Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  “Beyond Time’s Aegis” did not escape this kind of reprocessing either; I rewrote it as the first half of a novel whose second half consisted of various bits of “The Worlds Beyond the World” and several short stories which had appeared in various fanzines (mostly in Proteus, which I briefly produced in collaboration with a fan named Tom Jones). That novel too proved unsaleable, although it has recently been published by the Borgo Press. Many of my other fanzine stories of the period were cannibalized for the visionary sequence in Man in a Cage.

  I fear that I have never entirely shaken off this habit. I later expanded the other unsaleable novelette which I wrote with Mack into an unsaleable novel, which I hauled out of its file as recently as 1989 in order to borrow several of its key scenes for one of the pseudonymous novels which I was then writing for Games Workshop. There was a certain ironic propriety in so doing, given that I elected to adopt for Games Workshop the same pseudonym which Mack and I used twenty-five years before. I record all this now partly as the record of a curious folly, but also in case I should ever become an object of academic study—it might conceivably make a nightmarish jigsaw puzzle for some intrepid bibliographer.

  * * * *

  I did not enjoy my schooldays at all. I was utterly incompetent in the matter of meeting the expectations which others had of me, whether the others in question were my teachers or my peers. This was not because of any rebellious streak or daring assertion of individuality—it really was simple and straightforward incompetence. I did not know how to organize my intellect in such a way as to cope with most of the everyday problems which presented themselves to me, and I had not the determination or power of perseverance to cultivate such organisational skills.

  That incompetence, and the unhappiness which it generated, may not have been the only factors involved in my getting into science fiction, but they were the factors which determined the depth of my involvement: the sheer ravenousness of my appetite for it and the urge to create as well as feed upon it. Looking back now, I can see that no other fate was possible for me but that I should eventually be recruited to the profession of science fiction, and I cannot help feeling that it was only my general incompetence in coping with matters of life and ambition which delayed my final absorption for such a long time.

  Because my birthday fell near the end of the academic year and because I was in a high-powered school I first sat A level examinations when I was sixteen. Whether my immaturity was responsible for my poor performance, or whether it was simply that I spent too much time reading science fiction and not enough time working I cannot tell—probably the latter, given that the diaries which I kept (in which there was nothing to record except for the books I read) revealed on later inspection that I read more than 600 SF books and magazines in 1964 and a further 600 in 1965. When the time came for me to resit the exams a year later I took the appalling step of giving up SF for two whole months—and when I went to university in October of the same year my reading habit became much more moderate. I only clocked up 450 books and magazines in 1966.

  Those three years were of crucial importance in laying down the groundwork for my later career as a historian of science fiction. I systematically worked my way through the contents of the British Science Fiction Association’s two lending libraries (in those days they had a magazine library as well as the book collection which is now housed at the SF Foundation). This process displayed to me both the pulp heritage of magazine SF and a good deal of relatively-obscure British scientific romance. I had not at that time the economic resources to be a collector—most of the material which I bought came from market stalls and was later traded in at the same stalls for credit—but my methodical borrowing ensured that when I did have money to spend in second-hand bookshops I knew what to look for, and how to recognize something interesting when I caught a glimpse of it. A little obsession can go a long way, if one is careful to capitalize upon it.

  * * * *

  The University of York, to which I went in 1966 to study Biology, seemed to me to be the closest thing to Utopia which the world was likely to contain. For the first time in my life I was able to meet members of the opposite sex, to make friends, and in general to have a social life. I was still utterly incompetent in all these spheres, but the environment was far more conducive to learning than any I had encountered before.

  At university I was able to catch up (gradually) with all the vices from which I had previously been totally insulated. I took to gambling like a duck to water, and spent a great deal of my time as an undergraduate playing poker and backing horses. Drinking I took to far more cautiously, mainly because I hated the taste of beer, but after some years of practice I managed to develop a healthy appetite for wine. Smoking, fortunately, I had somehow contrived to try—and had heartily disliked—when I was thirteen, and I was never tempted to try again.

  My most conspicuous vice—although I did not regard it as such at the time—was a penchant for bitter and scathing sarcasm which I had picked up at school. Having always been puny, I had channelled all my aggression into verbal warfare, and had become far too good at it. When I first realized how easy it is to hurt people with words I was delighted, because a society which consists entirely of teenage boys has norms of behavior that legitimize constant hostility—everyone must constantly strive to be as vilely vicious as he possibly can. When I moved into a different kind of society I thoughtlessly carried with me many habits which were entirely inappropriate, and it took me some years of real effort to set them aside, or at least to quieten them down to an acceptable level. One unfortunate thing about sarcasm, though, is that one never can lose a reputation for it—once people have the suspicion that you might be being sarcastic, even the most sincere and heartfelt compliment is likely to be perceived as having a dark double meaning.

  I am nowadays a very meek, placid, and mild-mannered person. I mean no harm to anyone. Nevertheless, there are still occasions when the old reflexes are unexpectedly triggered, and I still retain a certain gift for verbal viciousness and deadly insult. This would not matter much were it confined to everyday social intercourse, but it is something which has occasionally overflowed into my critical writing, especially into hastily-penned book reviews written while the disappointment of the reading experience was still preying on my mind. I try to avoid it (with increasing success as time has gone by) but there are still times when the temptation of a cleverly-crafted sneer prove irresistible.

  This fault in my character devastated my social relationships for several years even in Utopia, and still does some disservice to my professional relationships. It may have had an effect on the reception of some of my fiction—I have written a lot of stories which do not make sense (or, at least, do not carry the intended meaning) unless they are read in a sarcastic tone of voice; some readers do not notice this at all, and some who do find it rather annoying. I keep trying to give it up but I doubt that I will ever succeed completely. Alert readers may have noticed a certain unfortunate tendency to sarcasm even in this conscientiously earnest and objective account of my decent into the Dantean realms of the profession of science fiction.

  * * * *

  Term-time at university was very busy, and my financial circumstances were so straitened that I had to get paying jobs during the long vacations. This meant that my attempts to write SF became confined to the two short (four-week) vacations. Even that time seemed to slip by all-too-easily, and although I started a couple of projects in the first eighteen months of my career as a student I finished nothing.

  I decided, when only ten days of my second Easter vacation remained, that what I needed was discipline, and that I would force myself to complete a novel by establishing a quota of 5,000 words to be written each night (starting work at midnight), and not permitting myself to go to bed until the quota was finished.

  To make things easy I used a very simple linear plot: chapter one provided the characters with a motive for undertak
ing a long journey, chapter ten described what happened when they got to their destination, and the eight intermediate chapters described their encounters with various odd environments and nasty monsters. I wrote it in longhand, then paid one of the university secretaries to type it out for me (which, being somewhat undersupplied with work, she contrived to do in her normal working hours in the space of a fortnight).

  I sent the novel, Cradle of the Sun, off to Anthony Cheetham, an editor at Sphere Books who had recently written a short piece in the BSFA magazine Vector in which he declared his intention to boost Sphere’s SF list and asked for advice from the fans. Nothing happened for several months, until I wrote a polite letter inquiring as to what had become of the manuscript. Cheetham then replied, saying that the novel was unsuitable for the Sphere list, but that he was going to New York in the near future and might be able to sell it for me there if I was willing to let him act as my agent. I agreed, and he promptly sold it to Don Wollheim for the Ace Double series, which was then on its last legs.

  Had I been more idealistic I might have realized then that the die was cast, and could have concentrated my mind on the business of becoming a better writer, properly fit to join the august ranks of the profession of science fiction. Unfortunately, I had not the least confidence in my ability to make a decent living as a writer, and so I procrastinated. For the next twenty years I tried to keep two career strategies going side-by-side (to the inevitable detriment of both). That twenty years now seems to me to have been largely wasted, in that the books I produced were mostly written in a hurry to fit into the temporal interstices of an academic career which I always secretly regarded as a fraud.

  Hurried production became the norm from day one. I was in my final year as an undergraduate when I made my first sale, and dared not neglect my academic work too much lest I fail to qualify for three more years in Utopia as a postgraduate student.

  I had 18,000 words in hand of the novel which ultimately became To Challenge Chaos, but it seemed easier to cobble together The Blind Worm from pre-existing materials, so I did that first. After I sold The Blind Worm to Don Wollheim, Anthony Cheetham suggested that the time was ripe to obtain a multi-book contract. On being asked how I might go about this, he suggested that I outline space opera versions of the plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and call the result a trilogy. This I dutifully did, giving the result the high-flown title Dies Irae; the promised multi-book contract duly materialized, as if by magic.

  I finished the first draft of Watchgod’s Cargo/To Challenge Chaos while waiting for my examination results to be published, then spent the summer vacation producing a submission draft and writing the first two volumes of the trilogy. As with all my previous works I did longhand drafts at night (when there were no distractions) but had to do the typing by day so as to avoid driving my neighbors to distraction.

  By the time my first novel was actually published, late in 1969, I had completed four more—although Watchgod’s Cargo was rejected by all the publishers to whom my agent initially showed it.

  * * * *

  My postgraduate career in Biology was devoted to an experiment in animal population dynamics. Almost all previous studies in animal population dynamics had been carried out in the wild, because the generation time of most animals does not lend itself to laboratory study. I was to work with Tribolium confusum (the confused flour beetle, so called only because it had previously been confused with Tribolium castaneum, not because of any character trait of its own), which had a generation time of thirty days. In order to get data on enough generations the experiment would have to last two and a half years, and I would have to count my experimental populations every seventy-two hours. In the meantime, I conducted a number of parallel experiments in which populations of T. confusum were in competition with T. madens (the black flour beetle, unconfusable with confusum even in its larval stage). I also tried to build a computer model which would ultimately be capable of reproducing, and thus helping to explain, my experimental results.

  For some time this research seemed to be going awry, because my computer models always forecast that the beetle populations would stabilize; this contrasted with all previous experiments, in which the populations always oscillated. One American doctoral student had even produced a mathematical model of such an oscillating population. Two years passed before I realized that my models were not incompetent, because my experimental populations ultimately did what the models said they should do and stabilized. The oscillations in the American experiments were thus revealed to be an artifact of their counting procedure, and the doctoral student who had published the oscillation-producing model had simply lied about it—I found that if one actually put his figures into a computer his hypothetical population stabilized too. Thus I discovered that some “real” science is fiction too.

  I did not suffer a nervous breakdown in the course of my experiment, but I did get sick of the sight of flour beetles, and there came a time when the thought of spending the rest of my working life with them, according to the conventional logic of academic specialisation, became quite intolerable. I became so disenchanted, in fact, that I never did get around to writing up my experiments and submitting a thesis—which was a pity, in a way, because the results were really very interesting.

  This fortuitous disenchantment might have prompted me to become a full-time SF professional in 1972, thus saving me a lot of time, but it coincided with the end of my early success, which had rapidly come to seem like a flash in the pan.

  * * * *

  After completing Dies Irae I wrote a novel based on a novelette I had written some years earlier with Craig Mackintosh. Don Wollheim rejected it, on the grounds that it was sick and far too downbeat—and he also complained that the trilogy had turned out far more downbeat than the original outline had implied. His rejection letter suggested that I had had my “head bent and [my] ego inflated by the so-called New Wave” and should make strenuous efforts to get my act together. Ace was in financial difficulties anyway, and the payments due on publication of the early volumes of the trilogy were conspicuous by their non-appearance. Furthermore, Anthony Cheetham had lost interest in being a part-time agent, because it was a trivial enterprise contributing nothing to his ambition to be a millionaire superstar of the publishing world before he turned thirty (an ambition which he subsequently brought to spectacular fruition).

  In the summer of 1970 I began to write Man in a Cage—a novel with which I was much more involved than I had ever been with my earlier action-adventure extravaganzas, and which took far longer. Progress was handicapped by the fact that I knew while I was writing it that Don Wollheim would hate it, because it embodied all the things he most deplored. I eventually finished the first draft in 1971 but did not begin preparing a submission draft. Two other projects which I started were also abandoned when I could not muster any faith at all in the prospect of their eventual publication. I did finish the novel version of “Beyond Time’s Aegis,” but only by virtue of regarding it as a purely personal mission—I knew that the book had no hope of selling.

  By the summer of 1971 I was totally demoralized. Don Wollheim was, of course, absolutely right to say that what I needed to do was to get my act together and start writing for the market, putting the action-adventure back into my books and making sure the endings were upbeat. It seems ridiculous now to say that I could not do it—of course I could have done it—but at the time it really did seem that I was powerless. My personal life was plagued by the kind of agonies and crises which I really should have got out of the way in adolescence (or, even better, not bothered with at all) and my view of the world was so thoroughly jaundiced that I simply could not express myself in any other way than bitterly.

  No light appeared at the end of the tunnel until my new agent, Janet Freer, told me that Don Wollheim had left Ace to set up his own company and was looking for material. He was now willing to take Watchgod’s Cargo, which he had previousl
y rejected, and was prepared to look at some new proposals. Gritting my teeth, I dusted off an old aborted story about a crashed space pilot, and wrote down the outline of a plot extrapolated from it, using all the clichés I could think of. Said plot might easily have been found in Planet Stories, and made vague promises about an upbeat ending. If it sold, I resolved, I would make a series out of it and thus keep myself in work for years. Don Wollheim duly bought it—and then I had to write it.

  I composed Halcyon Drift in a rather peculiar state of mind. I was determined to produce a publishable book, but I still had a mental block which stood in the way of wholehearted enthusiasm. As I set out, I decided that although I would deploy all the promised clichés I would do my best to subvert—or at least to pervert—every one. I further resolved that this would be the first ever space opera series in which the hero would not only never shoot anybody but would never even hit anybody (and, if invited to fight, would always politely decline to do it). Because of these strictures the hero/narrator, Grainger, became something of a clown—but at least he was unusual, and his cynical rhetoric had a certain sarcastic charm which ultimately seduced me into liking the book much more than I might have.

  Don Wollheim liked Halcyon Drift well enough to commission two sequels, and promised that I could add further volumes to the series if all went well. My writing career seemed to be unsteadily afloat again. Cautiously, however, I decided that it would be best to conserve my other options; this, coupled with my reluctance to abandon Utopia for the Real World, led me to my apply to the Sociology Department to become a postgraduate there.

  My original intention in converting to Sociology was to become a demographer, adapting my computer models for use in the description of human populations. Unfortunately, the department’s demographer left shortly after my application was submitted, and I was offered the alternative of joining a one year postgraduate course leading to a B.Phil. I accepted, and found two parts of the course which were of particular interest—the part dealing with the philosophy of social science, which helped to develop my embryonic interest in the philosophy of science in general; and the part dealing with the sociology of literature.