The Way the Future Blogs

    Frank Herbert, 1978.
 

As promised, we made Hawai’i our destination on our usual get-somewhere-out-of-the-cold trip one winter. Frank and Beverly Herbert had built themselves a house in the district of Hana, on the island of Maui, an area renowned for its beauty even in the state where there is very little that isn’t. Betty Anne and I had talked about taking a look at Hana before, but never as a serious plan, because Hana wasn’t easy to get to. You had to drive for a long time on a bad road through tropical near jungle to get there and that didn’t sound like much fun. But now a brand-new puddle-jumper airline that linked Hana to the capital of the island had just become available. It required no use of that unlovable road, and anyway, that’s where the Herberts were.

So we booked the flight and a hotel. Hana was indeed a particularly interesting area to see, home to a few movie stars and once a beloved retreat for, among others, Charles Lindbergh. When Lindy’s flying days were over, he spent the end of his life in Hana, and his family elected to bury him here. The area also has a waterfall nearly a hundred feet high and all sorts of beautiful growing things. Betty Anne saw most of them with Bev as a guide, while I mostly stayed near the hotel pool or my typewriter.

Of course, we were staying in the hotel, and not with the Herberts. We had known in advance that that wasn’t possible. Their multi-roomed house, though it had six baths, had only one bedroom, and that was their own. (They didn’t like the idea of houseguests.) At dinner, Frank conceded that they were beginning to believe that it might be nice to be able to put friends up now and then, after all, as long as they weren’t in the same house as the Herberts themselves. They were thinking that maybe, someday, they would put up a little guest house down the hill for that purpose

I don’t think that ever happened. Beverly’s health worsened and not long afterward she died. She and Frank had been married for nearly forty years.

 
In 1985, Betty Anne and I decided to take in the Worldcon in Australia, a continent I had never set foot on. We enjoyed it a lot, especially the sightseeing, although just as we were getting ready to leave our home, one of Ted Turner’s producers invited me to write a script for a new Turner project. It was an attractive prospect, but it meant I would have to write a treatment for the script while we traveled, and courier it back to America from somewhere along the way. But that seemed doable, and by the time we got to the con, we had had several really long flights. That sort of thing is good for my writing. I did some of my best work on airplanes, with my weird but lightweight and almost soundless Brother typewriter on my tray table.

At the con, we were happy to find that Frank had turned up there before us, in fact now equipped with a good-looking, brand-new wife to show off. Her name was Theresa, and they too had been exploring Australia as a sort of honeymoon. Frank was full of stories about the shooting of Dune, mostly in Mexico, and the two of them seemed about as happy as newlyweds are generally supposed to be. Well, with one exception. Somewhere along the trip, Frank said, he had picked up a touch of food poisoning, and he was going to have to watch his diet for a while.

That was a self-diagnosis and, sadly, it was wrong.

The next time I saw Frank was about a year later. I was at O’Hare Airport, waiting to board my flight to Seattle, where I was to take part in a brainstorming session about future small arms for the U.S. military when I heard my name called. It was Frank. He looked leaner and a bit tireder than when I’d last seen him, but his voice was strong.

That pain in the gut in Australia, he told me, hadn’t been food poisoning. It had been pancreatic cancer.

I knew what that meant. Nearly always, it meant dying quite soon. I must have looked as though that was what I was thinking, because Frank was shaking his head.

“I know that’s got a bad prognosis,” he said, “but the University of Wisconsin medical school has some new ideas about treatment, and that’s where I’ve been.”

The new ideas, he said, were pretty strenuous. Each period of therapy had to be followed by a stretch of recovery time at home. He had completed two therapy sessions and was on his way home to rest up for the third.

“Sounds like hard work,” I offered.

“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m going to beat this thing!”

I don’t know what else we talked about. Not much, I imagine, because they started boarding the flight. Our seats were not near each other. I thought of asking to change mine so I could have his company for a few more hours, but Frank already had one of his sons and one or two other men traveling with him … and, too, I didn’t want to risk tiring him out. When we reached Seattle, I looked around for him to say goodbye, but he was gone.

A few weeks later, I learned that he had died in Madison after undergoing cancer surgery.

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man

Frank Herbert

I met Frank Herbert and his wife Beverly at the home of Poul and Karen Anderson in the early 1960s, where we had all been invited for dinner. It was a great evening. There weren’t many people more fun to share a meal with than those four, especially when Karen was creating one of her original recipes (this time with Japanese black beans and I have no idea what else).

We became friendly quickly. I should mention that the Andersons’ home was in those unexpectedly precipitous hills across the Bay from San Francisco, because when it became going-home time the Herberts and I were driven back to the city by another diner, a local resident who knew every hill and curve and preferred to take them all at high speed while turned halfway around in the driver’s seat in order to have a friendly conversation with us. When we got out, the Herberts and I agreed that we had just been through a life-changing experience, and we would be lifelong buddies from then on.

Still, we managed to get together only rarely because of problems of geography, except for the occasional fortuitous occasion — for example, the day in the early ’80s, when I was in Seattle on a book tour. As I was crossing a street on my way to a TV interview, a car pulled up in front of me and a woman stuck her head out the window. “Hello, sailor,” she called. “Looking for a good time?” It was Bev, with Frank grinning over her shoulder from the steering-wheel side.

It wasn’t the best of opportunities for a lengthy chat, but I was glad to see them both looking well; Bev had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and, I knew, was facing surgery. Before the other drivers began honking, the Herberts mentioned that they were building a house in Hana on Maui, and I promised that the next time we were in Hawai’i we’d look them up.

 
Meanwhile Frank, working as a newspaperman, had started to research an article about the sand dunes of Oregon, and that changed his life. The dunes fascinated him. He never finished the article, but he began writing science-fiction stories for John Campbell’s Astounding, starting with a three-part serial about a dune planet and its inhabitants.

Herbert himself thought it might make a pretty good hardcover book but was disappointed by the responses when he tried offering it to publishers. No book publisher was interested in acquiring the hardcover rights to this rapidly expanding mass of manuscript, however, until an editor at the quite small publishing house of Chilton Books managed to stitch the several existing stories into a single huge novel. He called it Dune, and when he published the result, it became a runaway bestseller, said to be the most profitable sf book ever written.

Frank had written with real people and places in mind, though he gave them invented names for his stories, just as Cordwainer Smith had for his own stories of the imperfectly concealed Middle East. Arrakis was Frank Herbert code for Iraq, The Baron was Dick Cheney, Selusa Secundis was Afghanistan and so on. (I’m sorry to say that I don’t know all the identities for either author.)

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man, Part 2

Jack Vance, 1979.

One weekend last summer — to be exact, on the morning of 19 July, 2009 — a lot of New Yorkers got a surprise when they opened their Sunday Times Magazine. What they found was particularly pleasing to those among them who chanced to be science-fiction fans, for there in that prestigious journal was a critical — and very favorable — essay on a writer that it called “one of America’s most distinctive and underrated voices.” And the owner of that voice, it said, was none other than our own Jack Vance.

It was not only Carlo Rotella, the critic who wrote the Times piece, who thought so. He was able to quote Michael Chabon (“Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don’t get the credit they deserve. If The Last Castle or the Dragon Masters had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation.”) and Dan Simmons, who said that discovering Vance “was a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or Henry James…. He gives you glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly tuned language. If he’d been born south of the border he’d be up for a Nobel prize.”

As one of those Vance-loving sf fans myself, I read the Times piece with astonishment and pleasure, for science fiction has long had a bad press — slightly relieved in recent years by the impressive earnings of writers like Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov — from most of the country’s respectable journals. But what this piece said was not only interesting, it was precisely true. Jack Vance not only imagines wonderful things to tell us about, he embodies his visions in a special individual kind of language that is all Vance’s own.
 

I came late to Vance. Most of his early stories appeared in magazines and other places that I didn’t normally read. Friends with my best interests at heart did try to persuade me to give this Vance person a try, but I never quite got around to following their sage advice. Then Horace L. Gold began to find the editing of Galaxy too much for him to handle. I helped him as needed for a while; then he retired and the publisher asked me to take over.

I not only had read little of Vance, I had never — unusually among the sf writers of the ’50s and ’60s — happened to meet him. We had many friends in common among the writers who lived, like Vance, in the Pacific Northwest, and they didn’t fail to keep me informed of his doings. With Poul Anderson and Frank Herbert, he had for a time owned a houseboat, and when one day it sank at its moorings, Vance was the one who worked out a way to refloat it.

With his late wife, Norma, whom he had met and married when they both were still college undergraduates, Vance was a world traveler, visiting unlikely spots all over the map, and writing whole books in improbable places. He had begun writing while in the Merchant Marine in the South Pacific in World War II, and kept it up in whatever part of the world he happened to be visiting at that specific moment. Whatever the locale, Jack wrote his stories in longhand, whereafter Norma typed them up to send out..

And then one day, after Horace had retired and I had inherited the batch of stories he had bought, I was going through them and I discovered one or two I had never seen. One was by Vance, and it was called “The Moon Moth.” It was the story of an Earthman posted as a diplomatic official on a planet whose people appear in public only when wearing ornate masks and communicate not by talking but by singing.

It caught my attention. Vance was what I thought of as an ornamental writer — mannered prose, complex sentences, formal dialogue. That was not necessarily a good thing. I’m as fond of Remembrance of Things Past (or whatever they’re calling Marcel Proust’s masterwork now) as the next man, but I don’t normally find that kind of linguistic mastery in the slush pile of a science-fiction magazine. Done beautifully, that sort of thing is beautiful. Done poorly, I send it back to the writer.

This was definitely in the beautiful territory.

One of Vance’s scholars has reported that Vance was impressed by the equally ornate style of James Branch Cabell. Both Vance’s and Cabell’s styles are similarly inflated, but I don’t think they are mannered in quite the same way. No matter. “The Moon Moth” was a fine story. I scheduled it for an early issue and sought more. It took a while, but ultimately my efforts did bear fruit as I received a new Vance manuscript called The Dragon Masters.

I read it at once and instantly loved it. It concerned a planet inhabited by humans, but from time to time visited by spaceships from another planet, this one inhabited by intelligent lizard-like aliens, called dragons, who kidnap humans for the purpose of breeding them into fighting troops. When they have achieved their purpose they have an army of mutated humans in several different types, including giant warriors. The dragons use these to capture more humans for their breeding experiments. However the humans of the raided planet have managed to capture one dragon spaceship with its crew, well before this story starts, and are breeding dragon warriors in the same way that the dragons breed (formerly) human ones.

It struck me as the perfect Jack Vance story, with a handsomely imagined setting, a carefully invented plot line, embellished by his unique use of language. I got busy.
 

I called Jack Gaughan, the most inventive of our stable of artists, and asked him to come in to discuss a particularly challenging set of illustrations. The wonderful thing about Gaughan was that he understood what I was asking for a good deal faster then most illustrators, and he did not disappoint. He came through with a bunch of his best work, including a cover and interior black and whites that involved thumbnail sketches of each of the purpose-bred races each side had created out of the captured samplings of the other.

I loved it.

I wasn’t the only one who did, either. When at last that issue was on the stands the reader mail was good, and when it came time for award voting The Dragon Masters had — of course — won a Hugo (though, curiously, it was described as a short story, I have never known why) and Gaughan had won an art Hugo of his own, specifically for The Dragon Masters work (and, I believe, the only time the award was given for a specified set of illustrations rather than for general high quality.)

Sometimes being an editor is fun.
 

For me the fun quotient was diminishing around that time. I have long believed as an article of faith that no one should hold the same editorial job for more than a decade or so, because (I believe) the best work is done when it is all fresh and new and after a while the editor is just going through the motions. A few years after The Dragon Masters, I proved that point by making a serious mistake with another Jack Vance story, The Last Castle. Jack had divided the story into a number of chapters and added a clutch of scholarly, but irrelevant, comments at the beginning of each chapter. Editors are put upon this Earth for the purpose of correcting an author’s errors in such matters, and I set myself to improving Jack’s chapter headers by cutting them fifty per cent or so.

The mistake wasn’t in making that decision — those chunks of prose were excessive and seriously distracting — it was in doing the cutting myself without first asking Jack to fix it. When he saw the published version he was unhappy. When I ran into him at a meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association in Lake Tahoe a little later his first words were, “Fred, you shouldn’t have done it,” And he never sent me another story.

Actually he didn’t have many opportunities to do that. Not long afterward, I took a week off to go to a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, and when I came back to the office I found that Bob Guinn had taken advantage of my absence to sell the magazines to another publisher.

Indeed, that was his right; he owned them. But I think he suspected that if I were around when he was making that deal I might have talked him out of it, and I certainly would have tried. It wasn’t a good idea. But by then it was a fait accompli.

I took it as a reminder of my convictions about the relevance of longevity to performance in an editorial job, and actually as an opportunity to try something else for a while. (The other publisher had no idea how to run the magazines, as I had expected. They hung on for a couple of years of dwindling quality and then were folded.)
 

For a time, I lost touch with Jack Vance, as I did with many of the Galaxy contributors after that. Then I heard that things were not going as well as he deserved for him. First came the word that he was losing his vision, and then that Norma had died. Before the blindness became total, he was still managing to get some writing done by scribbling a word or two, in giant letters, on each sheet of paper and then writing the next word or two on another sheet, und so weiter.

Since then we do keep in some sort of touch by the occasional phone call, and I was happy to learn that he now has a sensitive high-tech computer system to write with. He’s too good a writer, and too good a man, to be condemned to silence.