Weird Stories, and a Big Request

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Everything Old

Two years ago I dove into reading “cozy” mysteries and learning their tropes, and I got a great book out of it. A book I’m genuinely proud of, but you can judge for yourself soon enough. This summer I’m up to my eyeballs in reading old science fiction, and by old I don’t mean Ready Player One, but I mean Clarke and Verne and Asimov, all the pulp paperbacks I read as a kid.

Summer in the ‘60s Eastern Washington State desert was brutal. People did tasks in the early morning or late evening, and during the day they hid indoors and read books. In basements. In front of electric fans. It’s easy to revisit a genre you loved as a kid, but it’s like Heraclitus said:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Reading these ratty Dell pocket paperbacks, well, they’re not the same books I read at the age of eight or nine. Back then I was a bored kid on summer vacation, who wondered what the world and the future would hold. This summer I see these stories aren’t really about the future. They’re about the past; specifically, about each of their author’s past. On the surface they depict corn-fed Midwest young men who’ve dipped a toe into space travel and lived to tell about. Some of the stories show us robots banding together for a mission. As a kid that was my take-away.

This summer I see these stories are thinly veiled “Dangerous Writing,” as Tom Spanbauer would call it. They’re stories told by recently returned WWII vets who are still young men, but are now burdened with horrors no one wants to hear about. The fictional narrators are troubled heroes who don’t want to inflict their pain on the folks at home. That these shell-shocked authors are casting themselves as damaged spacemen trying to cope with civilian life makes it all doubly moving. They’re simultaneously trying to entertain the kiddies—me—with adventure, while they process their own wartime crap.

The Buck Rogers trappings make the truth all the more effective than any realistic Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk.¹

These sci-fi stories seem about the most pure form of Dangerous Writing I’ve seen. In our world of let-it-all-hang-out memoirs about pain and anger, these seemingly cotton-candy space stories land with more emotion than even the most “true story” autobiography. Imagine the moving-forward optimism of the ‘50s when the world just wanted to forget the Dust Bowl Depression and the World Wars, and no reader wanted to spend their spare time and money hearing about pain. It was into this complete censorship—the war’s over, Happy Days Are Here Again!—that writers like Edmond Hamilton had to shoehorn their wartime memories that no one wanted. And make a buck doing so.

Speaking of Hamilton, his story What’s It Like Out There? is about a survivor who’s returned from Mars. Most of his fellow spacemen died, and their families have written to him asking for accounts of their loved-one’s death. In every case, the narrator invents a peaceful or heroic death while remembering the actual extended, tortuous, violent event.

In other stories, robots or machines are the stand-ins for deadened war vets. The mechanical characters chug through their days—look for But Who Can Replace A Man? by Brian Aldiss—without expressing any emotion. Events occur but the robots have no emotional reaction to those events. The robots just plod along. The reader is forced to carry the building emotional and psychological weight of the plot. Like in the best of Minimalist writers like Amy Hempel and Mark Richard, the reader soon becomes incredibly invested in the fate of robots. Robots! The reader must have the emotional reaction to events that the robots—i.e. the war vets—can’t allow themselves. It’s a masterful trick.

We all have mothers who will die, but not many of us will fork over money to read about the death of someone else’s mother. That’s the weakness of memoir. Still, if the mother is masked as a Martian or a robot, the trick works. The reader will find herself sobbing over the death of a machine, even an evil machine. That’s the marvel of fiction.

In the older science fiction—Poe, Twain, Bierce—the subtext seems to be the Industrial Revolution and the loss of the natural world, but the majority of the old space-opera stories seem to be about lost innocence. Ray Bradbury chief among them, with his world where summer afternoon and long evenings on Midwest lawns fade into distant memories. Much like they do in stories by Stephen King. To read these stories now is to read a thousand versions of The Great Gatsby.

Consider also that these stories weren’t meant to last. None of these authors were trying to write the Great American Novel. As Richard Matheson once told me, “You don’t get writer’s block when you’ve got the power bill to pay and diapers to buy.” These stories were knocked out for monthly pulp magazines and seldom had a life longer than a couple weeks. It’s that constant freshness—write it, sell it, forget it—that allows for constant invention, like it did for early music videos. These were throwaways.

An aside: I’ve bored my workshop with this lecture, so now I’ll bore you. The golden era of anthology television—The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, the various “playhouses” — came about due to a perfect storm of surpluses. First was magazine stories, all those short stories that had been sold and read and forgotten, they could be bought cheap. Second was actors. Old Hollywood stars and rising stars would work cheap, so you could get Agnes Moorehead and a fledgling Clint Eastwood for minimum wage. Third—and possibly most important—the studio system was top heavy with sets and costumes and props. Decades of leftovers. The studio backlots offered endless standing sets. As America’s Gilded Age families had fallen on hard times the studios had trucked out their European brick-a-brack to use in films. And now that television was eating the theaters for lunch no one needed the warehouses full of bygone costumes. Cheap stories, cheap talent, cheap overhead. If a The Twilight Zone wanted to create a Napoleonic war story one week, then a futuristic epic the next week, it was cheap to do so. As the backlots and excess props got auctioned off, the bubble burst and that killed anthology television. Lecture over.

The surprise of my summer reading is that good pulp science fiction is often better than the most earnest literary fiction. That’s not to say a lot of the genre isn’t crap. But good Minimalist rules applied to that crap sci-fi would’ve help a lot. If Gordon Lish had edited Amazing Stories or Uncanny Magazine just imagine how wonderful those stories could’ve been.

Now the request

This summer has been a three ring circus of work. I’ve been preparing for tour—you’ll be happy to hear I overbought on kangaroo costumes so some events will have as many as FIVE Kangaroo Helpers. But I’ve been slacking at Substack, while trying to write short fiction, while casting around for a new novel idea to flesh out.

With the exception of the tour—the tour will rock balls—I’ve failed at everything else.

So do me a favor, please. Do NOT re-up your paid subscription. Not for the time being. September will see the bulk of paid subscriptions renewing, and you should not resubscribe. Not until the dust settles and I’m providing more content.

Summer will end. Our lives will calm down. In the meantime I’ll hammer out things like Gloves Off and whatnot, but I’ll post those things free for everyone. There’s no reason why you should pay, not until I can give you more of my time and effort.

If you’re looking for a workshop to get you writing into the fall and winter, our own Randy Dong has one to pitch. Per Randy:

Coach Suzy Vitello and I have been working on a virtual workshop. Here are some highlights:

- 12 weeks long, meet once per week on Saturday or Sunday (TBD)

- There will be 12 seats for the workshop

- Each workshop will have one short lecture + discussions of 3 submitted stories

- The 3 submitters for the week get to have a one-on-one session with Suzy (each students gets 3 one-on-one's in total)

- Workshop will be over Google Meets and from 1pm - 4pm EST/10am - 1pm PST

- Priced at $1,000 per head

I’ll provide more about that workshop, and a link, soon.

Thank you for your attention. Remember that even the crappiest genre fiction can carry a Dangerous Writing punch. And nix your subscription until I’m doing a better job at this after tour.

P.S. I hope we meet in person on tour, and that people will video some of the events so people elsewhere can enjoy them.

1. That said, I really loved Dunkirk.