Masters


 


I'm currently reading one of my treasures. I'm less a book collector than a book hound: when I find my quarry I snuffle up to it and bellow. I've attended hundreds upon hundreds of book sales, and more often than not left with boxes upon boxes. Usually the other folks with multiple boxes are dealers, and in some cases teachers looking for class resources. Me I just intend to eat them here.
I don't usually remember individual sales, especially since I've attended the same events year after year--but one I remember: I was living in New York, and it was sometime in the 70's. It was a small suburban church book sale in Northern Westchester. Mount Kisco, I think. or maybe Bedford. yeah, yeah, some vivd recollection, but I remember perfectly the hilly tree-lined road it was on, and my walking back and forth to my car with boxes--because this place somehow had a science fiction section full of early-to-mid 50's SF paperbacks. Some of them, I knew even back then, were rare and valuable, and I had that blissful feeling as I paid for them at a quarter a pop that I was getting away with murder.
There were, of course, loads of Ace Doubles. Two lurid covers on two novels printed upside down to each other. Everybody who was an SF fan from that period loves Ace Doubles with a guilty Smaug-like love. It was at that sale that I got, for example the Ace Double that reprinted (in the mid-fifties, when he and his author were unknown) Conan the Conqueror, the only Conan novel Robert E. Howard wrote--backed up by The Sword of Rhiannon, by Leigh Brackett (the woman who made, as one of her last deeds, The Empire Strikes Back the best Star Wars Movie. She also worked on the screenplay of The Big Sleep, and created a Mars that beats Edgar Rice Burroughs at his own game.) When I made my find, i knew that the book was going for 50 bucks; Paradoxically, it may be worth less thirty years later, Conan having suffered from overexposure.
But I also picked up the one I'm reading now, a Double that had on one side Cosmic Manhunt, by L. Sprague de Camp, and on the other Ring around the Sun, by Clifford D. Simak. And this stuff is good. Not just guilty pleasure good, but good good.

That's the amazing thing about the Science Fiction Ghetto: ignored almost completely by the outside world and the rest of the publishing industry, and consigned to pulp oblivion with Westerns and Romances, there were (along, of course, with stacks of hackwork) writers of skill, erudition, wit and vision--and as different from each other as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. And publishers like Don Wollheim (Ace's daimon) would slap a cover with a babe and a rocket ship on it, retitle it if the original wasn't punchy enough, and give these writers steady income. Philip K. Dick did Ace Doubles, as did Jack Vance and (yes, got it from that same trove) Harlan Ellison.
L. Sprague deCamp (surely one of the best names a writer could be blessed with) was one of those anomalies: he was a world traveler, multilingual, and at one time manager of the International Correspondence schools. He not only wrote taut efficient stories, but laced them with both a depth of literary and cultural allusion, and a sense of humor.
Cosmic Manhunt was originally titled The Queen of Zamba, a perfectly good pulpish title, but which The Wollheim probably thought wasn't SF enough. And Wollheim's gift for writing blood-and-thunder captions sometimes makes me pull out my Aces to read them. In this case it Was: From a Wonder-World Hideaway She Defied the Code Of Space!
Oh my gosh and golly.
Now 'She' isn't even vaguely the main character of the story. The actual story is a sprightly genre-mix: a future private eye is hired by a rich merchant to get back his daughter who has skipped planet with a ne'er-do-well. The trail leads to the planet Krishna, which is under a stringent treaty, where humans are only allowed at the spaceport, and technology transfer is strictly forbidden. But it is possible to disguise an Earthman as a Krishnan, and so the private eye goes undercover, finding out that the ne'er-do-well has somehow become King of the island nation of Zamba, with the daughter as Queen.
OK, not bad. A decent pulp story, right? But nothing to blog home about.
But here, the god is in the details. The spacefaring monopoly is run by the Brazilians, and so Portuguese is threaded all through the story. He lifts, announcing as he does so, a plot device from Hamlet. In the midst of our hero's undercover escapade in the dash's court, we suddenly get treated to a razor-sharp parody of the vocabulary of foxhunting. And we never quite get to Zamba. Moreover, de Camp ends the tale with a story--not a quote, but a story--from Plato's Republic. deCamp's Krishna is not simply a lift from China or India (or Barsoom) but a thoroughly mished mash of cultures, done by someone who's made a systematic study (with a sardonic eye) of the varieties of human cultural experience.
All of it is fit into a firmly paced adventure story, sans divagations. Fun to read? You betcha--but I didn't have to dial myself down to twelve years old to do it. I found pleasures aplenty for the adult seen-it-before mind.

Clifford Simak (not bad as names go either) is also something other than a hack, but where deCamp is witty and erudite, Simak is lyrical and thoughtful. I had read, and was affected by what's probably his best known work in the SF Ghetto, City . But it wasn't until his much later work, Way Station , that I realized that Simak is Sf's greatest pastoralist. (Read both of these when you get the chance.) But Simak's passion for place, for the contemplative mind, for living on one's own earth informs so much of his work, which is pretty startling when you're dealing with the rootlessness of science fiction.
Ring around the Sun is charmingly dated in places: it's set in the future of 1977, first of all, and begins with a marvelous little economics problem centered (at first) around three marvelous gadgets: a razor blade that never goes dull--a cigarette lighter that always lights, and a lightbulb that never burns out. Remember cigarette lighters? And, yes, there was a time before electric razors. But that quaintness aside, the 'menace' works with a compelling logic, but tied in with the adventure plot is a surprisingly passionate examination of human loneliness. Come for the pandimensional conquest mystery, stay for the contemplation.

That's one of the things that makes me look at American culture with a different eye. Phillip K. Dick has posthumously been given superstar status in 20th century American fiction at large--and SF's bust-out into movies has given some folks general celebrity. But there are so many folks who wrote just plain wonderful fiction, who did things with words that no one else did, who are celebrated inside the genre but unknown without: Avram Davidson--Barry Malzberg--Jack Vance--Alfred Bester--R.A. Lafferty--Theodore Sturgeon--Cordwainer Smith--David R. Bunch--Clark Ashton Smith--John Brunner--and the list goes on. They all were published under garish covers and sold to readers who got more than they bargained for and were made stranger and better for it. And there was a commensal community that, while it didn't give them the riches and recognition their writing deserved, supported them in their writing even though they were more than a little off the pulp center.

It's not just nostalgia that brings me back to these old places. It's the good good stuff.

Posted: Monday - April 23, 2007 at 05:04 PM        

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