting tired. The corridor we were walking in had a little bay that looked down into the lobby, far below. It had chairs that were just being vacated by a few fans, their sore feet healed, charging on to the next room party. I took action. I didn’t say anything about wanting to rest my own feet for a moment. I just grabbed a vacant chair and, looking grateful, so did Professor Hull. Leaning over to rub her toes, she looked up at me curiously. “Tell me more about what you do at Bantam. Delany’s book. Is it a big success?

I laughed. “Big enough. I’m Bantam’s wonder child this week. I paid peanuts for it, and it’s selling its head off. Just under six hundred thousand copies last I heard, and it might go over a million.”

“Delany,” she mused. “Yes, I know some of his work. If the administration lets me keep my sci-fi — ”

I gave my throat a meaningful clearing.

She didn’t fail to understand my meaning. “Oh, right,” she said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to say sci-fi, I mean science fiction. If the administration lets me keep my science fiction class, maybe I should teach it next semester. I’ll get a copy and read it real fast.”

I laughed. “That I don’t think you can do. It’s a long one, way more than twice as big as his Ace novels. And it’s not much like his other books. But I think I put a couple of copies in my bag. If I find them, I’ll put one in my pocket tomorrow and if I see you it’s yours.”

“Thanks,” she said, sounding as though she meant it. But she was rubbing her feet again. Then, looking at her watch. “Oh,” she said. “Look at the time. Listen, Frederik, how would you like to try a different kind of room party? Mary Badami — she’s my roommate — and I agreed to have our own party tomorrow. Not a lot of liquor but tea or coffee and soft drinks, and Mary’s making some food. I have to help her pretty son now, but then when the party starts tomorrow you’ll know a lot of the people — some will be the ones we ate dinner with, and I heard you mention Marty Greenberg and Joe Olander….”

I said, “Can we sit down there now? I’m in!”

Continue reading ‘Arrival, Part 4: The Party Plan’ »

Researchers led by Andrew Jarosz at the University of Illinois at Chicago devised an experiment to check the conviction, held by some, that an author’s work desk is not complete without a typewriter, some paper and (at least) one open bottle of beer. They gave 40 men either a vodka and cranberry drink or a non-alcoholic one, after which they all took a test which required them to link groups of words with a given concept.

The vodka drinkers solved 38 percent more problems than the teetotallers and reached the correct answer faster. And so (identities withheld) are vindicated at last.

 

Mr. Left Hand, Meet Mr. Right Hand: You Two Should Talk

Even when it come to food, Congress still likes to talk out of two sides of its mouth at once. Congress has appropriated large sum of tax money to urge Americans to eat more healthful food, their ideal dinner plate supposed to contain 50 percent of fruit and vegetables, and no more than the other 50 percent given to meat and starches.

But Congress is right now in the middle of a new farm bill which would spend the overwhelming majority of its appropriation on subsidies for growing those very starches — wheat, rice, corn and so on — that they are urging us to eat less of.

If you feel moved to write your congressman about this, all you need say is “subsidize fewer fattening starches, more green vegetables and fruit.” If you like him, you can add “please.”

Bluefin tuna: Threatened with extinction.

So far in the history of life on Earth there have been five Great Extinctions. One was caused by the giant meteor that hit what is now the coast of Mexico, two by freezing in the oceans and the lowering of the sea levels, one by huge, widespread volcanic eruptions, one (probably) by gigantic meteorite showers.

They were all many millions of years ago — all but the sixth Great Extinction, which has barely started. That is the one the scientists are calling the “Holocene,” and its cause is annihilation of species of birds, animals and — especially, for example — edible fish.

And the cause of that is Us.

How do we cause extinctions? Oh, we have lots of ways. For fish, we harvest the tastiest ones en masse until there are none left (it’s estimated that we have removed nearly 90 percent of large fish from the sea). We destroy habitats. Most of all, we cause global warming. Anyway, our work in this matter has gone far enough for scientist to refer to the present as a new age, the Holocene.

One of my favorite Italian dishes was scaloppine al limone, a fried cut of veal with lemon juice. Second favorite would be any other scaloppine, but it’s been a couple of years since I tasted any. See, the trouble is, they’re made with veal, and the way veal itself is made takes all the fun out of eating any.

If you think too much about the ordeal all of your meat dishes go through on their way to your table, it does nothing to help your enjoyment of even fried chicken or a pork chop. But with most meats, the animal at least gets some kind of life before the chop-chop. The calf gets nothing. At birth he goes into a wooden crate too small to turn around in. He never tastes his mother’s milk. That’s pumped away to sell, while the baby is given a formula that is liberally mixed with streptomycin, penicillin and four or five other antibiotics, for the purpose of making him grow faster. Their secondary effect is that they also give him constant diarrhea, which no one cleans away, so the calf lies in it for most of its life.

Oh, and they have one other effect. They contribute to that exercise in controlled breeding that the farmers of the world have been carrying on for some generations now, in which their antibiotics kill off all the weaker bacteria, leaving the stronger — and better able to resist all known antibiotics — in each generation to become the dominant varieties. This, in turn, has its own effects, one of which is that my personal resident bacteria are now immune to all known antibiotics except to those few that are almost as toxic to large mammals — like me, for instance — as to the bacteria they are meant to control.

This, of course, means that, if and when I pick up any future serious infection, my doctors will have to guess whether the antibacterial properties of one of them outweighs its toxicity. Or whether, on the other hand, the effect of injecting me with it would resemble the effects of infecting strychnine.

But enough about me.

So tell me: do you still really enjoy veal? Or, to look at the problem from a different angle, should we go on letting the veal manufacturers grow the little calves in total misery when they could at least give them clean crates?

Hannes Bok, 1941.
 

There were a couple of things about Hannes Bok that we didn’t mention last time, but they were important to him. One was his love of music. Indeed, when young Wayne Woodard, as he had been named by his parents, started working out the name he wanted to live his life under, the names he started with were all variants of those of the great early master Johann Sebastian Bach. First it was Johan, then Johannes, then he modified the spelling and came up with Hannes Bok. (Which was a little odd, actually, because Hannes’ favorite composer wasn’t anyone as old-fashioned as a Bach, but the quite modern Finnish master, Sibelius.)

The other great passion of his life took up even more of it than music — and was less sympathetic to most of his fellow fans. That was his passion for astrology. Hannes didn’t just believe in it, he studied it with the same intensity that a disciple might have given to the works of his 12th- or 14th-century master. Hannes went so far as to work out complete astrological readings for a few of his friends. They were detailed and — inasmuch is there is anything that could be called trustworthy about the study of astrology in general — quite trustworthily prepared. Looked at as art objects rather than useful tools, they are in fact well worth hanging on your wall. Which is what I did — way back when, with mine — but it’s long lost now and I can only wish that I had it still.

During the years of the War and just after, Hannes had been having his most prosperous period, doing over a hundred covers for Weird Tales and a dozen other science fiction and fantasy magazines, plus interior black-and-whites for them and covers for Ballantine and many of the semi-pro book publishers that were springing up. Most of them didn’t pay very well, and Hannes had a self-defeating habit of putting in long hours of experimentation on new techniques of enhancing the color on each job. But he was eating, and relatively happy.

That, however didn’t last. Hannes had developed another self-defeating habit, this time of becoming pretty quarrelsome. Sadly, a lot of the people he quarreled with were the customers for his artwork. One after another of them quietly took Hannes’ address out of their card file — which had the effect of cutting down on his income — which had the lock-on effect of making him still more quarrelsome.

I saw very little of Hannes in that immediate post-war period. The only contact I remember is running in to him by accident at someone’s office, I think perhaps John Campbell’s. He didn’t seem particularly thrilled at meeting me again, and I wasn’t overly charmed by his manner. It was quite a while after that that I went up to his desolate little flat and saw him for the last time.

It happened that I had met with Don Wollheim for some reason, maybe for lunch one day, and as I was getting ready to leave he said, “What I have to do now is go up and see Hannes Bok to talk to him about some artwork. Want to come along?”

“Sure,” I said, before I could change my mind. The apartment was pretty far uptown, but the subway got us there quickly enough, and Hannes was buzzing the door open before we even rang his bell.

“I was sitting by the widow, and I saw you guys coming, Have you got my checks?”

Donald’s reason for coming, he had explained to me, was to buy a couple of drawings that he hoped to be able to use in his job at Ace Books, but he shook his head at that. “No checks till we get the art,” he said. “I told you that. Have you got the drawings?”

Hannes complained briefly about that, but he went into the room that he called his studio and came back with two flat packages wrapped in newspaper. “When will I get the checks?” he asked Donald.

“As soon as I can get them signed,” Donald said. “You know what it’s like.”

Hannes gave him a bitter grin. “I do,” he said. Then he turned to me. I guess I’d been looking him over pretty closely. He was a lot skinnier than I remembered and quite a lot surlier.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

I lied. “No, nothing,” I said. But what I had seen in that quick snarling grin had been a real shock. The man had no teeth at all, not even dentures.

I didn’t take much part in the conversation for a while after that. I was doing my best to understand what it would be like to have no teeth. Hannes wasn’t much older than I was. Under forty, anyway. By no means old enough to be the toothless grandpa he had turned into, and by no means as old as the oldest old fart I’d ever had the actual experience of living with. That particular old fart was my own real grandpa, briefly occupying our back room before Ma had managed to shift him off onto the care of Aunt Marie, who had a bigger house and a bigger yard and a hot, dry attic where he could cure the backyard-grown tobacco no one would give him money to buy.

That was when I figured out that you didn’t have to have all that many calendar years behind you in order to turn into Grandpa. Or worse.

Continue reading ‘Hannes Bok, Part 2: The story with the unhappy ending’ »