There was no room in the house for an office—so I moved out. There was a grand two-car garage facing the front garden and I seized it. I nailed the large up-and-over door shut and put in an air conditioner and was right at home. I filled it with yards of shelves for my books. Its back door gave access to a breezeway to the house. All was well in Southern California.
But I did get a small whiff of the culture I was now living in. I hated waste and I muttered and felt the bent carriage on my Rheinmetal portable. There was a large stationery store in the next town and they had a typewriter department that had a display of antique typewriters. I grabbed up the Rheinmetal, put it in the car, and made a visit to the repair department. The mechanic came out and listened to my story, nodding in agreement.
“So that’s it,” I said, pushing over the typewriter. “Can it be fixed?”
The mechanic took his time, turned the machine over, sighting along the carriage, then testing it with a steel straightedge, then putting it down between us.
“No problem,” he said. “Easy to fix.”
“That’s great,” I said. But I spoke too early.
“But I’m not going to,” he added, pushing the machine across to me.
My jaw dropped and I asked the important question. “Why not?”
There came a simple answer to a simple question.
“It’s a commie typewriter,” he said, and went into the back of the shop and closed the door. It had been made in East Germany, not West Germany. This was before Glasnost, and the two Germanys were still separate countries. American politics had taken a strange turn in the years we had been away.
* * *
This—and much else—got me up the nose. I was looking for an end to it all, but there was no end to it. I was just plain overworked, which got me down. And I just was not happy in America, that’s all. The politics got right up my nose too. That part of the world where we were living was very right wing—they’re all ex-navy and it’s in their blood. It made for an uncomfortable environment. On an earlier visit to America, my cousin Debbie had thrown a party. She was an accountant and all her friends were in the same trade. I was chatting with one, an ex-navy man now employed by H&R Block. Which says a lot. The conversation went:
“So you’re Debbie’s relative?”
“First cousin.”
“Great to have relatives you get on with. You still live back east?”
(The following conversation is quoted verbatim.)
“No. In fact I live overseas. In Denmark.”
“So you’re a commie.”
“Sorry…?”
“You have socialized medicine, don’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“So you’re a commie.”
He turns about and leaves. No attempt to listen to the benefits of the Danish medical system. How happy we are to use it. How capitalism and socialism mix easily to all our benefits. What had happened to my country? Had big drug and big pharma worked such a mind-blowing change?
There were other reasons for my dissatisfaction with living in California. I missed going to Italy every year and talking Italian. I missed the endless variety of Europe as well as the Esperanto people. There was no Esperanto group in San Diego—what a surprise! Maybe if I’d lived in a different city I’d have been happier there. But Joan loved every minute of Imperial Beach life. She had many friends there and she enjoyed the life, which made me pull back my neck and not complain for a bit.
Not that we didn’t have some good times. Brian Aldiss and his wife and small son made their first trip to the United States—and stayed with us. We did have some great fun! I rented a trailer, hooked it on behind the camper, and headed for Mexico and Baja California. We swam, sunbathed, barbecued, ate glorious Mexican seafood, and returned, most reluctantly, to the United States. There was the time when Brian explored the joys of American supermarkets. This was many years ago and the first limping supermarkets were opening in England. Brian curled his lip at them. He pointed to an American employee who was cleaning up a broken jar. “In England it would be there for a week,” he said. He was wide-eyed at the endless variety displayed and the sheer mileage of shelves. In the very center of all this food was a little snack bar for those stricken by sudden hunger. Among the items on offer was an English Burger.
“What,” Brian asked, “is that.”
“Haven’t the foggiest. I’ll ask…”
“No, don’t—because I know! It’s a burger which, after cooking, is cooled down on a chiller plate—then served with a cigarette butt crushed out in it.” He wasn’t being kind to the English that day.
I had taken Brian to the various beer bars that stretched the length of Palm Avenue. They served bottled and draft at exactly the same price and they all appeared identical. They weren’t—and the stranger soon felt uncomfortable and left. Each bar had a very exact clientele, with no exceptions. The one next to the supermarket was for wives of petty officers who were at sea. Strictly female, with the occasional much-striped sailor home on leave.
Around the corner next to the post office was for younger other ranks—no ordinary seamen. It goes without saying that Brian helped me with my research—his English accent confusing them when he ordered the beer. Then there were the ordinary, rough-and-tumble California tough bars. Brian was specially fond of the one where the murder had taken place. It was only a bit of a punch-up between a navy chief—out of uniform—and a Mexican-American. It would have ended at that—torn shirts and a few black eyes—had the chief’s date not taken a revolver from her bra and passed it over. A single shot, a dead Mexican. The chief handed her back the gun and ran out the door but he was back just when the police and the MPs showed up. He had changed into uniform. What Brian liked most about the story was the busty girlfriend. Who when asked why she had the gun explained that she always had a gun in her bra …
Brian enjoyed the frontierlike quality of Imperial Beach but, sadly, it was time to leave. Brian and I were enjoying a last beer when he hesitated—then said with feeling, “I’ve enjoyed every moment—so don’t get me wrong …
“But I do feel that you are knee-high in a waist-deep culture.”
He didn’t elaborate.
He didn’t have to.
Living in California meant that, inevitably, I was going to get involved with films. But this was from left field. I was contacted by Alex Cox, the most creative of the new generation of filmmakers. He had made the classic Repo Man. Now he had squeezed a twenty-four-hour option out of my agent for Bill, the Galactic Hero. We met for breakfast at one of the delis and took it from there. There was a lot of interest in our pitch, followed by a positive maybe. Depressing on one hand, but exciting for me to make all these contacts.* The best was Roger Corman. We talked a lot about film, and it was a revelation to me to listen to two real pros. No sale was made but Roger called me in a few days later and asked me to write an SF screenplay for him; I replied with an instant yes. I would get five thousand dollars for the script. Whether the film flopped or was a big success that would be my fee. Working for Roger was a gamble. Many big directors and actors had owed their success to Roger—and his fixed-fee contracts.
I read through the proposed outline and there were opportunities. But the walking through the forest inside giant wooden wheels wouldn’t fly.
“The backer wants big wooden wheels,” Roger said.
“I’ve just thought of a way to make wheels work!”
I wrote the script and sent it to Roger. Who called me in a week later.
“Not a bad script, though it requires some work.”
“Happy to do it.”
“You won’t have to; the project goes back into the file cabinet.” I kept the five grand and it would be some years before I wrote another script.
Not that my name wasn’t known. Star Trek was in its early weeks and already hitting the charts. So I should have been flattered when Gene Roddenberry called me in.
“You know, Harry, this show eats idea
s, zipping round space and all that.”
“I know. And I’m here to help. How about some bright new twists? Two, maybe three of them, new and applicable to your show.”
“That’s what I want!”
“Three ideas at a time and they’ll only cost five hundred dollars each, a bargain.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
Well I knew. Ideas are gold in Hollywood. He could have afforded it ten times over. But he was just a schlock merchant who would always think cheap. It would be some time before my film career took off. Meanwhile I wrote my books for a growing readership.
15
Brian Aldiss and I got to know each other in the 1960s through our common interest in good science fiction. Brian was literary editor at the Oxford Mail, and at the same time was writing very classy reviews for the British Science Fiction Association magazine, Vector. I wrote for the same magazine. We corresponded and found that we had very much in common, and the friendship grew bit by bit. Out of this came the idea of having a magazine devoted to intelligent reviews of science fiction. Along with Tom Boardman and his publishing know-how we created SF Horizons, the first serious critical magazine about science fiction. We did only two issues of reviews and articles and—an idea pinched from The Paris Review—interviews. It cost you nothing to get a guy talking about his work. Kingsley Amis interviewed C. S. Lewis in the first issue. Jim Blish was a great fan of William Burroughs and went to interview him. There was a good variety in there.
Traditionally, for about ten or twelve years, I would work like crazy all year round and Easter would be my time off, at the Eastercon in England. Joan would see me out of the house and I would go and stay with Brian. We’d have a few drinks then we’d go off to the Eastercon by train and do some serious fanac, which would usually end up with us doing the Harry and Brian act. One fan asked us if we did much rehearsing. Another compared it to Flanders and Swann. They wouldn’t believe that it was all spontaneous. Then it was back to Brian’s neat little house in North Oxford, with a pub located just across the road, a mucky duck (Black Swan) if I remember correctly.
There’s a moral story of some kind lurking here. Brian had bought this house with the income from his first novel sale. I had bought four one-way tickets from New York back to Europe with the income from my first novel. But safely ensconced behind glasses of strong drink we let the ideas flow. We started a novel together but we were too different as writers. We hit pay dirt with anthologies. We started off with Nebula Award Stories 2 for 1967, doing it for a miserable editorial fee from the Science Fiction Writers of America.
This started the blood stirring. Why didn’t we bring out a Year’s Best? There were other annual anthologies, but they all closed in December when the last magazines came out. I realized that we could close in November, because the magazines dated December actually come out then. By closing early we would have two months’ lead on the other guys. Not only that but we would have the whole book done and set in type except for one story. We would put in the best stories from the December mags and publish in February of the new year and beat them all to the bookstores. It was a grand idea, except the publisher managed to screw things up and it came out eight months later, after all the other Year’s Bests.
But our anthology earned out and was quite successful and we were very cheered. At this time there were three or four annual anthologies—Judy Merril had one, Terry Carr and Don Wollheim did one as well. But our tastes were completely different. I checked each year, and I was very happy that we never overlapped with any of them. Every story we had was completely different from theirs. I like to think that ours were intelligent, up to date, and fun! We got a fan letter on a postcard from Tom Disch saying it was the only intellectual annual anthology.
At this time I was reading The Humanist Annual—the atheist annual—and I found a short story called “Mary and Joe” that really worked. It was written by a Naomi Mitchison. I wrote and got permission from her, and I put it into the Year’s Best. We began a correspondence and she sent me a copy of Memoirs of a Space Woman, an English hardback novel. It was quite good and an American publisher agreed to buy it. Only when we met later in London did I realize who she was: Lady Naomi Mitchison. Her husband was in Parliament, her brother the noted scientist, related to the Huxleys. In later years we would visit her in her fabulous home in Campbeltown, Scotland, where we had the chance to mingle with the Huxleys and end up feeling like intellectual pygmies!
I came to know Anthony Burgess in a similar way. I anthologized one of his stories and we began a correspondence. We met in New York over a curry that he cooked. This began a friendship that lasted a good number of years.
We were still churning out the Year’s Best. We looked at what we had and figured that by December, if science fiction magazines hadn’t filled three-quarters of the book, we were going to put in stories from elsewhere. Brian was a great guy for justifying the use of a story. I remember we had one where this guy is hit by a car, and he’s lying unconscious on the ground, paralyzed. But he can hear people talking about him. I asked, “Brian, how can we justify this as science fiction?” He wrote back, This man, trapped under this car, is as far from humanity as he would be if he was on one of the moons of Jupiter. Absolute nonsense—but it worked!
Brian and I also did the Decades series. We started with the “golden years,” the ’40s, which was the Campbell era. It wasn’t planned that way but all of the stories were from Astounding-Analog. Then we did the ’50s and the ’60s. We couldn’t do the ’70s because we were still in the ’70s. We were going to go back and do the ’30s—but the stories were unbelievably awful, even those in the anthologies. Damon Knight did a pre-golden years anthology, Asimov did one—and I found all of the stories unreadable. We gave up on the decade idea and killed the series.
We worked well together but you couldn’t find two more different writers in the entire universe—Brian and I had nothing in common in our writing—but we found out very early on that critically, as editors, we agreed 100 percent. In fact, we agreed never to disagree. Over all the years, in over a dozen anthologies with a dozen or so stories in each, there was only one story that one of us picked that the other didn’t like. We just threw it out.
Publishers must have been eager for anthologies. They made money for everybody. I earned enough from them to give up writing Flash Gordon. I was still turning out a book a year. We’d get ideas for anthologies, and we’d just do them on the spot, such as Hell’s Cartographers. One day Brian said we just get six of our friends to write ten thousand words on how they work and we have the book. “Who are the other four other guys?” I asked him.
Those chosen produced good copy, including Damon Knight, who sent in over sixty thousand words instead of the ten thousand. He thanked us for breaking a many-years-long writer’s block.
Those days are long gone. I remember once I was staying with Brian at his house in Oxford, which was a charming old three-story house, very echoey. We had a bottle of Johnnie Walker that was providing us with inspiration. We were talking, remembering lost stories, putting together the anthology, climbing his shelves searching for the right stories. By the time the bottle was emptied, we had a pile of mags with bookmarks in them.
Next morning we looked through the pile of stories, and they made a very good anthology. The ones Brian had picked were quite good, and he enjoyed my selection. But there was one remaining story that I hadn’t picked and neither had Brian. We figured Johnnie Walker was the only other person who could have picked it!
* * *
Brian has wider tastes than I have. Pamela Zoline wrote a story called “The Heat Death of the Universe,” which Brian put into a couple of anthologies. I loathed it: nothing happened in it at all. Brian liked the avant-garde science fiction of the “new wave.” Judy Merril invented the term for an anthology. I wasn’t against it—I printed “new wave” stories, including Norman Spinrad’s “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.” But many so-called new wave wr
iters just couldn’t write very well. The best of the whole lot was Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head. He read the French avant-garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, who inspired him. I read the English translation of Robbe-Grillet’s book and Brian’s was quite an improvement on it!
Brian and I agreed that stories in our anthologies had to be entertaining and they had to be correct scientifically. We had some odd items in there—like the computer-written short story and the complicated diagram that was Gahan Wilson’s “How to Write a Horror Story.” There were a lot of good writers who didn’t get the attention they deserved. Jim Sallis, who published in New Worlds. Bob Shaw was a good writer, very subtle—he didn’t write enough. He reminded me a bit of Jim White—sotto voce. Both were very quiet, soft-spoken, and very literate, but able to put the boot in when needed. The classic one from Bob was about “slow glass,” a great story. Equally great was The World Below, a Jim White novel about a ship at the bottom of the ocean and the generations living there. Bob wrote Larry Niven’s Ringworld idea before Larry did, in Orbitsville.
We both also believed that there’s no reason why science fiction can’t be well written, but it’s hard to find. Some science fiction will never be well written—by the scientists and engineers who have fantastic ideas expressed in limping prose. We were so happy when people like Tom Disch came along, an author who would get a story right—and who could write as well.
Every year we’d end up with two or three or four stories from general fiction or “art” fiction magazines that were nothing to do with science fiction. Brian would write a justification that made it seem like science fiction. I dug a lot of Borges out that had never been published in the States. We did two or three of his stories before they discovered that fifty dollars wasn’t what Borges should have been getting! They upped it to a thousand and we couldn’t afford him anymore.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 21