Isegoria

Fritz Leiber’s life story was almost as strange and wondrous as those he concocted for his books, Ted Gioia says:

At one point or another in his life he was a movie actor (you can see Fritz Leiber working with Greta Garbo in Camille), chess champion, board game inventor, comic strip writer (for the Buck Rogers series), editor of an encyclopedia, minister, student of psychology, student of philosophy, student of theology, writing teacher, Shakespearian stage actor, inspector for the aerospace industry, skilled fencer, speech instructor (at Occidental College in Los Angeles) and, of course, science fiction and fantasy author. Despite these considerable talents, Leiber spent his final years in humble surroundings, residing in a one-room apartment in San Francisco’s tenderloin district. Harlan Ellison has described Leiber writing his stories on a manual typewriter propped over the sink in his cramped quarters.

Leiber drew on his odd hodgepodge of skills and personal experiences in crafting his stories. His considerable skills as a chessplayer — Leiber won the Santa Monica open in 1958 — are reflected in a number of tales, perhaps most notably in “The 64 Square Madhouse,” which presents the extraordinary concept (at least back in 1964, when it was published) of a computer entering a chess tournament. Leiber’s deep knowledge of Shakespeare — he played Malcolm in Macbeth and Edgar in King Lear — shows up in countless stories, for example “No Great Magic” which features an acting troupe that, through the wonders of time travel, performs Macbeth for Queen Elizabeth I and the Bard of Avon himself. Leiber’s brief stint as a minister is reflected in the religious themes of various tales — he credited it as an aid in writing Gather Darkness, although his teachers at the General Theological Seminary would not have been pleased with the practitioners of witchcraft serving as heroes and the priests playing villains in this novel. And, of course, Leiber’s talents as a fencer are echoed again and again in his adventure stories, especially those featuring Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the former character modeled after the author himself.

Des Taylor has produced these Life-like magazine covers featuring comic-book heroes:

In his youth, Ted Gioia determined that there were exactly four ways that a contemporary novel could earn adulation from the literary establishment:

First, the novel could make its mark for its experimental excesses, and, in this case, the more difficult and insufferable the reader found the work, the more likely that it was a masterpiece.

Second, the novelist could earn acclaim for a work, or even an entire oeuvre, by leading a lifestyle that was sufficiently bohemian, drug and alcohol ravaged or otherwise transgressive — think of Norman Mailer stabbing his wife, Ken Kesey ingesting massive quantities of LSD, etc.

Third, a novelist could hit it out of the park by addressing a pressing social issue, employing fiction as a tool of advocacy for some righteous cause — a good book was a book that did good.

Finally, if all else failed, a writer could take the path of Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita and Updike’s collected works by mixing in dizzying doses of sex, preferably excluding the standard missionary position between husband and wife, and ideally leading to a book burning, obscenity charges from a D.A. in a southern state or, at a minimum, outraged parents demanding a novel’s removal from a school library.

Those were the four recipes. No others existed, as far as I could see. And if following them was still no guarantee of literary acclaim, certainly ignoring all four of them was a sure predictor of perdition.

Ted Gioia explores the rise of conceptual fiction:

During the middle decades of the 20th century, literary works that experimented with language were seen as harbingers of the future. These Joycean and Poundian and Faulknerian creations were singled out for praise and held as models for emulation. These works won awards, were taught in universities, and gained acceptance (at least in highbrow circles) as contemporary classics.

During these same years, another group of writers, universally scorned by academics and critics, were working on different ways of conceptualizing reality. Unlike the highbrow writers, they did not experiment with sentences, but rather with the possible worlds that these sentences described. These authors often worked in so-called “genre styles” of fiction (science fiction, fantasy), publishing in pulp fiction periodicals and cheap paperbacks. Despite the futuristic tenor of their writing, these authors were not seen as portents of the future. And though these books sold in huge quantities and developed a zealous following among readers, these signs of commercial success only served to increase the suspicion and scorn with which these books were dealt with in highbrow circles.

In a strange quirk of history, literature in the late 20th and early 21st century failed to follow in the footsteps of Joyce and Pound. Instead, conceptual fiction came to the fore, and a wide range of writers — highbrow and lowbrow — focused on literary metaphysics, a scenario in which sentences stayed the same as they always were, but the “reality” they described was subject to modification, distortion and enhancement.

This was seen in the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie; the alternative histories of Michael Chabon and Philip Roth; the modernist allegories of José Saramago; the political dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro; the quasi-sci-fi scenarios of Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace; the reality-stretching narratives of David Mitchell and Audrey Niffenegger; the urban mysticism of Haruki Murakami and Mark Z. Danielewski; the meta-reality musings of Paul Auster and Italo Calvino; the edgy futurism of J.G. Ballard and Iain Banks; and the works of hosts of other writers.

Of course, very few critics or academics linked these works to their pulp fiction predecessors. Cormac McCarthy might win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road, a book whose apocalyptic theme was straight out of the science fiction playbook. But no bookstore would dare to put this novel in the sci-fi section. No respectable critic would dare compare it to, say, I Am Legend (a novel very similar to McCarthy’s in many respects). Arbitrary divisions between “serious fiction” and “genre fiction” were enforced, even when no legitimate dividing line existed.

Only commercial considerations dictated the separation. Literary critics, who should have been the first to sniff out the phoniness of this state of affairs, seemed blissfully ignorant that anything was amiss.

José Saramago’s Blindness might have a plot that follows in the footsteps of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain or Greg Bear’s Blood Music, but no academic would ever mention these books in the same breath. Toni Morrison’s Beloved might have as its title character a ghost and build its action around a haunting, but no one would dare compare it to a horror novel — even though it has all of the key ingredients.

It almost seemed as if the book industry (and critics and academics) had reached a tacit agreement. “If you don’t tell people that these works follow in the footsteps of genre fiction books, we won’t either.”

Science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt would have turned 100 last month. He coined the term fix-up, to describe a novel made up of previously published short stories, and so Ted Gioia describes him as the fix-up artist:

He wrote a guide to hypnotism, published in 1956, and his fiction frequently features characters who use forms of mind control to exert their will on others. I suspect that this incessant quest for a superior system led van Vogt to join forces with L. Ron Hubbard. When Hubbard’s Dianetics, a memory auditing technique with pretensions to scientific rigor, evolved into the Church of Scientology, van Vogt refused to participate in the new venture, unhappy with its mysticism and religious trappings. Yet he continued to operate a Dianetics Center until 1961.

Van Vogt’s heroes usually have some superior philosophical system or mental framework that gives them an edge in their dealings with others. In 1948′s The World of Null-A, Gilbert Gosseyn (read: “go sane”) renounces Aristotelian logic in favor of Alfred Korzybski’s theory of general semantics. In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Dr. Eliott Grosvenor repeatedly outwits his fellow astronauts by applying the science of Nexialism, a method for integrating different disciplines into a holistic view. Nat Cemp, in the 1969 fix-up The Silkie, relies on the similarly arcane “Logic of Levels.” At times, van Vogt seems to forget he is telling a story, and adopts the shrill tone of a huckster delivering a recruitment pitch. But the fervor of his delivery, and van Vogt’s skill — no doubt tested in his non-literary endeavors — for hinting at dazzling revelations known only to initiates, impart a unique flavor to his stories. Reading them, you feel like you’ve been handed some inside information, akin to a hot stock tip or sure-fire bet at the racetrack.

[...]

In 1939, van Vogt published his first science fiction story, “Black Destroyer,” in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. This gruesome tale of a monstrous creature who feeds on the “id” of living bodies and attempts to take over a spacecraft was later incorporated into van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Like the U.S.S. Enterprise, the Space Beagle is on a five-year mission to explore distant worlds and seek out new life forms — although, more often than not, these new life forms actually seek out the crew of the Beagle. (Another van Vogt work, The Mixed Men, includes a description of a space teleportation machine similar to the famous Star Trek transporter.)

Five months later, van Vogt followed up with another space monster story, “Discord in Scarlet” — also incorporated into The Voyage of the Space Beagle — and in 1940 he returned to the theme in “Vault of the Beast.” Even before his thirtieth birthday, van Vogt appeared to have played out his talent, mastering a single type of story but incapable of moving beyond it. “I was in a very dangerous position for a writer,” he later recalled. “I had to break into a new type of story or go down into oblivion as so many other science fiction writers have done.”

The result was Slan, first published in serialized form in Astounding during the closing months of 1940 (and released in book form in 1946). If van Vogt had previously been guilty of relying on just one plot, he now jumped to the other extreme: in Slan, he adopted the frenetic pacing and obsession with cliffhangers and action sequences that would become the trademarks of his mature style — if one dares use the word “mature” to describe an author whose mindset seems trapped in perpetual adolescence. His “is the realism, and logic, of a small boy playing with toy soldiers in a sandbox,” SF writer and critic Darrell Schweitzer has opined. “There is no intersection with adult reality at any point.”

Slan starts as an account of a mutant race that is hunted and killed by a repressive government — a theme with potential to rise above its pulp fiction origins given the historical context. The Nazi regime in Germany was constructing its first death camp in Auschwitz at the same time van Vogt was writing Slan. Indeed, I would like to interpret this novel as a plea for tolerance and non-violence — and certainly there are sufficient clues in the text to justify such a reading. On the other hand, we must balance van Vogt’s clear obsession, both in Slan and his other works, with master races and his obvious fondness for authoritarian, manipulative leaders. If van Vogt had written 1984, Big Brother would have been presented as a dashing hero with movie-star looks, and “newspeak” lauded as a purified conceptual framework for advanced thinkers.

There is heavy irony in the mismatch between van Vogt’s ideology, so hung up on pseudo-philosophical systems, and his plots, which invariably sacrifice logic and coherence in favor of thrills and chills. He followed a strategy of introducing a new twist or complication every 800 words — a method SF author and critic James Blish called recomplication, and which Damon Knight derided as the “Kitchen Sink Technique.” This approach is both exhilarating and frustrating, and has contributed to the sharply polarized critical response to van Vogt. In the words of Brian W. Aldiss, he was a “genuinely inspired madman.” Philip K. Dick, who ardently defended van Vogt against his critics, asserted that he “influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.” At the other extreme, we encounter Knight, the leader of the anti-van Vogt faction, who — in an infamous fanzine article entitled “Cosmic Jerrybuilder” — almost singlehandedly torpedoed van Vogt’s reputation by famously proclaiming: “Van Vogt is not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy using a giant typewriter.”