The Way the Future Blogs

Fantasy Commentator
Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles Memorial Issue, Special Double Issue, Nos. 59 & 60.
 

When John W. Campbell, Jr., washed out of MIT by failing to pass their German course, he didn’t stay in Massachusetts. Instead, he returned to his mother’s home in Orange, New Jersey. He had left some close friendships behind, though, and one of the first things he did after relocating was to write a letter to his Massachusetts friend Robert D. Swisher, a pharmaceutical chemist working for the Monsanto Corporation.

That was the first letter of many, and they were all carefully preserved, misspellings, factual errors and all, by Swisher, and then by his widow. Now they are published, under the guise of an article in the late A. Langley Searles’ fanzine Fantasy Commentator, published as a memorial tribute by Searles’ widow, Alice Becker, M.D. The issue contains nothing but the letters. Its length — 156 large pages — is within accepted book publishing standards. So let’s call it a book, the two of us, all right?

This book, then, contains all the letters John wrote to Swisher over a period of more than twenty years, from John’s early attempts at writing science-fiction stories of his own through his triumphal masterminding of the world’s best science-fiction magazine and his intoxication with L. Ron Hubbard’s invention of Dianetics, followed by his final rejection of that cause — though not of the validity of many of its principles which, called by one name or another, he apparently subscribed to until his death.

As a document bearing on these matters, this is not merely a good, readable book. It is an invaluable one, and the credit for the clarity and completeness that make it such a pleasure to read belongs in no small part to its editor, the late Sam Moskowitz. The source material Sam had to work with was a clutch of actual letters, many of them handwritten and some not easy to decipher, and a considerable fraction of them comprising little more than technical descriptions of the cameras, lenses and films for which the two correspondents shared an affection. All of that photography material Moskowitz skillfully redacted away. What remains is the next best thing to a detailed personal diary of the life of a stand-out major figure in the field of science fiction.

Continue reading ‘The Campbell Letters’ »

This isn’t exactly political, it’s more about morality. Well, political morality, specifically our policies on immigration.

What I would like to add to the discussion is a poem, or anyway part of a poem, by a woman named Emma Lazarus. It was written for a dedication ceremony to the Statue of Liberty, and a copy of it is engraved on a plaque at the Statue’s base. Its title is “The New Colossus” and the part of it that I think relevant goes like this:

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

If that isn’t our policy, what sort of hypocrites are we?

Clearly there are other factors — poverty for one, proximity to an ocean with the potential for a tsunami and imperiled nuclear plants for another, both as in Japan 2011. But political corruption —and thus inadequate requirements for inspection and construction of buildings — is a factor that people can do something about.

 

That least likely of billionaires, Warren Buffett, wrote in an Op Ed piece in the New York Times, “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”

And then he added that of his many super-rich friends most wouldn’t mind paying something more in taxes and he had never seen any of them shy away from investments because of the tax rates on potential profits.

“People invest to make money,” he said. “Potential taxes have never scared them off.”

Pres. George W. Bush on vacation in a scene from Lions Gate Films' Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).

Don’t the right-wing politicians ever run out of just plain lies? Like the other day Donald Trump babbled that President Obama “takes more vacations than any human being I’ve ever seen,” specifically including former President George W. Bush. But the fact is that at the same point in their presidencies Obama has taken all or parts of 38 vacation days, while Bush had taken 102 days, while days spent at Camp David for Obama were 32, and for Bush 123.

You might think a responsible human being would at least apologize for the fibs. Well, probably a responsible human being would.

 

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.