A Bob Dylan Anecdote

Perhaps the most influential of the new generation of Greenwich Village folk singers was Bob Dylan, viewed early in his career as the heir of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Indeed, on his 1962 debut album Dylan included an original contribution in homage to Guthrie. He quickly  established a reputation as a “protest singer.” Soon, however, he introduced a more private and personal element to the lyrics of his “folk songs,” which liberated others to do same.

Bob Dylan was also a crucial catalyst in the transformation of “folk” into “folk rock” in the mid-Sixties. Illustrative of this dynamic is the evolution of the song “House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional ballad rearranged by folk singer Dave Van Ronk. Dylan learned the song from Van Ronk and then recorded Van Ronk’s version for his 1962 debut acoustic album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” A new British group, The Animals, part of the “British Invasion” which conquered American music in the wake of the Beatles, picked up the song from Dylan’s album, electrified it, and released it as their second single. It became a #1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1964.

But Dylan had actually first heard the Animals version of “House” during his 1964 British tour. It was a revelation to him. “You ought to hear what’s going down over there,” he told his friends when he returned to America. “Eric Burdon and the Animals...he’s doing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in rock. Rock! It blew my mind!” And, evidently, Dylan soon made up his mind to do the same to his own music.

On July 25, 1965, Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the foremost venue for folk music in America and a place where Dylan had been a star performer in 1963 and 1964. His performance is famous as the one where Dylan “went electric,” performing rock versions of his songs while backed by the hard chugging Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Soon thereafter, everything changed. The Byrds, a Los Angeles band, quickly released an electrified version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which topped the charts. Folk singers throughout America began exchanging their acoustic guitars for electric, and folk rock groups such as Simon and Garfunkle, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young, and West Coast bands such as the Eagles became some of the most successful performers of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Thus, the British Invasion broke down the insular and parochial walls of folk, turned it into “folk rock,” and as folk rock, transformed American popular music. Folk music endures today as a defining element of what has simply come to be known as “rock.”

Balancing the Budget During the Great Depression

During the 1932 presidential campaign, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Democratic challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood. There he unveiled the major pledge of his campaign. As president, he would "balance the budget."

As it happened, the economy was in such collapse it didn't matter what the Democratic challenger promised. He was guaranteed victory against the Republican incumbent, seen as responsible for the economic shambles.

Once in office, FDR discovered the only way out of the economic mess he'd inherited was through a big government economic stimulus program. So, he funded a number of such programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.

But, because FDR and most of Congress still believed the most important priority was "balancing the budget," none of these programs, known collectively as "The New Deal," were funded enough to completely pull the economy out of the Depression.

Yet they did bring about enough of a recovery so that things began to look better and, in 1936, the slight recovery helped FDR win a historic re-election landslide victory.

Encouraged by the margin of safety his re-election gave him, and the slight economic recovery, FDR decided it was now time to get serious about "balancing the budget." So, in his second term, he cut back on all the meager deficit stimulus spending he'd promoted.

The economy promptly relapsed into what historians call "The Roosevelt Recession" of 1937. His Republican opponents surged back to victory in the 1938 congressional elections and FDR's New Deal was effectively ended.

Meanwhile, the economy hobbled on to the end of the 1930s, only to be finally pulled out of the Great Depression by the massive government deficit spending required to win World War II.

FDR never did fulfill his Pittsburgh Promise to "balance the budget" and stop deficit spending. But the economy was booming -- and so no one cared about "balancing the budget" for many, many years.

Art Is A Lie That Tells the Truth

And the truth is *inherently* political. This is because one of the truths about human society is the power relationships in society. Thus, the oft-proclaimed incompatibility between art and politics is false. Indeed, that proclamation is, itself, an expression of power, the expression of the powerful who would trivialize art   neuter it, and have it only talk about the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees, and the agony and ecstasy of love. Yes, art can talk about all of that. But to tell the full truth about human relationships one must tell the truth about power.

So, among other things, art is a lie that tells the truth about power. 

Interview With Curt Siodmak from "Pioneers of Wonder"

My full interview can be found here:

https://sfmagazines.com/?p=5592

Octavia Butler & The Devil Girl From Mars

I met Octavia E. Butler, the pioneering black female science fiction writer, only once. In September, 1992, she came to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University for the Second Shooting Star writers’ conference. The conference was sponsored by the Pittsburgh-based Shooting Star Productions, an organization dedicated to promoting black culture and artists. At the time, Butler was working on her novel, Parable of the Sower, which would be published the following year and nominated for the Nebula Award in 1994. Butler agreed to sit down with me and Anita Alverio for an interview about her life and work. And it was good that we actually did sit down, because, although neither I nor Anita are short, Butler towered over us.

Octavia E. Butler, who was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010, was also a towering presence in science fiction. Her work often mixed gender, feminism, religion, politics, and racial themes in a brew seldom seen in the genre. The field responded with two Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards. In addition, in 1995 she received the first MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grant to be given to a science fiction writer. The grant was for $295,000 dispersed over five years to enable her to write more of her genre-bending science fiction novels, which have sold over a million copies.

Octavia Butler was born poor in Pasadena, a Los Angeles suburb. Her mother, a cleaning woman, read her bedtime stories until Octavia was six. After Octavia began to eagerly anticipate the bedtime reading, her mother handed her the book and said, “Here, read them yourself.” And so it began. Reading, and a neighborhood branch library, became Butler’s escape from the ghetto neighborhood in which she lived.

She wrote her first story, about horses, at age ten because she was forgetting the stories she’d been making up since age four. Then, Butler recalled, in 1959, when she was 12, she saw the schlocky 1954 movie, Devil Girl From Mars, rebroadcast on TV. The movie is one of the silliest examples of British SF ever made. In it, a beautiful Martian woman dressed in black leather lands her spaceship outside a remote Scottish inn stocked with cliched Brit types. She tells the Brits that Martian women have taken power on Mars and established “an intransigent matriarchy,” which has eliminated all the men. But now, Mars needs men for a Martian-human eugenics program, and she’s come for them. “Surprisingly,” Butler told us, “the men didn’t want to go.”

From such small acorns mighty oaks may grow and, watching it, Butler said to herself, “I can write better science fiction than that.” And so she wrote her own story of alien-human interbreeding which, reworked as an adult, became the seed of her acclaimed Patternmaster series of novels. And thus began her science fiction career.

We asked Butler why she thought there were so few black science fiction writers like her. “There are so few black science fiction writers because there are so few black science fiction writers,” she replied. “That sounds like a joke, but I think it’s true. People don’t do what they don’t see others like themselves doing. I’ve had a number of black women say to me, ‘I’ve wanted to write science fiction, but I didn’t know there were black women science fiction writers.’

“Well, now here I am, but not having role models didn’t stop me. I just began writing. Science fiction is free and open and you can be anyone and write it. The only person who ever told me I couldn’t write was an aunt, who told me when I was 13, ‘Negroes can’t be writers.’ Being 13, I, of course, disagreed with her.”

And so Butler kept writing. After high school she worked at a series of unskilled, low-paid jobs, while writing every day. “I had no social life,” she said, “so I went to bed at 8 o’clock and rose at 2 a.m. and wrote for several hours before leaving for work. It was a habit. And that’s how I made it. Habit is better than inspiration; habit is better than talent; habit is better than imagination, all of which are completely useless words. Have you ever seen a child without imagination? We were all children once, and our imagination is still there. You have all the imagination you need, right now. Just start writing. Make it a habit.”

While working, Butler enrolled in Pasadena Community College, from which she graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in 1968. While there, one of her stories won a school writing contest.

After graduation she enrolled in the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters Guild of America-West. One of her teachers was Harlan Ellison. Impressed with her potential, Ellison began supplementing her income from odd jobs so she could write more. He also told her about the Clarion science fiction workshop, founded in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1968, and encouraged her to apply.

In 1970 she did, and Clarion accepted Butler even though she had sold nothing at the time, usually a prerequisite for admission. Ellison then paid the 23-year-old Butler’s way to, and tuition for, the workshop. Not only did the SF community at Clarion embrace her, but that crucial support was also her breakthrough, as she sold her very first story written at Clarion to Robin Scott Wilson, one of her teachers. That story was “Crossover,” included in Clarion, Wilson’s premiere 1971 anthology in the series of outstanding stories by Clarion Workshop students. (At the same time, she sold a second story to Ellison, who was also teaching at Clarion, for his anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions. That anthology, with Butler’s story, has never been published.)

Butler returned from Clarion convinced that she had at last made it as a writer. However, she didn’t sell another word for five years. Even so, she continued writing and submitting for publication. “Persistence,” she said, is the most important attribute of a writer. And she quoted her teacher, Harlan Ellison, who told her, “If anything can discourage you from being a writer, then you shouldn’t be a writer.”

Octavia Butler eventually fulfilled the promise her teachers saw in her. “Speech Sounds,” her 1983 story from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, won the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. “Bloodchild,” her 1984 “pregnant man story,” as she called it, also from Asimov’s, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Short Story in 1985. And “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” was nominated for the Nebula in 1987. These, and other short fiction, were published in her 1996 collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

But, although Butler became a prize-winning short story writer, she focussed most of her attention on novels, of which she published eleven. At first, after returning from Clarion, she despaired of being able to write anything as long as a novel. But, she told us, she knew she could write a short story of about 20-pages. So, that’s how she began to approach novel-writing. She wrote 20-page chapters as if they were short stories. And that, she said, was how she wrote her first three novels, all of which she eventually sold without benefit of an agent.

The first of these novels were in the “Patternmaster” series. These included Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). These novels describe the origins of a vast eugenics project meant to breed superior humans. The project begins with a 4,000-year-old shapechanger in Africa in 1690 and ends in a future global Armageddon which will bring either a heaven or a hell for humanity.

In the midst of this series, Butler published one of her most evocative works, Kindred (1979). In this novel, the first written, although the fourth to be published, a Southern California black woman time travels back to the antebellum South, where she is enslaved. The protagonist did this in order to save the life of a white man, the son of a slavemaster, who will become her own ancestor. She thus ensures her own existence in the future by enabling atrocities in the past. The horror of a modern black woman, with modern sensibilities, trapped in a nightmarish past is both riveting and disturbing. Kindred has become a common text in high school and college courses and has sold over 250,000 copies.

In the 1980s Butler published her “Xenogenesis” trilogy, comprising Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1987), and Imago (1989), collected into the omnibus volume Xenogenesis (1989) and also republished under the collective title of Lilith’s Brood. Again, humanity is subjected to a vast eugenics program. This one, however, is conducted by aliens who have come upon a post-holocaust Earth where only a few humans remain alive in suspended animation. The aliens launch a long effort to inter-breed with the humans. Their goal is to produce a hybrid alien-human species which no longer exhibits the destructive tendencies which almost destroyed both humanity and the Earth itself.

The 1990s brought her powerful double-novel series, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In Sower, which takes place in 2024, an apocalyptic Southern California is ravaged by global warming and swarming with murderous hoards of scavengers attacking the walled communities of the wealthy. The story continues in Talents, where a right-wing religious zealot ravages the remnants of American society. Talents went on to win the 1999 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Butler’s last novel, published shortly before her unexpected death at age 58 in 2006, was Fledgling (2005). A “young” female vampire is the only survivor of an attack on her vampire community. Genetically modified to enable her to walk in sunlight, she now must survive on her own, and discover what it means to be human.

In all of her work, Octavia Butler enlarged the genre of science fiction -- and helped teach us what it means to be human.

Harlan Ellison: Right the First Time

Harlan Ellison produced first drafts quickly, and there was nothing careless or thoughtless about them. If you’d like to read one of his first drafts, just read any of his stories. What you see is what he wrote, first time, last time. I know this because I watched him do it.

Once upon a time I lived in Boston. One of the premiere independent book stores in Boston at that time was Avenue Victor Hugo, although it wasn’t located on Avenue Victor Hugo. There was no Avenue Victor Hugo in Boston. Instead, it was located on chic Newberry Street not far from the Boston Commons. It had a large department store front window usually filled with popular new titles, all facing outward. One week, however, Avenue Victor Hugo displayed something else in its front window: A writing Harlan Ellison.

For five days Harlan sat in the window of Avenue Victor Hugo from Noon till five p.m., pounding away at a story on a portable typewriter. (Yes, Dear Reader, this all happened long, long ago in those distant days of yore before everyone had laptop...or desktop... computers!) Anyone who wished could go and gawk at Harlan writing. You could stand on the sidewalk and stare through the window, or you could go inside and stand up close to him, almost reading over his shoulder as he wrote, piling up page after page beside his typewriter.

But, you couldn’t talk to him. You could talk to anyone else you wished, other gawkers, your Significant Other, yourself...but not him. There was a sign taped to the side of his writing table with the dire warning: NOT NOW!

But, promptly at five p.m., Harlan finished what he was writing. He sighed, leaned back, and pulled the sheet of typewritten paper out of the platen. And then you could talk to Harlan. Indeed, he wanted you to talk to him. It seemed he was tired of being interior and was eager to meet and greet. You could make insulting comments about his personality, obtuse observations about his writing, or you could ask questions. Harlan didn’t seem to mind. He gave as good as he got and had an answer for everything.

I arrived around four the day I went to watch Harlan write, knowing he always stopped at five. Not even the sight of Harlan staring at a sheet of paper could be entertaining for much longer than that. I hung around chatting until five. Harlan typed his last words exactly at five and climbed down from the window. He gave his pages to a store employee for Xeroxing. In those pre-inflationary days of yore, if you bought $10 worth of books from Avenue Victor Hugo you also got a copy of the story Harlan wrote in the window that day. I made sure I bought $10 worth of books so I could have a copy of the story I watched Harlan finish. There wasn’t a single typo or correction anywhere on the pages. And, when Harlan’s story was later published, I compared the published version to the photocopy I owned. It was exactly the same, not one word was changed.

After handing his pages to the store employee for copying, Harlan turned to the encircling crowd of gawkers, ready to talk.

A female reporter from a local college newspaper asked him the first question: “Why do you write just one draft?”

“Because I get it right the first time,” Harlan answered. Badda-Bing!

After a few others asked similar questions, I ventured my own: “Are there any circumstances under which you can’t write?”

“Absolutely none,” Harlan replied. “If you’re a true writer, you can write under any conditions...in the middle of a party, riding in a car, in a store window, anywhere.”

I tried to complicate the question. “What if you’re a welfare mother with seven kids, living in a small public housing project apartment with no time to yourself, with no privacy?”

“You can write one paragraph, or one sentence, sitting by yourself on the toilet. If you do that every time you go to the bathroom, it adds up. Or you can go into a closet, shut the door, turn on a light, and write. Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past in a small closet. It was cork-lined to keep out the noise, but it was a closet.

“Let me tell you something,” Harlan continued, warming to his subject. “Last year was the worst year of my life. I got divorced, which proved to be very expensive. There were massive renovations on my house, which proved to be far more costly than anticipated. My mother died, and there were huge death bills associated with that which I had to pay. I was constantly on the road giving readings, more than ever before, because I needed the extra money that brought.

“But I wrote more than I’ve ever written in my life! A writer writes. And, if you really are a writer, nothing can stop you. You’ll write anywhere, under any conditions, you’ll just do it. It’s that simple.”

"Other Worlds" SF Magazine

Other Worlds Science Fiction Magazine

Sometimes a particular issue of a science fiction magazine can be more than just entertainment. Sometimes it can also be an invaluable historical resource. Such is the case with the June, 1952 issue of Other Worlds Science Stories, issue No. 19 of that magazine. 

Other Worlds was officially edited by Raymond A. Palmer, with Managing Editor Beatrice Mahaffey doing much of the heavy lifting. No. 19, with a cover by Malcolm Smith of a Borg-like pyramid ship in space, is an “All-Star Editor Issue.” It is so-billed because five of the six stories included were written by present or former SF magazine editors. 

The five editor-written stories are “Robot Unwanted,” by Daniel Keyes (5,000 words - illustrated by Joe W. Tillotson); “Factor Unknown,” by Sam Merwin, Jr. (12,000 words - illustrated by Tillotson); “The Third Ear,” by Paul Fairman (7,500 words - illustration uncredited); “Gandolphus,” by Anthony Boucher (3,000 words - illustration uncredited); and “Nightride and Sunrise,” by Jerome Bixby (11,000 words - illustrated by Bill Terry). The lone story by a mere lowly writer is Part II of the serial, “The Golden Guardsmen,” by S. J. Byrne (16,280 words - illustrated by Jon Arfstrom), included of necessity. 

In his introductory editorial, Palmer says that, “Our purpose was to show that the science fiction editor of today is not just a copy-boy, hired to paste up galleys by the publisher, who doesn’t...know his science fiction from a hole in the ground.” He explained that an invitation was sent to most, if not all, editors, but for various reasons, many could not respond. “Therefore, this issue of Other Worlds proves editors -- all of them -- can write top science fiction, and those included are representing those not included.” (Not sure how this constituted “proof.”)

These stories, alone, make this issue interesting. All are competent, typical of early Fifties SF, not the best by these author-editors, but representative of their work. However, they are not the reason the issue is of historical usefulness. There are other reasons.

In addition to the stories, there are three articles. British SF editor E. J. Carnell’s “London Becomes Space Conscious” describes the reaction of Londoners to the opening of the SF movies, Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon. In addition, he described the activities of Arthur C. Clarke, “chief astronaut [note early use of this word] of the BIS [British Interplanetary Society].” It seems Clarke was a TV regular. He appeared on a program to show the illustrations from the American publication of the Ley-Bonestell book, Conquest of Space and, shortly afterward, his book Interplanetary Flight was published. “Coming in the future,” Carnell says, “is the British edition of Conquest of Space, and advance publicity is already being tied in with the color movie [Destination Moon], which, by then, will be travelling the outer circuits. And there will be another Clarke TV program on rockets, plus a radio feature on Destination Moon.”

Carnell reports that Rocketship X-M “brought a howl of caustic criticism from the jaded film critics, but, nevertheless, aroused sufficient interest to induce the public to stand in line to see it. Two weeks after X-M had snatched the advance publicity, the trade preview of DM got the critics overhauling their typewriters and ignoring their stale beer....

“Authors Clarke, Temple, Chandler, editor Gillings and myself, BIS technicians, BBC drama producers, and a few of Joe Fann’s relatives, made up a cosmic...group to see the trade show.” The movie was well-received until the end. Then came a 23-word speech accompanying the planting of the American flag on the Moon: “By the grace of God and in the name of the USA, I take possession of this planet for the benefit of mankind.”

“Despite Marshall Aid, Bundles for Britain, Food Parcels, and the Korean War,” writes Carnell, “every film critic in London fastened upon that one piece of bad dramatization, played it up, and played the real worth of the film down.

“‘A Flag Goes Up on the Moon,’ headed The Daily Express, but critic James Leasor admitted liking the space rescue scene. While the Evening Standard critic (a woman), stated ‘It seems the United States is hysterically worried about the Moon as a probable projectile base in the next war. Up go some braves in a super-duper gadgety rocket, and landing on that pock-marked old derelict, proclaim that by the grace of God the Moon is now a part of the United States Empire.’”

Even so, says Carnell, “despite these facetious and sometimes adverse criticisms of what we know to be the finest film of its time, Londoners have been flocking to see it. Even on wet evenings (practically every night), long queues have formed around the Leicester Square Theatre.”

The second article is a long “Open Letter to Paul Fairman” by Palmer. It seems in the May, 1952 issue of If, Fairman published an article devoted to Palmer entitled, “Personalities in Science Fiction.” In it, Fairman attacked Palmer’s flirtation with “The Shaver Mystery.” This “Open Letter” is Palmer’s defense of his infatuation. If anyone is interested in his defense, here it is.

But it’s the third article which makes this issue so historically useful. This article is a long biographical essay on science fiction editors by noted New York fan James V. Taurasi entitled, “The Story of Science’s Editors.” It seems that Taurasi was “responsible for this issue’s leg-work,” perhaps, in addition to writing his essay, also acquiring the eleven photos and two line drawings of editors which appear in the issue. 

On the back cover we find a photo of Hugo Gernsback supplied by Sam Moskowitz and another of J. Francis McComas clapping Anthony Boucher on the shoulder as McComas leans over Boucher at work.

Inside the front cover we find photos of Taurasi at his typewriter; Sam Merwin, Jr., smoking a cigarette as he reads copy at his desk; a studio portrait of Daniel Keyes; and a candid shot of a mustachioed Jerome Bixby.

The inside back cover has photos of Damon Knight, sans bushy beard; Sam Mines, leaning back from his desk and staring into the camera; and Robert W. Lowndes, looking like Boston Blackie in Fifties dress hat and thin mustache. There’s also a large photo of Mary Gnaedinger, “Affectionally called ‘Queen of Science Fiction.’” The most interesting photo here is the one of John W. Campbell, Jr. He’s not wearing glasses, nor is his hair crewcut. Thus, he looks astoundingly like John Wayne! Indeed, I had to look closer to ensure it wasn’t a photo of John Wayne. Rounding out the back cover is a line drawing of T. O’Conor Sloane, drawn by Herman Von Tokken, from a photo in a 1926 issue of Amazing. Sloane is bearded and Edwardian in his upturned shirt collar. There is also a line drawing of H. L. Gold accompanying Taurasi’s essay.

That essay itself is long and filled with nuggets. All that space permits is a listing of the editors Taurasi discusses: Hugo Gernsback, T. O’Conor Sloane, F. Orlin Tremaine, Charles Hornig, Robert W. Lowndes, Mort Weisinger, Sam Merwin, Jr., Jerome Bixby, Mary Gnaedinger, Ray Palmer, Bea Mahaffey, H. L. Gold, John W. Campbell, Howard Browne, Robert O. Erisman, Daniel Keyes, Damon Knight, Fred Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Bill Hamling, Anthony Boucher, J. Francis McComas, and Paul W. Fairman. British editors discussed include Walter Gillings and Ted Carnell. All-in-all a valuable source of information on early SF magazine editors and a worthy addition to anyone’s library.