Why this is unspeakably ironic is, twenty years ago I won science fiction’s top international honor, the Hugo Award, for a story called “Melancholy Elephants”—which argued that firm limits will one day have to be placed on the length of copyright…because our technology now gives society an elephant’s memory, and when was the last time you saw a happy-looking elephant?
Not ironic enough yet? You can read that story right now, for free, online—legitimately! It appears in my story collection By Any Other Name, and Baen Books publisher Jim Baen believes online samples are like rock videos: he figures if you like the free story, you’ll buy the paperback. Maybe he’s right.
I wish we were done with irony now. “Melancholy Elephants” was originally dedicated to Virginia Heinlein, Robert Heinlein’s widow and one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known. On Saturday, January 18, Ginny passed away in her sleep in Florida, surrounded by family and friends. She outlived Robert by fifteen years, not seventy. But she leaves several descendants—one of them three years old—and I don’t see why they should get ripped off because “information wants to be free.” We creative types are content for our information to be reasonably affordable. Whether we ourselves happen to be breathing or not, don’t begrudge us that pittance, as long as someone we loved is alive.
Silver Lining
Valmiki’s Third Reality
FIRST PRINTED DECEMBER 1997
ONE OF THE GREATEST LESSONS of my life came from a man I never met named Aubrey Menen.
In the summer of 1977 my wife attended the American Dance Festival at Duke University in North Carolina. We stayed in campus housing, cramped and sweltering. Every day Jeanne left at dawn and returned well after dark, utterly exhausted and creatively stimulated. All I had to do was survive the brutal heat. One thing that helped was Duke’s splendid—air-conditioned—library, and one day I found a wonderful book there.
It purported to be a rogue translation of the oldest known work of literature, the Ramayana. Indeed, it claimed to be the only good translation. The problem with all previous ones, the author claimed in his preface, was that they’d all been made by Brahmins—and the Ramayana is, he said, essentially a sidesplitting satire of the whole Brahmin caste. I have no idea whether any of this is true—but I bought the premise, and enjoyed the book immensely. I can’t recall many specifics—my principal recollection is of laughing so hard that sweat flew from my forehead and stained the pages—but twenty years later, I retain its final lines verbatim.
Prince Rama begins the story (this version, at least) much like Prince Siddhartha: rich, sheltered and naive. By the end, he’s been stripped of everything: wealth, friends, family and worst of all, his ideals and cherished beliefs. Broke and banjaxed, he crawls across the world to the feet of the wisest sage in the world, Valmiki. “Master,” he cries, “everything I ever believed is false; all my dreams were illusions. Is there nothing in life that is real?” And old Valmiki smiles, and speaks the sentences that changed my life:
“My son, three things in life are real. God…human stupidity…and laughter. But the first two pass our comprehension: we must do what we can with the third.”
I had the wit to copy that down in my notebook. (No: I quoted it to Jeanne that night, and she had the wit to tell me to write it down.) But the Carolina sun had parboiled my brain, and I failed to note the author’s name. By the time I got back home to Canada, it was gone from my head, and it took me years to find another copy of his masterpiece. (I presume it was his masterpiece.) His/Valmiki’s words, however, just kept burrowing deeper and deeper into me in the meantime. I’d been a writer for four years, then, a published novelist for less than a year. I knew writing was what I wanted to do with my life…but those words helped me understand what kind of writer I wanted to be. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed the most pressing problem on Starship Earth is rotten morale, and the best thing I could do about it was to try and make people giggle. Twenty-three books later, I’m still trying…because it only hurts when I don’t laugh.
I once had surgery to correct a tendency of my lungs to collapse. It worked…and nearly killed me. I learned only recently that the procedure is considered one of the most painful a human can survive. When they sent me to my parents’ house to recuperate and weaned me off narcotics, I spent a ghastly ten straight days awake, in so much agony Seconal couldn’t touch me. Every time I started to drift, I would shift position slightly—wiggle a toe, say—and shocking pain would wake me. I began praying for the strength to kill myself. Finally, a movie I’d never seen before came on TV: The Marx Brothers Go West. It’s probably the worst movie they ever made, and it was torture to laugh, and I laughed so hard I exhausted myself, and my eyes closed…
I awoke to total darkness, bright pain and insoluble dilemma. Somehow I’d managed to fall halfway out of bed. The only thing holding me up was the bad arm, the one too weak to lift a cup. I bleated in terror.
From the next room I heard, “Huh? Weebis? Snorkfarble.” And then, in succession, thump!…bump!…CRASH tinkle tinkle tinkle…“Baggerin’ jagfabble!”…clang! clang!…CRASH scrape!…“Holomcummen’!”…thump! CRASH! scrape…thump! CRASH! scrape…thump! CRASH! scrape…and the door flew open and in lurched Mom, in her pajamas, eyes glued shut, one foot inextricably wedged in a wastebasket, mostly asleep but coming to rescue her injured child. She stopped, pried one eye open, discovered she had come within an inch of impaling it on the TV antenna, refocused past it, our eyes met…
…and we both laughed so hard we fell to the floor, and crawled to each other’s arms, still laughing, and it was at that moment—not when I woke from the twenty-six hours of healing sleep that ensued—that I passed over the hump and decided to live. Maybe that’s why Valmiki’s words resonated for me.
God and human stupidity I can’t deal with. It’s laughter, if anything, that will get me through the Crazy Years.
The Ones with a Zero on the End
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 1998
WELL, I TURNED FIFTY. According to Theodore Sturgeon, I’ve entered “the autumn of middle age.” By the standards my cohort proclaimed in the sixties, I have been untrustworthy for twenty years now. If it is true that life begins at forty, I should be entering puberty soon.
Actually, I spent several days turning fifty. We had the party the Saturday before. My wife Jeanne and I had recently moved from Vancouver out to the Islands, and I couldn’t ask my friends to ferry out on a weekday for a party. The last ferry back to the mainland pulls out at 9:30 P.M.: by the time they could get here from work, it’d be time to turn around and go home again.
So we celebrated my birthday a few days early, maybe fifteen of us, all day Saturday, and we had us a good time. Steve Fahnestalk and Tam Gordy and I played and sang damn near every song the Beatles ever wrote, played until the fingertips of our left hands threatened to split, sang until our upper registers were shot and quit only when our faces hurt from grinning at the beauty of the harmonies and the memories. Everyone gorged on the gourmet feast Jeanne and our friend Anya Coveney-Hughes had prepared. The coffee flowed like water. The jokes were toxic. I got nice presents, including a framed blowup of the Revolver album cover with myself digitally inserted as the Fifth Beatle, the memorial John Lennon boxed set I’d been hoping for (the last of the wine!) and another four CD box, an anthology from Verve called Jazz Singing which is so supernaturally wonderful that it is, all by itself, almost enough to be worth fifty years of sweat and aggravation. I got several birthday cards, all hilarious.
And we all talked of many things together: some serious, some funny and some both. For instance, a majority of us are Boomers (what an ironic name for the generation that wanted to stop the bombing!), and so we spoke of the recently-acquired syndrome Baba Ram Dass calls the “organ recital”: the tendency, when meeting a friend you haven’t seen in a while, to open the conversation by listing the organs that have begun to betray you since last you spoke. Funny and serious both, see? For awhile we lis
ted Geniuses Who Got Screwed: people whose inventions created the world we live in, and whose names almost nobody knows. Nikola Tesla, of course, the most shafted man in the last century, who gave us practical electricity, the electric motor, the transformer, the condenser, radio, the vibrator and (if you want to talk about things fundamental to our culture) the remote control…and died broke and is forgotten. Elisha Gray, who patented the telephone the same day as Alexander Graham Bell…unfortunately, two hours later. Many others more recent, too—just about all the pioneers of the Internet. (Do you know the name of the man who invented e-mail? Want to guess how much money he got for it?)
Perhaps I sang so long and talked so much because I did not want to leave an opening in which someone could ask me, “So…how does it feel to be fifty?”
As it happened, nobody did.
A few days later, on my actual birthday, Jeanne did ask me, late in the evening as we were cleaning up the kitchen together. “So…how does it feel to be fifty?”
I had been pondering the question for weeks, in odd moments. I’d spent most of the party wondering what I would say if asked. I’d been thinking about it ever since, and had devoted at least a solid hour to the question that morning in bed, before arising. When my wife asks me about my feelings, I generally think about twice as hard and fast as usual. And I put down the dishtowel and opened my mouth, and after a long while answered honestly, “Beats me, love.” I had, and have, no answer.
It doesn’t feel like anything. Really.
I don’t think I’m in denial. I know that I have, like many men and some women, a tendency not to notice my own feelings going by until enough of the sludgier ones clog up in the pipes to cause some kind of bursting or spillage. But I know a lot of my own tricks by now, and I’ve employed my little interior flashlight in all the corners of my skull. And I don’t feel one bit older than I did last year—nowhere near as old as I did back in the eighties, when I went through a horrid eighteen months of clinical depression. My fear of onrushing death has not increased by any detectible increment. I may not be the man I was…but hell, I was always more man than I needed to be, anyway. I’m not looking forward to retirement because writers can’t retire. I’ve lost a few notes off my high register…but I’ve gained a few on the low end. Just tune the guitar down a step or two, and I won’t even have to relearn everything in new keys.
Over the last few years I’ve seen friends, relations and colleagues experience their fiftieth birthday as a major trauma. Some got weeping/laughing drunk or hopelessly stoned. Some quit their jobs, or bought a motorcycle, or traded in their spouses and kids. Why am I, after much self-scrutiny, apparently unaffected by the dread occurrence of a zero on my odometer?
I began this essay with the hope that I might come up with an answer by the time I got to the end—and I think maybe it just now came to me. About three sentences ago. The answer is: dumb luck. I am fortunate enough to love my job, and to love my wife and daughter, with all my heart. I always have, and I believe I always will. I still think I can keep all three, if I work hard enough and am lucky. So nothing important has changed.
Bring on those Crazy Years—even the one with the zero at its end!
Precious Are the Eggs of the Sturgeon
FIRST PRINTED MAY 1999
I WAS GUEST OF HONOR at the science fiction convention DemiCon X back in 1999, and while talking with a knowledgeable twenty-something fan at a party, I mentioned the late Theodore Sturgeon. And the young man said, “Who’s that?”
It was as if a contemporary baseball fan had failed to recognize the name Willie Mays, or a hockey fan had said, “Rocket who?” Only two decades after Ted’s death, a reputation that should stand for two millennia is—somehow—apparently already fading. I cannot permit this. Just as Robert Heinlein used adventure to teach me the love of reason and science, my friend and mentor Ted Sturgeon used words, the terrifying beauty that could be found in their thoughtful esthetic arrangement, to teach me the love of…well, of love.
He sometimes wrote entire chapters in iambic pentameter, for the sheer hell of it, and reviewed sf for the New York Times. When I was sixteen—barely in time—I read a story of his called “A Saucer of Loneliness,” and decided not to kill myself after all. Years later I read another Sturgeon story called “Suicide” aloud to a friend of mine who had made five increasingly serious attempts at self-destruction, and she has not made a sixth.
It’s customarily said that all Ted’s work was about love. He himself didn’t care for that description. He accepted Heinlein’s limiting definition of love: “the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another become essential to your own.” Ted wrote about that state, but about much more as well. If he must be distilled to some essential juice, it might be least inaccurate to say he wrote about need. About all the different kinds of human need, and the incredible things they drive us to, about new kinds of need that might come in the future and what they might make us do; about unsuspected needs we might have now and what previously inexplicable things about human nature they might account for. (Consider his famous Star Trek script, “Amok Time”: the one in which poor Spock goes into heat.)
Or maybe what Ted wrote about was goodness, human goodness, and how often it turns out to derive, paradoxically, from need. I envision a mental equation I think he would have approved: Need + Fear = Evil, but Need + Courage = Goodness.
One of his finest stories is actually called “Need.” It introduces one of the most bizarre and memorable characters in literature, a nasty saint named Gorwing. How can a surly rat-faced runt with a streak of cruelty, a broad stripe of selfishness and a total absence of compassion be a saint? Because of an unusual form of telepathy. Gorwing perceives other people’s need, any sort of need, as an earsplitting roar inside his own skull—and does whatever is necessary to make the racket stop. Other people’s pain hurts him…so for utterly selfish reasons, he does things so saintly that even those few who understand why love him and jump to do his bidding. Whenever possible Gorwing charges for his services, as high as the traffic will bear—because so many needs are expensive to fix, and so many folks can’t pay—and he always drops people the moment their needs are met. Marvelous!
Ted’s own need, I think, was to persuade the post-Hiroshima generation that there is a tomorrow: that there is a point to existence, a reason to keep struggling, that all of this comic confusion is progressing toward something—and although he believed in his heart that this something was literally unimaginable, he never stopped trying to imagine it, and with mere words to make it seem irresistibly beautiful. He persisted in trying to create a new code of survival for post-Theistic man, “a code,” as he said, “which requires belief rather than obedience. It is called ethos…what it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity, a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leaped when he saw a star.”
Ted’s classic “The Man Who Lost The Sea” concerns a man who, as a boy, nearly died learning the lesson that you always spearfish with a buddy, even if you wanted the fish all to yourself—that “I” don’t shoot a fish, “we” do. Now the sea-sound he seems to hear is really earphone-static, caused by the spilled uranium which is killing him:
The sick man looks at the line of his own footprints, which testify that he is alone, and at the wreckage below, which states that there is no way back, and at the white east and the mottled west and the paling flecklike satellite above. Surf sounds in his ears. He hears his pumps. He hears what is left of his breathing. The cold clamps down and down and folds him round past measuring, past all limit.
Then he speaks, cries out: then with joy he takes his triumph at the other side of death, as one takes a great fish, as one completes a skilled and mighty task, rebalances at the end of some great daring leap; and as he used to say
“We shot a fish,” he uses no “I”:
“God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”
Not all Ted’s influence on my own writing was benign. He was a terrifying punster: the man who said H.G. Wells had “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” He and I were once forcibly ejected from a Halifax restaurant called Chicken Tandoor for persistent punning.
“There is really only one sense,” he told me once, “and that is touch; all the other senses are just other ways of touching.” North Atlantic Books is currently partway through a ten-volume hardcover reprinting of all of his short stories, edited by Paul Williams; I urge you to seek them out, and his novels More Than Human, The Cosmic Rape, The Dreaming Jewels and Godbody (an astonishing and audacious contemporary rewrite of the New Testament), and let him touch your eyes and heart and mind with his extraordinary fingers.
Thanks for the Music
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2000
I READ AN ARTICLE IN THE NEWSPAPER a couple years back that had my jaw dragging on the floor. It was a very little item, on page B-14, about extremely premature newborns. So premature they haven’t had time to develop the sucking reflex. Such infants are literally too dumb to eat. What caused me to spend the rest of that day staring at the wall was the statement that doctors have lately learned to coax such preemies into sucking…by rewarding them.
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