Mason & Dixon ARC (1997)

At some point in the early 1980s, I took an oddball science fiction course -- one of only two such classes in fantastic fiction offered by my university during the time I was there. I say oddball because it wasn't a genre overview by any stretch of the imagination: no context of tradition for our course selections was established, Wells or Verne merited little mention, and I'm sure Hugo Gernsback never came up. Our primary text was a contemporary and relatively generic best-of anthology published by Playboy, and lecture discussions were on how topical concerns related to whatever we'd just been assigned (meaning, more than anything, it was yet another course in metaphor). Not counting my recollection of the professor's ridiculously scraggly beard, only two things have stayed with me: being spellbound by George R.R. Martin's excellent novella Sandkings, and, in a rare moment when the Golden Age peeked into the windows of our classroom, listening to a scratchy LP audio interview with Isaac Asimov wherein he brought up John Campbell's notion that sci-fi isn't an isolated genre, but rather the exact opposite: every genre is actually a subset of science fiction, covering as it does all of time and space and possibility. I've been known to drag that posit out when in the presence of someone staunchly claiming to hate science fiction on principle, usually just to make them hush for a minute.

This morning, plotting my summer vacation reading, Mason & Dixon, which ranks among my favorite novels, came to mind. If any one book could serve as exemplar for Campbell's definition, it could well be this one: a historical romance employing modern meta-storytelling techniques to re-imagine a young America, the virgin landscape divided by a couple of star-crossed, star-gazing, unassuming surveyors onto whose humble names crashed a terrifying amount of significant history. Pynchon lays out his agenda on page 349, declaring that history's Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, a jack-of-all-trades job description sounding suspiciously like Novelist. Here is the Past given focus through modern lenses, retrofitted for Star Trek references, seeded with psychic talking dogs, a watch powered by perpetual-motion, sentient bread dough, and a robot duck. Maybe I was never taught any better, but if this historical Frankenstein's monster isn't science fiction, I don't know what is.

This is an advance reader's copy, an artifact from my bookseller days courtesy of a generous sales rep, one of 500 with promotional information on the back (another 500 were in generic wraps). I'd only made it through the Transit of Venus section when the first hardback editions came in, so this one is essentially unread, a treasure. For a long time, I had one of the specially-printed cardboard crates Henry Holt shipped the early printings in (like many things, it didn't survive my time in Montgomery), but I do still have some ridiculous promo cards, suitable for framing, advertising the cinderblock-sized tome as a breezy beach read, canvas lounge chairs parked beneath particolored umbrellas and all. Because, why not. It's only science fiction, after all.

Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time & Space (1946)

I wandered into my college career with a rough draft of a novel already under my belt: The Stonehenge Connection, a space opera in five "acts," scrawled in cheap black ink across 368 college-ruled pages when I should have been listening in high school Geometry class so that I'd now know how to hypotenuse a triangle, or whatever. The story of an Earthling recruited by a rebellious alien to save his own planet, it was absolutely nothing but a loose bag of cheaply imitated influences -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Blade Runner, Doctor Who, Time Bandits -- dropped into a plot worthy of Ed Wood. Then again, I enrolled in Creative Writing with the mere aim of learning how to write better sci-fi and horror potboilers. And I had some hope, early on -- the room where the classes met was nicknamed the "Star Trek Room" due to its being dominated by a gigantic oval conference table. But I don't recall Star Trek ever being discussed, not in a way I found interesting, anyway.

Time travel is a seductive folly partly because we like to imagine there are moments in our lives where, if we could return and intervene, whisper wisdom into the ears of our younger selves, we could avoid losing years to an unnecessary struggle down some errant path. (Also because if you could time travel, you could saddle up a T-Rex, but I digress.) Truth is, I don't recall a singularity wherein my low-key aspirations of being a SF author with a meager cult following imploded. Maybe during a conversation with my instructor, being told I'd rather have the respect of my "peers" and publish in the Paris Review than peddle in Ye Olde Sewer of Genre. Maybe when I switched my major to Philosophy instead, because dabbling in Metaphysics seemed like it might bring me closer to understanding Tom Stoppard's brand of Existentialism. Or when I further shifted to Psychology, finally seeking some hard science about the mysteries of human wetware. Looking back, I think what I mostly did was manifest that old Steve Martin zinger about learning just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. (I did always think that was a pretty funny joke, after all.)

When I more-or-less randomly grabbed this book for the purposes of mindlessly entertaining myself during a recent holiday car trip, I didn't expect to be derailed before reaching the first tale. The introduction is an ode to the editorial work of John W. Campbell, as many of the stories contained herein have his stamp of approval. As the editor of Astounding, he forged the "Golden Age" of science fiction, debuting authors now seen as primary pillars of the genre: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, Fredric Brown. Trends have come and gone, minor names have exited the mainstream the way they always do, but all these fellows are still in print and Campbell's most famous short story has to date been been filmed thrice. Not bad for sewer-dwellers, as critics of their generation (and at least one more following) tried to paint it.

Emerson spoke of his Giant following him around -- a highbrow version of Wherever you go, there you are. It's not displayed anywhere, but I still have The Stonehenge Connection. And from time to time, I will take a moment to wonder why. The ugly plotting, the plagiarized characters, the cartoon dialogue, the misadventures in narrative only a naive and heavily pimpled teenage could love ... should anyone ever find it, my death certificate will read: spontaneous combustion brought on by acute embarrassment. But Campbell would be the first to tell me: There's no rough draft that can't be improved by hard work. Bet on ending somewhere very different than where you started, but hard work will lead to improvement every time. It's a form of simple math. I'm not looking to saddle up any dinosaurs; I know all too well that directionless travel -- whether through time, space, or both -- can be treacherous folly. But then again, sometimes an errant path will lead you to your Bliss.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells Can't you remember anything I told you? and lets fly with a club.
     -- John W. Campbell, Jr. 

On a Related Note: Jason Sanford's Cosmic Mistakes

Who Goes There? (1938)

I'm not sure when or where I picked up this little gem -- maybe I stumbled over it at a random paperback swap-shop, lost somewhere back among the years; maybe it was the object of a targeted search on ABE.com, bought from some dealer located west of Timbuktu; maybe it was at the bottom of a box collected during one of our Over the Transom book hauls, and from there it jumped to my bookshelf. Who knows. But because I've had it in the neighborhood of forever, it's even possible I filched it from my old friend Justin's house.

Campbell's titular story has been filmed three times to date, twice titled as The Thing. He was a writer and editor who, helming a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction (still publishing as Analog Science Fiction and Fact), near-single-handedly shaped the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He was also Justin's step-grandfather.

Like many who grew up in the Church of the Latter Day Geeks, my sci-fi intake at that point chiefly consisted of Star Wars, reruns of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, and whatever zany giant insects were stomping around during Mad Science Week on Afternoon Thriller Theater. So this was my first exposure to harder science fiction, emphasis on the scientific (not to mention social -- Who Goes There? is at heart a series of characters logically puzzling through a zero-sum game involving each other, a kind of locked-room whodunnit taking place prior to the murder) over the fantastic. Campbell was long gone by the time Justin and I met each other as seventh-grade classmates, but plenty of his books were still around -- or at least so many that I (allegedly) nabbed one for myself without anyone noticing (so far as I know).

That group of writings which is usually referred to as "mainstream literature" is, actually, a special subgroup of the field of science fiction -- for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction.
     -- John W. Campbell, in the introduction to Analog 1 (Doubleday, 1963)