William Tenn: Immodest Proposals / Here Comes Civilization

A smalltime businessman is sitting in his poky office when a man walks in without knocking and asks, "Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?" The newcomer is dirty and disreputable looking; the businessman tells him there are no beggars allowed in the building, and tries to throw him out. The newcomer wants to know what's wrong with his offer, but the businessman is unrelenting, so he retreats, leaving his card: he is Mr Ogo Eksar, operating out of a hotel in Times Square. The businessman, Bernie, can't get the incident out of his head. Obviously there's a catch, because no one in his right mind would offer to pay twenty dollars for a five-dollar bill. But Bernie's a bit of a hustler himself - he'd like to know what the catch is, and it can only cost him five dollars, at the worst, to find out. So he goes round to the hotel in Times Square, and they do the deal - the twenty and the five are exchanged and Eksar even insists on a receipt.

What happens now? Maybe Mr Eksar would be interested in another deal, say, buying a ten for a fifty, or a twenty for a hundred dollars?

Eksar is contemptuous. What kind of a deal is that?

Well, Bernie says, isn't there anything else you want to buy?

The Golden Gate Bridge.

This is the opening of William Tenn's short story 'Bernie the Faust'. In the course of a couple of pages, the two find themselves negotiating over other geographical features, like the Sea of Azov (It's only forty-nine feet deep! "Where are you going to do better than three hundred and eighty dollars for a sea like that?"), not to mention fishing and buried treasure rights on the moon. Bernie is slightly uneasy about the fact that he doesn't actually own any of these things, but Eksar is happy to agree to purchase only whatever rights Bernie may have to them, just so long as he gets his receipt. Of course, there is a catch, and Eksar is not what he seems. There are several twists before the end, but I won't spoil them for you.

I was probably about eleven when I first read that story. I was reading a lot of SF at the time, and other stories that made a deep impression on me were Isaac Asimov's 'I'm in Marsport Without Hilda', Damon Knight's 'The Country of the Kind', and Bob Shaw's 'Light of Other Days'. I read them for their inventiveness, and William Tenn consistently seemed to be the writer with the best ideas. I got a book of his stories, Time in Advance, out of the library: all of them were brilliant. I was on my way to becoming a fan.

Then - a refrain that will recur many times in this blog - I couldn't find anything more. All my friends were reading Asimov, nobody had heard of Tenn. In due course, my interest in SF cooled anyway (it has revived in the last few years), and I began to think I had imagined him, until one day about ten years ago I found 'Bernie the Faust' on the web, and it was as good as I remembered - better in fact, because I now understood how cleverly Tenn was manipulating the conventions of Jewish humour to make them into SF. It turned out he had a website, from which I learned that his real name was Philip Klass, and that his complete fiction had been published by NESFA Press, in two volumes (whose brilliant covers are shown here), called Immodest Proposals and Here Comes Civilization.

One reason for Tenn's comparative obscurity is that he was a short fiction specialist. The Golden Age of Science Fiction was dominated by magazines, in particular Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy. That meant a big market for shorter forms, not just the short story proper, but the novelette (defined by the Nebula Awards as having a length of between 7,500 and 17,499 words, and the novella (between 17,500 and 40,000 words). There was a good living to be made writing these shorter forms, and they could subsequently be republished in anthologies and collections. But as the magazine market diminished, so too did the interest in short fiction, and writers like Tenn became marginalized. There is some hope the internet will eventually reverse this process - too late for Phil Klass, who died in 2010 at the age of 89, though from what I've read of him he was not the kind of man to feel any bitterness about it.

Of all the classic SF themes - post-apocalypse, androids, space travel, time travel, etc - it is aliens that Tenn excels in. In 'The Sickness', an arrogant intellectual on an international expedition to Mars is unnerved when all his companions are transformed by a virus into disembodied super-intelligences, like the Martians themselves. In 'Firewater' the aliens who have colonized Earth are so different from us that the only humans who manage to communicate with them go mad - though enriched by their contact with technological knowledge that is a valuable resource for any normal humans who are willing to trade with them. And in 'Venus and the Seven Sexes', he gives us an elaborately worked-out Venusian creature that has adapted to its hilariously hostile environment by evolving into seven distinct forms, creating a life-cycle so complicated it just manages to avoid extinction:

There is only one thing that all the ravening life-forms of Venus would rather eat than each other, and that one thing is a Plookh.

There's a joyous extravagance in his exploration of the idea of alienness and the juxtaposition of incompatible values it implies: they may be bug-eyed monsters to us, but we, to use a term from one of his stories, are flat-eyed monsters to them. This relativism puts him in a great satirical tradition which, as the title Immodest Proposals suggests, he was well aware of. It's also, of course, a natural theme for a New York Jew, aware not only of a heritage of obscure and wonderful knowledge, but also of the daunting fact that many of the other groups around you would rather devour you than each other.

If you don't fancy buying the complete works, his only novel, Of Men and Monsters, is available in the superb SF Masterworks Series. (It is also included in Here Comes Civilization, and illustrated on the cover to that book, shown above):

Mankind consisted of 128 people.

The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society patrolled the outermost corridors with their full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful initiates who served them.

Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force.

Giant aliens have invaded Earth and taken over all our resources. Nothing like a war can be said to have taken place: the aliens are too huge and advanced even to recognize us as intelligent. Human beings are reduced to living, mouselike, in burrows in the walls of alien houses. (Some editions of the novel carry the alternative title The Men in the Walls.) This is Tenn at his most Swiftian, ruthless in the accuracy of his satire. Like the mating cycle of the Venusian Plookh, the anthropology of his parasitic Mankind is worked out with a rigour that probably owes something to the influence of his scientist brother, Morton. It's a very funny, but sometimes dark, book, and makes a great introduction to Tenn's work.

It's about time I did an entry on a living author, so next time I will be blogging about the first novel of an eminent British scholar of Arabic literature, a fabulation set in medieval Cairo.

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker

I have always liked the kind of books that have maps at the front. They seem to promise, not just a story, but a whole world. In fact, the more documentation the better as far as I'm concerned - I'm also fond of those lists of characters you get in Tolstoy, and the family trees in epic novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude. Probably the novel that offers most in this department is The Lord of the Rings, with its fold-out maps, and no fewer than six appendices on things like languages, chronology and pronunciation.

Riddley Walker is a slim novel, unlike these other examples, but it keeps the promise made by the map at the front: you get a world as well as a story. It's the world of the eponymous hero, and it doesn't take much scrutiny to realize that it's actually a slightly altered map of Kent, a Kent of the future where some of the landscape and all of the placenames have changed: Cambry is Canterbury, Do It Over is Dover, Sam's Itch is Sandwich, Horny Boy is Herne Bay, and so on. Only the road names eerily remain the same, but you have to walk rather than drive on them, because this is Kent several hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse.

The post-apocalypse story is one of the oldest themes in science fiction, and the post nuclear variety is the most common of all: Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, John Wyndham's The Chrysalids and several novels by Philip K.Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dr Bloodmoney and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are classic examples; more recently, Cormac McCarthy's The Road has reminded non-SF buffs of the perennial power of the theme. Apocalypse in general appeals to our fantasies of a more primitive life that may offer greater freedom or excitement - it's closely related to other fantasies of simplification, like desert island stories or pastoral poetry. But the nuclear versions, being based an all-too-possible catastrophic scenario, tend to emphasize the loss and suffering involved rather than the liberation. Often (in Miller's novel, for example), finding out exactly what went wrong is important to the characters, as is trying to reconstruct imaginatively the world before the war. That means defamiliarization comes into play; we know what our world is like, but through the efforts of the characters we get to see it as it would look from a very different perspective, and perhaps value it more as a result.

Riddley Walker is typical in this respect. The characters spend a lot of their time digging up objects from before the apocalypse (One of them is a Punch puppet from a Punch and Judy show), and a lot more time telling stories and singing songs which contain cryptic references to the earlier civilization and what happened to it. The people from "back way back" had "boats in the air and picters in the wind", but they lost it all through their fatal obsession with the "1 Big 1", the nuclear bomb. They've developed an entire culture out of the ruins of ours.

What sets this apart from other treatments of the theme is the language. Hoban's masterstroke was to invent a future version of English. Here is the funeral for Riddley's father, killed while trying to excavate a giant machine from the industrial age:

We done the berning that nite on the bye bye hump. The moon were cloudit over and a hy wind blowin. I put the 1st torch to the stack then Straiter Empy for the crowd then Rockman Bessup for Widders Dump then Lorna Elswint for las. Arnge flames upping in the dark and liting all the faces roun. Catching that time of that nite stoppt on all them faces. You cud smell the berning sharp on the air mixt with the meat smel from the divvy roof. Dogs begun to howl it were coming and going on the wind. The fire blowing in the wind and the sparks whup off into the dark and gone. Dark and gone. Before the wording we sung Sarvering Gallack Seas:

     Pas the sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye
     Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky
     Thine the han what shapit the black
     Guyd us there and guyd us back

This gives some idea of the power of this new language. The description would be vivid even in standard English, but it's full of mistakes or misunderstandings that not only defamiliarize but create new metaphors: galaxies become seas, nebulae become an eye. In the continuation of the passage, the "wording", where the members of the community share their memories of the dead man, it becomes clear that they've misinterpreted the word "thine" in the song; everyone sits round and "thines" hands. The language of the book is full of little touches like this, some funny, some enriching. Reading it is a unique experience.

It could be argued that Riddley Walker is too well-known by now to be considered a cult book any longer. I thought of doing a posting on Kleinzeit, which is my second favourite of Hoban's books, but in the end felt that his masterpiece simply could not be avoided. Like The Man on a Donkey, it is one of the great novels of modern times: my account here doesn't give an impression of how moving it is (the ending is shattering), but readers who don't know it can find much more on the web. Hoban died on 13 December at the age of 86; despite the fame of his best-known novel, he was a cult author through and through, taking the most outrageous risks with his writing and getting away with them more often than might be thought possible.

Since my last posting I've discovered a very recent and excellent review of The Man on A Donkey by Rosemary Mitchell in the online journal Open Letters Monthly. Like me, Mitchell sees it as a great and neglected book; she also cites the similar view of my friend Diana Wallace in her study The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Maybe a groundswell of support for Prescott is beginning at last - I'd like to think so.

My next posting will be on the two-volume collected works of another recently deceased writer, a brilliant satirist from the Golden Age of SF.