Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  Starting around 1990, the Myth books lost their magic for me. Years passed between volumes, and the books that did appear seemed half-hearted. In his introduction to M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action, Asprin apologized for the delay, citing a bad case of writer’s block. In these volumes Skeeve increasingly descends into alcoholism, which seemed out of place and was hard not to interpret as the author working through some personal issues. I also heard vague rumors that Asprin was having problems with the IRS, further hampering his ability to write. In 2003, Asprin took on a cowriter, Jody Lynn Nye, who continues to write new Myth books. I haven’t read any of these, so I can’t really comment on them. I’ll probably check them out at some point.

  But those early Myth books, wow they’re good. I reread Another Fine Myth a few years ago and still found it laugh-out-loud funny. When it comes to humorous fantasy, people think Terry Pratchett, and everything else seems to get no respect. I still remember a time when I was competing in a high school science fair, and I was talking to the girl who eventually became our class valedictorian. We were each holding a book. “What are you reading?” I asked her, and she showed me her book, War and Peace. “How about you?” she asked. “It’s a funny fantasy,” I explained, showing off my copy of Craig Shaw Gardner’s A Multitude of Monsters, which I was reading for the fifth time. She sort of rolled her eyes and said something about how our respective reading choices said a lot about our personalities. That’s what I mean about the no respect thing, same as my teacher in third grade. Of course I know that none of those people have ever actually read any funny fantasy books. But if they did, I’m sure they’d love them just as much as I do.

  GRADY HENDRIX

  It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s Apocalypse

  Underneath the bleachers of the early eighties, men’s adventure fiction had a quickie with science fiction and birthed a generation of what Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University calls “Radioactive Rambos.” These tough guys starred in numerous books set in the postapocalyptic ashes of the United States of America after the missiles flew, fighting Commies, biker gangs, and mutants (or “muties”, or “mutates” depending on the series) with a lovingly described arsenal of subguns, shotguns, Minimi M249’s, and Madsen 380 ACPs.

  Science fiction has always embraced the apocalypse, all the way back to the very first postapocalyptic novel, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1885), which attributed the death of humanity to a plague. By the late fifties, the Soviets were to blame. Whether by accident (On the Beach, 1957), or by design (Alas, Babylon, 1959) we assumed the Commies were going to kill us all in a nuclear hellfire. Or even worse, as both books posited, they’d leave a few survivors scrounging around in the ruins, trying to pathetically piece the world back together out of glowing scraps.

  The eighties didn’t have time for depressing reality, and Jerry Ahern figured out what became the formula for postapocalyptic men’s adventure in The Survivalist: Total War (1981). Ahern’s Survivalist series owed a massive debt to Don Pendleton’s Executioner series, as did pretty much every paperback writer churning out men’s adventure novels in the seventies and eighties. In 1968, World War II vet Don Pendleton had written War Against the Mafia, his first Executioner novel, which introduced the world to his hero, Mack Bolan, who would feature in 453 Executioner paperbacks, and sell 200 million copies.

  Judge Gerard Goettel, in his opinion in the case of Harlequin v. Warner Books, one of several lawsuits surrounding Pendleton’s creation, summed up the template as succinctly as anyone, “The constant element was killing on a massive scale. Terse dialogue spiced the violence. Each killing was described in explicit and gory detail. Paramilitary tactics, weaponry, and terminology were heavily emphasized.”

  Jerry Ahern’s 1981 stroke of genius was to graft science fiction’s preoccupation with nuclear war onto the Mack Bolan template, in this case introducing readers to John Thomas Rourke, a hard man and survivalist prepper who emerges from his bunker after the missiles fly and battles Commies and mutants, with his woman by his side, for twenty-nine volumes that ultimately sold 3.5 million copies and only ended in 1993.

  The Survivalist’s success spawned at least eighteen other postapocalyptic men’s adventure series, and whether the world ended by natural disasters (The Warlord, six volumes, 1983–1987), or nuclear war (Doomsday Warrior, nineteen volumes, 1984–1991); whether the series took place immediately after a first strike (C.A.D.S., twelve volumes, 1985–1991), or a hundred years later in the ashes of the old world (Endworld, twenty-nine volumes, 1986–1991) the drill was always the same.

  Our lone Mad Max manly man roamed the ruins on a motorcycle, in powered armor, a supertank, or on foot, either searching for his wife and children in the chaos or just kind of randomly blowing away Commies, mutants, bikers, and the occasional feminist war tribes stealing man sperm and murdering the donors (Doomsday Warrior #3: The Last American, 1984).

  First published in 1987, the Phoenix book series by David Alexander comprises five volumes: Dark Messiah, Ground Zero, Death Quest, Metalstorm, and Whirlwind. The books are out of print, but the full set is available for e-readers.

  Written under numerous house names (Jason Frost, D. B. Drumm, Ryder Stacy) by authors ranging across the political spectrum—from a punk rocker like John Shirley to a military vet like Len Levinson, who railed against the women controlling what he called the “New York Publishing Cartel”—these books delivered fantasy scenarios for weekend warriors who thought America was falling apart and kids today were wimps. Peaceniks were inevitably part of the problem and numerous novels kick off when a spineless U.S. president sells America out in the interests of appeasement. But despite being set in the aftermath of nuclear mass murder, the postapocalyptic landscapes were high-caliber playgrounds where nukes were off the table and conventional weapons ruled, where radiation was limited to a few danger zones, where there was no nuclear winter, rarely any radiation sickness, plenty of food, lots of sex, and where the main characters usually repaired to ultra-comfy man caves in hardened bunkers between action climaxes.

  Ironically, for a genre heavy on the gun porn, one of the last publishers standing was Gold Eagle, an imprint of Harlequin, best known for its romance novels. The genre’s sales had peaked around 1988 and steadily declined thereafter, but Gold Eagle enjoyed a direct distribution deal with PX’s on military bases around the world and was able to hold on until 2014 when HarperCollins acquired Harlequin and shut down Gold Eagle, bringing to an end their postapocalyptic series Deathlands (125 volumes since 1986), and its spin-off Outlanders (75 volumes since 1997). Today, the closest thing publishing has to a postapocalyptic men’s adventure series is the long-running Walking Dead comic book (177 issues since 2003) that features a one-handed former cop and a stoic, female, African American lawyer with a katana, rebuilding civilization after the zombie apocalypse.

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Foreword to John Shirley’s City Come a-Walkin’

  William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. In science fiction’s alternate history, Gibson also penned a screenplay for Alien III (which you can read about on this page). Though widely credited as the founding father of the influential 1980s SF genre of cyberpunk, in this foreword to City Come a-Walkin’ by his friend and fellow author John Shirley, Gibson suggests there’s plenty of credit to go around.

  John Shirley was cyberpunk’s Patient Zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent, a carrier. City Come a-Walkin’ is evident of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this novel.)

  Attention, academics: The city-avatars of City are probably the precursors both of sentient cyberspace and of the A
Is in Neuromancer, and, yes, it certainly looks as though Molly’s surgically-implanted silver shades were sampled from City’s, the temples of his growing seamlessly into skin-stuff and skull. (Shirley himself soon became the proud owner of a pair of gold-framed Bausch + Lomb prescription aviators: Ur-mirror shades.) The book’s near-future, post-punk milieu seems cp to the max, neatly predating Blade Runner.

  So this is, quite literally, a seminal work; most of the elements of the unborn Movement swim here in opalescent swirls of Shirley’s literary spunk.

  That Oregon boy with the silver glasses.

  That Oregon boy remembered today with a lank forelock of dirty blond, around his neck a belt in some long-extinct mode of patient elastication, orange pigskin, fashionably rotted to reveal cruel lengths of rectilinear chrome spring. “Johnny Paranoid,” convulsing like a galvanized frog on the plywood stage of some basement coffeehouse in Portland. Extraordinary, really. And, he said, he’d been to Clarion.

  Was I impressed? You bet!

  I met Shirley as I was starting to try to write fiction. Or rather, I had made a start, had abandoned the project of writing, and was shamed back into it by this person from Portland, point-man in a punk band, whose day job was writing science fiction. Finding Shirley when I did was absolutely pivotal to my career. He seemed totemic: There he was, lashing these fictions together, and propping them in the Desert of the Norm, their hastily-formed but often wildly arresting limbs pointing to the way to Other Places.

  The very fact that a writer like Shirley could be published at all, however badly, was a sovereign antidote to the sinking feeling induced by skimming George Scithers’s Asimov’s Science Fiction at the corner drugstore. Published as a paperback original by Dell in July 1980, City Come a-Walkin’ came in well below the genre’s radar. Set in a “near future” that felt oddly like the present (an effect I’ve been trying to master ever since), spiked with trademark Shirley obsessions (punk anti-culture, fascist vigilantes, panoptic surveillance systems, modes of ecstatic consciousness), City was less an SF novel set in a rock demimonde than a rock gesture that happened to be a paperback original.

  Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies SF recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith’s Horses for the first time: The archetypal form passionately reinhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring-do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.

  Mr. Shirley, who so carelessly shoved me toward the writing of stories, as into a frat-party swimming pool. Around him then a certain chaos, a sense of too many possibilities—and some of them, always, dangerous: that girlfriend, looking oddly like Tenniel’s Alice, as she turned to scream the foulest undeserved abuse at the Puerto Rican stoop-drinkers, long after midnight in Alphabet City, the visitor from Vancouver in utter and horrified disbelief.

  “Ignore her, man,” J.S. advised the Puerto Ricans, “She’s all keyed up.”

  And, yes, she was. They tended to be, those Shirley girls.

  I looked at Shirley today, the grown man, who survived himself, and know doing that was no mean feat. A cat with extra lives.

  What puzzles me now is how easily I took work like City Come a-Walkin’ for granted. There was nothing else remotely like it, but that, I must have assumed, was because it was John’s book, and there was no one remotely like John. Fizzing and crackling, its aura, an ungodly electric aubergine, somewhere between neon and a day-old bruise, City was evidence of certain possibilities which had not yet, then, been named. It would be a couple years before whatever it was that was subsequently called cyberpunk began to percolate from places like Austin and Vancouver. Shirley was by then in whichever stage of sequence of relationships (well, marriages actually; our boy was nothing if not a plunger) that would take him from New York to Paris, from Paris to Los Angeles (where he lives today), and on to San Francisco (hello, City). He gave me vertigo. I think we came to expect that of him, our tribal Strange Attractor, and blinked in amazement as he gradually brought his life in for a landing. Today he lives in the Valley, writing for film and television, but for several years now he has been rumored to be at work on a new book. I look forward to that. In the meantime, we have Eyeball Books to thank for reissuing the Protoplasmic Mother of all cyberpunk novels, City Come a-Walkin’.

  Vancouver, B.C.

  March 31, 1996

  An Interview with John Shirley

  John Shirley, an early architect of the cyberpunk movement, has written novels, short stories, TV scripts, screenplays, lyrics, poetry, songs, and various forms of nonfiction. More than forty of his novels have been published. Many of his 200 or so short stories have been compiled in eight short-story collections. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others.

  DB: Cyberpunk is sort of the quintessential example of a political landscape merging with a literary landscape to birth a new genre. Do you see any parallels between the political and cultural atmosphere of the early 1980s and the world of today? I guess another way of saying that—could a literary SF movement with the same political underpinnings arise today, even if the aesthetics were different?

  JS: There are always going to be parallels because there will always be young people redefining the world to their own preferences, their own evolving values, against a backdrop of some constraining—sometimes oppressive—status quo. Angry Young Men of the early twentieth century, Beats, and so on. Not that all constraints are needless—I haven’t been an anarchist since I was nineteen—but cultural forms, for example, are going to be set in terra cotta . . . even though that concrete has only just dried and hardened! It’s the duty of one generation to model forms; it’s the duty of the next one to break them down to some degree, so that real choices can be made. Artistically it’s constantly happening, sometimes with good results, sometimes with unintended absurdity. Punk rock was necessary; cyberpunk, as we understood it (now it means something else to most people) was necessary. The latest trend, excessive political correctness, is absurd. When cyberpunk started, science fiction was still largely Heinleinian, John Campbellesque, despite the occasional Michael Moorcock and Ballard. We had to bring it down to the street reality, because that’s where meaning was for us. So yes, a new mold-breaking literary SF movement can and will arise. Some sort of transhumanist (ugh!) variant, perhaps.

  DB: You used to describe yourself as “the Lou Reed of cyberpunk and Gibson as the David Bowie.” Would you expand on this analogy?

  JS: A very loose analogy, and hubris was involved. But Gibson is more refined than I am, though I’ve learned a great deal about consistent style and cogent writing over the years. He got a review in The New Yorker! Also, while Gibson had his drug experiments, I got quite carried away, and was occasionally literally carried away, and had to go through a struggle, after relapses thirty years ago, to really get clean (see my novel Wetbones). So that’s like Lou Reed—he was never a heroin addict, as some people imagine, despite his song about it. He was an amphetamine addict, for sure, big time. I was a cocaine addict. I identified with the underclasses, the demimonde he described in “Sister Ray,” in “Street Hassle,” in many other works. He was the unofficial poet laureate of those largely abandoned people. I tried to do something like that in some of my stories—e.g., the stories in Black Butterflies—and in some of my science fiction. Misfit science fiction . . .

  DB: I was delighted to discover that you’re also a Clarion alum. (And incredibly jealous that you were lucky enough to have Ursula Le Guin as one of your instructors.) What was your experience at Clarion like (BESIDES dropping acid and jumping out of a t
ree onto Harlan Ellison)?

  JS: I was a very young, very unpolished, often unbathed mess of a kid there, but Harlan and Ursula Le Guin and Frank Herbert and Avram Davidson and Robert Silverberg and Terry Carr at Clarion, all thought I was talented and they gave me hope. Before then I felt like the great misfit of the western world, hopeless . . . They helped me get my first professional publication and that kept me out of the reach of suicide. I remember that I was prolific but, of course, sloppy. The pressure of these various professionals scrutinizing young Clarion writers, and our scrutinizing of one another, was enormously helpful. I began to get a sense of . . . editing!

  DB: Did the Clarion workshop play a role in shaping and influencing your work? Did any of your classmates share your literary and aesthetic inspirations and goals?

  JS: It shaped my writing by helping me to see it more objectively. There were one or two guys at Clarion who read the avant-garde writers, like I did, who read decadent poets and listened to Dylan and the Doors and Alice Cooper and Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Zappa and the Blue Öyster Cult and Patti Smith as well as having read heaps of science fiction and horror . . . A lot of people there were more sophisticated than I was. I was semi-feral. It was later, when I met Sterling and Rucker and Gibson and Shiner and Cadigan that I found fellow travelers. I was more influenced by the weirder rock and by filmmakers like Fellini and Buñuel and by painters like Max Ernst and Duchamp than the others at Clarion . . .