Who do I admire in SF? You and you and you as far as eye and memory reach, sir and madam. Some for this, some for that. All different. But more than that—
I love the SF world. And I don’t love easy. Out of SF I wouldn’t spare one, from the dimmest two-neuron dreamer to the voice from the heart of the sun. Maybe to you on the inside it’s not as clear as to me out here. What is SF?
What but a staggering, towering, glittering mad lay cathedral? Built like the old ones by spontaneous volunteers, some bringing one laborious gargoyle, some a load of stone, some engineering a spire. Over years now, over time the thing has grown, you know? To what god? Who knows. Something different from the gods of the other arts. A god that isn’t there yet, maybe. An urge saying Up, saying Screw it all. Saying Try. To… be… more? We don’t know. But everyone has made this. Limping, scratching, wrangling, clowning, goony, sauced, hes, shes, its, thems, bemmies for all I know, swooping glory, freaked out in corners, ridiculous, noble, queerly vulnerable in some ways others aren’t—totally irrelevant, really.
These are the nearest to winged people that we have and I would shut up forever rather than hurt one of them. Dead or alive.
That’s what’s bugging Tiptree about listing “influences.”
Dig?
—December 3, 1970-January 29, 1971
In the Canadian Rockies
When I decided to start publishing the small fanzine Kyben, I described it to Tip-tree as a zine “in which I and my friends sit around and talk about things, mostly…. Would you like to write a little column?”
Tip agreed, and in Kyben 1/Phantasmicom 8 (December 1971) we introduced ‘The 20-Mile Zone.” The column consisted of two essays, “I Saw Him” and “Spitting Teeth, Our Hero—,” and a piece of the letter to me that had accompanied them.
Most of the installments of “The 20-Mile Zone” contained travel writing, but the second, “Do You Like It Twice?” (Phantasmicom 9, February 1972), was a response to a review in F&SF. The third column again consisted of an essay (“Maya Máloob”) and parts of the letter accompanying it. When I ran this in Kyben 3 (September 1972) I edited the letter into two segments, “Mexico on 5 and 10 Haircuts a Day” and ‘The Voice from the Baggie.” This time, instead of just reprinting it that way, I went back to the original letter and edited it more lightly, so the one section here is longer than the two sections were in the fanzine.
Never have I seen so much Human lard—except when I was a kid in what were then the Dutch East Indies. (The colonial Dutchman was a Human swine and so was his mate.) Up north it isn’t pig fat, just solid cylinder-people… and tourists. Old, old tourists in their millions, busloads of geriatric specimens, singing “You Are My Sunshine.” The entire Route 61 around the west end of the Lake Superior is bumper-to-bumper with old old people in beige Cadillacs. Gerontology Boulevard. Old old men hung with cameras, dressed in weirdo mod stuff their pantsuited old ladies have put on them. Man, if they were all stripped I bet you’d only see three navels visible west of Ontario. Not to mention other organs. But the natives of the Rockies, though aged, are tough. Met one still climbing with ropes at eighty-two, another ninety-seven. It’s a UN there, due to the railroads. Found Scots, Swedes, Swiss, Gypsy, Indian, Hungarian, and assorted Oriental hybrids. (Chinese restaurants appear early in the frontier.) They’re the only ones with waistlines.
Also found a marvelous army of young Canadians male and female, who go in to staff all the lodges during the summer and who were just pulling out to scatter to their colleges. Restored faith in the race after the Golden Years brigade. Also some kids who were born there and love it too much to leave. They’re living in another world, the world where your folks came in and homesteaded wild ground and the oldest son is the hero who hauled the generator up the mountain and is organizing a helicopter patrol. Colony on Planet X?
Man, if we could only go on living like that! Human-sized problems, but five generations later you get—Us. Mice in the crevices of Mordor. Ah well, let’s fry an ore for supper.
I ought to mention that it’s becoming a bad scene to try hitchhiking in the Canadian parks. The Canadians are fairly accepting, but they had a bad experience when they tried to set up facilities for hitch trippers. One chap (the Hungarian) told me a heated tale about Mafia infiltration, heavy drug-pushing in the hostels and camps. The old pioneer types that run the area are getting edgy. They’re used to beards and jeans, but they can’t tell one long-haired kid from another. If you go, get some sort of wheels, square up into a Great American Nature Lover type when you arrive, and make Contact with the local young people to find out how the scene works. The place is so great, assuming you’re not allergic to pure air, it’s worth a little tactical effort.
And, go early or late; in midsummer you can’t see around the bodies. Unless you get ‘way up back on foot.
—September 18, 1971
I Saw Him
Ballard’s Drowned Giant, I mean. He’s lying on the North American continent, frozen stiff. Among the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. That’s where I saw him, or at least his arm.
It’s not called his arm, it’s called the Athabasca Glacier, which is one limb of the Columbia Icefield, which is the largest hunk of the Ice Age left south of the Arctic. (150 square miles of it with peaks at 12,000 feet, figurewise.)
The Ice Age has of course been gone for ten thousand years or so. Imagine an ice cube so big it can melt for ten thousand years and still be there. Great thick towering green-creviced, hundred-mile blocks of ice, cradled in the peaks, forever gushing down torrents of melt to nourish the forests and moose and meadows below… for ten thousand years. When it’s all gone…?
What you see, edge on from the new highway, is one huge, incredible mess. Devastation. The party’s over. Think of a tray of ice cubes melting in a sink—that’s about the scale of it. Only the ice is seven miles long and the sides of the sink are thousands of feet high. And the ice has made that sink. Ice a mile high once filled it up, grinding forward, gouging, crushing through and over the peaks. A mile down under the ice, what went on was terrible. Now as the ice retreats you can see it. A world of rubble, of mountains ground to gravel. Not a leaf, not a moss. Sterile. You approach through a lunar landscape; all it needs is a little tin flag to be an Apollo TV. Glaciers make an abominable mess, probably the worst mess going. Nuclear bombs, volcanoes—mosquito bites, comparatively.
Glaciers also have bad breath. They exhale a sullen archaic draft. The cold flows down forever from the icefield above. Even though the day is bright a mile away, freezing squalls and blizzards play at the edge of the ice.
This is what is called a tourist attraction.
I was a tourist. I got out and joined the line of Human insects straggling up the cold moraine toward the ice. The ice. I told myself I wanted to see what made the astounding corrosion-green color in the crevasses. Secretly, I wanted to touch it. I passed signs that said the ice ended here in 1950, and here in 1960. Everybody was jumping over streams of meltwater on its way to become the MacKenzie River and end in the Arctic Ocean. This icefield feeds three oceans; it’s the hydrographic apex of the continent. We passed under a small rainbow. My desire to touch the ice-beast did not seem to be shared by my fellow primates; they advanced one-eyed, holding up their Instamatics like magic amulets.
When I came to the edge of the ice I saw that the whole mass was dimly lit up oystercolor from within. The ice itself here was glistening granular, full of pebbles and other debris of its million geologic crimes. The edge sloped and the bottom was about a foot off the ground. Pursuing (I told myself) my interest in the green, I stuck my head underneath. This involved kneeling in a stream. The whole glacier seemed to be hollow underneath, dripping from a billion ice udders. It was resting only lightly on the ground, like—like a vast hand. A hand barely pressing on its fingerpads. I pulled back out and saw the Drowned Giant. Or his big frozen brother.
Remember Ballard’s description of the troops of people clambering up, over, into th
e drowned body? Picking at him, scuffling in his eyeballs?
I looked at the line of little figures trudging up over the gravel waste. More cars arriving. A busload now. All day, every day. I saw a big woman in curlers pry off a piece of the ice-body. (A very small piece.) It was snowing. A man had his girl photograph him standing on the ice shelf. As he climbed down he stopped and frowned. Then he kicked the ice. The ice-finger did not break.
I looked up; the ice-arm behind the hand was seven miles long; the shoulder was an enormous icefall. Tiny snow-cat buses were sightseeing near the elbow. They had worn a dirty track. The arm lay quietly; the first ten thousand years had been easy. I watched Ballard’s tourists. A boy crawled into a serac. Remember the boy who crawled into the giant’s nostril and barked? If this boy barked I didn’t hear him. Glaciers are noisy.
Another man was kicking the glacier. Making no impression, he backed off, nodded fiercely at nobody in particular and then jumped at it with a kind of clumsy karate kick, hard. That didn’t affect the ice-giant either. The man went away. I saw three more men kick the glacier. Very popular act. It hailed and I too went away, wondering.
Kicking glaciers…?
Race memory, could it be? The ice-giant was helpless now. But I could see his work. If that ice ever rises again, man, we are through. A mile-high wall grinding over cities, missile bins, Disneyland, Pat Nixon, everything.
Well, I never found out what was causing the green. But I touched it, the ice age. I can report that it is cold, dirty, and a lot bigger and older than I am. And I didn’t kick it.
Sort of wish I’d tasted it, though.
—September 18, 1971
Spitting Teeth, Our Hero—
—Curled up, that’s what.
Imagine you’re wrestling some big old shutters off a fishing shack in a big old forest. Imagine further that these so-called shutters are actually monster antiques made of heavy splintery planking and the kind of hardware they tie ships onto. To get them off you have to push up; it’s like heaving a piano through a transom. Luckily there’s a big guy helping you. Okay?
So, just as you notice the planks are kind of slippery, your eye catches an interesting ripple on the lake behind you—
Ooops—powwwww!
And you’re down on the ground feeling your gushing face to see where your teeth are and if your nose is still there. And you hurt. The shutter hit your facebones, split one lip and cut the other off the gums, and knocked half your teeth around. Blood pouring.
What do you think about?
Well, of course you think about plunging your agonized muzzle into the cold lake, and where’s a doctor, and so on. But if you’re a writer you also think about all those heroes. How they get their faces stomped in or shot off and leap up gamely and—
Steal an alien rocket ship, and—
Figure out a vector-mathematical language and/or the secret of the universe, and—
Fuck at least the bad girl and the good girl during surgery, while—
Making a half a dozen brilliant psychosociophilosophical speeches.
Man, I couldn’t. I couldn’t!
I couldn’t do anything but sit down and sluice my face and accept a ride to the hospital, and after I got sewed up I just sat down some more.
I wasn’t interested in the nurses and the only speeches I made were something like ” ‘Anksh ‘Oc” and “Fflthh.”
Who can?
Well, another thing I thought was, Jeesus, this is what your professional ring fighter goes through every week or so. You’ve seen him—Joe Meathooks, down on one knee, blood streaming down his mashed puss, crowd yelling at him to get up.
And he does.
The more I thought of this the worse I felt.
My injuries were minimal you understand, compared to Joe’s. Shoot, nothing was broken, my teeth may even stay with me. No wires. A nothing, a tap. Joe would laugh.
So what’s wrong with me? Yellow? Decadent intellectual faked up in a woodman’s shirt?
Well (I told myself), Point A, this sort of thing is part of Joe’s business. Lots of businesses have painful parts. Astronomers freeze their arses off all night, politicians cripple their shaking hands. Joe might even dislike a couple parts of mine… maybe.
Or, Point B, Joe has his adrenaline going. Adrenaline is really something. My very few small brawls taught me that it really does block pain. (I even noticed a pinkish haze, too; can’t imagine why.) Whereas I hadn’t been desperate, or mad at the shutters—I was in a peaceful cholinergic state when the Pow! hit.
So I concluded that our adrenaline-powered Hero probably can get up and fight some, shinny up walls, and bash doors and such. And maybe (after the wet towels) he can fumble around a bit with the girls. But man, no speeches. And as for cracking the higher mathematical functions, the grand intuitive insights—
Forget it.
Days, weeks, not even a feeble storyline came to me. All that was in my mind was the horde of invisible hornets in my face and thoughts like why the doc forgot to sew up the inside. And the difference between me and Sonny Lis ton.
Now do I hear somebody saying, There are heroes even if you aren’t one, creep, and heroes are interesting?
Or, well, sure, but in fiction you keep things moving, it’s that surmounting violent damage is a symbol—
Of what?
Well, here I offer the one little insight that crept to me.
The day after my happening a friend who is a genuine Tough Guy fell off a power pole onto a rock. He wasn’t seriously damaged and he’d piled himself up before. But this one hurt him in a new way. When he got out of the hospital he sat telling how he’d been unconscious, frowning in a puzzled way. Then he’d hold up one big hand and look at it, and look at his legs. I think I know what he was discovering.
How fragile we are. Fragile!
Compared to almost everything around it your body is as frail as a soap bubble. The chair you’re sitting in can break your leg, the edge of the table can crack your skull. The steering wheel of your car can crush your precious guts out. We’re bags of Jell-O, mostly water held up with goo and a few frail sticks, a pulsing mass of vulnerability in which everything depends on everything else working—and no replacements. We can be pierced, fried, crushed, broken, mutilated, and killed in a million ways by practically everything in our environments. And we run around manipulating chain saws and bulldozers and nuclear fusion… for an average of sixty-seven years. Incredible!
What agility!
And what a fantastic self-image!
A “tough” man? An eggshell. A grape in a concrete mixer. One slip with that axe and your foot’s gone. One misstep and tap your skull on the curb—cracked egg.
But we manage to skip through it for sixty years, roaring past each other in lethal missiles, playing with power mowers and welding arcs.
Astounding.
You can’t think about it, either. Not and go on doing it. Once you watch your hand whisk back from the crunch of the car door you’ve had it. Let your automatic reflexes alone. Keep up the myth. Bury deep down the knowledge of how vulnerable we are.
Heroes help us do it.
Heroes get squashed and sliced and dismembered and burnt and they shed torrents of blood—but they’re all right! They may hurt, but they go on acting furiously, thinking brilliantly.
They keep us from realizing that we’re surrounded by instant obliteration. The absolutely necessary myth.
Who needs realism?
Well, there’s my great ten-cent insight. It has a small corollary, too: When you consider the fantastic unconscious skills we and the other animals have developed to handle our dangerous environment on this planet, isn’t it possible that man is going to have some pretty hard times when he really starts living in zero-gee? We’ve seen astronauts playing with plastic bags and very carefully handling lock covers and so on. Paying attention every minute. But when you start living you start depending on your reflexes, on your built-up feeling of how all those hard he
avy lethal things are going to behave. When they start behaving differently while still keeping their lethal mass—oops. Ouch!!
We’ll make it, though.
Now I’ll go chew on a milkshake. Screw Sonny Liston. My next hero who shows up with his teeth on his chest and his shattered kneecaps tied up in his girl’s brassiere… and starts deciphering the riddles of the alien technology… is going to bed first.
Alone.
At least until I see my dentist.
Fflthh.
—September 20, 1971
Do You Like It Twice?
In the October 1971 F&SF, Baird Searles complains (gently) about a book because it must be read twice for “complete clarity.” That is, some of the references in the early part aren’t fully understandable until you’ve read the whole thing, he says, and that’s “a lot to ask of any reader.”
This startled me out of my granola.
Hey, Baird: What????
You mean this isn’t good? But… but… what about all the sweat I’ve spent trying to build my stories so there is stuff that will only come out on second reading? I always thought you owed that to the reader, that a story without it was boring.
Now Baird says this is bad?
Startled, I immediately begin to look inwards. (This is my usual reaction when startled, it is sometimes criticized in traffic.)
My first observation, which we won’t even discuss, is that I really don’t know how to write. Leaving that aside as irrelevant, since I am writing, what’s with this reading-twice thing? Why do I feel that readers have a right to complain if there isn’t a bit of mystery, an angle or insight tucked away under the surface, like a thingie in a cereal box?
I feel this so deeply I never even knew I felt it, see. There’s this invisible face behind my shoulder, watching, waiting… it wants what it wants… if it doesn’t get it I feel it fading back disgusted, sighing, “Is that all? Cheap, Tiptree.”
Meet Me at Infinity Page 23