A bump on the doormat announces the arrival of the morning mail. Our cat Scotty runs up the hall and stares at the door expectantly, knowing my opening it will allow him a brief escape into the alien world of the winding staircase, and a glimpse, down six flights, of a Paris in which he, rooftop-born and bred, has never set paw.
Being raised in an Australian country town caused me to allocate exaggerated importance to mail. It meant the outside world still knew of my existence. “And none will hear the postman’s knock/Without a quickening of the heart,” wrote Auden in his commentary for the film NIGHT MAIL, “for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?” And a bump was doubly exciting, since it always meant books.
Today it’s SHAMBLEAU AND OTHERS, a collection of science fiction stories by Catherine Moore, published by Gnome in 1953 – just about the time the sf bug first wriggled into my blood. This nice copy of the first edition was snatched from the flood that pours hourly through eBay. On the dustwrapper, sharp as on publication day, three impossibly sleek rockets lance up from a rocky landscape against a black sky and a looming, cratered moon. A fifties idea of space travel, as quaint as that year’s finned, chromed Cadillac Eldorado.
I dip into the first story, BLACK GOD’S KISS.
Joiry’s lady glared back at him from between her captors, wild red hair tousled, wild lion-yellow eyes ablaze… “Come to me, pretty one,” he commanded. “I wager your lips are sweeter than your words…”
Well, it read like frozen music at fourteen. But space opera, like the pulp paper of the magazines that printed it, turns yellow and crumbling almost before the ink’s dry.
I shelve the book between Anne McCaffrey’s DECISION AT DOONA ( inscribed “To John, for courage above and beyond the call of a writer’s function…” – “courage” being smuggling forbidden birth control pills into Catholic Ireland for her daughter), and Michael Moorcock’s THE FINAL PROGRAMME.
Mike spent last summer in Paris, recuperating from a foot operation that forced him to spend all his time in a wheelchair with one leg raised to the horizontal. A friend and I trundled him up Boulevard Raspail to Montparnasse one day for lunch at La Coupole. Struggling to manoeuvre chair and foot through the vestibule was like a modern-day re-staging of Charlie Chaplin’s THE RINK, where Eric Campbell, as burly and bearded as Mike, keeps getting his gouty foot jammed in the revolving door.
The day SHAMBLEAU arrives also bring an email from Australia. Lee Harding, an old friend from my days as a not-very-good science fiction writer, announces that John Clute, editor of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION, the standard reference, has flown in from London for a summit with co-editor Peter Nicholls, once the ranking fire-eater of sf scholarship, now in poor health.
Never one, however, to miss the opportunity for a party, Peter threw one for the sf community, at which discussion centered on whether the new edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, too huge now for a single volume, should be available only on line, and on the state of science fiction, which many feel has expired as a literary form. “Like myself,” writes Lee, “Clute feels that sf has ‘done its job’, with only vestigal traces visible amidst the godawful fantasies now clogging the bookshops, and he’d like to see the ENCYCLOPEDIA as an historical record of the Golden Age…”
I’m with him. Of the thousands of books in my collection, ranging from Wells’ THE INVISIBLE MAN and FIRST MEN IN THE MOON through John Wyndham’s DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, Asimov’s THE NAKED SUN, Clarke’s 2001 and Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451, few date from later than the mid-sixties. They’re reminders of a time when we thought science was the solution to society’s ills rather than a contribution to them. Lincoln Steffens, returning from new-born Soviet Russia in 1919, proclaimed “I have seen the future, and it works!” Apparently not, it now seems.
From emails, I jump to eBay, checking what my overnight searches have turned up. A first edition of Robert A. Heinlein’s THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH? Sounds good. Terrible tripe, of course. In the title story, a blind space poet, tending an atomic rocket gone bad, reels off stanzas of verse so leaden that no radiation could possibly have penetrated it. But the dustwrapper looks great, and I post a bid. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past – or rather to a future that never happened, and now never will.
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