Fritz’s Conjure Wife tips the balance with the poorly understood phenomenon of “witchcraft,” which the author almost makes into realistic SF (ghosts may be “real phenomena, poorly observed,” as Nigel Kneale’s character observes in the Quatermass series of television serials), and we watch the what-if play out as a drama of warring motives, in the wife who knows what she can do and the husband who denies what is happening, and must inevitably join the conflict on his wife’s side.
My Empties plays out between two people who can’t truly encompass what is being offered to them, or what to do about it, much in the same way as what is “offered” in human life, wealth, for example, or political power, or a fast car—all of which merely amplify human flaws. There are black comedy features to my story. Many a man’s intelligence sinks before a beautiful woman. Men and women of power excite sexual longings and suppress reasoning ability. The struggle is well expressed in the famous Keats poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in the countless pitiless women of drama and fiction, although today we know that every story could easily reverse the roles.
If only my characters could have turned to the back of the book for the answers, for the “stepback” insights of this very afterword! It’s here, but they could never have read it, postmodernism be damned.
What Conjure Wife still has to say about our two sexes is that each has power over the other, and that this leverage may be variously, indefinitely enhanced. Empties sets the enhancement at the extreme, a nearly valueless, horrifying exertion that still follows familiar parallels. The result, I hope, has been intriguing, and readers will forgive this postmortem, but remembering Fritz led me to ask why I wrote a so-called horror novel—or any of the horror stories in Black Pockets (see my ruminations in the “afterbirth” to that 2006 collection).
The answers were always there. Fantasy reflects our oldest inner life, while science fiction looks to the high ground of the reasoning cortex, to knowledge. But the old darkness keeps at us, subverting the cortex. The longer I live the less I see of knowledge ruling us and more of humankind living by no rules at all; worse, kicking over the game board whenever it sees a disadvantage to set rules, especially the restraints, some would say weakness, that seems to come with kind behavior. The horror is that it has never been otherwise for very long, and that writers cannot help but reflect their times. Karl Rove’s example of doing the outrageous thing comes to mind even as I hope that a day will arrive when no one reading these notes will know his name and will have to look it up.
It is no accident that I wrote this novel about tipping the balance of power between people; no accident that I wrote Brute Orbits, a novel about an absurd future penal system, on the eve of tortures at Abu Ghraib and at other “secret locations” which power reserves for itself; or Cave of Stars about provoking religious fundamentalism. My world seeped into my fiction as I tried to write without bending the knee to commerce, or, in my science fiction, subservience to a temporal parochialism.
Literature, or artfulness, should carry within itself all those qualities that are bundled inside the term “entertainment” (provocation, beauty of expression, even incitement to thought and action). Writers should kick ass, or try to, because, even when they don’t, they are the alarm canaries in the mineshaft—except that they don’t choke on the gas right away to warn the miners; they go on choking, slowly, word by word, with every household dollar, asking themselves what they think they are doing.
I wrote Empties with no publisher in mind, with no contract in hand, which I had done since my first novel. I wrote it in delight over what Fritz Leiber’s examples of craft and artfulness had taught me. On one note regarding superstition and science I have followed his example: the “witchcraft” in Conjure Wife is rationalized into a science fictional way of thinking, as part of the husband’s character; in my novel, Dierdre’s mindpower may have a natural explanation, but it is mostly assumed. The transcendent question may well be, does anything in what we call reality happen without cause? To answer with the words “chaos” and “uncaused events” may be the most horrific ideas anyone can consider, as all conceptions of order are ruled out before the “old darkness” that seems to press in on us from inside and from the “outer horrors” of the cosmos.
Fritz might have said that you can escape form or content, but you can’t escape both and hope to produce anything more than an empty-headed time waster.
Toward the end of Fritz Leiber’s private sessions with his sorcerer’s apprentices, I ventured to say that one day I would hope to write a novel to equal (I dared not say surpass) Conjure Wife.
“Do you have one in mind?” he asked, and I still see his sharp-eyed gaze.
“No,” I said.
“You will,” he said, “you will...”
Some years later I was at a book signing, where I sat with Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, Pamela Sargent, and astronaut Scott Carpenter; I mentioned my novel to Bloch, which I had sketched and set aside.
Bloch smiled at my gleeful precis of the central notion, then said, “Sounds right to me. Don’t neglect it.”
George Zebrowski Delmar,
|New York, May 2008
About George Zebrowski
George Zebrowski’s nearly forty books include novels, short fiction collections, anthologies, and a book of essays.
Science fiction writer Greg Bear calls him “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration,” and the late Terry Carr, one of the most influential science fiction editors of recent years, described him as “an authority in the SF field.” Zebrowski has published about a hundred works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays, and has written about science for Omni Magazine. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Nature, the Bertrand Russell Society News, and many other publications.
His best-known novel is Macrolife (Harper & Row, 1979), which Arthur C. Clarke described as “a worthy successor to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s been years since I was so impressed. One of the few books I intend to read again.” Library Journal chose Macrolife as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and The Easton Press included it in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. Zebrowski’s stories and novels have been translated into a half-dozen languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Stranger Suns (Bantam, 1991) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
The Killing Star (William Morrow, 1995), written with scientist/ author Charles Pellegrino, received unanimous praise in national newspapers and magazines. The New York Times Book Review called it “a novel of such conceptual ferocity and scientific plausibility that it amounts to a reinvention of that old Wellsian staple, [alien invasion]...” The Washington Post Book World described the novel as “a classic SF theme pushed logically to its ultimate conclusions.”
Brute Orbits (HarperCollins, 1998), an uncompromising novel about the future of the penal system, was praised by reviewers for its characters, originality, and thought. Paul Di Filippo, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, said that “Zebrowski never ceases to invest his individual characters with three-dimensional roundness... Startling, sobering, provocative,” while Publishers Weekly called this novel “boldly speculative.” The book was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year.
Cave of Stars, a novel that is part of his Macrolife mosaic, was published by HarperCollins in 1999. Skylife, an anthology edited by George Zebrowski with physicist and writer Gregory Benford, was published by Harcourt Brace in 2000. Swift Thoughts (Golden Gryphon), a hardcover collection of his stories, with an introduction by Gregory Benford, came out in 2002. A second hardcover collection, In the Distance, and Ahead In Time, was also published in the same year. Synergy SF: New Science Fiction, the next volume of his legendary Synergy series of original anthologies, was published in 2004. Black Pockets and Oth
er Dark Thoughts (Golden Gryphon), with an introduction by Howard Waldrop, came out in 2006, and a new edition of Macrolife was published in that year by Pyr Books, with an introduction by Ian Watson. Golden Gryphon published his horror novel Empties in 2009.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Itzy
ISBN 978-1-4804-9478-7
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Fritz Leiber, A Remembrance
About the Author
Empties Page 19