When the Gentlemen Go By

Margaret Ronald

It wasn’t a sound that woke her this time, nor the soft slow lights that came dancing through the curtains. She thought in that first wakening haze that it might be a scent, like the “bad air” her mother had talked about, creeping in to announce their presence. Then full wakefulness and knowledge struck her, and her only thought was Not yet.

Laura rolled out of bed, making sure not to disturb Jenny, who’d crawled in about an hour after bedtime. Toby, in the crib, slept like a swaddled stone. The nightlight cast a weak gold glow over them, but the first hints of blue had begun to creep in, cool and unfriendly. She glanced back once at the sound of Jenny’s whimper, then turned her back on her sleeping children.

At least their father wasn’t here.

It was an old bargain, old as the Hollow at least. With bargains you had to uphold your side; she’d learned that early, probably before she even knew about the Gentlemen.

Her bedroom in her parents’ house had faced the street, and when she was five the changing shapes of headlights across the far wall had fascinated her. One night she woke to see a block of light against the far wall, flickering in all the colors of frost. When the light stayed put, as if the car that cast it had parked outside, she sat up in bed, then turned to the window.

The light was just outside, on the strip of green that her father liked to call the lawn. She crawled out of bed, dropping the last couple of inches to the floor, and reached for the curtain.

“Don’t look.”

Laura turned to see her mother standing in the doorway. “Mumma?”

Her mother crossed the room in two strides and took Laura into her arms, cradling her head against her shoulder. “Don’t look, baby, don’t look.”

Obediently, Laura laid her head against her mother’s shoulder and listened as something huge or a hundred smaller somethings passed by with a thunderous shussh. Her mother’s eyes were closed tight, and she rocked Laura as if she were an infant again, even though Laura had two little brothers and hadn’t been rocked since the first one was born. The sleeve of her mother’s bathrobe was damp with a thousand tiny droplets.

In the morning, she tried to talk about it. “I had a dream last night — ” she said at the breakfast table.

“I expect we all had dreams,” her mother said, pouring milk over her Cheerios. “What with all that pizza last night. Bet you had them worst of all, right, Kyle?”

Her brother Kyle, six years old and indeed the one who’d eaten the most, shook his head and began to cough.

The light was stronger in the living room. Soon it would be strong enough for her to read by, if she’d ever had the urge to do so. Laura closed the bedroom door behind her, making sure it latched, and picked her way through the maze of toys that covered the carpet. She watched the blue-edged shadows rise over the edge of the couch and drew a deep breath. I wonder what they’ll bring, she made herself think over the rising dread in the back of her mind. And to whom they’ll bring it.

They bring gifts. I have to remember that. They bring gifts too.

It wasn’t till she reached second grade, just after Kyle’s funeral, that she found a name for them. It was in a book of children’s poems, the old kind that usually read as if they’d been dipped in Karo syrup. But this one, “The Smuggler’s Song,” wasn’t like that at all. It made the room seem darker when she read it, and darker still when she thought about it. Even after she learned that the poet hadn’t ever set foot in Brooks’ Hollow, she still secretly called them the Gentlemen, after the poem.

Five and twenty ponies/ trotting through the dark…

She waited until her father took her remaining brother out to play baseball before talking to her mother about it. “Mumma,” she asked as they washed dishes together, “why did Kyle get sick?”

Her mother’s hands paused, wrist-deep in sudsy water. “Well,” she said after a moment, in that careful voice adults used when they didn’t know how to say something, “people in the Hollow get sick sometimes. It’s just something in the air.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t need to worry, sweetie. I won’t let anything — ” She stopped, her lips pressed together, and went on in a different tone. “You know what the pioneers used to say about our land? Good land, bad air. They might have been right about the air, but we had the best farms for miles. Still do. The Hollow’s a good place, Laura. I want you to remember that.”

Later that evening, after the boys had settled in to watch football, her mother took her by the hand and led her upstairs, where she rummaged in the back of the closet until she found an old cardboard box. “I thought you might want to try this on,” she said, and took out a fragile crown, woven out of hair-thin wire and stones like gleaming ice, so delicate it chimed in her hands. She set it on Laura’s head and held up a mirror. “Don’t you look just like a princess, now.”

Laura caught her breath. “I do! Mumma, I do!”

“I thought you might.” Her mother smiled.

Laura shivered to remember that crown. It was here somewhere, in the boxes she’d packed up after her mother’s death, but she hadn’t ever gone looking for it. She sometimes dreamed of wearing it, and woke up with bile in her throat.

She reached up and took down the little blue notebook from its place above the television. It had pages of notes about the sound the Gentlemen made: pines in the wind, highway traffic very far away, heavy rain, but none of them quite caught it. She’d been keeping the notes ever since she could write, first on what it looked like when the Gentlemen went by, then — later, as she grew up and began to understand — the annotations.

And the more she watched the indistinct shapes through the curtain, the more she felt as if her whole life became only watching. Her second brother’s death, her graduation, the strikes at the cabinet factory — all images apart from her. Even now, she was at a distance, watching herself sitting huddled wrong-way-round on the couch, a patch of drying formula stiff and sticky under her left forearm.

Sometimes they brought things, she told herself again. A crown, a song, a whisper in someone’s ear. And their trail was thick with flowers, even when they passed by late in October.

And the Hollow was a friendly place, after all. It seemed there was always a family to bring a casserole; it seemed there was always a service “for those taken from us” at the little church that was the only official marker of Brooks’ Hollow, and the pews were always full.

But you didn’t talk about it. You shrugged, and blamed bad air, and made sure your child’s last months were comfortable, treating them like a stranger the whole time, and then you buried them in the good rich earth of the Hollow.

The light grew, shimmering like opals, and with it came a faint scent: greenery, growing things. But there was an edge to it as well, something like grass clippings left in the rain and then rotting in the sun. Something green gone wrong. Laura held the book tight against her chest, as if it might hide her, her and her children. “The Smuggler’s Song” was inked in blue on the inside flap, an addition she’d made just after her wedding.

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie./ Watch the wall, my darling, when the Gentlemen go by!

In her senior year at the county high she met Rich. Rich came from the north of the county, and he played guitar, and when he smiled at her Laura felt her heart come unstuck. For the first time in ages she felt as if she could be part of the world again.

She was worried at first what her parents would say. Some of her girlfriends had had to move out of the Hollow because their parents had kicked them out for any number of reasons — going out with boys, going out with only one boy, getting pregnant, not staying pregnant. Her parents turned out to like Rich, though, and they even helped them find a place to live.

They got married on the hottest day of the year. But the sky was clear, the beer was cold, and Rich looked at her like she was the sun come to earth. At the reception, she tore her hem dancing and had to go looking for her mother. She finally thought to look for her in the bathroom, only to find her talking to an old friend. “Rich tells me they’ve bought a trailer down in the Hollow,” said Laura’s old babysitter.

“It’s a nice little place,” Laura’s mother said. Laura shrank back against the door.

“That ain’t right, Missy. Bringing someone new into the Hollow ain’t right, especially not a good sort like Rich. Why didn’t you send her away?”

Laura held her breath. “She’s all I got,” her mother said after a moment. “I can’t send her away.”

“Oh, Missy. That’s no way to treat a good girl. You know what the Hollow’s like — that’s why we’ve been sending our girls out. I know. You get sent or you get taken, and that’s it.”

“Or maybe you spend a good long life in the Hollow, like me and Bobby.” Laura’s mother sniffed. “Maybe that’s what I want for my girl. You think of that? Besides, the way you keep sending your girls out, there won’t be hardly any families left, and it’ll be harder for anyone who stays. You think you’re doing it for the whole Hollow, but it’s just for yourself.”

“That’s not it,” Laura’s babysitter insisted. “That’s not why. There’s things a girl should know, if she’s going to be a mother in the Hollow. You think she can handle that? I can’t handle that, and I’m twice her age. It’s not worth it.”

“. . . she’s all I got.”

The other woman sighed.  “Well, God keep you both.”

Laura hesitated a moment longer, then thumped the door as if she’d just opened it. “Mumma?” she called. “I need some help with my dress.”

“Be there in a moment,” her mother said.

Not worth it. She formed the words, but couldn’t make herself push the breath behind them. It was easy to forget, sometimes, amid the gifts tangible and intangible. No woman in the Hollow ever miscarried. No plants died in the ground, no house ever caught fire, no one ever quite starved. When you looked at the uncertain world, you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe Kyle’s life had been a good trade.

At least Laura hoped you could be forgiven.

What was it the union man had said, just before she’d had to leave for Toby’s birth? “The contracts need to be renegotiated,” he’d said, and there was more. Most of it she hadn’t paid attention to, being nine months pregnant and having what her friend Charlene called “baby brain.” She’d thought it was dumb at the time — you make a bargain, you stick with it — but that had been before Rich came back.

Maybe bargains went bad, sometimes. Maybe they went bad and there wasn’t anything you could do but stick with it and hope for the best.

The closest anyone ever came to saying anything out loud was just after her mother’s death (no Gentlemen, just three packs of Marlboros every day for twenty years). A lawyer in a rumpled blue suit had arranged for a big town meeting, and he’d gotten nearly the whole Hollow to attend on the promise of free barbecue. He had charts, and maps, and he talked excitedly about disease clusters and the factory up the road. And after half an hour of silence from the good folks of the Hollow, he’d asked them to join in a class action suit.

The minister of First Church, acting for all of them, had smiled and nodded and escorted him to the door. “A lawsuit can’t help us,” he’d said, “even if you knew who to sue.”

It was right after he closed the door that someone could have spoken, could have broken that throat-tightening silence and actually said who was to blame. But the lawyer drove off, the silence won out, and the minister shrugged and sighed.

Rich went to the war. Rich came back. Laura had written him about Toby’s birth, and it made her heart fly free again to see him smile. But the look he turned out the windows was haunted, and with more than just wartime ghosts. He couldn’t drive any more, not without pulling over and putting his head down every few miles. So he spent more time in the Hollow, and the Hollow clotted around him.

In April, after the Gentlemen’s spring visit (which would later be annotated with Ashley Irvine, 6, 4 mos. after G.), they had a fight. It wasn’t even a real fight; she’d dropped a glass, and he’d charged into the kitchen so fast he almost knocked over Toby. He yelled at her, she yelled back, both scared and angry at each other for being scared, and Laura didn’t even see the slap coming until her cheek was already burning with it. She raised a hand to her face, disbelieving. Rich stared at her as if she’d grown horns, then turned and ran out the door, heedless of Toby’s yowls.

Laura didn’t go after him, even when dinner and sunset passed without his return. She took extra time putting the kids to bed, and didn’t get up when she heard the front door open.

When she came out from the bedroom, she found him sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his hands. She sat down across from him, and after a while, he began to talk.

“They told me I might have trouble, coming back,” he said, and this time he didn’t move away when Laura took his hands in hers. “And I think I was okay, for a little while . . . But something about here, it’s like, like I keep seeing things I oughtn’t, and it just keeps getting worse. Like something keeps poking at my head.” He glanced out the window, as if something was watching him.

Laura said nothing, only thought of how smart Rich had been in high school, how quickly he saw things that it took her ages to notice, and how she should have known that wouldn’t change.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and kissed her fingers. “I don’t know where just yet, but we can live with my folks a while.”

Laura unknotted her hands from his and went to stand by the window. “This is my home,” she said.

Rich’s eyes went wide and broken. “I know, babe, but it’s not a good place. We need to get out.”

I do. But you get sent or you get taken, and that’s it. “So,” she said, “either I go with you, or you go alone.”

“What? No, that’s not — ”

“I know.” She turned and smiled at him, blinking back tears. “I’m sending you away, Rich. I’m sending you out of my life.” And out of the Hollow.

The divorce wasn’t been pretty — it couldn’t have been, with the two of them still in love. Rich called her and left messages, angry or maudlin or pleading, and she’d listened to them all, hugging herself so tight there would be white marks in her arms when the message ended. Toby began to fuss more, and Jenny started to crawl into bed with her at night.

But Rich was free. Rich was out of it, and she could never, ever hand him over to them. Even if she sometimes woke and cried over the cold side of the bed. Even if she was back watching her life again.

The lights hadn’t changed, and the whispering had stilled. And now Laura had to admit it, had to see that the Gentlemen had come to her house. Oh, I tried, I tried, she thought. I could have sent the kids away, I could . . .

But would it have done anything? The old women, like Lara’s babysitter, had sent their kids away. And some had then died alone and unnoticed, so successful at cutting the ties between their loved ones and the Hollow that they’d cut their own lifelines. Even that wouldn’t have been enough.

She’d gotten as far as the border of the Hollow, car packed to the gills and kids in the backseat, before the strength left her limbs and she found herself unable to leave. She’d even thought about ringing the house with iron and salt, the way one woman had back in ‘09, but that woman’s family had all died in a gas explosion two months after. The Gentlemen took their claim. You had to carry out a life to them, and you had to let them carry that life away.

It was an old bargain, old as the Hollow at least.  And you had to keep bargains.

A soft trill shook the window panes, traveling from them down to the tips of her fingers through some malign conduction. Her first instinct was to categorize it, and she thought of flutes, screech owls, mourning doves, before she quite heard it, and hearing it was lost.

This was right, the cry said. Children die, and if one of them had to, who better to choose than their mother? She sat up — looking, had she known it, very like her mother — then got to her feet.

She ghosted into the bedroom and gazed at her children. Toby, she thought, he’s too young to really understand about being sick. No, Jenny, because she’s had at least some time. No . . .

Something burred against her consciousness, a wrong note in the Gentlemen’s music.

Decide. You have time. Just decide.

But the burr remained, coming through in bursts like — like a phone, she realized, and glanced over her shoulder in time to see the harsh red light of the answering machine flick on.

“Uh. Hi. It’s me,” Rich’s voice said, crackling over the tape. “Look, I know you’re not awake — Jesus, I hope I didn’t wake the kids, I’m sorry — but I had to talk to you.”  He went on, but Laura was no longer paying attention. His voice was harsh and ragged and so unlike the Rich she’d known, but it was enough to drown out the Gentlemen’s echoes.

Laura looked back at her children. She could let herself walk into the room, as she was doing now, let herself pick up a child and go outside. And she could tell herself later, when her child died, that she hadn’t really done it, that she’d just watched herself do it.

She thought of the crown, and of Kyle.

Jenny shifted, putting out a hand to the empty space where Laura had slept, and sat up. “Mumma?”

“Stay inside, sweetie,” Laura said. She crossed her arms, denying herself a last hug in case her resolve failed. “Stay inside and under the covers. I’ll be back — ” She caught the lie between her teeth and shook her head. “Sleep tight, sweetie. Love you.”

She turned her back, ignoring Jenny’s scared squeak, and closed the door. The last moments of Rich’s message cut off, cut short by the tape, and Laura touched the answering machine as she passed. “Love you too.”

Finally she closed her eyes, opened the front door, and stepped out into light. The trill sounded again, closer, all around her, and she opened her eyes with a gasp. Two dozen sets of eyes regarded her, wide and unblinking.

They didn’t ride horses, of course; at the back of her mind she was proud of herself for having figured that out. They rode owls, giant white faces staring at her without curiosity. That was the only thing recognizable about them; it was as if the owls, strange and gigantic as they were, were a concession to reality.

They were made of light, and they shone, oh they shone. For a second she thought they could be angels, but the memory of the little blue notebook tainted that thought. One of the riders — white and blue, and human only in shape — leaned over his reins toward her and gestured toward the house.

“No,” she said aloud. “You didn’t get Rich. You don’t get them. You get me.”

The rider slashed one hand across his chest: rejection. Others agreed, some agitating their mounts so that the huge birds hopped from one foot to the other.

She shook her head. “I don’t care what you want. You don’t get to choose. And I choose this. I choose me.” She leaned forward, and was rewarded by the sight of the head rider leaning away from her.  

You think you’re doing it for the Hollow, but it’s just for yourself. The words were her mother’s, but the head of one of the Gentlemen moved, as if speaking her thoughts.

Laura shook her head. “No. For the Hollow. For the dead of the Hollow.” All the services, all the casseroles, all the dead then and now.

There came a familiar prickling on the back of her neck. If she turned now, she knew, she’d be able to see Jenny at the window, nose mashed up against the glass, mouth open in the beginning of a sob.

She didn’t turn, not even to say goodbye. Watch, darling. Watch. “This bargain is ended,” she said. “We will not be renegotiating.”

The head rider motioned to the others, and they advanced on her, cruel hooked beaks clashing. Laura held her ground. It always hurt to break a bargain; there was always something that got lost. But it was worth it, if the contract was no good.

The owls took her by hand and foot and hair, and their beaks were sharp. The first cut came, and with it a rending deeper than her skin, deeper than her heart: the Hollow breaking, breaking so that it could never be repaired, and her blood turning the rich soil to useless swamp. 

Watch. Oh, watch.

About the Author

Margaret Ronald’s fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Baen’s Universe, and Helix. Her first novel, Spiral Hunt, will be out from Eos Books in 2009. {{{ She is an alum of the Viable Paradise workshop and a member of BRAWL. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.

The Glory of the World

Sergey Gerasimov

They went upstairs, to the second floor that was actually much higher than the first. An unknown contractor had sandwiched it in between the dimly lit twenty-second and the exceptionally roomy fifty-fifth, either for fun or as a publicity stunt. As they walked up they saw through the big windows an embarrassed town changed very much by the linear perspective, refracted here and there as if seen through a huge quivering prism, scared, shiny, dark-cornered. One of the corners folded up and the rain flickering along the horizon trembled there like piano strings.

The starry heaven gaped over the clouds. The constellations and shiny dabs of galaxies wheeled there, shivering with their own beauty. Seeing this, a lady with a tame cobra around her neck frowned and strained herself to unlock the door. She was long-legged and purebred like a Great Dane.

“Savior, hold it, please,” she said.

She handed him the pensive cobra, and made her hands free for a two-handed key. Savior took the snake. The cobra shook its head as if rousing itself, then squashed his hand, smiling quite cheekily and glistening as if it were smeared with stale grease. Savior put the snake into a pot with a cocoa palm and it immediately, with rumbling stomach, muzzled into the soil rich in fluoric limestone.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” said the lady. “Now she’ll gnaw the roots. She’s a snake, a predator. Understand?”

Savior presented her with a bunch of red folios, and she gave him a condescending nod. They entered.

The boss sat at a round table elongated enough to receive lots of victuals, which formed a slanted turret in the middle of it. Steamed crab legs, made of wild sardine scale, crowned the turret. A few nonentities with indiscernible faces sat nearby, so the table was empty to the right and to the left as well.

A security guard with such a muscular neck that the muscles dangled below his shoulders slept at some distance. A dog, extremely lean and long, romped on a leash staying aloof. The pet was so attenuated by hunger that you had to have a really trained eye to distinguish it from the leash. It licked off its sweat reducing the environmental pollution. Very far away three moneychangers, small end evil like avian flu viruses, played cards for curtseys with a coal-miner. A buffoon played the pipe and sold doves.

Savior froze, stunned. He had expected to see something unbelievable here, but this impossible world was anti-believable, and it had a hypnotizing music of its own at that, a shrieking sort of music that can sound inside a happy lunatic’s mind; it jammed a low, quiet voice of conscience Savior had been always listening to. This world looked him over with button eyes, grinned, let him in.

“I don’t believe in it,” Savior whispered.

“What about getting paid?” the world asked.

“Oh. It would be nice.”

“Got dyspepsia?” the lady asked and Savior started.

“No, I was just thinking.”

“Yeah, thinking gives me gas too,” the lady said in a brain-shrinking voice.

“Hi,” the boss said, “Savior? The one? Welcome.”

He held out his hand with five nails, and the Savior shook it, feeling prone to cringe.

“Well, well, I know,” the boss said. “Heard much about you, you’re that tough guy who cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and even overthrew the tables of the moneychangers. It’s my house! Ye have made it a den of thieves! Piss off everybody! I can appreciate such things. But, you know, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. I mean, times change. Just in case, if you forgot Latin. Today wine maketh us merry: and money answereth all things. By the way, want to drink? No? Pity. I know everything about you because my people never lie, though I don’t believe them of course. So want to hear it from you. From the horse’s mouth, ha-ha. Don’t be modest. Position yourself. Can fly? Or walk on water?”

The boss took from the table a forty-three-barreled cigarette lighter.

“Yes,” Savior said.

“Cool. Will you fly if I throw you out of the window, right now?”

The boss brushed Savior’s cheek with his fingers, quick and spidery, incompatible with his plump face.

“No, I’d be killed. The ability to fly, uh…comes to me, from time to time. I can try, though. Maybe, if not very high…”

He flew up and hovered for a minute above the table. The lady was busy putting on her nose a layer of absolutely transparent powder. The coal-sweep had already lost the game and given out all the curtseys. Being sick and tired of everything, he pressed his stained face to the wall and charcoaled a self-portrait there. Savior was hovering. His face wore a dreamy look necessary for flights.

“That wasn’t bad,” the boss said. “Be my friend. Meet this girl. She’s Denise. A female variant from Denis. And don’t meet the others. They are morons.”

The lady with the key slowly winked; she was aristocratic like an oyster in spinach. Then unscrewed a stiletto-heel and picked her teeth with it.

They spoke of this and that, then the conversation turned to food and stopped at this comprehensive point. The buffoon got tired of selling the lewd doves and, being hungry, sucked at his saliva ejector. The nonentities kept doing nothing. Their gazes moved up and down Denise’s legs polishing them to a mirror luster. The words stirred in Savior’s mouth, losing taste like a wad of chewing gum.

“They say you can live on spirit,” said the boss in a voice of a business executive opening a staff conference. “I hope that’s true.”

Savior was about to say something noncommercial but changed his mind and answered artlessly. “Sometimes. But I eat, as a rule. Something low-caloric. Austere repast, you know.”

“Cook yourself?”

“Yes.”

“By a fiat of will?”

“No. Prefer a microwave.”

The boss raised his brow as if surprised at such an extravagance. “Now you listen to me, bud,” he said. “I want here and now, by a fiat of will. Make for me something really delicious and special to eat.”

“I can cook for you cobra’s flesh. Is it okay?”

“Go on, man, go on.”

Savior took a porno magazine decorating the table and flipped through. One of the women fitted perfectly: snake-eyed and resembling a piece of meat. He decided to make the dish from this picture. Tore it out, crumpled, and placed on the plate. Intertwined his fingers over it.

The boss went out of the room not wanting to wait for at least fifteen minutes. The buffoon was licking the paints off the pictures and shoving them into the proper tubes; the dog watched him with a melancholic rapacity in its heart. Denise played with a gold watch chain and moved rhythmically her wonderful eyelashes, so long and dense that they could shovel humus.

“What else can you do?” she asked and made the moment flinch.

“Everything,” Savior said.

“The most difficult, I mean.”

“With a single word I can make a man happy.”

“It’s easy,” Denise said, “I can do it too. Hey, guard, I order you to be happy.”

The guard woke up and burst out laughing, junked up with official delight. He was prompt to carry out the orders to sob, to fall in love, to go mad and senile, to get prodigious acne, and at last to go to sleep again. The nonentities echoed, though not at all concerned. Savior was talking, keeping his mind intent. He developed some arguments to Denise. She was listening to him with unflagging indifference. He was so carried away that he didn’t even notice the sudden appearance of a black car smelling of expensive lubricant.

The guys in the car started shooting, and a bullet plowed through Savior’s spinal column. He stooped a little more, trying to remain concentrated, but the smell of the smoldering varnish distracted him. The bullet, which had popped out of his chest, was spinning on the table, before his eyes, a puffing lead corpuscle scorching the polish. Denise fired back with an enviable sang-froid and picked off two of attackers: one of them died in the driver’s seat; the other got a bullet in his lung. This one fell out of the car and immersed into the green shag of the carpet. The carpet liana crawled up to him planning to suck out all his fluids except the toxins. Two non-entities were killed immediately; the third tried to flee away but died of fright on the way. The moment wheezed and wriggled on the floor. Time kept going, but away from the penal acts. Time was accustomed to such scenes, it knew what to do.

Security guards came in time splitting their sides with belated laughter, and Denise shut them up. She leaned over the dying man and eyed with curiosity the incarnadine foam on his lips. She looked like a preteen school-girl with innocent buds of breasts under a t-shirt who for the first time pressed her orbital bone against the ocular of a microscope. Her face shone like a fluorescent lamp.

“Well, now,” she said in a voice of a virgin waiting for her first kiss, “we met at last, didn’t we? Oh, you want to die so much, no, no, don’t cheat me, you’re not dying yet, want a drop of water, huh? Nuts to you…Gimme a rag.”

A guard gave it.

She moistened the rag in the aquarium where sharky-fish shaggy with algae finned optimistically, and moved it over the lips of the dying man. A drop dropped. The man moved, moaned, and she lifted her hand.

“Nope, no way, no water today,” she said in a voice of a yeanling jumping around a barn.

The boss appeared at last, sat down at the table, and started peeling a sea tomato.

“What about my meat here?” he asked, then noticed the blood and scowled at that unhygienic nuisance. The blood washed itself off.

“Almost done,” Savior said. “Why is she torturing him? Let him die.”

“I’d like to, dude, but no. It’s personal. He is the Denis. I mean, Denise is a female name made from him. They rubbed shoulders, then, you know how it goes, rubbed not only shoulders; now they’re like a dog and a cat. I don’t meddle with their lives. If the torture bothers you, make him die.”

“I can’t make anybody die.”

“I can,” the boss said in a voice of inborn certainty. “Hey, you there, die!”

Three guards died and the long dog turned his heels up. The fourth guard jumped out of the window trying to escape his master’s anger. The buffoon got stricken by paralysis. The remote coal-sweep escaped with severe fright. In faraway Bonzibar an epidemic of crayfish distemper broke out. The carpet liana painted itself on the carpet simulating a black and white imprint. Sharky-fish, being deaf, didn’t care a cuss.

“It wasn’t for you, idiots,” the boss said. “I was talking to Denis. Denis, die!”

And Denis died.

The boss touched Savior’s jacket and shirt. The holes were real. The flesh had already healed the wound.

“Nice,” the boss said. “Very nice. The rumors were true. Those guys in the car worked for a rival firm; they wanted to blip you off. They thought I could use you. But you are so difficult to kill, aren’t you? Denise is also a cool wench, good for her.”

“But if they’d killed me?”

“Then what’s the use for me to buy you?” the boss said. “Well done, see? Have killed three birds with one shot. Checked you up, wiped their dirty nose, and Denise gave vent to her feelings. But you’re a sly guy; they knew you’re worth shooting at.”

Saying this, the boss looked so piercingly that he cracked in the meantime the Bermuda Triangle mystery, and eight other mysteries, not as big as that one.

“Well. How much am I supposed to pay for you?” he went on.

“Seven hundred curtseys a week… Pre-tax,” Savior breathed out.

“Pre-tax, well, may be,” said the boss. “But first thing’s first. Where’s my dinner? Cobra’s flesh.”

Savior raised his palms. The dish looked well-roasted and smelled delicious. The boss waved to one of nonentities who waddled nearby.

“You try it first.”

The nobody tasted the dish. “Ummm,” he purred so melodically as if he had practiced over night at a Karaoke hall. His flesh got pimpled with goosebumps. He smiled with delight, opening his mouth like a dead lizard.

“Enough.” The boss tried a bit, and chewed it with concentration. “Well, it doesn’t taste like glue.”

He paused, busy with chewing and swallowing. His fork stirred the convolutions of noodles.

“My people can cook better,” the boss said slowly, with moments of leaden silence inserted between the words. “You’ve put too much salt in it. Why?”

“For the lack of concentration, maybe. The noise, the shooting, I was wounded…”

“Give him seven hundred curtseys,” said the boss in a voice of an electric meat grinder revving up, “and get rid of him right away. Drop him somewhere outside. You think, boy, you are the only one so omnipotent at my disposal? I receive eight guys like you a day. The very archbishopissimus is at my command! Lack of concentration, did you hear that? Well, I think it’s the next savior at the door. Just in time. Let him in.”

The door opened and bent low.

The second savior entered and presented Denise with a bunch of red folios.

“I have a talent, a wonderful thing!” the second one sang out cheerfully, positioning himself in the proper way.

“Don’t take it too personally,” Denise said to the first Savior, “you were a wonderful freak. But we are highly competitive, you know.”

The bodies had already vanished; the cobra’s flesh was eaten. The boss wiped his glossy lips.

“Savior? The one? You’re welcome.”

But the last guard was still falling outside. In the very beginning, he had a hope to save his life because he was an all-round diving-into-shallow-reservoirs champion who specialized in puddles. The rain had just stopped and there were lots of puddles in the streets. He flew poising himself with his long hair. But half-way down a cooling breeze gently kissed him, saying goodbye, turbulenting the hair just enough to sweep him to the concrete wall. In a few seconds, the guard hit against the wall and turned into a wet blotch.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” he mumbled instructively in the end. Thus passed the glory of the world. But no, the glory did not pass with him: the sunset, dense and heavy like a red-hot stone block, glared over the town. The town floundered in this light like a blowfly in sunflower oil. Only this light was real; the disheveled policemen scared of anything real fired into the sky with their authorized slingshots. They closed the left eyes at that, or both, for additional bravery.

Savior saw that as he walked downstairs. At first he thought to save the falling guard but then changed his mind: right now he didn’t feel like saving anybody. There’s something wrong about this world, he thought, or is it just me? Millions of people live in this flat universe as oblivious as moth-eaten scarves to what is going on. No, I’m being too picky. Where has the glory of the world gone? Or am I just an interesting freak?

He went out into the street, looked up at the blackening sky, and saw the last drops of rain, which caught the light of street lamps; they were falling slowly like confetti. Then, on buying a cheap advertiser for a half of curtsey, he started perusing the columns. But in vain: saviors were required for unqualified and poorly-paid work. To gnash their teeth off-screen in dental prosthesis commercials for example.

About the Author

Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine with his wife and daughter. He has a degree in theoretical physics from Kharkiv University and has sold twelve novels and nearly a hundred stories in Russia and Ukraine. This is his fifth story published in English. Previous stories appeared Adbusters, #68 and #71.

Smart Broads and Tough Guys: The Strange World of Vintage Paperbacks

Lisa Morton

It all started with Lance Casebeer.

In the late 60s, a man with a name that sounded as if it’d come straight from a cheap crime novel started collecting old paperbacks. Casebeer, who’d once been a comic book dealer, traded one expendable pop culture item for another, and in 1976 he started sharing his obsession with other collectors. That was the year he inaugurated Lance-Con, the first annual gathering devoted solely to vintage paperbacks; for the next quarter-of-a-century, Lance-Con would continue to be held in Casebeer’s Portland, Oregon home, drawing up to 200 bibliomaniacs yearly. Most came to buy, trade, or sell, and all came to appreciate Casebeer’s collection, which by 2000 was the only complete collection of all paperbacks published between 1938 and 1968. During these gatherings, the almost-exclusively middle-aged men would spill over into the backyards of Casebeer’s neighbors, exchanging esoteric bits of information on their favorite authors, or arguing whether there were more paperback covers featuring Marilyn Monroe or gorillas (that was a real contest Casebeer had once entered into, and he had the roomful of Monroe books to prove he’d won). Each Lance-Con culminated with a group dinner, usually featuring Casebeer’s notorious purple turkeys, some locally hired entertainers, and a lot of kegs.

Casebeer, who died in 2003, also published a newsletter, Collecting Paperbacks, and probably helped to establish vintage paperbacks — which up until the 80s had been largely ignored by most antiquarian booksellers — as legitimate collectibles. Well, if these little jewels, once considered wholly disposable and featuring authors with names like Vin Packer and Gil Brewer, can be said to have any legitimacy whatsoever.

Actually, the first paperbacks didn’t feature mob punks and covers featuring scantily clad women. The first modern paperback was Pocket Books’ edition of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth; priced at twenty-five cents and pocket-sized, the publisher initially issued the book in a small test run of no more than 2,800 copies. (You can imagine the value of that first printing nowadays — only a handful are known to still exist.) Pocket’s baby step into the paperback market was immensely successful, and it immediately began producing more small paperback versions of some of their bestselling hardbacks.

But Pocket’s early, more serious paperbacks aren’t what eventually drew fans like Casebeer. No, that took a publisher named Gold Medal. Founded in 1950 by Roscoe Kent Fawcett, Gold Medal began as a way for Fawcett to exploit a contractual loophole: His distribution deal with Signet/New American Library prevented him from publishing his own paperbacks, but only if they were reprints. Gold Medal became the first paperback publisher to release exclusively paperback original novels (PBOs), and Gold Medal soon found that there was a huge market hungry for the same kind of film noir crime stories that were packing movie houses. Gold Medal’s stable of authors included many who are now considered the masters of the mystery genre, including John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and Chester Himes.

While there were plenty of other publishers also releasing mystery paperbacks — Pocket, Popular Library, Avon, Dell, Lion, Ace — Gold Medal branded themselves with both a distinctive look and a house style. Aside from dynamic cover art that featured the work of artists such as Robert McGinnis, each Gold Medal book bore a distinctive yellow spine with the logo at the bottom. The books were short, running 125 to 175 pages, with fast-paced plots and plenty of punchy dialogue. Even the back cover copy was exciting: “He was a tall, cleanly attractive young man,” reads the blurbage for Peter Rabe’s 1956 Dig My Grave Deep, “the kind you’d like to have for a neighbor. Press the right button and he’d mow you down with the ruthlessness of a Sherman tank.”

One of Gold Medal’s most successful lines, however, wasn’t the macho mystery but the lesbian drama. In their first year of business they had a smash hit with a book called Women’s Barracks, which sold over four million copies. In 1952 they published Spring Fire, a book now canonized as an early lesbian classic. Its author, Vin Packer, published plenty of other books with Gold Medal, most with titles like Come Destroy Me and The Thrill Kids. What his readers at the time didn’t know was that Vin was actually Marijane Meaker, a lesbian who’d once had a two-year affair with mystery writer Patricia Highsmith. Along with Ann Bannon’s series of novels following a young woman with the unlikely name of Beebo Brinker, Meaker’s books paved the way for later feminist and lesbian authors.

Meaker was hardly the only author employing a pseudonym, though. By the late 50s, paperback originals were firmly established and many writers dipped their toes in the water courtesy of pseudonyms, usually employed on “sleaze” or soft-core porn novels. One of the most sought-after vintage paperbacks now is a hot number called Sex Gang, credited to one Paul Merchant — who was actually Harlan Ellison (Ellison has been known to buy copies of the book and tear them up in front of the dealer he’s just paid). Donald Westlake was only one of several authors who wrote sleaze novels for the “Midnight Reader” series under the name Alan Marshall. Robert Silverberg used Don Elliott, and even horror master Dennis Etchison got into the swing with a late 60s porn novel credited to the punny-if-not-funny moniker Ben Dover.

While Gold Medal had the lock on the crime and lesbian markets, other paperback publishers were doing well with science fiction, westerns, and romance. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Philip K. Dick are now darlings of the literati, but both started writing science fiction paperbacks. Dick’s early books often appeared in one of the more unusual paperback lines, the Ace Doubles. These hefty volumes gave readers “Two Complete Novels for 35¢” as the covers proclaimed with two novels bound in opposite directions; flip it over and you got a second front cover. As with Gold Medal, Ace employed some top-notch artists, including Kelly Freas, and the books were guaranteed to at least be eye-catching.

If the Ace books offered a great deal in terms of quantity, the quality sometimes left something to be desired. Modern collectors, for example, are likely to purchase something like, say, Ace Doubles D-193 for the first appearance of Dick’s The Man Who Japed (1956). E. C. Tubb’s The Space-Born, the other novel in the double, generally fails to impress.

Those publisher-assigned serial numbers are a crucial part of paperbacks to their hardcore fan base. Some collectors, like Casebeer, go for complete lines; a perusal of their shelves will turn up rows of clean, bagged paperbacks, their spines reflecting a perfect numerical sequence. Other collectors take a more personal approach, though: They might collect particular authors, cover artists, or even themes. Got a kink for needles? You can put together a fairly substantial collection of vintage paperbacks featuring hypodermics on their covers. Nurses? Bondage? Good girls? Even gorillas.

There’s some dispute among collectors about the end run of vintage paperbacks. DreamHaven Books’ owner and vintage paperback dealer Greg Ketter notes that some of the more valuable paperbacks actually come from the 1970s. “Print runs in the 50s and 60s were astronomical compared to now;100,000 was not an unusually high run,” he says. “That’s one reason you find more books from that period than from the late 70s and throughout the 80s and beyond, where runs have gone as low as 10,000. Some books from the 70s and 80s are among the scarcest of titles.” Most experts cite 1968 or 1969 as the end of the vintage paperback age.

As with comic book hoarders, vintage paperback collectors are fanatics for condition, and listening to them talk can be a disconcerting experience for the novice or total outsider. “It’s got a creased spine, wraps are pulling from the block of the book,” can spell the end of a potential deal. Serious collectors seal their prizes in archival bags, store them away from sunlight, and may even have special shelves built to house their collections. Although paperbacks don’t yet employ the complicated numerical grading scheme used for comic books, the obsession with condition is similar; the more disposable a product once was, the more modern collectors will prize condition of that product.

Disposable though they may once have been, it’s now almost impossible to overestimate the influence of vintage paperbacks on everything from the science fiction novel to academic gender studies. Sure, most literary critics are never going to accord William Faulkner’s paperback-penning brother John the same kudos (despite the fact that John’s bibliography includes the delightful titles Uncle Good’s Girls and The Sin Shouter of Cabin Road), but bestselling authors like Walter Mosley freely acknowledge the importance of some of the early paperback writers. Mosley has often cited the work of Chester Himes, one of the few African American authors working in the largely white world of 50s paperbacks. Tom Piccirilli, a contemporary writer whose own work has moved away from horror and more into crime fiction, is such a fan of vintage hardboiled paperbacks that he recently set up an online forum, “The Big Adios”, to discuss his passion with other devotees. Piccirilli is heavily influenced by David Goodis, saying that, “Goodis…taught me how to weave a significant atmosphere of despair into the action of the work.”

Some fans have taken their love in different professional directions. Witness, for example, publisher Hard Case Crime. The founders of Hard Case, Charles Ardai and Max Phillips, had been the CEO and art director (respectively) of the Internet company Juno; when Juno merged with another company and left Ardai and Phillips free to pursue other ventures, a few drinks and a discussion of favorite vintage paperbacks led to the idea behind Hard Case. They published their first book (Grifter’s Game by Lawrence Block) in 2004, and since then have published a mix of reprints and PBOs, all in the hardboiled mystery genre.

Their method of choosing what they reprint is simple: “I have several thousand old paperbacks on my shelves at home,” Ardai told me, “and I’ve read most of them; the ones I remember — and remember loving — years after first having read them are the ones I pursue as reprints.” Ardai and Phillips even went after the classic vintage paperback cover artists, and several of their releases have featured art by the iconic Robert McGinnis “It’s like having your meals cooked by one of the world’s master chefs,” Ardai says of working with McGinnis.

Hard Case recently published their first book by a female author, Christa Faust’s Money Shot. Faust’s book knowingly riffs on the genre’s tropes — a bag full of stolen money, shoot-outs and hideouts, a smart broad and a tough guy — except in Money Shot the smart broad, a former porn star named Angel Dare, is the protagonist.

Women and people of color have a strange and politically incorrect history in the vintage paperbacks, despite the success of the lesbian novels. The tough-guy stereotype of the 50s usually came with plenty of prejudice. Ardai notes that some of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books, for example, “were marred by unfortunate racist portrayals of servants and such.” A new breed of writers — including Faust, Mosley, Megan Abbott and Vicki Hendricks — have begun to appropriate some of the genre’s tropes and reconfigure them for a new century. According to Faust, “We’re making the genre our own, taking tired gender stereotypes like the ‘femme fatale’ and turning them inside out, telling dark, hardboiled stories from a uniquely female perspective.”

Women aren’t the only group that may be discovering (or re-discovering) the excitement of vintage paperbacks now; they’ve also started to make their way into the rarified world of academia. A number of university libraries feature special paperback collections. In fact, Casebeer had hoped that a university would take his collection, although it mostly ended up piecemealed out. The Special Collections Division of the University of Saskatchewan holds a substantial catalog of gay, lesbian and transgender-themed vintage paperbacks; the University of Delaware has a vintage paperback science fiction collection.

And then of course there’s the business side. Where just a few years ago supercollectors like Casebeer were touting the affordability of paperbacks to beginners, their value has evolved well beyond their original two-bits price tag. Want a copy of Fredric Brown’s 1951 Dell release The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches? Be prepared to fork over five C-notes for a pristine copy, if you can even find one. Even so-so copies of books by lesser-known authors now routinely fetch twenty bucks and up. Although there are only a handful of brick-and-mortar retail stores across the country specializing in vintage paperbacks — Kayo Books in San Francisco is the best-known, although the waiting-room-sized Always First in North Hollywood is a favored spot for Southern California collectors — there are dozens of online dealers, many of whom also put out newsletters, guides, and informative websites.

Why vintage paperbacks? What is it about these yellowing tomes that leave booklovers panting after them like a jilted detective after a stripper? Ultimately, despite fancy cover art, inflated prices and even, as Christa Faust notes the tactile pleasure of “that musty old foxed paper smell”, it has to come back to the writing. Hard Case’s Ardai sums it up: “Lean, gripping stories, told with (and often written at) ferocious velocity”. Post-Tarantino, these books — with their machine-gun chatter and twisting plots — feel somehow new and relevant again. With contemporary New York publishers insisting on bloated epics that seem to exist only to justify a ten-dollar price tag for a paperback, the stripped-down, bare-knuckles style of vintage paperbacks offers an exhilarating alternative.

Oh yeah, and — as Casebeer understood all too well — they really do look pretty nice lined up on a custom-made shelf.

About the Author

A reformed screenwriter, Lisa Morton is now the proud author of three books of nonfiction (The Cinema of Tsui Hark, The Halloween Encyclopedia and A Halloween Anthology). Her short fiction has been published in numerous books and magazines; recent and forthcoming appearances include the anthologies Winter Frights, Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, The Living Dead and Midnight Premiere. Lisa won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction, and she currently lives in North Hollywood with Henry the Red from Army of Darkness.

John Grant and Paul Barnett Agree: Science Has Been Corrupted

Jeff VanderMeer

“John Grant” is the pen name Paul Barnett uses for his non-editorial work, including the book Corrupted Science, a compendium through the ages of situations in which facts have been trumped by ideology, pride, selfishness, and avarice.

Corrupted Science made a USA Today best-of list last year and has recently been prominently displayed on the gift book table of a major brick-and-mortar chain. Although not fictional, Corrupted Science often reads like fiction. This reader, at least, could not believe the sheer extent of stupidity and pigheadedness on display. It makes for exciting reading, even as you wince at some of the worst examples. Others, however, are laugh-out-loud funny. The genius of Grant-Barnett’s achievement is both in its encyclopedic completeness and the way in which the author still manages to breathe life into each anecdote. The compact and stylish design of the book doesn’t hurt — you’ll want to keep this one on your shelf of favorites for both its content and its look.

Barnett, as Grant, has written sixty-odd books, about twenty-five are fiction. They include The Far-Enough Window, The Hundredfold Problem, Albion, The World, Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (published as half of a “double” with Colin Wilson’s The Tomb of the Old Ones), two collaborative parodies with David Langford (Earthdoom and Guts) and the twelve novels of the Legends of Lone Wolf series. His serial novel The Dragons of Manhattan was published online during the latter part of 2003 by the global journalism website Blue Ear; it has just been published in a print edition by the UK publisher Screaming Dreams Press.

His best known works of nonfiction are The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters (three editions), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (done with John Clute) and most recently The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective (done with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville). As John Grant he has received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award, the J. Lloyd Eaton Scholarship Award and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award.

I recently interviewed Barnett via email because I think Corrupted Science is an important book that deserves as wide an audience as possible.

How did you come to write Corrupted Science?

The book grew naturally out of a previous nonfiction book of mine, Discarded Science (2006). The earlier book was concerned with notions and hypotheses which over the centuries science had, as it were, deposited by the wayside — from the flat earth to the music of the spheres to Creationism, the luminiferous aether, and beyond. While I was writing it, it became apparent to me that there was a qualitative difference between those notions that were wrong simply because of people’s lack of information — their position along scientific history’s timeline, in effect — and those that were wrong because people were deliberately making them wrong.

To take a single example, when Ptolemy maintained that the Earth was the center of the universe, this was because he didn’t know any better: it was a reasonably logical guess considering the state of knowledge in his day. Centuries later, however, when Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo had shown there was a much better explanation for the behavior of the heavens and the Roman Catholic Church was trying to suppress that better explanation, the Vatican was guilty of deliberately corrupting science. The motivation in this instance was a doctrinal one — much like the motivation for most Creationists/IDers today, now I come to think of it. Of course, there have been lots of other motives that have led people — both scientists and non-scientists — to corrupt  human knowledge. Personal gain is an obvious one, as is self-deception, but the various ideological motives clearly are likely to have far wider-scale effects. Just think for a moment of the bad anthropology that was used to justify the Nazis’ attempted genocide of “lesser races”.

So the subject of the corruption of science seemed to me to be an important one. Luckily my publisher, Cameron Brown at AAPPL/FF&F, agreed with me — and not only because Discarded Science proved to be a really quite successful book.

The book contains a plethora of amazing stories about science and scientists. What is your own background in science?

My own science background is pretty undistinguished, I’m afraid. I’ve always been interested in both sciences and arts, and unfortunately I was channeled in the later years of my school education into an exclusively science track… which meant that when I got to university I found myself reading Maths, Physics and Astronomy (at King’s & University Colleges, London) when really I’d have been happier in the Scottish university system where it’d have been open to me to read a mixture of sciences and arts. Whatever, I didn’t have the math ability for this degree course, and lasted just a year. At the end of that time, I was enthralled by the Astronomy part of it all but bored by and lousy at the rest — and it was only some of the Astronomy that I was good at!

So off I hopped to seek a university place reading English Literature. By the time I’d found one, though, I’d managed to start a career in book publishing (as an editor). A major dither: should I ditch my fledgling career to take up the university place I’d sought so long, or should I keep doing what I was very much enjoying and what I seemed to be modestly good at? I decided on the latter, and so the path of the rest of my life was settled.

At that time, though — and perhaps even today — there was, at least in UK book publishing (I’ve no idea what the situation was on this side of the pond), a distinct shortage of editors who were scientifically literate. Although I might not have gained a huge amount of what I should have been gaining during my year at university, I was certainly scientifically literate — and I also retained a passionate interest in cosmology, particle physics, and one or two others of the “sexy” sciences. (Geology and Earth History followed in due course.) So, naturally enough, the publishers I worked for were keen enough to tap what they regarded as this strength of mine and have me editing — and in due course commissioning — books in the field of popular science.So there I was, mixing it with quite a few people who were actually very good scientists, being fired up by them even as I was trying to fire them up to write books for me. And then, wow, I was reading their manuscripts months and months before the public could see them in printed form, and… Oh, I was the science fanboy, all right! The result was that, even though my math remains lousy, I began to learn far more science, and about how science works, than I might have had I managed to stick it out at university. I’d still be useless as a working scientist, but I’d become a modestly competent science journalist.

Somewhere along the road I became especially interested in History of Science — another subject to add to my roster of scientific interests! From there came, eventually, the book Discarded Science and, after it, Corrupted Science.

How much research was involved?

Oh, heck, a lot! There were a few extremely useful books I could read on specific aspects of the subject, and they were very helpful. For the most part, though, I had to cast my net pretty wide and hope to catch a fish here and there. It was very helpful that I’d written Discarded Science, because at least I was pretty well aware of the directions in which I should be casting my net. I have no idea how many books I consulted in search of goodies — certainly far more than are listed in the Bibliography. Also, of course, I made extensive use of the internet: my subscription to New Scientist meant I had access to their fairly enormous archive, but even more useful, I think, were the online archives of the major newspapers, which allowed me to nail down details that might otherwise have been elusive while at the same time allowing me to gain at least some understanding of how events looked to people at the time.

There was another way in which the newspaper archives were useful. It had been evident to me from early on that, in the part of the book which discusses the corruption of science by political regimes, the activities of the current US Administration had to be an important element: it is not a topic that anyone interested in the integrity of science can actually fail to notice. It is, however, a topic about which our mainstream political punditry and journalism seem to be, for the most part, in complete denial. (Some, like the New York Times, are less guilty than most.) However, even though the newspapers and especially the broadcast media have shown themselves overall completely incompetent in this respect, that doesn’t mean their journalists — mostly but not always their science correspondents — haven’t been keeping a tag on events as they’ve unfolded. So, for example, while I could find occasional accounts of the muzzling of James Hansen elsewhere (often in partisan sources, which raised problems in itself), to find out what had really happened — or at least the best approximation to it — I had to read contemporary newspaper accounts.

Incidentally, because of my discussion of the Bush Administration’s corruption of science — alongside that perpetrated by other regimes, let it be noted — I’ve been occasionally lambasted by rightist critics as having an anti-conservative political bias. I very much resent this accusation. If the Bush Administration had not so extensively corrupted US science then it wouldn’t and indeed couldn’t feature in the book; that’s basic logic. The rest of the Administration’s activities, whether they’re to the right or left, are irrelevant to the subject of Corrupted Science. I think the rightist critics are, with the accusation, merely trying to deflect attention away from the facts I present. I kind of wish they’d grow up. I also wish they’d stop regarding other readers as being so stupid as to fall for this kind of nonsense.

Did you have any help with the research?

My wife Pam helped me with some of it, but she’s no scientist so essentially it was up to me. I was also e-chatted incessantly with friends, and many useful bits of information came out of that.

How did you decide to structure the book the way you did?

To be honest, it wasn’t so much me who structured the book as the book itself that did so! As I was working on it, things just seemed naturally to fall into place. The other day I came across my original synopsis for the book — the proposal I’d put forward to AAPPL — and I laughed aloud. It was completely different in structure to how the final book turned out.

What’s your favorite part of the book?

That’s a difficult one to answer, because of course they’re all favorite parts! But, if I were to be stranded on a desert island with only a single section of the book to keep me company… Well, I thought I did pretty well with the longish chapters on the ideological and political corruptions of science, and the chapter on scientific idiocies by the military makes me grin, but probably my favorite chapter is the one on scientists who’ve corrupted their own science not through any mendacity or ideological blinders but through straightforward self-deception. Every time I think of some of the cases in that chapter it makes me re-examine myself and my own preconceptions a little more rigorously!

I was reading recently about the idea of the belief engine, and how it’s hardwired into us to believe things. (I touch upon this from time to time in Corrupted Science, although with a rather different emphasis.) The believing part is important; the truth or falsehood of the things believed in is very much secondary, so far as our psychological hardwiring is concerned. This makes all of us very vulnerable to delusional beliefs, of course (who was it who first said that the trouble with having an open mind is that people come along and dump their trash in it?), but scientists have perhaps an extra vulnerability, since they tend to be better than most of us at constructing hypotheses — it’s their job, after all! Look at the way Ptolemy (again!) had to add more and more complications, epicycle after epicycle, to his Earth-centered theory of the universe. He was very good at making those adaptations, too — in fact, one of the reasons people were slow to accept the Copernican, sun-centered hypothesis was that the Ptolemaic one, ludicrously complicated though it was, gave more accurate results. (Not until Kepler realized the planets move in ellipses, not circles, did the Copernican model become a reliable tool.) If Ptolemy had been less good at constructing these additional sub-hypotheses, as it were, then it might have dawned on him that some of his contemporaries, who thought the Earth and planets went around the sun, could well be right…

Was there anything you had to leave out?

Quite a lot — a difficulty with all my nonfiction books, I’m afraid! When I first started out in publishing, if an author delivered a book 50% longer than anticipated, that was just dandy, because it meant you could put a higher cover price on it. Nowadays, of course, with everything budgeted in advance and various editions likely sold to book clubs or foreign publishers, you’ve got to try a bit harder to keep texts to the pre-ordained length. I had to cut my penultimate draft by about a quarter, and did so largely by removing a long chapter on false cryptozoology, the fakery of fossil animals and anthropoids, etc.

But it shall not be wasted, oh no. At least of some of all this will be going into my forthcoming book, Bogus Science.

What would you really like readers to take away from the book?

That the corruption of science, being more truly phrased as the corruption of human knowledge, is IMPORTANT.

We all suffer whenever someone indulges in the wholesale falsification or suppression of knowledge. The most serious suppression of knowledge at the moment is in connection with global warming, where media and corrupt or just plain dimwitted politicians have conspired in the idiotic pretense that there’s still debate within the scientific community about the reality. There ain’t. There’s debate about some of the details, but the only dissent within the climatological community about the reality of global warming is from a handful of mavericks. All power to those mavericks, but their rather noisy existence doesn’t imply that the climatological community is riven with doubt.

Because of the media/political pretense, the most important player in the quest to ameliorate the complete hell that’s facing our children and grandchildren, the USA, has done almost completely nothing for what may very well have been the crux years — those years in which something could have been done to stave off the worst.

I thought at least the current crop of US presidential hopefuls had cottoned on to the urgency of the need to take action. Now I discover that two of them — McCain and Clinton — are proposing a “holiday” from gas taxes this summer, to encourage consumers to drive more miles than they might otherwise do — i.e., to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine quite how imbecilic one must be to imagine this could be a good thing.

But it’s not just at the political level that seeking to corrupt others’ knowledge is a dangerous and indeed criminal act. As I say, it affects all of us. Look at a whole list of cases where drug companies have suppressed knowledge of harmful side-effects some of their products can display. I could go on almost indefinitely!

What are you working on now?

As mentioned, my main focus right at this moment is the nonfiction book Bogus Science, while I’m also girding my loins for a biggish book on film noir, which is a passion of mine. I’ve just finished writing a cute children’s book called The Velociraptor that Came for Christmas, which my friend Bob Eggleton plans to illustrate; we’ve not yet started hawking it around to publishers. I also have to look vaguely alert for the publication this year of two novels — The Dragons of Manhattan (Screaming Dreams Press, any day now) and Leaving Fortusa (Norilana Books, Fall) — and a novella (The City in These Pages, PS Publishing, Fall). And there are various short stories demanding to be written. Life’s a bit hectic right now!

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning writer with books published in over 20 countries. He has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog, io9, New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among others. Jeff's novel Finch and writing book, Booklife, are forthcoming this fall.

Cavemen Discovered in the 21st Century

Neil Clarke

I’ve recently been following a disturbing discussion that is taking place on a major genre magazine’s forum. It all started when Jonathan Strahan, a respected anthologist, publicly apologized for not including enough women in Eclipse 2, an anthology to be published later this year. In the days prior, there had been considerable outcry about this from both women and men. Under ordinary circumstances, his table of contents wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but with the prior book in this series, the publisher, Night Shade Books, featured only male names on the cover despite the book’s relatively gender-balanced table of contents. That decision led to months of discussion, culminating with a panel at Wiscon, a feminist science fiction convention. It was at that panel that the publisher promised to right that wrong with the cover of the next volume. A few weeks later, the anthologist announced a nearly all-male table of contents.

Let’s jump back to today. At the time I’m writing this, there are nine pages of chatter about this apology in a thread called “Strahan caves to the PC Nazi Brigade”, almost all of it by men who feel he should have put those women in their place. After all, they want the “best stories” and if that means cavemen only, well God Bless America! We don’t want no stink’in emotional air-headed girl cootie drivel in our science fiction!

Dear lord, people like that do exist. I think I must live a sheltered life or perhaps I just hang out with a better quality of people. No one I know ever behaves like that. Seeing this gives me a much better appreciation of what women and minority authors have to put up with.

Do anthologists and publishers have an obligation to women and minorities? Absolutely. Does that mean taking lesser quality stories based on race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity? Absolutely not. This is about being a market that is friendly. If all you get are stories from white men, maybe you need to do some outreach and get a more diverse body of people submitting stories to you. Or perhaps you’ve done something to scare them away. If you were or are a minority, would you send a story to a market that supports or promotes individuals like some of those on that forum?

One argument I see presented is that a more diverse pool of writers will change the personality of the publication. It’s ironic that a forward-looking genre can sometimes be so rooted in its ways. “But you might scare away the readers!” Wake up. The readers are already leaving. Yes, you might upset a few die-hard white supremacists, but a publication that represents a more diverse body of people may just appeal to a more diverse body of people. You might actually attract more readers. The fact of the matter is that the editors are responsible for the personality of a publication. Just because they’ve made an effort to attract a more diverse author pool does not mean that that publication will suddenly dip in quality and become a “market for women and homosexuals.” It means that they actually are trying to find the “best stories.”

Not everyone taking part in that discussion is a caveman. On occasion, there are much more enlightened viewpoints being represented, but neither side is likely to prove the other wrong. Like politics and religion, this is something that people cling to with a passion. Our worldviews demand that we can’t be wrong. Was that anthologist wrong to apologize? I don’t think so. There was an expectation of both him and his publisher, and that expectation was not met.

What’s your opinion? Was he right to apologize? Can a magazine or anthology embrace diversity without harming itself? Who are some of the authors that prove your point? Do you pay attention to the table of contents when selecting what you’ll buy?

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.