A moment in time, as viewed by the sci-fi community
December 16, 2021 7:34 AM   Subscribe

Nat Tilander found a two-page spread in the June 1968 Galaxy. Each page of the spread was a list of names of fantasy and sci-fi authors, including most of the major luminaries of the day; one page listed those who signed their name to a petition to end the war in Vietnam; one page listed those who signed a petition to continue the war. All in all, a fairly stark indication of who was on which side in one of the most pressing political issues of the day, with many of the positions you'd expect (no surprises about, e.g. Jerry Pournelle and Ursula K. Le Guin), but a few appearing in an unexpected camp.
posted by jackbishop (66 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
A petition to continue a war is the weirdest fucking thing imaginable.
posted by praemunire at 7:50 AM on December 16, 2021 [30 favorites]


Looking up MZB's bio to try to figure out what was going on with her was a pretty fucking challenging TIL
posted by paimapi at 7:51 AM on December 16, 2021 [25 favorites]


It looks as though the pro-war faction is older on average and, again on average, has less durable reputations. Also male-r on average, although that might be generational - there certainly were women who started writing for the pulps in the thirties and forties but not nearly as many as were writing later.
posted by Frowner at 7:52 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


A petition to continue a war is the weirdest fucking thing imaginable.

The wars in Iraq, both of them, were similarly polarizing in most of our living memories. History is never the same, but I'd put the furor of the early 2000s as a pretty fucking weird time to be alive as well.
posted by bonehead at 7:56 AM on December 16, 2021 [14 favorites]


Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, had infamously written a number of lesbian sleaze novels during the 60s

TIL
posted by chavenet at 7:57 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


I mean, this is so totally fucked up, yet normalized at the same time. In Afghanistan, American Troops patrol the same routes their fathers did. Not the Onion story with practically the same headline.
posted by bonehead at 7:59 AM on December 16, 2021 [9 favorites]


Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, had infamously written a number of lesbian sleaze novels during the 60s, and her science fiction typically featured strong female protagonists—suggesting values perhaps more aligned with the surging liberal culture.

She also sexually abused her own daughter from the ages of 3 to 12, and assisted her husband Walter Breen, a proud and open pedophilia advocate with multiple child molestation convictions, in obtaining and abusing a number of young boys and covering up the abuse for him.

Kind of weird to hold her up as some kind of righteous liberal paragon.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:05 AM on December 16, 2021 [38 favorites]


This is a neat find and a useful index of the politics of famous SF writers. Others whose politics I learned more about this year include Chan Davis, interviewed recently in Strange Horizons especially about his 1949 opposition to stereotyping in SF (his stories are political and fun too), and Frank Herbert, reportedly opposed to war in Vietnam though I'd guess for reasons it would literally take a historian of American imperialism to sort out (see also Jacobin's recent take on his overall POV).
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:18 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Just a trigger warning for those not familiar with Marion Zimmer Bradley's history of abuse: do not look it up if you are sensitive to descriptions or referrals to graphic sexual abuse and assault: what she and her husband did was truly sickening. Gut-churning. I'm not joking. When the stories came out, my wife threw her copy of Mists of Avalon directly in the garbage.
posted by fortitude25 at 8:21 AM on December 16, 2021 [25 favorites]


"good writers on both sides"

plus ça change, sigh
posted by xigxag at 8:23 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


This seems like a great opportunity to project our current political polarization backward into the past. Seriously, people didn't align all their beliefs along one axis then as we do today in the U.S. Just because someone was on the right or wrong side of this one issue does not mean we're can imagine them to be 'on our side' or 'against us' on every other imaginable issue.
posted by agentofselection at 8:26 AM on December 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


plus ça change, sigh

Being a good writer has no bearing on being a good person.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:34 AM on December 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


This must have been inspired by the book published the previous year, 1967, called Authors Take Sides On Vietnam (itself inspired by the 1937 Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War). Most of the authors were against US intervention in Vietnam, but John Updike and Kingsley Amis came out in support of it.

This was W.H. Auden's contribution to the Vietnam book:
Why writers should be canvassed for their opinion on controversial political issues I cannot imagine. Their views have no more authority than those of any reasonably well-educated citizen. Indeed, when read in bulk, the statements made by writers, including the greatest, would seem to indicate that literary talent and political common sense are rarely found together.
For a more recent example of the genre -- and a reminder that these issues rarely seem so clear-cut at the time as they do with hindsight -- see the LRB's symposium, 11 September. That created a furore because of Mary Beard's remark that 'many people openly or privately think .. the United States had it coming'.
posted by verstegan at 8:37 AM on December 16, 2021 [14 favorites]


It's a little disappointing to see Alan Nourse on the pro column, given the content of his work.
posted by suelac at 8:42 AM on December 16, 2021


verstegan, wow, thanks for that LRB link. Its from October 4, 2001, talk about capturing the raw emotion of the moment.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:50 AM on December 16, 2021


I'm sad to see Leigh Bracket in the "pro" column but I guess she did write a bunch of John Wayne westerns.
posted by octothorpe at 8:59 AM on December 16, 2021 [8 favorites]


I recall reading an account by Isaac Asimov about the petitions. It started at a convention with the anti-war petition circulating first. Asimov was dismayed that Poul Anderson was on the other side but the two remained friends. (And yes, Asimov was a sexist pig who groped/goosed young women by the hundreds at cons).

Ray Bradbury became a disappointment to me when he fell into conservatism in his declining years. He created a firestorm when he decreed that his classic Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship.
posted by Ber at 9:02 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


the statements made by writers, including the greatest, would seem to indicate that literary talent and political common sense are rarely found together

Joseph Roth thought that the problems of post-WWI Europe could best be solved by restoring the Dual Monarchy, no lie. (On the other hand, no one was better on the poison of nationalism than he.)
posted by praemunire at 9:17 AM on December 16, 2021


posted by bonehead:
I'd put the furor of the early 2000s as a pretty fucking weird time to be alive as well.

I remember the people who supported the Iraq War -II, calling those who opposed it all kinds of names. And the opposition to it was not confined to the left, if I recall. But the nadir was Krauthammer diagnosing Al Gore as psychotic, because Gore was vehemently opposed to it.
posted by indianbadger1 at 9:46 AM on December 16, 2021 [5 favorites]


Decades ago, when I was in college, I remember picking up this issue in a used bookstore and finding this very spread! Had I known there would be a discussion about it on a "website" (those didn't exist yet, at least to my knowledge) I'd be participating in for 15 years and running of my later adult life, I would have purchased it!

Seriously, though, the memory of it has come back to me every time there's a controversial issue around a writer's political views. I really do wish I'd grabbed it -- what an interesting piece of sci-fi history.
posted by treepour at 9:53 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


It is fascinating to see how various authors' views shifted over time. Robert Heinlein, for example, was much further to the left earlier in life, until he became more of a proto-libertarian. I wonder if in his later years Ray Bradbury changed his mind and would have wanted to go back and switch to the pro-side. And PKD would later write letters to the FBI accusing fellow SF author Thomas Disch of being part of an underground Nazi conspiracy, accusing Stanislaw Lem of being the pseudonym for a committee of Soviet authors, and accusing Fredric Jameson (the literary scholar/philosopher) of being part of a secret Soviet-Marxist conspiracy.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:21 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


PKD on Lem, Jameson, et al
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:21 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


I had always thought E. Hoffman Price was one of the more progressive of the pre-WWII pulp authors, sadly, that was definitely not the case by the 60s. I guess that’s mirrored by people like Silverberg, who were progressive in their day but are sadly decayed now.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:22 AM on December 16, 2021


This must be the SFWA petition Michael Moorcock mentioned in his Starship Stormtroopers essay. He wrote that many of the pro-war faction were the most popular sf writers in the world at the time (and still were when he wrote the essay about 10 years later).

Interestingly, he wrote that Larry Niven supported the condemnation proposal when it was first proposed. Guy was probably already plotting with Jerry Pournelle about getting the pro-sides' voice heard.
posted by house-goblin at 10:28 AM on December 16, 2021


MZB is less surprising if you know her history a bit. She wasn't feminist in an exactly straightforward way. There's an enlightening quote from here.

"I have a copy of the Winter 1954 Thrilling Wonder Stories containing a 'letter to the editor' MZB wrote that might apply here. It's rather long and I don't feel comfortable excerpting it on my own, but it discusses birth control, specifically 'young females who believe themselves eminently qualified to judge for themselves how many children they ought to have and resented my implications that their squallings might be motivated by selfishness.' Here are two more sentences: 'America is swinging, slowly but surely, toward a matriarchy -- and decadence. Women, in their present emotional muddle, are NOT SUITED (sic) to assume important positions in the commanding of the world...my personal preference is for today's generation of mental eunuchs to recover their lost manhood and give today's women a good swift kick in the seat of their mass-produced pants!'"

And similiar comments after the publication of Darkover Landfall decades later.
posted by tavella at 10:28 AM on December 16, 2021 [5 favorites]


A petition to continue a war is the weirdest fucking thing imaginable.

Is it, though? The actual text of that petition says, "We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country." (emphasis mine)

Compare to the thread we had just a few months ago about the US pulling out of Afghanistan. I know some folks who still feel that leaving our Afghani allies to the tender mercies of the Taliban was unforgivable, regardless of the bullshit circumstances that started the war.

In 40 years time, those people we abandoned in Afghanistan will be mostly forgotten about, or regarded as a sad, but inevitable and abstract tragedy, and pulling out of Afghanistan will seem an uncontroversial no-brainer that we clearly should've done much sooner. But in that moment 4 months ago, you could've gotten quite a number of very decent, upstanding and moral people to sign a petition saying the US should remain in Afghanistan and keep its promises to the people of that country.

Not that I am saying MZB et al were necessarily upstanding moral people (my sympathies to anyone who's just finding out about her today, because I still remember how flabbergasted I was when I found out), I'm just saying, this seems like one of those situations where the passage of time has flattened out all the nuances. Having 20/20 hindsight is easy.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:39 AM on December 16, 2021 [34 favorites]


Yeah, signing the "continue the war to help the Vietnamese people" petition wasn't incompatible with being progressive. Lots of people who would have considered themselves progressive also supported the war effort for similar reasons, mstokes650 said about Afghanistan. And being in favor of this particular war doesn't mean a person could have been progressive on every single other issue you can think of. Like most things, it's just not that simple.
posted by goatdog at 10:42 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


Neat post, thanks! I've heard of these lists before -- I had the impression they were a big deal in sf/fandom circles at the time -- but I don't think I've ever seen a copy.

I'm not surprised to see R. A. Lafferty on the pro-war side. He's one of my favorite writers, but he was a conservative Catholic and it's pretty clear that he had terrible reactionary politics. One of those cases where the art has more nuance than the artist.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:35 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


...I remember the people who supported the Iraq War -II, calling those who opposed it all kinds of names.

I have some vague recollections of such events in the distant past.
posted by y2karl at 11:38 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Like other participants in the thread no name in these lists strikes me as particularly surprising. With regards to PKD, his mental health issues - including paranoid delusions - are well known and also rather obvious influences on his art as an author. For this reason I consider him generally less culpable than others of his generation for being on the wrong side of the issue.
posted by delegeferenda at 11:41 AM on December 16, 2021


In re Marion Zimmer Bradley: the early Darkover books, at least, are based around "women absolutely must by force if necessary have babies to preserve the human species after a spaceship crashes on a habitable planet". They are precisely the kind of books an abuser would write. Joanna Russ wrote the much better and more accomplished "We Who Are About To..." as a rebuke of this trope.

Honestly, with a lot of the pro-war writers, you can see the love of and glamorization of violence, coercion and hierarchy in their books - Heinlein, for instance. Bootlicker books, only the boots one is supposed to lick belong to a culturally superior spaceman, for instance, instead of an Earth cop.
posted by Frowner at 11:44 AM on December 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Fascinating. I wish I was surprised by either list. (I guess I am surprised that Orson Scott Card isn't there, but I guess it's a few years early.)
posted by eotvos at 11:48 AM on December 16, 2021


Regarding MZB. I was a big fan of her work in my early-mid teens, and my mother signed me out of high school so I could see her speak to a class at the local university where my mother was a graduate student. I got to chat with MZB a bit, and, while I was very excited at the time, I’ve never had the heart to tell my mother that MZB was maybe the last Sf writer she should have taken a teen to see….
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:57 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


I don't know most of these authors, as I don't really read around much in sci-fi. So I'm curious to ask those of you who know this subject: How, if at all, do these authors' avowed political leanings correlate with their respective reputations among admirers of sci-fi? Perhaps that's too big a question, but I'm interested in what that Venn diagram looks like.
posted by Dr. Wu at 2:07 PM on December 16, 2021


Like other participants in the thread no name in these lists strikes me as particularly surprising. With regards to PKD, his mental health issues - including paranoid delusions - are well known and also rather obvious influences on his art as an author. For this reason I consider him generally less culpable than others of his generation for being on the wrong side of the issue.

PKD signed the petition against the war.
posted by jamjam at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


She also sexually abused her own daughter from the ages of 3 to 12, and assisted her husband Walter Breen, a proud and open pedophilia advocate with multiple child molestation convictions, in obtaining and abusing a number of young boys and covering up the abuse for him.

She also encouraged those in her circle in similar pursuits.
posted by sock poppet at 2:51 PM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


Dr. Wu: There are big names on both sides. Still, very informally, I see more big names on the anti-war side.

Pro-war: Anderson, Brackett, Brown, Campbell, de Camp, Heinlein, Lafferty, Niven, Vance, Williamson

Anti-war: Asimov, Blish, Boucher, Bradbury, Carr, Delany, del Rey, Dick, Ellison, Farmer, Harrison,
Knight, LeGuin, Leiber, Roddenberry, Silverberg, Spinrad, Wilhelm

(Many caveats apply-- no fans would give you the same list, and I'm sure I missed some names.)
posted by zompist at 3:21 PM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


I remember seeing these ads in The Magazine of F&SF(though I thought it was earlier, like '67. This ad is post-Tet.) I showed the ads to a professor at the school I was attending. He was astonished at this kind of division in American society. It was neither my first nor last glimpse of Ivory Tower mentality. Arthur Schlesinger (and some others) wrote books about how the Vietnam War was damaging the nation by polarizing it. (Though he backed a hawkish Kennedy, Schlesinger disliked LBJ.)
Anyways, I wound up disgusted with the lot of them.
posted by CCBC at 3:24 PM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


I feel pretty strongly against starting a war or police action, but sometimes go against the leftist tide on continuing a war or regime shoring up that we are already embroiled in. Sort of a "We broke it, means we bought it" sensibility. At this point we've betrayed and abandoned so many allies that only the stupid or desperate would believe any of our promises of support though. We go in to so many of these things with zero pre-planning on outcomes or exit strategies. It's like the US is only interested in nominal or Pyrrhic victories.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:35 PM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


Thanks, zompist! Very interesting.
posted by Dr. Wu at 4:35 PM on December 16, 2021


Read through knowing exactly where I'd find Robert Heinlein. Wasn't surprised.

Nice to see most of my heroes on the right side of history, tho.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 5:00 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Joe Haldeman is mentioned in the additional notes below, he had actual combat experience in that war, and was very anti-war afterwards.
posted by ovvl at 5:20 PM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Read through knowing exactly where I'd find Robert Heinlein. Wasn't surprised

I mean, yea, but most people's take is Starship Trooper is anti-draft at least. Not sure how you continue the war but end the draft in 1968 tho.
posted by pwnguin at 5:44 PM on December 16, 2021


I recognize more names on the oppose side than remain.

No real surprises, except maybe Fritz Leiber. As a writer of sword and sorcery, one might expect to see him him on the pro-war side (with e.g. Jack Vance), but happy to see he’s not.
posted by rodlymight at 8:04 PM on December 16, 2021


Saxon Kane, thanks for posting that Phillip K Dick link. His justification for his suspicions about Lem are pretty amazing.

For an Iron Curtain Party group – Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not – to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas.
posted by Zumbador at 8:17 PM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


> No real surprises, except maybe Fritz Leiber. As a writer of sword and sorcery, one might expect to see him him on the pro-war side...

Most of the good (IMO, of course) fantasy authors have been pretty good at drawing boundaries between the world they live in and the worlds they write about.

For my part, I'm not surprised that Lafferty was on the hawkish side, but I'm sad to be reminded of it.
posted by ardgedee at 5:03 AM on December 17, 2021


But what kind of sword and sorcery?

I feel obligated to mention that Leiber's books contain some incredibly creepy sexual stuff about young teenage girls that would, I hope, not be publishable de novo today - sheds a lot of light on where people were coming from with the MZB/Walter Breen abuse.

But Leiber's sword and sorcery is pretty much "cheat and steal your way into as much money as possible so that you can spend it all on drinking, trinkets and women" - he's not an admirer of states, armies or even, really, fighting for the sake of it - a lot of fights get won by a trick or go awry somehow or are played for laughs. And in general the various kings, dukes, high priests, etc are evil and/or corrupt.

Wikipedia also informs me that he was a pacifist in youth and viewed WWII as a war against fascism.

Samuel Delaney, an extremely left wing guy and surely one of the finest SFF writers in the history of the genre, technically wrote "sword and sorcery" - the Neveryona books - and even though those are intended to be critical of a lot of sword and sorcery tropes they are a much more positive representation of kings, fights, weapons, etc than Fritz Leiber's work.
posted by Frowner at 5:24 AM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


As someone who loves the Legion of Super-Heroes, I was disappointed to find Edmond Hamilton on the pro-war side, though I had no concrete reason to think he wouldn't be. I didn't know about R.A. Lafferty's right-leanings, so that was a real surprise.
posted by Superfrankenstein at 7:41 AM on December 17, 2021


Yeah, disappointed to see Leigh Brackett's name on the "pro" side (her science fiction is clunky, but her fantasy books are great). Sometimes you get suckered into things because of the zeitgeist. I can remembering being in favor of the invasion of Iraq. After all, everyone knew Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and then Colin Powell did his presentation about the (fictitious, it turns out) weapons of mass destruction. But time reveals all. I picked up a book of SF short stories to read a couple weeks ago (Stellar #5 was the title), opened it, saw the names MZB and L. Neil Smith (over-the-top gun fanatic), and just tossed it aside in disgust.
posted by jabah at 8:49 AM on December 17, 2021


Space-Time for Springers demonstrates Fritz Leiber at the very least got cats right.
posted by y2karl at 9:40 AM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've read a lot of Leigh Brackett and, much as I've enjoyed it, her female characters are secondary and usually trope filled. If I remember right, even her later stuff like the Skaith trilogy, still subscribed to notions I associate with 30s to 50s sff. So, it wouldn't surprise me if her husband's (Edmund Hamilton) pro-war stance had something to do with hers. Even if it was just the two of them being simpatico in their views.

Regarding Leiber, he may have got cats right in that one story, but I think it's the decidedly feline Grey Mouser who brought out the creepiness already mentioned. Also, though he's supposed to have coined the term, I wouldn't characterize Leiber as a Sword and Sorcery author. Far as I know the bulk of his writing was not S&S. That said, books like Conjure Wife and stories like Gonna Roll the Bones (and, to get back to s&s, The Snow Women) seem to exhibit a high degree of misogynistic background radiation.

Finally, yes, if you've read Leiber's S&S stories (and those of other early practitioners), or you just want more literary-minded S&S, I will second that you should try Delaney's Neveryona. However, be aware that he sometimes gets pilloried for works like Hogg and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, as well as a 1995 comment he made about NAMBLA and later comments on the original comment.
posted by house-goblin at 11:44 AM on December 17, 2021


Most of the good (IMO, of course) fantasy authors have been pretty good at drawing boundaries between the world they live in and the worlds they write about.

IME, an author's underlying beliefs tend to come out in their writing in ways that become increasingly difficult to ignore.
posted by Lexica at 11:59 AM on December 17, 2021


I'm curious about Pournelle's inclusion in the list of supporters, not because of the position (because of course Pournelle would be a hawk) but because this happens years before Pournelle's first sale to an SF publisher.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:01 PM on December 17, 2021


Puurnelle's first sf story was published in Analog in '71, so yes that is weird.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:24 PM on December 17, 2021


Pournelle's ghost just told me only communist bureaucrats, or their dupes, would ask or say such things.
posted by house-goblin at 12:25 PM on December 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


Also, Fritz Leiber's Time in The Round stuck with me for sixty odd years and one unanswered Askme.
posted by y2karl at 12:49 PM on December 17, 2021


The June 1968 issue of Galaxy is not available on archive.org, but its sister magazine is: the June 1968 issue of Worlds of IF magazine. If you click the page forward button, you'll see on the next few pages an editorial (which says, turn away from positions and try to find solutions) and a contest (!) to solve the problem of the Vietnam war. Such a Brady Bunch solution—Hey, we'll hold a contest! I actually have this issue of the magazine. The cover is simple and beautiful, and the interior art is nice too (Jack Gaughan, Jeff Jones, Vaughn Bodé).
posted by jabah at 4:11 PM on December 17, 2021


Sometimes you get suckered into things because of the zeitgeist. I can remembering being in favor of the invasion of Iraq. After all, everyone knew Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and then Colin Powell did his presentation about the (fictitious, it turns out) weapons of mass destruction

to be frank, you're either anti-war because you inherently distrust the nation state and its persistent, historically well-documented string of lies justifying human rights abuse, mass murder, etc, as many of the anti-war advocates who opposed the recent attempted colonial conquests of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq were, or you don't really understand what it means to be anti-war

SF&F writers who find themselves on the 'right' side of history aren't the ones following the day-to-day news trusting the crap that comes out of the chief propagandists of the military - they have ethical and moral convictions that are illustrated plainly in the themes present in their fiction. the lines here are very bright - the dystopians are never written to be fiction so much as they written to be critical analyses of the societies they're produced from with the hope that the readers will be able to make the 1:1 connections between things like doublespeak and 'military aged males'

people like Heinlein who accidentally stumble into leftist views do so because they see how it would benefit them personally or muck their way to it like an adolescent philosopher would with their thought experiments. but writers like Le Guin make it pretty explicit what their views are and where they stand, and it'd hard for me to imagine that they're the type who would get 'suckered into the zeitgeist' as it were. there's no excusing where you stood historically - either you learn to have better, more consistent convictions or you stay on the wrong side of history
posted by paimapi at 11:11 AM on December 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Jack Vance? Oof.

No reason except that I read The Dying Earth in Grade Two or Three and was honestly and thoroughly changed by it.
posted by jokeefe at 1:04 PM on December 19, 2021


Regarding Leiber, he may have got cats right in that one story, but I think it's the decidedly feline Grey Mouser who brought out the creepiness already mentioned.

I reread some of those stories years ago, and can confirm that he brought the cringe.

On the bright side, I had forgotten about the story where they go to Earth.
posted by thelonius at 1:09 PM on December 19, 2021


I'd put the furor of the early 2000s as a pretty fucking weird time to be alive as well.

Not like now when things are totally normal.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:03 AM on December 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


Jack Vance? Oof.

The truth is in the details and as La Rochefoucauld once wrote:

To be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.

Vance worked as an electrician degaussing ships at Pearl Harbor as a civilian in 1941. (His eyesight was too poor to allow military service.) But he found even then that military discipline not to his taste and ended up being discharged ''with prejudice'' in November 1941, thereby dodging any number of bullets

As for the stories in The Dying Earth -- which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in ...World War II -- it helps to remember these were written by a man whose physical vision was so bad that he had to memorize the eye chart in order to join the Merchant Marine. And note that he served on two ships that got torpedoed.

As Frowner noted -- in brief passing -- above, Fritz Leiber, who was a life long pacifist, went to work for McDonnell Douglas doing quality inspections of the C-47, the military version of the DC-3 in an airplane factory because he felt obligated to do something to help defeat fascism.

So, it might help to note that for a lot of the older names on the left hand page of that 1968 Galaxy, being on the right side of history involved that little Godwinesque detail we know as the Second World War.

Avram Davidson, for instance, was an orthodox Jew who served as a medic for the Navy and Marines in that war (with a full beard no less!) and later drove an ambulance in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. I don't know whether Davidson was an outright pacifist but he did manage to avoid being a trigger puller in both conflicts. His name is not on either page of that Galaxy.

Nor is the name of the devout Catholic Gene Wolfe, whose first novel was published in 1970. Had he been published earlier I suspect his name might have been on the lefthand page as well.

Another thing to note about those lists is the presence of Forrest J. Ackerman, the OG science fiction fan of all time, which suggests some of the less recognizable names on the left side were first in the fannish category as well. (Which would go to explain Pournelle's presence on the 1968 list, btw.)

As for Lieber, one might start with A Literary Newton: A Suggestion for a Critical Appraisal of Fritz Leiber or even his Wikipedia page, where I discovered "Black Gondolier", a short story in which a protagonist uncovers a cosmic conspiracy in which oil from ancient fossils preys upon human beings and human civilizations.... Now there's a concept.

Yet another Leiber story that comes to my mind is The Pale Brown Thing, wherein a pile of books and manuscripts piled and strewn across one side of a struggling writer's mattress transform into a paramental monster that terrorizes San Francisco by night. That was so scary for me that I actually slept with a light on for a couple of nights after I first read it in the Magazine of Fantasy in Science Fiction.

tldr: History has far more than two sides when the past is not even past. Even with 20/21 vision. In 1968, for better or worse, the right side of history for many of those names on the left hand page involved the eensy beensy elephant in the room we call the Second World War.

...not to mention the Korean war, not to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On whatever multifaceted side of history he was on, Leiber, someone who corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft in his youth only to be claimed later by Ramsay Campbell as his personal greatest influence, deserves better than some glib handwavey dismissal of either his writings or person which ignores those infinite details.
posted by y2karl at 12:00 PM on December 20, 2021 [4 favorites]


Yet another Leiber story that comes to my mind is The Pale Brown Thing

Getting deraily, but it’s the shorter version of Our Lady of Darkness, a great horror novel.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:16 PM on December 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


I expect those infinite details mentioned just above also apply to everyone who posted here and not all things taken as glib handwavey dismissals are in fact such things.

For instance, I mentioned Conjure Wife because it was 1986 when I first heard someone complain about the view of women Leiber expressed in it. This was just some random co-worker dude who I happened to notice was reading the book.

And Gonna Roll the Bones came in for similar complaints a year or two earlier. This time from a friend who gave me, and insisted I read them, the first 2 or 3 books in Pournelle's There Will be War series. For added measure, I'll note that he later became a cop.

So, it's not like these complaints are something new. And since I also seem to remember random co-worker saying he'd never read anything by Leiber again, I think it's better to forewarn people about the problematic aspects of at least some of his stories.

Regarding the eensy beensy ur-godwin detail that might be behind a lot of the names on the left side of the page, it's kind of a wash isn't it? What with Leiber against and Vance for despite both doing what they could in the fight against fascism.

And it's not like time stopped after this particular moment. The following years brought My Lai, the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee etc. Maybe it's something I missed, but I don't know of any of those left pagers revising or clarifying their position in any way whatsoever. It's the type of thing I'd like to think I'd remember if I ever came across it. So, if anyone knows of an example, I'd appreciate it.
posted by house-goblin at 12:19 PM on December 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


...not all things taken as glib handwavey dismissals are in fact such things.

Except when they are.

You: Regarding Leiber, he may have got cats right in that one story, but I think it's the decidedly feline Grey Mouser who brought out the creepiness already mentioned. Also, though he's supposed to have coined the term, I wouldn't characterize Leiber as a Sword and Sorcery author.

A peer of Leiber: "The less I say about this story," Joanna Russ says of Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers," "the less I will slobber over the page and make a nut of myself"

Nothing personal, mind you, but I found myself sticking up for Leiber here because of the way people piled on with all the creepys etc.

Indeed, Russ's Picnic on Paradise was an homage to Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories and, indeed, the two namechecked each other's character's in their separate S&S sagas.

And each gave high praise to each other's work in book reviews. If Leiber was such a flaming misogynist, one would think Joanna Russ of all people would have busted his ass for it.

Between the opinions of his peers vis-a-vis those you and your random coworker dude hold, I am inclined to side with the former. And in that I am far from alone.
posted by y2karl at 6:08 PM on December 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Content Warning
Among other things, the reason Leiber got "piled on with the creepys" is because in later Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories he dwells a lot, mostly via the character of the Gray Mouser, on nubile young girls and budding or fresh breasts. And I'm pretty sure frowner's mention of "incredibly creepy stuff with teenage girls" is a reference to the story The Mer She which features the Mouser tying up and apparently forcing himself on what he takes to be a 13 (or not much older) year old girl. Also, these aren't the only examples.
End Content Warning

Now, despite having said all that I will mention there are probably about a half dozen of Leiber's books that have managed to stay on my shelves for the last few decades. Overall, I like the guy and have read a lot of his books, but I'm not going to pretend he doesn't have issues or that they somehow don't matter because of the accolades of his peers or his many awards. Personally, I'd be very careful about recommending Leiber to others. Right now, thanks to this thread, I feel I could do so for Adept's Gambit (the one where they go to earth) and Our Lady of Darkness. Thanks, folks!
posted by house-goblin at 9:08 PM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


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