At its best, Cover’s work is exciting and stimulating, filled with fresh ideas presented in new and unique ways. At its worst, his style can seem incomprehensible, tangled, even ponderous, and certainly different from the expectations of the average reader. But then, you can’t always tell a book by its Cover.
30. SLICING AWAY AT SUBURBIA
THE FANTASTIC FICTION OF WILLIAM F. NOLAN (1991)
William F. Nolan started his creative life as an artist, but quickly turned to the more lucrative science-fiction and men’s magazines in the mid-1950s. Nolan was one of a group of Southern California SF writers that included (at times) the late Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, the late Chad Oliver, and others. These authors not only socialized together frequently or occasionally, but also used their common interests in fantastic literature, film, television, and professional racing to develop a myriad of creative projects, often in collaboration. Although each writer eventually went his own way, artistically and personally, for the ten-year period from 1955-1965 most followed a similar path, moving from pulp fiction to slick nonfiction to the lucrative television market.
Nolan has been a full-time freelancer from the beginning, producing some fifteen hundred short fiction and nonfiction works in the course of his career, plus sixty-odd books, forty teleplays, and a dozen screenplays. Although his career has been a financial success, his work has been spread across so many subjects and genres that he remains relatively unheralded as a writer. Still, the frequency with which Nolan’s 130 stories continue to be regularly anthologized (“Small World” has been reprinted at least twenty times) is a sign of his continuing popularity and deepening influence as a writer.
Nolan’s reputation as an SF writer seems secure, resting primarily on wide popular acceptance of two fictional creations, Logan the Sandman and Sam Space. Logan’s Run (written with George Clayton Johnson [1967]), together with its two sequels, both written by Nolan alone, Logan’s World (1977) and Logan’s Search (1980), represent the high water mark of the author’s science-fiction career, having been turned into both a successful motion picture and a television series, as well as being adapted into a popular comic book series.
In the not-so-distant future, young people have revolted and killed all the adults. The new regime decrees that henceforward anyone reaching the age of twenty-one (age thirty in the screen version) shall voluntary undergo euthanasia; those who refuse to die shall be hunted down by the police (the Sandmen) and summarily executed. A massive computer (“The Thinker”) is built to control the world and enforce the new rules. The new world state provides each citizen with everything he/she might want: travel, drugs, pleasures of all kinds, even work for those who want it—but everything ends at twenty-one. Logan 3 is a Sandman who begins questioning the system after being forced to terminate a young girl. As his own time begins running out, Logan searches for Sanctuary, the semi-mythical place to which some runners have apparently escaped, and meets Jessica 6, with whom he forms a lasting and loving relationship. After a series of harrowing adventures, including a confrontation with the Thinker which succeeds in shutting down the machine, Logan and Jessica find Sanctuary, and live to fight another day.
In Logan’s World, Logan and Jessica return to find the Sandman system largely destroyed, except for a group of renegade Sandmen who are trying to repair the damaged Thinker. In the ensuing chaos, Logan’s son is killed, the Thinker is destroyed, and mankind is left to find its own way to the future. Logan’s Search concludes the Trilogy with Logan’s attempt to defeat the Sandman system on a parallel Earth where the Thinker still exists.
Logan is Everyman, the man forced by conscience and circumstance to blaze a new path for himself—and for mankind. The signs of systemic failure are everywhere, literally and figuratively: this brave new world of the future, itself once representing a great turning point in the history of the human race, has come full circle, to a cultural and historical dead end. The machines are breaking down—and so is human society. Logan must destroy the old, rekindle the new, and show man the way to a new civilization. In another sense, Logan is also Nolan (one name being nearly the anagram of the other): the author as iconoclast, the artist as creator/destroyer, the rebel with a cause, the self-made man remaking himself in fiction. Complacency is sterility, the author seems to be saying, a life without challenge a life not worth living. Mankind cannot stand still: it must either move forward—or die.
The three Sam Space books—Space for Hire (1971), Look Out for Space (1985), and the collection, 3 for Space (1992)—represent the second and third main strands in Nolan’s fiction: farce and hard-boiled detective fiction. Sam Space (i.e., “Sam Spade” in SF terms) is a Mars-based private eye who always seems to be getting himself into impossibly wacky situations. Nolan manages to satirize the conventions of both the mystery and science-fiction genres, as well as modern mores, his fellow authors, and the world in general. Other stories in this vein include: “The Day the Gorf Took Over,” “The Fasterfaster Affair,” “Papa’s Planet” (a robot-Hemingway send-up), and “Jenny Among the Zeebs” (a rock n’ roll spoof).
In the 1980s Nolan moved away from SF into dark fantasy, producing a horror novel, Helltracks (1991), and some fifty short stories, the best of which have been collected into Things Beyond Midnight (1984) and Night Shapes (1995). Like his frequent early collaborator, Charles Beaumont, Nolan has proven particularly effective at depicting the unpleasant side of human nature, and his stories are filled with clever twists, a legacy of his work in the mystery genre. These tales reflect a more cynical view of man’s nature, one in which there are not always happy endings or Pollyannish characters, in which evil is both acknowledged and sometimes prevails.
In the 1990s Nolan’s work has again zagged into new directions, with the author producing a series of mystery thrillers which feature “The Black Mask Boys”—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner—functioning as amateur detectives in the Hollywood of the 1930s. The first of these, The Black Mask Murders (narrated by Hammett) was published in 1994, with The Marble Orchard (narrated by Chandler) following in 1996.
In these and in all of Nolan’s fictions we find the writer sitting to one side, deliberately sharpening his authorial knife and covertly slicing away at man, his machines, and his conventions. Some of his stories may have more-or-less happy endings, but even these drip with skepticism and often twist into strange angles by tale’s end. In Nolan’s fictional world nothing is as it seems, no one is safe, and happiness always comes with a price tag attached.
31. A MODEST PROPOSAL
(1991)
NOTE: In response to a proposal to revise membership rules to allow only the top-producing SF writers to retain “active” membership in the professional organization, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., Reginald wrote the following letter to the SFWA Forum. It was never published.
Dear Folks:
I agree, let’s throw the riffraff out; the presence of hundreds of itinerant, would-be, or played-out writers only tends to corrupt the very few of us (at least seven) who constitute the real professionals, if in no other way than by filling SFWA’s coffers. We need to return to being a small, impoverished, largely irrelevant writers’ union. In fact, Dafydd ap Hugh et al. don’t go nearly far enough with their proposals; we must use this opportunity to purge the membership of those who are culturally, intellectually, and authorially inferior to those of us qualified to judge such matters. I therefore suggest these small emendations to the proposed membership qualification changes:
Alternative One
Writers shall qualify for active membership in SFWA when they have published ten SF novels, and shall thereafter be permanently qualified. Each member’s vote shall be weighted according to the cumulative record of SF books published, each monograph counting for one vote. Members shall qualify for office when they have published fifty novels. Writers who don’t qualify shall be called amateurs.
&nbs
p; Comment
Under this proposal, short fiction, anthologies, nonfiction works, etc., wouldn’t count for qualification purposes, since they reflect a less than serious effort on the part of the writer to attain true professional status. Personally, I think this category should be limited even further, to ten cloth novels, since otherwise Lionel Fanthorpe would have the largest vote (160+), and he is, after all, a foreigner, and probably not worthy anyway. One could also set a minimum length of 200 pages (or 80,000 words) to qualify; this would help keep out those goddam “paperback writers.” They’re all hacks, every one of them.
Alternative Two
Writers shall be eligible for membership in SFWA when personally recommended by already-qualified members of the organization, and when they have submitted to the Membership Committee a notarized statement prepared by a certified public accountant, showing that their annual income has exceeded for at least the five previous consecutive years a level of $100,000, at least one dollar of which must have been derived from professional sales of SF-related fiction or nonfiction. A member shall be accorded the number of votes appropriate to his or her income level (i.e., status), with one vote being awarded for every $50,000 of income. Dues shall be assessed inversely proportionate to income. Nebulas will annually be auctioned off to the highest bidders.
Comment
This proposal really cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? We want a wealthy, elite, intellectual organization, not a bunch of poor, self-trained hacks. I want to know that the idiot sitting next to me at the Nebula Banquets has some real knowledge, for Christ’s sake, of the watery vintage he or she is gurgling down by the gallon. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and cash is the easiest way to do it. Another variation of this plan would simply have the Membership Committee assess the net wealth of prospective members, and rank them from 1-100, limiting the organization to no more than that number (we can always have less!). There is one minor problem with the proposal: who shall qualify the first member?
Alternative Three
Prospective members of SFWA shall be rated for literary quality by the members of SFRA, and ranked in order. The top 10% shall qualify for Active membership, and the rest shall be deemed Amateur Apprentices. Dues would be levied only on those in the bottom ranks, the absence of dues being one of the perquisites owed the true professionals in the field. Only those in the top 5% would be eligible for office.
Comment
The virtue of this plan is that it combines elitism with pseudo-literary values; indeed, under this proposal the organization should probably be renamed The Academy of Science-Fiction Self-Realization (ASS), to reflect its sublimely high (and enormously smug) literary standards. Only those sanctified by a presumably objective outside panel could join, and there would be no appeal, no messy qualification process: either you pass the litmus test—or you don’t!
Alternative Four
I hope the membership will give all of these proposals the consideration they truly deserve. In the meantime, it is sad to watch this noble organization die the death of a thousand knives. Whatever SFWA is, whatever it has been, whatever it will become after this interminable logorrhea finally subsides, we are all diminished by these seemingly endless internal squabbles. If we really are professionals, in any sense of the word, then why are we wasting our collective time on issues which were discussed at great length on several previous occasions? Have we truly nothing better to do? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then I submit to you that SFWA has already degenerated to the status of a fan group or social club, and is unworthy of any further support, at any level. My “final solution,” fellow SFWAns, is to dissolve the organization entirely, and retire to the bar, where most of us can usually be found anyway.
Dyspeptically Yours:
Robert Reginald
32. PILGRIM AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
(1993)
This award is the culmination of all I’ve worked for during the past quarter century. I started my first book in 1968 as a senior Honor’s project at Gonzaga University. While attending Baycon in Berkeley that fall, and meeting for the first time a number of writers who had just been names on the title pages of their books, I realized that no one had ever compiled a “who’s who” of the science fiction field. I decided to produce one myself. It was my first experience as both author and publisher.
I was too dumb and too inexperienced to realize the utter impossibility of the task, so I rented a post office box, ordered some stationery and questionnaires, and began mailing them out. Much to my surprise, writers began responding in great numbers, many of them providing illuminating comments and quotations that I could use to highlight their entries. I compiled their bibliographies from the sources available to me, and typed up the individual entries on offset masters. Gonzaga found a little money somewhere to help complete publication, and I had my first reference book.
Stella Nova, as it was called, had serious flaws, including design problems with the index and an overuse of obscure abbreviations. But I learned more from working on that first nascent publication than from all of my academic classes. There’s a vast gulf between theory and practice that separates the amateurs from the professionals in almost every field of knowledge.
Even this early publication wasn’t produced in a vacuum, however, since I partially patterned the book’s design on the style used in Contemporary Authors, adapting it to suit my own needs. Within a year of its publication in 1970, I had proposed and sold to Gale Research Company two new books: a bibliography of the first twenty years of the mass market paperback, and a reworking of Stella Nova into a bio-bibliography of science fiction, replacing and updating Everett F. Bleiler’s pioneering guide, The Checklist of Fantastic Literature.
Bleiler’s influence on all subsequent reference works in our genre should not be underestimated. Produced at a time when bibliographical resources were minimal, The Checklist set a standard rarely to be exceeded or even equaled in the following decades, save by Bleiler himself. The book is an extraordinary piece of scholarship: authoritative and comprehensive, with an attractive, easy-to-use format. That such a work could have even been published in early 1948—coincidentally, within a month of my birth—is a remarkable testament to the man and his abilities, and to the acumen of my late friend, Ted Dikty, who published it.
Bradford M. Day and others had produced supplements to Bleiler’s guide, but I envisaged a complete re-verification of the original database, using the National Union Catalog, British Museum Catalogue, and other works not available in the mid-1940s, plus the collection of the late Dr. J. Lloyd Eaton, which had recently been purchased by the University of California, Riverside. I also intended to extend coverage through 1974, the year I actually started work on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. The two-volume set was published by Gale in late 1979; the supplement, covering the years 1975-1991, was issued by them in 1992, and covered more works in seventeen years than the original volumes had recorded in more than two and one-half centuries of SF publications. Together, the books cover some 38,000 original monographs of fantastic literature published in English.
In the forty-five years since the publication of Bleiler’s Checklist, some 530 additional bibliographies, indexes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference tools relating to SF and fantasy have been issued in monograph form. We critics have been extraordinarily blessed with this cornucopia; our brothers and sisters working in mystery and detective literature, a field with twice the number of primary works, have many fewer resources upon which to draw for background information, and those active in the field of Western literature have virtually none. Only a few of these publications, of course, are professionally written, but a surprising number possess at least some utility or merit, and a few are of surpassing excellence, as good as anything produced on “mainstream” literature.
Among the modern compilers of outstanding SF reference tools are: Mike Ashley, Neil Barron, John Clute, Bill Contento, Lloyd Currey, Ha
l W. Hall, Peter Nicholls, Leslie Kay Swigart, Donald H. Tuck, and, of course, Everett F. Bleiler himself. In particular, special mention needs to be made of Hal Hall, whose work so directly supports that of all SF critics. Without his Science Fiction Book Review Index and Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Index, the standard guides, respectively, to book reviews and secondary sources relating to fantastic literature, none of us would be able to do systematic searches of the secondary literature. His name is one that has been consistently overlooked by the awards committees.
The work that remains to be done is significant. We badly need a current, annotated guide to critical monographs in the field, something that will provide both detailed descriptions and full comparative evaluations of books and dissertations on SF writers and themes. The genre has yet to produce any literary biography of an SF writer equivalent in size and scope and authoritativeness to John J. McAleer’s Rex Stout: A Biography (1977), although critical guides have been published on most of the major science fiction and fantasy authors, plus scattered autobiographies and remembrances. The latter provide interesting details on the early publishing history of the field, but lack the kind of objective evaluations of each writer’s life and career that is so badly needed.
We have too many mediocre critical guides available on writers like Stephen King, and far too few on other, less prominent individuals who nonetheless deserve some further consideration for their work; and too many of the critiques and bibliographies that have been published fail, ultimately, even in their understanding of how and why this genre originated and developed. Where other genres and literatures have produced dozens of festschriften to honor their esteemed senior colleagues, we have thus far issued none.
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