Thursday, January 30, 2020

Philip Klass & Jorge Luis Borges

Philip Klass & Jorge Luis Borges:

Philip Klass died February 7, 2010, at age 89. He was perhaps better known to the SF world as noted science fiction writer “William Tenn,” active mostly in the Fifties. He lived in Pittsburgh and was an important and beloved member of the local SF club, Parsec.

Each year Parsec hosts a regional SF con known as Confluence. At Confluence 18 in 2006 I was on a panel with Phil Klass. The panel was supposed to discuss some pseudo profundity by near-blind Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. I can no longer remember any specifics about the Borges hoo-haw. It had been suggested as a panel topic by Phil, who was enamored of Borges because Borges came to lecture at Penn State when Klass taught writing there.

Phil was asked to speak first, to explain why he chose the Borges Deep Thought as a panel topic. Once the spotlight is turned on most writers and college professors, they linger in it (I know, as I’m both). Phil was no exception, even though retired from both writing and teaching. Once launched upon his topic, Phil proceeded to lecture on Borges for most of the hour reserved for the panel. As with the panel topic itself, I can no longer remember what Phil said about the ostensible Borges profundity.

However, I do remember the story Phil told about Borges: The near-blind Borges made a dramatic entrance into the packed Penn State lecture hall where he was to speak. He entered from the rear and proceeded down the center aisle toward the front. All eyes turned toward him. His hand was on the shoulder of a cute co-ed, who led him slowly and carefully to the front, cautioning him about this wire here and that piece of paper there on the floor. This took some time, and all the while Borges, his head up, peered intently this way and that into infinity, his blind eyes seeing more than mere mortals can see with their paltry 20-20 vision.

Then, seated at the table in front, Borges began to speak. Someone in the back of the room stood up with a camera to snap a shot. Borges saw him and fell into a picturesque pose for the camera. And every subsequent time a camera was aimed at him, Borges again fell into a similar picturesque pose.


“It was clear that his blindness was a fake,” Phil said. “Borges wasn’t blind at all. It was just a good show.”

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Conan the Hippie

Sometimes the “look” of something defines it in our imaginations far more than any verbal description. This was certainly true of early science fiction, where Frank Paul, Hugo Gernsback’s favorite artist, defined the look of science fiction for decades.

Frank Paul was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1884 and studied in Vienna to be an architect. He immigrated to New York for further study, where he met Gernsback. Frank Paul painted all of the covers for Gernsback’s “Amazing Stories”, and drew all of the interior artwork, from the magazine’s birth in April, 1926, until Gernsback lost control of the magazine in 1929. He then continued painting for Gernsback once Gernsback launched “Wonder Stories” later in 1929. Altogether, he painted 150 covers for Gernsback, plus 28 covers for other SF mags. Thus, he dominated the visual imaginations of early SF fans.

Frank Paul’s own imagination was mired in the Victorian past and, especially with his clothing, he never escaped that past. For example, no matter how outre the situation he portrayed for his stiff and simply drawn characters, they always faced their situations dressed in knickers and jodhpurs. This gave early SF, a literature of the future, an oddly retro feel. He also splashed his paintings with deep reds and yellows, garish even for the pulp era, and the bright colors of the pulp-era SF mags can be traced to his enduring influence.

Likewise, the look we most closely associate with the 1930s-era “Weird Tales”, the world’s first all-fantasy magazine, founded in 1923, is the look of the much-praised (and beloved-by-readers) artist Margaret Brundage. She painted 66 monthly covers for the magazine in the 1930s and, at one point, painted 39 consecutive “Weird Tales” covers. And she continued painting “Weird Tales” covers into World War II. It was Margaret Brundage who gave us our first glimpse of C. L. Moore's warrior princess, Jirel of Joiry.  And it was also Margaret Brundage who gave us our first visual depiction of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, painting nine “Weird Tales” covers depicting the barbarian warrior, as well as interior artwork featuring Conan.

To our eyes, Brundage’s Conan is a strangely demur character, hardly savage, hardly barbarian. He is slight of build and, most incongruously of all, has short, neatly-trimmed hair. Brundage’s Conan seems to have visited the barber every Saturday.

In the 1950s small press publisher Gnome Press published several Conan titles, all graced with cheery chaps in generic Roman armor on the covers, much like Brundage’s Conans. They did little to help sell the volumes, as the press runs of 3,000-5,000 per title took years, into the early 1960s, to sell out.

In 1966, paperback publisher Lancer Books, and artist Frank Frazetta, changed everything. That year Lancer published the first in a reborn series of Conan titles. This was “Conan the Adventurer”, with a cover painting entitled “The Barbarian” by Frank Frazetta.

This Conan was not slight of build, cheery, or clad in generic Roman armor. He was dark, moody, grim, his heavily muscled and scarred body almost nude, standing atop a pile of bloody corpses with a barely-clad lush young woman clutching his leg. This Conan was, at long last, the right visual depiction of the dark and brooding Conan featured in Howard’s fiction. He was truly savage. He was truly barbaric. And part of the wild exoticism of this bestial barbarian was his long, flowing, unkempt hair. Frazetta’s Conan erupted into existence in the midst of the Sixties, in the midst of the hippie era, when men sported long hair in defiance of custom and propriety, and the most ferocious long-hair of the age became Conan.

“Conan the Adventurer” was an earthshaking game-changer. This was before Conan comix, before Conan movies, before any heroic fantasy paperback series. No one had ever before seen anything like Frazetta’s Conan. Frazetta went on to paint the covers of eight of the eleven Lancer Conans published between 1966-1971. These covers were a big reason the Lancer versions of the Conan stories sold over ten million copies. Frazetta’s vision of what a barbarian warrior should look like became indelibly stamped in the public mind. Thereafter, the “look” Frank Frazetta gave Conan in 1966 became the “look” of heroic fantasy.


Monday, January 20, 2020

Million Year Picnic

The Million-Year Picnic

In the summer, 1946 issue of “Planet Stories,” Ray Bradbury published his influential story, “The Million-Year Picnic.” It was the first of a series of Martian stories he published in the late Forties which were collected and published in book form in 1950 as “The Martian Chronicles.” In this first story of the series, which takes place in the far-distant year of 1999, an Earth family of a husband and wife and their three sons land in their “family rocket” on a Mars where water still flows in the canals and in the fountains of long-dead Martian cities. The parents tell their sons they have come to Mars for a vacation, a picnic. When one of their sons asks how long they’ll be there, the father cryptically replies, “For a million years.”

It seems Earth has been fighting global wars for a long time, for decades. Indeed, the family had escaped Earth just before a nuclear holocaust seems to have finally obliterated the last traces of human civilization. “Wars kept getting bigger and bigger,” the father later tells his sons, “until they killed Earth. That’s why we ran away.” His plan is that they will begin anew on Mars and, with the daughters of another family following them in their own rocket, the children will build a new civilization on Mars, free of the hatreds and poisons of Earth. They are the new “Martians.”

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is understandable why Bradbury would wish to escape from into the wilderness and begin anew, leaving all wars behind. Twenty years later, in the mid-1960s, thousands of young hippies were feeling the same way about American society. They wanted to escape the degradations of capitalism and the pollution of the cities and go “back to the land” where they could live simply, free of the trappings of modern industrial life. So they returned to the land and formed utopian New Age communes such as “The Farm” in Tennessee, “New Buffalo” in Taos, “Morning Star Ranch” in Marin County north of San Francisco, “Earth People’s Park” in Vermont, and similar communal experiments in a hundred other places.

Perhaps the owners of the first comic book store in Cambridge’s Harvard Square were still feeling something of that when they opened their business in the mid-1970s, because they called their store “The Million-Year Picnic.” I was living in Cambridge at the time and I began my serious adult collecting and reading of comic books at The Million-Year Picnic when it opened.

In addition to haunting the store for the comix, I also made a point of catching the myriad celebrities the owners brought in. One of them was bushy-bearded Frank Herbert who sat with me and a gaggle of other fans discussing “Dune.” I wish I could pass along the pearls of wisdom strewn about by Herbert in that session...but I can’t. It was a long time ago. I just don’t remember.

But I do remember, vividly, when Wendy Pini visited The Million-Year Picnic in 1978. She was 27-years-old at the time and, with her husband, Richard, had just launched the Elfquest comic. It would become fabulously successful, with Wendy responsible for the resulting graphic novels and Richard responsible for the various text spinoffs. In 1985 Richard and Wendy Pini won a Balrog Award for Best Artist for their “Elfquest” work.

But, in 1978, that was in the future, and that’s not why I remember Wendy Pini at The Million-Year Picnic so vividly. I remember her because she came dressed (or, rather, undressed) as Red Sonja, the swordwoman friend-rival of Conan. She was Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja, the artist who envisioned her first in the Marvel Comics “Conan,” then in her own comic book: Soft leather boots, a knife in a sheath strapped to her naked thigh, a chain mail bikini with large connecting links on the sides imprinting themselves into the flesh of her bare hips, and a flowing, flamboyant red wig. Her leather-gloved hands held a massive sword like they were used to hefting it. This was long before Warrior Princess Xena, or any other chicks in chain mail, and I’d never seen anything like her -- except in a comic book. But here was a savage swordwoman in the flesh! Very much in the flesh. There was about her a certain something, a je na sais quoi, which drew the fanboys to her like moths to a flame, me included. What was it? OK, let me just say it plain: She looked damn good and was sexy as hell! 


Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Alternative History

British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill wrote a great piece of Alternate History where the South won the American Civil War and he speculated on what the world would have looked like if the North had won. It’s a nice twist on the usual approach to the alternative history of the Civil War which speculated on what the world would look like if the South had won. The story by is, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” It can be found in the anthology, “If It Had Happened Otherwise,” edited by Sir John C. Square, pub. in the UK in 1972 & by St. Martin’s Press in the USA in 1974. It was perhaps the first, certainly a pioneering, alternative history anthology.

Other speculations in the anthology include: “If the Moors in Spain Had Won,” by Philip Guedalla; “If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary, Queen of Scots,” by G.K. Chesterton; “If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness,” by Andre Maurois; “If Drouet’s Cart Had Stuck,” by Hilaire Belloc; “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America,” by H.A.L. Fisher; “If Byron Had Become King of Greece,” by Sir Harold Nicolson; “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln,” by Milton Waldman; “If the Emperor Frederick Had Not Had Cancer,” by Emil Ludwig; “If It Had Been Discovered in 1930 That Bacon Really Did Write Shakespeare,” by Sir John Squire; “If the General Strike Had Succeeded,” by Ronald Knox; “If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo,” by Sir George Trevelyan; and “If Archduke Ferdinand Had Not Loved His Wife,” by A.J.P. Taylor. A distinguished roster and fascinating thought experiments.

My own contribution to the alternative history genre, “Avenging Angel,” can be found in Far Frontiers, edited by Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen, Summer, 1985, reprinted in The Fantastic Civil War, edited by Frank McSherry, Jr., Baen Books, 1991. In it, the Confederacy develops a V-2 type rocket which takes out President Lincoln and almost his entire Cabinet at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural in March, 1865.

I had no idea Baen Books had reprinted my story until I chanced upon the above mentioned Civil War anthology in my local university bookstore. Cool! I thought. Wonder who’s in it? I picked up the book and glanced down the TOC: “For the Love of Barbara Allen,” by Robert E. Howard; “Bring the Jubilee,” by Ward Moore; “The Valley Was Still,” by Manley Wade Wellman; “The Long Drum Roll,” by Harry Turtledove; “Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air,” by Jack Finney; “Quarks at Appomattox,” by Charles L. Harness; “Time’s Arrow,” by Jack McDevitt....

Oh, yeah!, I thought. I gotta get this! Hey? What’s this? “Avenging Angel,” by Eric L. Davin? Wait! That’s my story! McSherry never asked to publish my story!  And I never sent it to him! And he certainly didn’t pay me for it!

I quickly turned to the copyright page and found this instruction after the notice saying my story had first appeared in Far Frontiers: “The author is asked to contact Baen Books to receive payment which is being held for him.” I sent proof of my identity to Baen Books and Martin H. Greenberg quickly sent me a nice check, along with a contract for me to sign and return. But he never sent me a contributor’s copy of the book!


Wednesday, January 8, 2020

H.G. Wells & Anti-Semitism

I was disappointed to discover the vicious anti-Semitism of H.G. Wells, a childhood favorite of mine.  Of course, his anti-Semitism merely reflected the endemic anti-Semitism of the times, but, even so, it mars some of his best writing.

One of Wells’ most distasteful anti-Semitic passages occurs in "The War of the Worlds."  In the chapter, “The Exodus from London,” the hero’s brother describes what he saw as he fought his way, with the rest of the population, out of the city as the Martians advanced on it:

“Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground.  They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses.  The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling.  He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly.

“So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket.  A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.

“Before he could get to it, [my brother] heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back....The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead.  My brother...yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black horse came to his assistance.

“‘Get him out of the road,’ said he; and, clutching the man’s collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways.  But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold....

“There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on horseback stopped.  My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head around and bit the wrist that held his collar....He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped back.  He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance to the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.

“He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all a child’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels.”

The bearded and eagle-faced Shylock, with his love of gold, greater than his love of life, had gotten what the author felt he deserved.

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Time in a Bottle

GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE & G. EDWARD PENDRAY

I was touring “The Castle” with inventor and captain of industry George Westinghouse, Jr., who not only invented the Westinghouse Air Brake, still found on all railroads, but also founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company to sell it. He also patented 360 other inventions and launched 60 companies, including the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Union Switch & Signal, and the forerunner of aerospace giant Rockwell International.

Actually, it wasn’t the real George Westinghouse. He died in 1914. It was a Westinghouse impersonator named Charles Ruch, but in his black top hat, Prince Albert coat, and with his white mutton chops, Ruch certainly looked like the real thing.

Meanwhile, “The Castle,” through which Ruch guided me, was the real thing. It was built by George Westinghouse in 1890 in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, about a 30-minute drive east of Pittsburgh. For nearly a century The Castle, a massive stone structure designed by noted architect H. H. Richardson, was the corporate headquarters of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, also located in Wilmerding. Intended to look like a medieval robber baron’s castle, some might say it was an entirely appropriate command center for a modern robber baron.

Charlie Ruch would not be among those. Charlie Ruch greatly admired George Westinghouse. That’s why Charlie impersonated Westinghouse when he conducted tours of The Castle and when he made appearances as his hero throughout Western Pennsylvania. Born and raised in the Pittsburgh area, Charlie Ruch graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1936. There he’d been a journalism major and had edited The Pitt News, the student newspaper. He began working at the Westinghouse Castle in 1938 as assistant editor of the company’s employee magazine. In 1942 he became its editor and he subsequently served as communications manager. In the years before his retirement in 1980, he was the Westinghouse director of personnel communications and community relations.

But Charlie Ruch never really retired. He stayed on at Westinghouse as a volunteer historian. In 1984 Charlie began impersonating George Westinghouse in order to raise awareness of the inventor’s achievements. By 1998, when Charlie died, he had impersonated George Westinghouse on 501 occasions.

It was Charlie who was the driving force behind the creation of the George Westinghouse Museum, which opened at The Castle in 1987. When I stepped into the Family Room of the Museum that day, I saw George Westinghouse himself, incarnated by Charlie Ruch, bent over his writing desk. He looked up from his papers, smiled, and welcomed me into “his” home. Then he led me on a tour, proudly pointing out the artifacts and memorabilia of the Westinghouse family, including furniture and Tiffany glassware from Solitude, the Pittsburgh home of George Westinghouse and his wife, Marguerite.

In the Appliance Room “Mr. Westinghouse” introduced me to a complete kitchen outfitted with Westinghouse appliances, including toasters, irons, mangels, coffee percolators, waffle makers, radios, washing machines and driers, and even an early Westinghouse sewing machine.

The Inventions Room held memorabilia relating to the 361 patents and inventions of George Westinghouse, including a model of a pioneering city-wide automatic telephone switching system.

I was most impressed, however, by the “Room of Achievement,” filled with an array of artifacts and photographs of products developed by companies founded by George Westinghouse. On one wall was a spectacular 12-foot-long oil painting of the Electric Company’s far-reaching East Pittsburgh Works in 1920. Displays ranged from a rifle made for the Russian army in World War I to the model car used in introducing a rapid transportation system of automated people-movers.

Of greatest interest to me in this room, however, were exact replicas of the twin time capsules buried by the Westinghouse Corporation at the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964. Both were 7.5-foot--long cigar-shaped metal cylinders. Unlike the ones in New York, however, these replicas had windows cut into the sides so you could see duplicates of all the objects crammed into the original capsules buried somewhere in New York. An adjacent plaque listed every item inside. I stared at the time capsules, gleaming like torpedoes ready for launching. With “George Westinghouse” himself beside me, it was almost as if I’d travelled back in time to the 1939 World’s Fair and was standing beside the very first “time capsules.”

Preserving things for the future, of course, wasn’t exactly new in 1939. Cornerstones in buildings date back to antiquity and are often filled with coins and other memorabilia. But in 1922 Howard Carter discovered the millennia-old tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Perhaps the most famous archaeological discovery ever, the artifact-crammed tomb -- an unintended time capsule --  catapulted the obscure “King Tut” into international prominence. The discovery also inspired Thornwell Jacobs, president of Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, with the idea of deliberately storing records and items for more than 6,000 years with a scheduled opening date. He eventually constructed a device to do so, which he called the “Crypt of Civilization,” at Oglethorpe University. He also publicized his idea in a notable 1936 Scientific American article.

Shortly thereafter, Westinghouse Electric Corporation was looking for something to promote the company at the 1939 World’s Fair. A Westinghouse publicist proposed that Westinghouse build and bury a similar “Crypt,” meant to be uncovered and opened in 5,000 years, at the Fair. However, the executive, who also coined the word “laundromat” to describe the Westinghouse washing machine, suggested a snappier label. He proposed that the “crypts” be called “time capsules.” The phrase gained currency almost overnight and stuck.

The Westinghouse publicist who proposed the idea of these time chambers, and named them, was G. (George) Edward Pendray, a rocket engineer and, under his own name and the name “Gawain Edwards,” also a science fiction writer. Pendray, who died from Parkinson’s Disease in 1987, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1901 and graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1924. A year later he earned a Master’s from Columbia University. He thereafter authored over 500 technical articles.

The same year he graduated from Columbia, Pendray joined the staff of The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter, later becoming its science editor. He left the paper in 1932 and was an editor at the Milk Research Council until joining the Westinghouse Electric Corp. in 1936 as assistant to the president. There he helped develop and administer the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search and kept the Westinghouse president from calling the 1939 time capsules “time bombs,” as he reportedly wanted to do. He left Westinghouse in 1945 to open his own industrial public relations firm, Pendray & Co., based in Bronxville, N.Y., where he was a senior partner until his retirement in 1971.

In 1929, New York publisher D. Appleton released Pendray’s only SF novel, The Earth Tube, published under the Pendray name. It is a “Yellow Peril” future war story in which Asians tunnel under and conquer South America in a drive to invade America. The hero destroys the tunnel, in the process flooding South America (sorry ‘bout that!). Perhaps it was this novel which brought Pendray to the attention of David Lasser, editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories. In any case, Pendray soon appeared in Lasser’s magazine under the name of “Gawain Edwards.” He quickly published three stories for Lasser, including “A Rescue From Jupiter,” SWS, Feb.-March, 1930; “The Return From Jupiter,” Wonder Stories, March-April, 1931; and “A Mutiny in Space,” Wonder Stories, Sept., 1931.

More importantly, Pendray became the prime mover behind the American Interplanetary Society, responsible for much of its early rocket research. The society was founded by David Lasser and his writers at an April 4, 1930 meeting in Pendray’s New York apartment. The writers elected Lasser as President and Pendray as Vice-President. When Lasser resigned in April, 1932, Pendray took over as President, serving in the capacity until April, 1934, when the society also changed its name to the American Rocket Society. Pendray continued his association with the society, serving as its Director from 1936-55.

In 1963 the society changed its name to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Pendray continued to serve as its public relations consultant. In 1945 Harper & Bros. published his The Coming Age of Rocket Power and in 1948 he edited the papers of rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, published by Prentice-Hall as Rocket Development: Liquid-Fuel Rocket Research, 1929-1941.  He was chosen for the latter task by Goddard’s widow, Esther, as by then Pendray was recognized as one of the leading American experts on rocket research.

Looking down at the shiny time capsules Pendray was responsible for naming, I mentioned some of this history to Charlie. “Oh, yes, I remember Pendray, he was here at the Castle many times.”

I was excited to hear this. “What do you remember about Pendray?”

“His Van Dyke beard. No one wore beards in those days, but he had a very distinguished Van Dyke. We all talked about it. It made him look like a professor or an important scientist.”

I glanced at Charlie Ruch standing next to me. Every inch of him looked like George Westinghouse, important inventor and entrepreneur. But he wasn’t the real thing. He was just pretending.

“Charlie,” I said, “he didn’t just look like an important scientist, he was one. Pendray was the real thing.”