by Gene Wolfe
For that word eldritch, with which Poe’s great imitator made such play, means only “from elfriche, from fairyland, from the kingdom (riche) of the elves.” And when the nameless narrator of “Ulalume—A Ballad” (who was surely Mr., or perhaps even Pvt., Edgar Poe, for despite all that has been said and printed, his stepfather’s name, Allan, was never really a part of Poe’s own name or of his spirit) roamed with Psyche “hard by the dim lake of Auber, in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” it was on Elfriche, surely, that they walked, Elfriche that “sinfully scintillant planet from the Hell of the planetary souls.”
And it seems to me that Mr. Greenland mistakes, as most of us are apt to, the warp and woof of human life.
Some years ago, psychologists (that is to say, those scientists who propose to analyze Mr. Poe’s private companion) uncovered a process they call normalization. It is anything but normal—except in the sense that all of us practice it—and if it were not too late to change the nomenclature, I would suggest that it be called abnormalization instead. Let me give you an example.
When a psychologist takes a group of cab drivers, men and women who have driven around the city in which they work all day, every working day, for years, and asks them to draw a map of downtown, he finds that right-angle intersections are shown on all the maps as right angles. But he also finds that some streets that do not make right-angle intersections are shown crossing at right angles on some of the drivers’ maps. And he finds that those maps that do not show those intersections as right-angled show them making angles nearer to right angles than they actually do.
That type of error is common—universal, in fact—but the street plans that result from it are not normal: it would probably be difficult to find a city anywhere on Earth in which all the streets intersect at or near right angles. (Manhattan comes close, but its best-known street, Broadway, is diagonal for about half its length.) In just the same way, it would be hard to find a house that did not preserve, most often in out-of-the-way places, parts of the lives of its inhabitants, and often precisely those parts which they believe they have put furthest behind them. In Peace Alden Weer (who perhaps bears a closer resemblance to me than reviewers are likely to realize or critics to permit), goes looking for his boyhood knife: “Just such a knife, I feel sure, as my grandfather would have selected for himself, a man’s knife, though it bore the words ‘Boy Scout’ on that plate let into its side. Closed, it was longer than my hand, and in addition to a huge spear blade that, once opened (I could not open it without his assistance), was held so by a leaf spring of brass, it had a corkscrew and a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a smaller blade which my grandfather warned me was very sharp, a leather punch, and an instrument for removing pebbles from the hooves of horses—this last, I think, is called a stonehook. Unlike the blades of boys’ knives to come, all these were of high-carbon steel and rusted if they were not kept oiled; but they would take and hold a good edge, as the bright and showy blades will not.”
A few nights ago, I went looking for a pocket knife myself. It was not a scout knife, as it happens, nor had it been given me by my maternal grandfather (though he had been successively a merchant seaman, a soldier, a circus performer, and a ship builder who raised fighting cocks and kept a pit dog, and was in short a man quite capable of giving a small boy a revolver, much less a pocket knife), but the paratroop knife once given me by Nick, my father’s old partner, who had been a paratrooper—in fact, the first sergeant in a paratroop company—during the Second World War.
I have probably thrown it away; but there are times, or perhaps I should say I have a mood, in which I think I have not thrown it away. When that mood strikes, I go and look for it (or any of several other things) in a place where I have not looked before, if I can think of one. If I cannot, I look for it (or for the object of my current obsession, whatever it may be) in some place where I have looked before, on the grounds that I may misremember having looked, or that I may have overlooked what I seek. As far as I can remember, I have never found the object of my search. But I have found a hundred other things, all of them interesting and some of them valuable. On that evening I mentioned, when I went looking for Nick’s old paratroop knife, I found my mother’s vanity set, pieces I remember displayed on her Art Deco vanity in my parents’ sweltering bedroom in Houston, Texas. Small parts of these pieces are (or at least appear to be) bronze, and are really quite pretty. The rest, except for the blade of her nail file and the glass in her mirror, are celluloid, and some suffer from the kind of decay (not peculiar, I think, to celluloid) said to be caused by air pollution. Eventually someone will throw them away; but it will not be me.
Just a moment ago, inspired by this essay (which you thought would inspire no one) I went looking again. I found the pipes I smoked back when I smoked pipes. I learned to smoke in the days when Nick and I shared a bedroom, by “borrowing” one of his and some of his tobacco when he and my father were at work; and so you see I’m getting a little closer to his knife, though I may never reach it.
I think that all of us must live like this, like Weer in Peace whether we are willing to admit it ourselves or not. Those pipes have followed my wife and me through several moves. The pieces of her vanity set followed my mother from Houston to Logan when my father retired and returned, still vigorous, to the sleepy farm town, the brick and tile-mill town, where he had gone to high school, the town where we lived for a time during the depressed thirties when I was small, the town that is the principal model for Cassionsville, where Alden Dennis Weer lives in Peace. And then they followed her, when my father was dead, from the house they had shared in Logan to her sister’s house in Virginia Beach. My grandfather beat his children, who were variously nine, or eleven, or thirteen, as one was born or another died of scarlet fever or malaria; but he never beat Mary, later to be my mother, who was his favorite and thus unpopular with the rest. But she, when she returned from buggy rides and church socials, left the chocolates her beaux had brought her at the bedside of her sleeping little sister; fifty years later Emily still remembered.
When Emily died, I brought my mother and her belongings back to Logan, where she had made friends when she and my father lived there, and where she wanted to spend the remainder of her life. And when she was gone, we brought her belongings—or rather, some of her belongings—to Barrington, where I wrote this essay.
Normalization tells us that such things do not happen, that the past vanishes each night when we sleep, that reality is simple and straightforward. Like city maps, history, which is the map of our journey, says otherwise; says reality is sane instead. Christopher Columbus went looking for the world as sphere, which had been lost with Greece and Rome, and found the New World. Captain Cook sought the path of Venus across the sun and found Terra Australis, the fabled Southern Land of the Renaissance geographers. More discoveries than we are willing to admit have been made by dreamers searching for the Fountain of Youth, El Dorado the Man of Gold, and the Garden of Eden. For as psychologists have also discovered, those who do not dream are not sane.
Someday human beings will land on Mars. If they are, as I hope, of the English Reading Peoples, some will have come, though they may not admit it to the rest, to walk beside the canals of the haunted, sinfully scintillating Mars of The Martian Chronicles. They will have been sent by politicians who, though they would never admit it to the news media, hope before the end to see photographs of their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren on the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom. And they will be applauded by journalists who will never admit to the public that they are cheering in part for Han Solo and Northwest Smith.
We go too in spirit; for we are gathered here in Melbourne, readers and writers, artists and editors, fans all, to celebrate the forging of the dreams that beckon them, having nothing on Earth better to do.
Algis Budrys I
(1984)
Like Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, he is ours by courtesy of Communism. I have been told that his real name (which is beyond t
he spelling, much less the pronunciation, of most of us, and certainly beyond mine) means something like John Sentry, a pseudonym he has in fact employed. A sentry he is, if the brave who watched the stockade, the alien walls of the invader, may be called a sentry.
A warrior he is by any definition. He understands more of the psychology of the man who rights—not the man who dies, the man who fights—than any other writer I know. Where he has learned it, I cannot say; only that he looks like a big, not very good tempered, yellow-brown bear, and that he writes as though he has spent more than a little time in the bear pit.
Every age and every genre produces a few writers too good for them, authors who pour oceans into their wine cups or summon Sigurd and Fafnir to entertain their nurseries. Budrys is one of these. He is, in the best sense, too serious a writer for science fiction.
Who? (1958) is the book that made him famous, at least within the SF community. It is perhaps as fine a study of dehumanization and alienation as science fiction will ever produce. A brilliant American scientist is torn by a laboratory explosion and repaired with what we would now call “bionic” parts by the Soviets. He is returned to the U.S.—but the U.S. cannot be sure of that; so much of him is gone that what remains cannot be identified.
All this is simple enough, if you like. It is even—if you like—a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s story of the Tin Woodman, who when he had sliced his “meat” humanity completely away could no longer recall his true name (which was Nick Chopper). The difference lies in intent, and the treatments that result from it. Baum was manufacturing a paradox to amuse children, one not really much different from the rhyme about the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat who ate each other up. Budrys is intensely concerned with the effect of technology—and the tensions of the Cold War—on our humanity. He asks whether the Soviets were really doing the West a favor when they restored Martino, since he cannot be identified and thus cannot be of use. Can they do the West a good office, when all they do must be suspect? Has Martino actually been restored at all, when his formal identity has not been—and now cannot be—restored? SF offers few figures of the symbolic intensity of this faceless, maimed scientist, the man who could prove ten thousand things, if only he could prove who he is.
Budrys’s writing falls into two distinct periods, the first ranging from 1952 to the middle sixties, the second from the middle seventies to the present. The best work of his earlier period is surely Rogue Moon (1960), which he wished to call The Death Machine, a vastly better title (though that assertion cannot be substantiated without spoiling the story). The change in title says something, surely, about the pressures that kept one of SF’s most brilliant novelists silent for a decade.
In Rogue Moon, a “matter transmitter” has been invented in a near future in which rocketry is still primitive; and an unmanned probe has managed to drop a transmitting and receiving station on the far side of the moon. The first explorers to go through the transmitter discover an alien construct millions of years old, a thing compounded of building, machine, and hallucination. It soon kills everyone who ventures inside.
This alien construct may well be the biggest and best red herring in all SF, because it is not what Rogue Moon is really about. It is about Hawks, the brilliant, compassionate, iron-souled scientist who has developed the “matter transmitter” and is determined to have the construct analyzed, and Barker, the death-obsessed Saturday-afternoon hero he gets to do the exploring—through a score of deaths. Like Who?, it is about the nature of identity. It is also about the nature of life, about what it means to live and have lived. If there exists an actor of forty or so capable of playing Hawks’s last scene(s), Rogue Moon could be turned into a motion picture at once as fine as 2001 and as frightening as Alien. All that would be required would be the imagination to shift the locale from our moon to a planet of another sun, a good director, that actor, and perhaps Budrys himself to write the script.
When a writer of Budrys’s caliber is silent for as long as Budrys was silent, silenced not by the knouts and jails of totalitarian authority but by his own frustrations, his readers are entitled to expect him to be a different and an even better writer if he chooses to write again. Budrys’s justification is Michaelmas (1977), his best novel to date and the book that has brought him considerable recognition outside SF.
If Rogue Moon was cinematic, Michaelmas is bibliomatic—a story that can be told well only in a book, the kind of story that will justify the existence of printed fiction despite any quantity of electronic progress. We Americans are apt to find a certain glamour in kings and queens, princes and princesses—an amiable weakness. We are sometimes liable even to find an attraction in tyrants of one sort or another, in Napoleon, Caesar, and even Stalin—though we should know much better. But numbed by a parade of crooks and nonentities, we seem to have forgotten the romance of a President, of the good citizen elevated by his own efforts and the admiration of his fellows to preeminence in the state, the romance our great-grandfathers sensed so strongly in the embodiment of the Republic. Budrys, a Lithuanian refugee and the son of refugees, has not.
G. K. Chesterton (that neglected sage) once said that a sword was the most glorious object in the world, but that a pocketknife was more glorious than a sword, because it was a secret sword. Laurent Michaelmas is a secret President, the secret President of the earth. In the hands of any other writer, he would almost certainly be a tyrant, and in the hands of most, an insane tyrant. In Budrys’s, as he struggles with human treachery and an alien of awesome power, he remains an eminently sane and decent man, as lonely and sad as our society’s sane and decent men must always be. In flatly and persuasively denying the inevitable corruption of power, Michaelmas may well be the most optimistic book of the latter twentieth century. It is certainly one of the best, as Budrys himself is one of its best—and least characteristic—storytellers.
Note: An earlier version, substantially edited without my consent, appeared in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers.
Algis Budrys II
Look in Patti Perret’s Faces of Science Fiction, and you’ll find “Algis Budrys,” though Budrys’s page is not numbered. He stands before a laboratory bench, looking toward the camera, wearing jeans, a skiing sweater, and the Mona Lisa smile that bluffed John W. Campbell with a pair of sevens. Before him, in a rectangular pan, squats a deadly Venusian fang-frog. He is about to do something to this frog—dissect it, make friends with it, or perhaps both. Overhead dangle parts looted from robots, cyborgs, and self-propelled killer mainframes. Some are still moving, though faintly and weakly. Who is this mysterious, self-contained Lithuanian whose friends call him “A.J.,” though A and J may not be his true initials?
Let me put it another way. In two and three-quarters years, a lenticular N-universe battlecruiser will land in the frost-locked swamps of southern Wisconsin. By night it will select a single individual, and with him (not her, see below) it will return to the galactic core; by this one man all Terrans are to be judged, provisionally at least.
I have arranged that this man shall be Algis Budrys (see?). He should get us at least a 2Gc + rating, entitling us to fifteen Stellar Counselors and our own horde in the Patrol.
Besides, it’s about the only thing he’s failed to do already. He’s given us the classic novels Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas (my own favorite), and short stories like “Silent Brother.” He’s the only presently productive reviewer who can be compared to Damon Knight and “William Atheling, Jr.” (James Blish) without a smile. (A collection of his Galaxy reviews is on the press; get your dad to tell you about Galaxy. What about his F&SF reviews, for gosh sakes?) He’s Toastmaster at this year’s DeepSouthCon, the most outspoken critic on Terra of science fiction “studies” by unqualified academics, and my friend.
And guess who edited Writers of the Future, surely the biggest and best collection of short stories by new talents ever published? Pretty good for a guy who says he spends most evenings singing in bars. Now get him to tell you abou
t the time he dropped the International Harvester flag in full view of the marshaled IH battalions. (The rest is history.) Or the giant pickle in the Daley Plaza. Or the Lake Michigan Sea Serpent. Buy him a glass of mineral water and get him to tell you his real name and explain the “Budrys Test.”
The Outline of Sanity
A BIOGRAPHY OF G. K. CHESTERTON.
By Alzina Stone Dale
Eerdmans. 354 pp. No price
(1982)
No writer could be less in fashion than Chesterton now. He was a romantic, and we are cynics; fat, and we run to slenderness; an advocate of the rights of small nations, and we are giving up on Poland even as we begin to wish we had not given up Vietnam.
In short, he is precisely the sort we need. If it is true that a great man is one who never reminds us of someone else, Chesterton was as great a man as his hero, Samuel Johnson. Like Johnson, he was greater, by virtue of what he said and what he believed, than any book he ever wrote—this though The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday are classics of fantasy, though in Father Brown he gave us one of the finest of fictional detectives (as he himself was the model for John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell), that The Everlasting Man is as good a piece of Christian apologetics as has ever seen print, and that hundreds of his newspaper columns can still hold our interest across a gap of sixty years or more. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the chief advantage Dr. Johnson had in respect to Mr. Chesterton was Mr. Boswell.
It is an advantage Alzina Stone Dale has not sought to neutralize in The Outline of Sanity (a title Chesterton used for a book of his own). In Johnson’s famous phrase, she has “turned over half a library to make one book,” and every page of it is dotted with references. Yet this book, though it tells us so much about Chesterton that we did not know and are happy to know, leaves us more certain that he is dead than of anything else about him. Dead, he has become a paper chase for the author, and the more reverently she follows his trail, the more we are liable to feel that the late lamented jolly journalist passed away in the 1880s (which she defines, without saying why, as the beginning of the “modern world”). In other words, very shortly after the actual Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born.