by Gene Wolfe
I will not trouble you here with thrilling accounts of supernatural black dogs, of which there are a great many. The point I want to make is that these creatures of folklore were originally creatures of myth, and of classical Greek myth at that.
Which brings me to a book I cannot recommend too highly, John Cuthbert Lawson’s Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion. Lawson was the first English-speaking folklorist to learn Greek and travel around modern Greece collecting stories and beliefs. This was from 1898 to 1900. His book, now considered a classic by folklorists, is often enlivened by unconscious humor. Lawson was very much a low-church Victorian Englishman, who considered a fisherman’s praying to St. Nicholas not only exotic but practically satanic. Now picture him, mounted upon a mule, picking his way along a mountain trail in the Peloponnese. “More than once,” he says, “I have been in villages where certain Nereids were known by sight to several persons (so at least they averred); and there was a wonderful agreement among the witnesses in the description of their appearance and dress. I myself once had a Nereid pointed out to me by my guide, and there certainly was the semblance of a female figure draped in white and tall beyond human stature flitting in the dusk between the gnarled and twisted boles of old olive-yard. What the apparition was, I had no leisure to investigate; for my guide …” Et cetera. “But had I inherited, as he, a belief in Nereids …”
There we have the whole spectrum: myth surviving as folklore, perceived as experience, and recounted as fantasy by an eyewitness.
Some years ago, I wrote an essay titled “Among the Pirates of Florida.” I doubt that any of you have read it, and since this entire talk has been a tissue of quotations, and the essay says what I want said now as well as I have ever been able to express it, I would like to read you an updated and abbreviated version.
I am quite convinced that dinosaurs still roam the earth. An acquaintance of mine (Roy Mackle) has spent a good part of his life looking for them. Of course he has different and better reasons: tracks, and stories told by pygmies, serious stuff like that. My own belief is founded more philosophically. Fundamentally, I might say that I have observed that practically everything that’s supposed to be extinct is still with us, and sometimes too much with us. I think perhaps this was brought to my attention first by a certain improbable ship.
Some of you may be aware that here among these United States we have an awful little place called New Jersey. It is—or rather used to be—the custom of our Navy to name battleships after states, and at a critical moment in World War II, when names for battleships had gone wherever it is that chocolate goes in wartime, the Navy had this grand and really quite fast battleship, and—well you get the idea.
The battleship New Jersey first came to my attention when President Reagan ordered it to the coast of Nicaragua. I saw him on TV, with people asking him why, and he said he just felt like it. I understood him perfectly, because I often feel the same way myself. Only I can’t order around a battleship.
The part I didn’t understand was how he had gotten a battleship in the first place. I was a small boy during the Second World War, and I listened to the news with a small boy’s impressionability and naive belief. And one of the things I recall quite clearly from all those broadcasts (my father always listened because he thought that sooner or later they might want him to help, though they never did) was an announcer announcing the Demise of the Battleship—I believe it was after the Battle of Jutland.
My first thought was that President Reagan had sent the state of New Jersey to Nicaragua. I still think this a good idea; it would serve them both right. My second thought was that a party of Ph.D.s, very thin men with glasses and fluffy white beards as I envisioned them, had been trolling at great depths in the Mozambique Channel, and had brought up a living battleship, still luffing and showing its teeth. I visualized them standing alongside it—a battleship is, after all, a great big sort of thing—and pointing it out to one another. Professor Smith would no doubt declare that it wasn’t a real battleship at all, but some sort of vessel contemporary with the last battleships. Professor Jones would give it as his considered opinion that it was a precursor of the aircraft carrier—not actually an aircraft carrier to be sure, but a form in the direct line that eventually produced aircraft carriers, possibly a ferry or one of the larger elves. Professor Robinson would triumphantly declare that it was a battleship, or at least a battle cruiser.
I was on the point of writing a book about all this when I made the mistake of consulting a friend who is knowledgeable in naval matters. He told me that the New Jersey had been put away in a cedar chest after World War II, then taken out for the Korean War, hung on the line for a bit, and found to be as good as new, practically. When it was discovered that China was not a naval power (I hope only after quite a bit of sailing around and singing “Anchors Aweigh,” a song I rather favor myself) the battleship was extinguished once more.
But now here she was again, steaming up and down the Banana Coast and fully alert for Chinese warships. It just goes to show you.
Which brings me to Florida, which I visited every year for three or four of them to attend this conference, and so feel that I know fairly well.
Perhaps at some point in your reading, you have come across the phrase “he was in an odd state.” It describes all of us perfectly. Basically, Florida is a sandspit extended from Georgia, with its lower end in South America. You know you’re in Florida when the bilingual signs are in Spanish and Cuban, and when you pass the middle (San Disney) one of the men who tries to kill Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre puts a knife to your throat and says, “You die, gringo dog!”
Boca Raton means “the rat’s mouth.” Now do you understand?
About the last thing you learn about Florida is that it is full of pirates.
No, let me correct that. It is not full of pirates. It is surrounded by pirates who never land. At least, the resident Floridians of the small English-speaking community assure you that they never land.
It seems a pity, because as a boy I was very fond of pirates. I had the advantage of growing up in Houston, Texas, very close to Galveston. Here in Florida you may not be aware of it, but Galveston Island was one of the last pirate strongholds. What happened was that after the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson decided it would be fun to defend the city of New Orleans. He recruited frontiersmen named Deer Slayer and Leatherstocking—he had to use frontiersmen because everyone else knew the war was over—and went down the Mississippi on a raft. When he got to New Orleans he enlisted the professional gamblers (I am not making this up—it was called the Blackleg Regiment), and that worked so well that he signed up the pirate crew of Jean Laffite.
When there were no more British around to fight, the pirates decided that New Orleans was becoming déclassé; although the bilingual signs were in English and French, they couldn’t read. So they moved to Galveston, not knowing that they themselves would be the only thing it would ever be famous for, or that they would eventually be wiped out by the Royal Navy, which held a grudge.
Thus it happened that as a child I often wandered the beach at Galveston wondering if there wasn’t just one pirate left for me. I thought of Wallace Beery and Robert Newton, nice pirates even if they did kill people. And every golden bottle cap might, with the slightest of twists in the reality line, have been a gold doubloon. To be a pirate, I felt sure, was the most glorious thing imaginable. Pirates were fantasy figures.
Here in Florida one passes through three modes of thought about pirates, none of which is the one I knew as a boy. At first you simply do not think of pirates, or if you do, you think of them as odd, gaudy creatures of the remote past, enchanted beings relentlessly pursued by ticking crocodiles.
Next, you become aware of the pirates as a part (a small part, perhaps), of the general decadent strangeness of the place. In Chicago, where I more or less live, one hears the sirens of police cars, fire engines, ambulances, and so on, almost incessantly. But that only means that
at any given moment an emergency vehicle is answering a call somewhere within a twenty-block radius that takes in a million souls. Once when I was riding through Boca Raton (a far smaller city) in a car full of people from this conference, all the sirens went off at once. Every police car within miles had turned on its siren, because every police car within miles had been called to the airport.
I yelled, “It’s the Penguin!” and my friends in the car looked at me as if I were mad. They wanted to know why Boca Raton should be attacked by a British paperback line.
But you see, back when I was a small boy thinking about pirates, I had also read comic books, particularly Batman. Batman, the Caped Crusader, was forever battling the wildest desperados, particularly the Penguin. And the Penguin, bless his wicked little heart, was forever organizing whole armies of criminals for Batman to frustrate. Adults all told me how absurd that was, and being only a small and particularly unprepossessing boy, I believed them.
The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools. In Southern Florida it’s perfectly credible that a whole army of criminals might storm ashore brandishing HKP7s and Uzi machine pistols, just as Sir Henry Morgan’s army of buccaneers stormed ashore brandishing cutlasses and flintlock pistols to capture and loot Panama. It could happen, and because the authorities know it could, they scramble every available unit every time they think it might have happened. There are billions, literally billions of dollars to be made smuggling marijuana and cocaine, and as one of my city’s greatest sages, Al Capone, once said about a far less promising enterprise, “It attracts a lot of smart boys.”
Which brings me to the third way of thinking about pirates, which comes when you realize they’re really out there, that any of the beautiful white boats you see moving up and down the coast may be under the Jolly Roger. The bullet-riddled bodies of the previous owners of fast, useful boats wash ashore pretty regularly, and though the Florida authorities say they come from the Bermuda Triangle, and the Bermuda authorities say they come from Florida—well, there’s a classic cartoon by Ronald Searle in which a headmaster says, “Mr. Wesson thinks it’s the ball-cock, Mrs. Gordon thinks it’s the shuttle pan. But I think it’s you boys. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
All this drifted through my mind before I wrote this essay, when I was watching the space shuttle lift off with Sally Ride on board. You see, I had read ever so many stories in which a beautiful woman scientist was a member of some spaceship’s crew. And there she was. There she went. Concerning the science fiction of the thirties, Damon Knight once said, “We have had their future.” And it occurs to me now that one might say concerning the science fiction of the forties (which is when I began to read it) “We are their future.”
But science fiction was not always called that. It was called fantasy when Cyrano sent a man to the moon by rocketship, and it remained fantasy far longer than it has been science fiction in this age of computers, robots, and spaceships.
I’ve spent more hours than I care to count listening with feigned politeness to casuists debating the difference between science fiction and fantasy. Now I am about to tell you what the difference really is, but I warn you not to publish it in Ascalon, because the daughters of the Philistines will never believe you. The truth is that the difference is simply a matter of range. Science fiction is a pistol. It hits targets almost close enough to touch, and even the willfully ignorant can’t deny that it’s effective. Fantasy is a sixteen-inch naval rifle. It fires with a tremendous bang, and it appears to have done nothing and to be shooting at nothing.
Space pirates? Those are fantasy figures for sure. One thinks of Ron Goulart’s Clockwork Pirates, and Ruth Plumly Thompson’s Pirates in Oz, with their parrots and flying ships. But for how much longer? The flying ship is here, and the pirates are on the wave.
The first time, they’ll hold the ship for ransom or sell it to the highest bidder, to be sure. (Remember, it can land on a good level stretch of desert just about anywhere.) But later? The pirates of a few hundred years ago were hunted down at last because, wide as they were, the seas were not wide enough. Soon their seas will stretch to infinity. The pirates are back already. They don’t have parrots on their shoulders yet; but when they do, those parrots may be stranger than we dream.
Dinosaurs? The pirates will find them, with a great many things more incredible. While I was writing this little essay, I heard that Vega has been found to have a solar system. (But we can’t call them solar systems any more, can we? They’re plural systems now.) Vega’s, however, is just a baby system, about a quarter the age of ours. Might have all sorts of things that are out of style here now.
Of course science won’t call them dinosaurs, any more than science will call the dinosaur that Roy Mackle finds a dragon. Not unless science is a lot smarter than it is now.
I wonder what science will call those parrots?
The real problem may be finding Saint George.
And that’s the end of the essay. Naturally none of you, respectable academics all, believe in pirates, or parrots, or dinosaurs, or dragons, or black dogs, or nereids, or Pan, or even Thomas Burnett Swann, in whose honor this conference was founded.
But I have told you all this in order that I might tell you something more: I try to read your work whenever I come across it, and I am ceasing to believe in you. Fantasy, it seems to me, is a much larger thing, and a much more influential thing, than you as a group are willing to concede—the only thing in the world that is bigger than the world, and a thing that touches upon virtually every area of thought, influencing and illuminating physics and biology as well as history and sociology, testing the borders of everything in the curriculum. It is not a small and safe area of academic specialization like the Medieval Lyric, and you owe it to the rest of us to give us a clearer indication of that. It is the living hand of the past—and of the wildest and strangest parts of the past at that—upon the reins of the future, and we are all passengers in its chariot, lurching and rattling faster and faster among the stars. We can hardly be blamed, I would say, for shutting our eyes now and then. But there is among us one small group that must never do so. I leave it to you to name that group.
What is it that you call yourselves?
Acknowledgments
I. GENE WOLFE’S BOOK OF DAYS
“Introduction,” copyright © 1981 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days
“How the Whip Came Back,” copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 6
“Of Relays and Roses,” copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Worlds of If
“Paul’s Treehouse,” copyright © 1969 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 5
“St. Brandon,” copyright © 1975 by Gene Wolfe; excerpted from the novel Peace
“Beautyland,” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Saving Worlds
“Car Sinister,” copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“The Blue Mouse,” copyright © 1971 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Many Worlds of Science Fiction
“How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion,” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Analog
“The Adopted Father,” copyright © 1980 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“Forlesen,” copyright © 1974 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 14
“An Article About Hunting,” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Saving Worlds
“The Changeling,” copyright © 1968 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 3
“Many Mansions,” copyright © 1977 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 19
“Against the Lafayette Escadrille,” copyright © 1972; first appeared in Again Dangerous Visions
“Three Million Square Miles,” copyright © 1971 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Ruins of Earth
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sp; “The War Beneath the Tree,” copyright © 1979 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Omni
“La Befana,” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Galaxy
“Melting,” copyright © 1974 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 15
II. THE CASTLE OF THE OTTER
“The Feast of Saint Catherine,” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Helioscope,” copyright © 1980 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Empire: For the SF Writer
“Sun of Helioscope,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Hands and Feet,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Words Weird and Wonderful,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Onomastics, The Study of Names,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“These are the Jokes,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“The Rewards of Authorship,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“The Castle of the Otter,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
“Beyond the Castle of the Otter,” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Castle of the Otter
III. CASTLE OF DAYS
“Lone Wolfe,” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe
“Peace of My Mind,” copyright © 1985 by Gene Wolfe
“Algis Budrys I,” copyright © 1984 by Gene Wolfe first appeared, in different
form, in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers