Black Gate

I’m old enough  to remember when the first heart transplant caused a flurry of debate on the ethics of harvesting organs, even from people certifiably brain dead (not including most politicians, television newscasters  and reality show celebrities), as perhaps a violation of natural, if not God’s law.  Of course, they used to say the same thing about blood transfusions, though even in the 21st century certain religious beliefs view this as impermissable, though in the decided minority and, in one recent case, prayer in lieu of medical intervention has been ruled criminal negligence, thank god. These days, scheduling a heart transplant or most any other organ swipe out with a biological or mechanical replacement is almost like taking your car to Jiffy Lube for an oil change.  (Needless to say, I exaggerate, as an oil change is much less costly and doesn’t involve third party payers.)  Times change. When I was a kid, notions of “post-humans” with biological enhancements and AI feeds were the stuff of science fiction.  Today, they are the subject of articles such as You: The Updated Owner’s Manual in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

Speaking of The New York Times, the magazine recently profiled Jack Vance, whose name I’ve seen but never read, something I now intend to fix post-haste.

I had been reading science fiction for four or five years before I actually ran across any of the science fiction magazines. I was aware that they existed, and was extremely interested in reading them, but never saw them in bookstores. I now attribute this to the fact that bookstores generally put genre magazines with the magazines and not with the books (where I had been looking for them), and also to the fact that I wasn’t super-bright.

Anyway, when I finally found the magazines, I was a little disappointed. The first one I bought, which is still around the house somewhere, was the F&SF for December 1973. It had an adventure novelet (sic) by Jack Williamson and a more literary piece by a new-to-me author named James Tiptree jr.– “The Women Men Don’t See” was the more-ironic-than-I-knew title. Other stories included an entertaining Shelley-esque pastiche by Gary Jennings, and Richard Lupoff’s “12:01 P.M.”, which still seems to me the most nightmarish horror story I’ve ever read. Then there were the features: a snarky film review by Baird Searles, a science article by my then-hero Isaac Asimov and a cartoon by someone named Gahan Wilson, surely one of the greatest Wilsons of this or any other age. So any complaints I had were not about content. No, it was just that the thing was so cheaply made: the coarse brownish paper on which it was printed was particularly off-putting; the digest size seemed strange–neither booklike nor magaziney. I bought it, read it, enjoyed it, kept it, soon was a subscriber to the magazine, but I was dissatisfied. It didn’t match the shining Platonic ideal I’d somehow formed of genre magazines. Now I know I was looking for something like the luminously maculate pages of Black Gate, but back then all I knew was that there was a painful gap between the real and the ideal, a lesson I’ve been forgetting and relearning ever since.

[More voyages in shelf-discovery beyond the jump.]

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I am sitting at the moment on a beach watching dawn brighten over the mountains in the east, without another human or (barely) anything built by same in sight. There is no electricity here, no landline or cell phone service, nothing that we didn’t bring in ourselves. (And since a 100-year-old alder tree came down in recent weeks near the turnoff from the main (one-lane, gravel) road, we had to hump everything we brought in a fair ways.) Tiny fish are feeding out on the nearly glass-smooth ocean, looking like raindrops, a couple of otters are arguing and splashing on the little islend across the way. A woodpecker has waked up and is rattling in the forest behind me. It’s so quiet I can hear a seagull complaining on a reef two miles away.

A great deal of fantasy takes place in non-technological settings very different from those most who write and consume it live in. I’ve been spending a part of every summer since I was 8 or 9 on this beach, and it serves as a reference when I read or write such fantasy. One thing that is on my mind at the moment is how much work simple things require. Getting a drink of water, for example…. …

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Okay, I’ll admit that in a past indiscretion I went to an adult store (this was in the days before the Internet, when it was the only place you could get such things) and bought an anatomically correct blow up doll.  But, it wasn’t for me. Honestly. It was a joke gift for a bachelor party. Nonetheless, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to my congregation, my constituents and my family for behavior that was actually perfectly innocent, though I realize it could be construed by some as some kind of perverted behavior  by those who haven’t as yet been caught in their own perverted behavior.

At least I didn’t actually use the thing (nor, to my knowledge, did the prospective groom). But, true, I am guilty in the trafficking of plastic pleasure dolls.

What’s this guy’s excuse?
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This is a strange book about a strange event in a strange time. In the summer of 1835, the first successful penny paper in New York published a series of articles documenting an extraordinary series of discoveries by the most famous astronomer in the world, John Herschel (son of the even-more-famous William Herschel). With the aid of a new optical technology and the pristinely clear skies over the Cape of Good Hope, Herschel had discovered life and, indeed, civilization on the moon.

The reason why these discoveries never came up in the recent 40th-anniversary celebrations of the Apollo moon landing is, of course, the moon landings were faked by the people who would later forge Obama’s birth certificate the truth is out there pyramids were built by Atlantean space aliens from SPA-A-A-ACE they didn’t really happen. The editor of the New York Sun, Richard Adams Locke, needed money. The publisher of the Sun, Benjamin Day, wanted to increase circulation–and wasn’t averse to money either. Day paid Locke to write a series of articles about the supposed “discoveries” of Herschel. Day never admitted that he knew the stories were false, but Locke eventually confessed both that he wrote them (they were originally published anonymously), and that they were false. By the time of his confession, everyone knew this, but when the articles first appeared it seems as if almost everyone took them at face value.

It was the golden age of hoaxes. The world and people’s understanding of it were being transformed by new science and technology. The penny paper, a primitive medium to our way of thinking, allowed information (or misinformation) to spread wide and sink deep into the awareness of an urban population. People were excited by the possibilities of the new world they were entering, threatened by its dangers, and eager on both counts to learn whatever they could about it.

[Hic, haec, hoax: beyond the jump.]

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