173 lines
8.7 KiB
Plaintext
173 lines
8.7 KiB
Plaintext
$0$0$0$0$$0$0
|
|
CHEAP TRUTH 3
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$
|
|
|
|
EDITORIAL. It has come to our attention that unscrupulous black marketeers
|
|
have been retailing copies of CHEAP TRUTH at astronomical prices, some going
|
|
as high as twelve to thirteen cents. The situation is especially bad in
|
|
Eastern Bloc countries, where the CHEAP TRUTH distribution network has been
|
|
penetrated by KGB and Bulgarian agents provocateurs, who take advantage of
|
|
desperate shortages of SF criticism to hike the underground price from one
|
|
American cigarette to as high as two or even three.
|
|
|
|
We suggest therefore that readers who cannot get pirated copies (or
|
|
who cannot access the samizdata On-Line edition on SMOF-BBS, 512-836-7663)
|
|
write directly to the CHEAP TRUTH offices, sending a dollar with their
|
|
address and nom de guerre (or nom de telematique). New issues will be
|
|
forthcoming.
|
|
|
|
** BARRINGTON BAYLEY RETROSPECTIVE **
|
|
|
|
Justice must be done for Barrington J. Bayley. His manifest virtues
|
|
cry out for vindication. Bayley has been neglected too long. Despite his
|
|
steady production, he is best known in America, when known at all, for his
|
|
ten-year-old work in NEW WORLDS.
|
|
|
|
The legacy of those days (THE KNIGHTS OF THE LIMITS, Barrington
|
|
Bayley, Fontana-Collins, 95p.) makes astonishing reading. It reminds one
|
|
that the power of British New Wave was not due to its decalcifying treatment
|
|
of sex or the fact that much of its readership was stoned. Those ephemera
|
|
blew away with the hash fumes over Ladbroke Grove. What is left is sheer
|
|
visionary intensity, which Bayley has always had and displays today even more
|
|
vigorously.
|
|
|
|
"The Ur-Plant" is Bayley's latest story, in INTERZONE, which is NEW
|
|
WORLDS' successor in British SF's valiant struggle for Arts Council grants.
|
|
Bayley's story stands out in this somewhat precious magazine like a cactus
|
|
among balloons.
|
|
|
|
Bayley writes science fiction with the natural fluency of a man who
|
|
can't help it. He has the ineffable, unfakeable genius of a true SF
|
|
visionary: of Wells, Stapledon, and Ballard; of Bester, Dick, and Farmer.
|
|
|
|
Small things do not content this man. He is tooling along in second
|
|
gear if he does not blow your mind ten times in eighteen pages. He is at
|
|
home re-inventing the nature of space-time, stretching the limits of
|
|
consciousness, reassembling reality. He leaps past the jugular and deep into
|
|
the frontal lobes.
|
|
|
|
Bayley is the Zen master of modern space opera. He has the wild power
|
|
of E. E. Smith, without Smith's pathetic illiteracy or gross provincialism.
|
|
The magazines of the '30's might have been titled to describe Bayley's work:
|
|
Amazing, Startling, Fantastic, Weird. This tie to traditionalism may explain
|
|
why his novels have been published by DAW: THE PILLARS OF ETERNITY, THE FALL
|
|
OF CHRONOPOLIS, THE GRAND WHEEL, STAR WINDS, THE GARMENTS OF CAEAN, COLLISION
|
|
COURSE.
|
|
|
|
Yet Bayley's elemental energy, his mastery of the sense of wonder,
|
|
cannot be denied. His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To
|
|
invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW
|
|
paperback (THE ZEN GUN, 1983) is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism
|
|
that keep SF alive. There seems no limit to the man's inventiveness, his
|
|
pyrotechnic bursts of fresh ideas. To these natural gifts, enough to sustain
|
|
a dozen lesser writers, he adds an intense dedication to craft that gives his
|
|
best work its eerie sense of dark complexity. To read a work like "The
|
|
Cabinet of Oliver Naylor" is to be simultaneously enlightened and bewildered,
|
|
to receive a Zen knock on the head; it is the literary equivalent of
|
|
psilocybin. It is, in fact, why science fiction was invented.
|
|
|
|
It was not a historical accident that science fiction first entered
|
|
mass consciousness in a welter of garish colors and howling verbal excess.
|
|
SF is the enemy of normality, the antidote to bored sophistication and
|
|
know-it-all over-refinement. If SF, in outgrowing its native vulgarity, also
|
|
loses its ability to stun, it will have sold its birthright for a mess of
|
|
pottage. At this point SF can commit any literary crime but boredom; any
|
|
crime, that is, except the one that is now killing the mainstream. In all
|
|
respects, Barrington Bayley's hands are clean.
|
|
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$
|
|
INTERVIEW WITH THE MARTYR
|
|
0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$
|
|
|
|
We got hold of H. P. Lovecraft. Never mind how. There are things in
|
|
the Cross Plains Dairy Queen that are best left unspoken. At any rate we had
|
|
the gentleman in the CHEAP TRUTH offices in late March, 1983 -- some 46 years
|
|
after his death. Lovecraft was dressed in a cruddy-looking black wrinkled
|
|
suit with a skinny tie and celluloid collar. His nose was sunburned. He
|
|
looked rather pasty and gaunt -- we had called him up from about 1935, when
|
|
his diet of graham crackers and canned spaghetti was definitely beginning to
|
|
kill him.
|
|
|
|
CT: Mr. Lovecraft -- may we call you Eich-Pi-El? -- this is a great
|
|
pleasure. Please, just toss the cat out of the chair, there, and have a
|
|
seat.
|
|
|
|
HPL: I wouldn't dream of disturbing puss. He's a fine, swart beast, isn't
|
|
he? (Spectrally) The cat is cousin to the Sphynx, but remembers secrets she
|
|
has long forgotten.
|
|
|
|
CT: Far out. Can I get you anything? A beer, maybe? HPL: Liquor has never
|
|
passed my lips. CT: Some coffee? HPL: That would be splendid. With five
|
|
sugars, please. (sips) Very good. This costs five cents a cup, you know.
|
|
Quite a sum when you're living on
|
|
seventeen cents a day. I made quite a science out of poverty, in my last
|
|
days. But I was never a -- businessman. You can't make a businessman out of
|
|
a corpse.
|
|
|
|
CT: Please, have all you like. The Cheap Truth publishing empire covers the
|
|
globe. That's one of the reasons we called you up, Eich-Pi-El. You are,
|
|
after all, the paragon -- the very archetype of the starving science fiction
|
|
writer. Were you aware that your premature death would set the model for an
|
|
entire
|
|
lifestyle?
|
|
|
|
HPL: Actually, no. I died with the firm conviction that my work would be
|
|
completely eclipsed, swept out with the rest of the illiterate pulp trash. I
|
|
knew what was good, you see. I read Proust, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser.
|
|
I knew what was good, and what was cheap garbage.
|
|
|
|
CT: And yet you died in pursuit of your art.
|
|
|
|
HPL: (shrugs) At that point it really didn't matter much. I had reached
|
|
the culmination of my philosophy -- what I called psychological
|
|
self-annihilation. I saw things from a cosmic perspective. The tragedy of
|
|
one atom -- even if it was myself -- was simply irrelevant.
|
|
|
|
CT: Destroy desire and you destroy unhappiness, is that it?
|
|
|
|
HPL: Exactly.
|
|
|
|
CT: But that's Buddhism. Classic Buddhist enlightenment, in fact. All that
|
|
ascetic discipline of yours --
|
|
|
|
HPL: (bristles) What? The spineless fatalism of the Hindu? I'm the scion
|
|
of blue-eyed Nordic conquerors.
|
|
|
|
CT: (uncomfortably) OK, that's cool. Is it true that you and Clark Ashton
|
|
Smith used to call Hugo Gernsback "Hugo the Rat"?
|
|
|
|
HPL: Yes. But we never hated him as much as we despised that crawling
|
|
horror, Farnsworth Wright. He starved us, cheated us. He rejected my best
|
|
work. He made his magazine into a pigsty for cheap scribblers. My stories
|
|
appeared cheek by jowl with truss ads. Was it any wonder that I began to
|
|
write letters instead? (Begins to talk faster and faster) At first dozens,
|
|
then hundreds, and at last a steady stream of them -- that instead of
|
|
publishing I wrote everything in longhand? Each time, for an audience of
|
|
one. A writer MUST speak, even if he has to pay for the privilege in postage
|
|
and starvation.
|
|
|
|
CT: I understand perfectly, Mr. Lovecraft. May I say that I've always
|
|
admired you? I suppose that your fiction WAS mostly garbage, but you are
|
|
more than that -- you're an avatar, a symbol. I wonder how many young
|
|
writers have found courage in your example. "After all, what's the worst
|
|
thing that can happen to me if I write SF? At worst, I'll simply die a slow,
|
|
miserable death by inches like H. P. Lovecraft." You never compromised -- you
|
|
stayed shabby-genteel to the end, and died without ever doing one single
|
|
practical thing. Your rejection of the world was total. It was the act of a
|
|
saint.
|
|
|
|
HPL: Are you Jewish?
|
|
|
|
CT: (startled) No. Thanks for coming, Mr. Lovecraft.
|
|
|
|
HPL: You have a funny swarthy look about you. I can tell you're a dago of
|
|
some kind. "Omniaveritas" -- what kind of name is that? Not Anglo-Saxon.
|
|
Let me see the shape of your head -- (He suddenly fades away. He is, after
|
|
all, dead.)
|
|
|
|
0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$
|
|
CHEAP TRUTH On-Line 809-C West 12th Street, Austin, Texas 78701. Vincent
|
|
Omniaveritas, editing. Shiva the Destroyer, Systems Operation. NOT
|
|
COPYRIGHTED. "Nothing Better to Do"
|
|
0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$
|