Copyright 1993 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times October 8, 1993, Friday, Home Edition SECTION:
View; Part E; Page 10; Column 1; View Desk LENGTH: 789 words
HEADLINE: CRAMMED WITH ENOUGH INFORMATION TO FILL THE UNIVERSE; LITERATURE:
COMING IN AT 1.3 MILLION WORDS LONG, THE NEW EDITION OF “ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
SCIENCE FICTION” SEARCHES FOR ORDER IN AN UNWIELDY FIELD. BYLINE: By
SHELDON TEITELBAUM, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
BODY: When Granada Publishing issued the first “Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction,” in 1979 in the United Kingdom, the editors of the landmark
730,000-word tome complained that the field had become far bigger than
anyone had suspected. “We initially imagined,” wrote Australian Peter
Nicholls and London-based Canadian John Clute, “that it might be possible
to put everything in, all the relevant facts. We were almost instantly
disillusioned.’ Nearly 15 years later, the long-awaited second edition of
the Hugo Award-winning reference is out, from Little, Brown and Co. in the
U.K. and St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. Priced at $75 (a soft-bound
American edition and a CD-ROM disc are forthcoming), the new edition
weighs in at 1.3 million words. The editors are no longer disillusioned by
the scope of the field. They are reeling. “SF has grown impossibly large,”
said Nicholls in an interview at the World Science Fiction Convention held
recently in San Francisco. “I found it very daunting. The last two years
were spent at the edge of a precipice, and I have been drained by the
effort. I don’t believe I would do it again.” In 1979, said anthologist and
teacher David Hartwell, science fiction was like baseball before expanding
into Montreal and Toronto or ice hockey before San Jose or Tampa Bay bought
their franchises. Science fiction now runs a bewildering, and increasingly
fragmented, gamut that includes movie and TV spin-offs, graphic novels,
young-adult fiction, choose-your-own-plot stories, technothrillers,
survivalist fiction, science fiction horror, fantasy with science fiction
premises, prehistoric fiction, erotic thrillers and alternate histories.
“Until the early ‘70s,” said Hartwell, “SF was still knowable. One could
have read all the masterworks, be conversant in the styles of the major
authors and many of the minor ones, know the publishing lines and the
magazines. By the 1980s, however, SF had become largely unknowable. One of
the impressive things about the new encyclopedia is that it makes SF
knowable again — somewhat.” Although recognized in 1979 as the finest
reference in the field, the first volume was occasionally faulted for its
smart-aleck tone. Critics also expressed distress over the cacophony of
voices emerging from its pages, the editorial eccentricities of some of the
contributors, and, according to some Americans, excessive Anglophilia. The
editors refute the latter charge. “We are both colonials,” says Nicholls,
“and as such have been able to regard the field from an unusual and usually
helpful vantage point.” The new edition offers a more uniform and
consistent voice than its predecessor because of the editors’ decision to
rewrite most contributions. And, it does not include negative personal
information in its biographies of authors. “Just because we know this stuff
doesn’t mean that we had to use it,” says Nicholls. “Although our British
publisher was once owned by Robert Maxwell, we didn’t want to produce a
tabloid encyclopedia. It may well be that a writer is the sum total of all
that he or she is about. But what we judge them by here is their writing.”
Questions of editorial judgment remain. The entry on Harlan Ellison, for
instance, is embarrassingly fawning, given his failure to contribute a
single novel to a field largely shaped by novels. The entire continent of
South America is reduced to a single entry. In its favor, the editors have
made the new edition as opinionated as the first. The current buzz
characterizes this as an encyclopedia with attitude, riveting though
unwieldy bedside reading. In what may be a first for reference books, the
hip magazine Entertainment Weekly heralded “The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction” as a must browse. “Encyclopedias are usually unreadable,” said
Nicholls. “This one is designed as a history as well as a series of
entries. And you can’t write a history of that field without fairly strong
opinions. We did try to keep them down, but it’s like working in a vacuum
if you try to make everything completely objective. And nothing is ever
completely objective, because the mere length of an entry reflects a value
judgment.”
“The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” is probably the last of its ilk, say
Nicholls and others. Although enjoying a new golden age, science fiction
has grown too big and too fragmented to quantify in any meaningful way.
“Doing an encyclopedia like this is like trying to take a snapshot of a
moving wave,” says Nicholls. “You want to freeze the molecules. But it
can’t really be done, because the molecules change even as you watch it. In
the case of SF, the field has lost its uniformity, and the molecules seem
poised to fly off in all directions.”
Copyright 1992 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times July 7, 1992, Tuesday, Home Edition NAME: HARRY
TURTLEDOVE SECTION: View; Part E; Page 1; Column 2; View Desk LENGTH: 1531
words
HEADLINE: PLAYING WITH HISTORY; FANTASY WRITER HARRY TURTLEDOVE LOOKS AT
THE PAST AND ASKS, ‘WHAT IF … ‘ BYLINE: By SHELDON TEITELBAUM, SPECIAL TO
THE TIMES: Teitelbaum is a Los Angeles-based senior staff writer for the
Jerusalem Report.
BODY: Science fiction novelist Harry Turtledove got the idea for his new
book from a postcard he received in 1988 from a fellow writer, Judith Tarr.
Tarr complained that the cover art for her latest book seemed “as
anachronistic as Robert E. Lee with an Uzi.” What was an annoyance to Tarr
was serendipity for Turtledove. In his new Civil War novel “The Guns of the
South,” due out in October from Ballantine, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate
troops pack AK-47s, delivered via a time machine by 21st-Century South
African right-wingers. Turtledove, 43, holds a Ph.D. in history, but turned
to science fiction and fantasy when he couldn’t find an academic job, and
has made his entire career as a writer of imaginary history. This field
seems to better suit the scope of his imagination. In the dozens of novels
and stories the Canoga Park resident has generated since graduating from
UCLA in 1977, he has grappled with premises that would not fly in the halls
of academe. What if America had been first settled not by Amerinds but by a
still-extant race of primitive man? (“A Different Flesh,” Congdon & Weed,
1988). What if Christopher Columbus had to answer to the Environmental
Protection Agency? (“Report of the Special Committee on the Quality of
Life,” short story, 1980). What if, in 1942, with the Allied and Axis
powers in strategic balance, the world had suddenly faced invasion by
aliens from space? (untitled novel-in-progress). The premise of “Guns of
the South” is also what if? What if in the late stages of the Civil War
someone had flooded the battered Confederacy with 20th Century automatic
weapons? “My story detector light lit instantly,” says Turtledove of the
Tarr postcard. “Who, I asked myself, would give Robert E. Lee an Uzi? But
no, don’t give Lee an Uzi — it’s a police weapon with a short range. Give
him a Russian AK-47. Give him lots of AK-47s. But who’d want to give Robert
E. Lee lots of Kalachnikovs? How about the South Africans — 150 years later
in time? What if a band of Afrikaner terrorists, angry over the dissolution
of apartheid, got their hands on a time machine?” Alternative or alternate
history is not a new intellectual game. In 1836, Louis-Napoleon GeoffreyChateau published the first known example. The premise of “Napoleon and the
Conquest of the World, 1812-1823” was that the French emperor had not made
the Unknown. Teitelbaum Mainstream Clips (Kindle Locations 2089-2103).
fatal mistake of invading Russia. In 1931, a number of historians and
social commentators, including A.J.P. Taylor, G.K. Chesterton and Winston
Churchill, tried their hands at alternate history in a book of essays
called “If; Or History Rewritten.” Thirty years later, Look magazine
published two essays: “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinlay
Kantor and “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” by William Shirer. The appeal
of the genre has extended to a gamut of writers, especially in science
fiction whose practitioners include Philip K. Dick, Ward Moore and Keith
Roberts. Within the literary mainstream, Britain’s Ronald Clark titillated
the English literati with books like “Queen Victoria’s Bomb,” exploring the
consequences of premature nuclear proliferation. In 1976, Kingsley Amis
published “The Alteration” about a modern-day Europe under Catholic
domination. Len Deighton, Vladimir Nabakov and John Hersey have also tried
their hands at remaking the present by tinkering with the past. Even former
cyberpunk gurus William Gibson and Bruce Sterling turned to history in 1991
with “The Difference Engine,” postulating Victorian England driven by coalpowered computers. Underpinning some alternate history are scientific
theories of parallel universes. Physicists including Murray Gel-Mann, Hugh
Graham and Stephen Hawking have pursued the many worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics, in which it is speculated there could be “a universe in
which all possible outcomes of an experiment actually occur,” according to
an article in Physics Today. Physicist and writer Gregory Benford, who has
edited three anthologies in a “What Might Have Been” series and will soon
publish a fourth, says of the genre’s popularity, “It’s the Zeitgeist.
Throughout Western civilization we have become more and more aware in the
last century of the fragility of events, the arbitrariness of history. This
crucial idea emerges from some of the feelings of uncertainty and anomie
and Angst that go along with modern times.” Alternate histories are proving
increasingly popular because unlike conventional science fiction, they
appeal to readers who are either fearful of science or simply geared to the
past rather than to the future, says Charles Platt, a science fiction
critic and the author of “Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who
Write Science Fiction.” “Alternate histories have a non-fiction appeal,”
says Platt, “because they have real history wrapped up in them. Overall,
there’s been a general trend in the last 20 years in book publishing toward
fiction which has a more documentary flavor, and I think this upsurge fits
into that.” Alternate history even has sub-genres, historical events that
repeatedly stir the imaginations of writers and readers. Probably the
biggest is: What if the Allies lost World War II? There have been so many
“Hitler Victorious” stories that they fill an anthology of that title as
well as any number of novels. One such, Robert Harris’s “Fatherland,” about
the state of Europe years after a Hitler victory, has topped British
bestseller lists for months. Published this month in the United States by
Random House, the book landed on Publishers Weekly’s national bestseller
list June 22, and film director Mike Nichols has optioned the book for $1
million. The Civil War and the Kennedys are also popular topics. “The
Fantastic Civil War,” along with “The Fantastic World War II,” are the
subject of anthologies of alternate history published in 1990 and ‘91 by
Baen Books. This year, author Mike Resnick compiled an anthology published
by Tor entitled “Alternate Kennedys.” Among the possibilities entertained:
What if the Kennedy brothers had grown up to be the hottest rock group in
the world? What if U. S. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy had been told to
investigate — and perhaps cover up — a break-in at the Republican Party
headquarters in 1964? What if John Kennedy had landed in the real Camelot?
Turtledove says that it was an early interest in science fiction that
sparked his fascination with history. A native of Gardena, Turtledove
recalls a third-grade encounter with L. Sprague De Camp’s 1941 novel, “Lest
Darkness Fall,” a Mark Twainish romp about a man who travels back to 6thCentury Rome and tries to stave off the Dark Ages. “I started out trying to
find how much of the book was real and how much wasn’t. By the time I’d
finished, I was hooked,” says Turtledove. At UCLA Turtledove specialized in
Byzantine history. The appeal of that empire, he says, is that it preserved
Christian theology, Greek philosophy and Roman law. The attraction
Byzantium holds for him as a science fiction writer, however, is that few
general readers in this country know anything about it. “I have command of
a large store of incidents and characters that are unfamiliar to the
general reader,” he says, “but which are made for adaptation into fiction
because they are interesting, exciting and vivid.” Turtledove’s Byzantium
novels, all published by Ballantine-Del Rey Books, include “The Misplaced
Legion” (1987), “An Emperor for The Legion” (1987), “The Legion of
Videssos” (1987), “Agent of Byzantium (Congdon & Weed” (1987) and others.
His titles sell a very respectable average of 75,000 copies each. Searching
for a launching point for the novel, Turtledove settled on the Battle for
the Wilderness, which marked the opening of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s
Richmond campaign in 1864. The 47th North Carolina was the first regiment
to meet Grant’s troops, and would be his recipients of the modern Afrikaner
guns. But a visit to the UCLA library failed to reveal who the 47th’s
commander was. “I wrote cold to the North Carolina Department of Archives
and History asking about who some of the officers were in early 1864,”
Turtledove says. “I figured they might know that. What I didn’t figure — in
Byzantine history you are dealing with patching threads of material rather
than being overwhelmed by it — a fellow named W. T. Jordan would mail me
the regimental history written by one of the captains and, better yet, a
complete roster with everyone’s age, rank, home town, occupation and wounds
suffered. “It gave me half of my characters,” he says. Turtledove set the
book late in the Civil War, he says, because if the South had won early,
“they wouldn’t have learned anything other than that they had been right
all along. I wanted to make sure that the South had to confront all of the
problems it would eventually face. “What science fiction does better than
any other form of literature,” says Turtledove, “is look at where we are
now through a fun house mirror. Playing with history — I really have little
interest in looking ahead at the far future — just gives you a different
kind of mirror to look through.” GRAPHIC: Photo, COLOR, (Orange County
Edition, E1) Harry Turtledove has a Ph.D. in history, but turned to science
fiction and fantasy when he couldn’t find a teaching job.
ROSEMARY KAUL / Los
DOCUMENTS Copyright
Rights Reserved Los
SECTION: View; Part
Angeles Times; Photo, Harry Turtledove 56 of 128
1992 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All
Angeles Times May 24, 1992, Sunday, Home Edition
E; Page 1; Column 2; View Desk LENGTH: 1259 words
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Reserved Los Angeles Times April 8, 1992, Wednesday, Home Edition SECTION:
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HEADLINE: SCIENTISTS SAY ASIMOV PUT THE STARS IN THEIR EYES; * LEGACY: HIS
WRITINGS INSPIRED MANY TO CAREERS IN SPACE, TECHNOLOGY BY MAKING THE
FANTASTIC SEEM POSSIBLE. ‘I REMEMBER READING THE FIRST ROBOT STORIES AND
DECIDING I WAS GOING TO BUILD THEM,’ ONE MIT SCHOLAR RECALLS. BYLINE: By
SHELDON TEITELBAUM, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Sheldon Teitelbaum writes about
science fiction filmmaking for Cinefantastique.
BODY: If you ask him what he does, artificial intelligence expert Marvin
Minsky will tell you that he is a robot psychologist. Or maybe a
roboticist. The MIT computer scientist is quite serious about these
designations and proud of his relationship with the man who invented them,
Isaac Asimov. Minsky says was very compelling to a mere youth not entirely
familiar with how irrationality might be as much a part of human nature as
the desire to learn more about science.” He was a biochemist by training,
but it was as a science fiction writer that Asimov was most widely revered,
and as he preferred to think of himself. Asimov’s rationalist spin on robot
behavior and his transfer of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire” to the pan-galactic arena of “Foundation”
(replete with the predictive pseudo-science of “psychohistory” which,
according to Schmidt, now appears to be actually emerging as a real
science) virtually revolutionized early pulp science fiction. “No one can
write SF today without having been touched by his ‘Foundation’ series,”
says novelist Greg Bear. With about 500 books published, Asimov was a
remarkably effective explainer of science in nonfiction as well as in his
stories. Peter Nicholls, Australian-based editor of “The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction” and “The Science in Science Fiction,” believes Asimov was
“a greater science journalist than he was an SF writer — possibly the best
of the lot.” New York-based novelist Ben Bova concurs, who believes that
Asimov “has done more to educate Americans about science than our entire
school system from coast to coast.” According to Bova, Asimov’s true genius
was his ability to “take any subject under the sun and write about it so
clearly and so simply that anybody who could read could understand it.”
“His role as an explainer was colossal,” says MIT’s Minsky. “His
explanations were always right and to the point. He talked to everyone at
every age, and he was unpretentious. If you look at other science
popularizers like (Harvard paleontologist) Steven Jay Gould or even
(Cornell astronomer) Carl Sagan, you get a lesson in English. It’s
wonderful to read or hear them talk because you’re always learning new
words and styles. But when you listened to Asimov … he’d just be telling
you something.” Despite his profound effect on generations of American
scientists, Asimov was oddly reluctant to stand face to face with the
fruits of his imagination. Minsky recalls his own unsuccessful efforts to
introduce Asimov to some actual robots he had constructed during the early
‘60s. Asimov demurred for close to a decade, arguing that to encounter
robots at so formative a stage in their evolution would be depressing. “He
said, ‘Well, if I came and looked at them I’d be stuck in the past.’ I
thought it was very wise of him to recognize that if you look at something
in its early stages, it’s going to pull you down rather than up,” Minsky
says. Robert Cesarone, the assistant program manager of JPL’s Deep Space
Network strategy and development team, says that he’ll be busy catching up
on Asimov’s prolific output. Cesarone, 39, has been reading SF for many
years, but for some reason never got around to Asimov. “About three or four
years ago, I decided that I really ought to read the ‘Foundation’ series if
I wanted to call myself a fan,” he says. “I embarked on this, thinking this
probably wouldn’t be that good. Boy was I wrong. It was perhaps the best SF
I had ever read, and it boasted one of the greatest characters ever
invented in literature — a total despot whom you feel sympathy for.” “I
can’t think of anyone else who could be as inspirational,” says JPL’s
Carlysle. “Maybe it’s something unique about the time, the postwar era,
when even in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, people were
convinced somehow that science and technology would lead us out of the
wilderness. “Asimov could appeal to a faith in the rational structure of
things that can’t be appealed to so readily today,” he says. “We’ve grown
more jaded and cynical, and for good reason. There’s a feeling a lot of
this promise has also come at great cost. I think he represents an era that
was a little more naive. But I hate the thought that in the process of
becoming more worldly and wise about the limitations of our technology and
science, that we have exchanged it for complete cynicism about the future.”
Copyright 1991 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times August 28, 1991, Wednesday, Home Edition
SECTION: View; Part E; Page 1; Column 3; View Desk LENGTH: 1718 words
HEADLINE: CHANGING HAUNTS; TRENDS: ARE VAMPIRES AS SCARY AS FREEWAY
SHOOTINGS? AFRAID OF BECOMING IRRELEVANT, HORROR WRITERS ARE DRAWING FROM
THE DARKER SIDES OF MODERN LIFE. AND L.A. IS RIFE WITH INSPIRATION. BYLINE:
By SHELDON TEITELBAUM, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
BODY: When Clive Barker addressed the Horror Writers of America at their
annual awards ceremony in Redondo Beach this summer, he sent chills down
his colleagues’ spines. “You guys just aren’t scary anymore,” declared
Barker, formerly horror’s enfant terrible and a newcomer to Southern
California. Stories about vampires, demons, exorcisms and werewolves are no
longer frightening — certainly not in Los Angeles, where freeway shootings,
an AIDS epidemic, interminable gang warfare and unbreathable air abound.
Unless you people get real, warned Barker, you risk becoming silly, and
ultimately irrelevant. Barker’s call for a new age in horror was sounded
here first for a reason. In recent years, the center of gravity for what is
now called dark fantasy appears to have shifted away from the East Coast,
where it has reigned during most of this century under the twin stars of H.
P. Lovecraft and, more recently, Stephen King. This year, the drift
westward became a virtual stampede because of the recent softening of the
book-buying market. Dozens of horror writers — some from as far afield as
the United Kingdom and even the Far East — have settled in Southern
California. Feeding off of a heady mix of local fears and universal human
anxieties, they are contributing to the glimmers of a new kind of horror
that can best be described not as dark fantasy, but, perhaps, as sunlit
suspense. At the least, they have transformed the region into a New
Jerusalem of fear. Traditionally, these writers have come eager to work in
film. And indeed, the film industry has affected their work — and behavior
— in fundamental ways. “People are very conscious of opportunities to adapt
their books to scripts,” says Jessica Horsting, editor of an irreverent,
Sherman Oaks-based literary journal, Midnight Graffiti. She cites a
recently published novel that has a 200-page chase scene she terms
purposeless other than it would look good on film: “That happens a lot out
here. I don’t think this town is always good for literature.” But horror
writers also genuinely enjoy basking in the psychic bleed-off of a region
that wallows as much in terror as it does sunshine. “There is a
dysfunctional compression going on here,” says R.C. Matheson, son of horror
grandmaster Richard Matheson and a television and film writer/producer who
is consolidating a second career as a horror writer with his upcoming
“People are fooled into thinking that bad things can only happen in dark
places,” says Schow. “They’re wrong.” “I’ve always said if there is a thing
to see, let’s see it,” concurs Barker. “The best lovemaking is not in a
darkened room, the best fantasy does not occur in the mist. The best
writers of the fantastique say: This is the mystery plainly, this is the
way the mystery looks, this is its face, the number of eyes it’s got, the
way it smells. Now that I’ve shown you this, be aware that the mystery is
not the way it looks, but what the thing is.” In Southern California, the
“thing” takes on genuinely bizarre countenances. Instead of demon-infested
castles, we have film studios populated by … shudder … producers and
agents. Our all-night convenience stores, according to writer Dennis
Etchison, are staffed by the undead. In “Less Than Zombie,” a pastiche of
the ennui-filled bestseller “Less Than Zero,” by Bret Easton Ellis, the
spoiled scions of Beverly Hills have become drug- and flesh-abusing zombies
— and no one notices anything different in their behavior. L.A. horror is
to the city and its psyche what Consumer Digest is to VCRs and Volvos.
Beware the Hollywood Hills, warns R.C. Matheson, who shows in one story how
becoming lost in them can be like falling into the Dark Abyss. In another,
yuppies who run their lives like the L.A. Marathon risk being run into the
ground — literally and painfully — by their renegade Reeboks. Despite the
different images they employ, most horror writers agree as to what they
think the genre is all about. “Horror is always about fear,” says Midnight
Graffiti editor Horsting. “The stuff people are writing today is not
substantially different from what’s been going on for the past 100 years.
Horror may have moved from the small towns to the suburbs and, most
recently, into an urban environment. But the things people are afraid of,
the horrors we inflict on each other, remain unchanged.” “The human
animal,” explains William Nolan, author of a recently published Writer’s
Digest guide to horror writing, “has so Unknown. Teitelbaum Mainstream
Clips (Kindle Locations 2835-2849). about the physical climate as a factor
in the writing. What I think of is the absolute moral deterioration. There
are too many people in many primal fears — of death, of isolation, or
desertion. I call horror an emotional escape hatch, a way for us to
transcend our mortality. I call horror mass therapy.” It has also, many
old-time writers bemoan, become shock therapy. The things that scared
previous generations barely titillate their more jaded progeny. The old
horror, dating back to the Gothics, used the shadows to good effect. The
true face of horror was often oblique. We all knew what Dracula was really
doing to his women, so why spell it out? H. P. Lovecraft, who worked a
revolution in supernatural fiction from his Rhode Island home during the
‘20s — his stories provided the basis for the two “Reanimator” movies
filmed during the last decade — always left his monsters and demons barely
mentionable. Succeeding generations of writers, from Ray Bradbury to Robert
Bloch, chose subtlety and whimsy to graphic violence and gore. Stephen
King, who emerged in the mid-‘70s with the novel “Carrie,” brought horror
into the full light of day. A decade later, Clive Barker threw a spotlight
onto it with his outrageously visceral “Books of Blood.” Barker began his
career writing about luminous cancers that took on a life of their own in
foul basements, and people whose bodies were torn to pieces by a cloud of
fish-hooks within the depths of hell. Within five years of his emergence,
however, others would regard him as too restrained. In Splatterpunk, wrote
Horsting in 1989, one found graphic depictions “of violence —
disembowelments, cannibalism, mother-eating fetuses, self-mutilation,
bestiality, incest, rape.” “Very little,” she declared, “is left to the
imagination.” “What is being confused with horror nowadays,” says Bloch,
author of the novel “Psycho” and a longtime resident of the Hollywood
Hills, “is violence. When ingenuity fails, bloodletting prevails.” It is
becoming increasingly evident, however, that the Splatterpunk aesthetic has
failed to maintain reader interest, particularly among women — an important
component of the horror readership. “A sizeable chunk of the mass
audience, mostly female, has no stomach for the blood and guts that the
gore hounds eat up,” declared a recent Cinefantastique review of Jonathan
Demme’s film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s cult smash, “The Silence of the
Lambs.” Matheson concurs heartily. “More and more what is intriguing to
me,” he says, “is the psychology of it all. That’s what made ‘Silence of
the Lambs’ so fascinating. The rest of the stuff isn’t horror — it’s like
Hulk Hogan.” He thinks there is a new horror on the way, and that it will
sport a California tan when it arrives. Etchison too detects the shifting
of the tectonic plates underfoot — and not only within the confines of dark
fantasy: “Something is coming, and it has to do with the end of the
millennium. Socially and historically, something is coming to an end, and
something new is about to reveal itself.” Barker doesn’t see it — not yet.
But there is cause for hope. “I don’t yet have a sense of a new horror. I
wish there were,” he says. “But if one existed, it would take a
millennialist view, one that would show we are changing as a species. “We
are writing a fiction about fear, what it does to us, how we are shaped by
it or improved or weakened or lessened by it. Unfortunately, in modern
horror, these issues are being addressed in diminishing amounts… . It
becomes the equivalent of putting toads down a girl’s knickers. But it can
be so much more than that.” GRAPHIC: Photo, COLOR, Robert Bloch, author of
“Psycho” stands in front of the Bates house on Universal Lot. “What is
being confused with horror nowadays,” he says, “is violence.” AL SEIB / Los
Angeles Times; Photo, COLOR, “People are fooled into thinking that bad
things can only happen in dark places. They’re wrong,” says David Schow,
author of the collection “Lost Angels.” ; Photo, “Less Than Zombie” writer
Dennis Etchison contends Southern California’s 24-hour convenience stores
are staffed by the undead. AL SEIB / Los Angeles Times Unknown. Teitelbaum
Mainstream Clips (Kindle Location 2877).
Copyright 1988 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times March 26, 1988, Saturday, Orange County Edition
SECTION: Orange County Life; Part 9; Page 3; Column 1 LENGTH: 1400 words
HEADLINE: LAD’S VISION BECOMES AUTHOR’S NIGHTMARE BYLINE: By SHELDON
TEITELBAUM, Sheldon Teitelbaum is a free-lance writer who often contributes
articles to The Times. BODY: Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
has a problem with mirrors. He sees things in them that others don’t — like
the future. He first noticed this, he recalls, as a small child, soon after
his family had moved from Illinois to a tract of unincorporated land by the
foothills near Orange. The neighborhood, back at the start of the ‘60s,
consisted mostly of orange groves, with new suburban streets extending into
the trees. Across the street from his home, construction workers were
putting up a house on an empty lot. Robinson would wander around the lot,
watching the men work and looking at the piles of sand and boards. One day,
Robinson stood in front of a stack of window glass placed on end and
leaning against some dark boards. The surface of the outer sheet of glass
reflected the scene behind him Unknown. Teitelbaum Mainstream Clips
(Kindle Locations 5214-5225). — the rows of orange trees that surrounded his
street. “But when I looked at the glass, the reflection showed me more
houses, the street extending off to the west, big buildings in the
distance, immense spans of concrete cleaving the sky.” Disturbed by this
vision of endless development, Robinson ran home and said nothing about it.
But three decades later, this stark and foreboding image of what Orange
County could become re-emerged, this time as the setting for a sciencefiction novel, “The Gold Coast” (Tor Books, $17.95). This is the future as
a slow-growther’s worst nightmare. The year is 2030, and the developers,
left unchecked, have had their way with Orange County. The northern half of
the region is nearly as densely packed as the Gaza Strip. Double-decker
freeways embedded with gas stations, coffee shops and low-income housing
crisscross the county, connecting a weblike network of omnipresent malls.
Fifty years from now, unemployment runs rampant, especially among the
young; drug abuse has reached pandemic proportions, and the system rises or
falters on the economic fortunes of the local weapons industry. Not at all,
Robinson acknowledges, what he, as a child, would have anticipated for the
area. “It was very rural,” recollects Robinson, who is 35 and makes his
home in Washington, D.C., “and I spent a lot of my time in the orange
groves reading. It was easy to pretend, having immersed myself in Mark
Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, that I was growing up in the 1880s, say
in Hannibal, Mo. “Through the 1960s, as I was growing up, I noticed a
curious thing. Every adult in Orange County seemed to be rushing about,
working as hard and as fast as they could to transform the landscape into
something more like the one I saw in the glass. Groves were going down at
an incredible rate; houses and office complexes and condominiums and
shopping malls were going up even faster.” Robinson believes it was this
rapid transformation of Orange County from “agricultural reserve into urban
corporate-capitalist consumer society” that contributed to him becoming a
science-fiction writer and, according to a left-wing French newspaper, a
Marxist. “I stepped out of the 19th Century and into the 21st in one brief
adolescence. It taught me that America was not the place I thought it was.”
Later, Robinson enjoyed what some right-wing critics within the sciencefiction field characterized as his revenge on the homeland of which he
despaired. The year 1984 saw the release of his novel “The Wild Shore,” as
the first in a new line of prestigious “Ace Specials.” In it, he portrayed
Orange County as a rural backwater still reeling from a limited nuclear war
that had reduced the entire United States — the only country in the world
to suffer such ravages — to Fourth-World status. “The right attacked the
book as an act of aggression against the U.S. The left attacked me for
having championed some basic American values in the book.” The sciencefiction field as a whole, however, seemed more interested in the seemingly
unheralded arrival of a new talent on the scene than in Robinson’s
politics. “I was your typical 10-year overnight success,” he quips.
Robinson had sold his first short stories in 1974, to editor Damon Knight’s
then-famous “Orbit” anthology. A year later, he attended Clarion, a
workshop for fledgling science-fiction writers each summer at Michigan
State University. And in the ensuing years, Robinson created a solid body
of work that included titles such as “Icehenge” and “The Memory of
Whiteness.” Robinson also forged a reputation as a critic. His doctoral
dissertation — a study of the novels of Philip K. Dick, a Bay Area sciencefiction writer who spent the last years of his life in Santa Ana before
dying of a stroke in 1982 — was published by UMI Research Press in 1984 and
received some acclaim. Robinson turned to Dick at the behest of Frederick
Jameson, one of the world’s foremost Marxist literary critics and his
academic adviser at UC San Diego. “At the time, Jameson believed that Dick
was America’s greatest living novelist, and he suggested that I have a
look at his work, which was available in manuscript form at Cal State
Fullerton. In fact, I once ran into Dick in the halls there. But we were
never friends.” Dick’s literary stock has gone up immeasurably since his
death. But though Robinson professes great affection for the man and
considerable respect for his determination to write as best he could under
onerous physical and mental conditions, Dick did not, he says, exert a
direct influence on his own work or career. “Dick’s style was so much his
own, his way of thinking so distinct, that you can hardly point to anyone
whose work is similar.” In the end, however, Robinson achieved what passes
for notoriety in the genre after being identified as a point man for a
coterie of writers who served as counterpoint for the Cyberpunk phenomenon
sweeping the field during the mid-1980s. Labeled the “Humanists” in an
article that appeared last year in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, these
writers purportedly rejected Cyberpunk’s technological fetishism, its
filmic tone, its feverish pacing, its slick surfaces and cool interiors.
Instead, the so-called Humanists demonstrated a familiarity with and
respect for “mainstream” literature, a love for science fiction and its
conventions, an interest in the traditional elements of well-crafted
fiction and a basically optimistic regard for humanity and some human
endeavor. Robinson was identified as a humanist by Cyberpunk writers who,
using pseudonyms, attacked him savagely in a science-fiction fan magazine.
He also was criticized for the pacing of “The Wild Shore,” which was
leisurely by the standards of much S-F and most Cyberpunk. “There were some
who called it ‘The Wild Snore.’ ” The furor within the insular sciencefiction community hasn’t hurt him. “The attacks, carried out by the
Cyberpunks in their usual Rambo style, mean that I’m doing something of
interest. I think they’re bothered that I’m not doing Cyberpunk and yet I’m
getting some critical attention. “It’s certainly boosted my sales in
France. The Unknown. Teitelbaum Mainstream Clips (Kindle Locations 52525266). French love these ridiculous literary battles.” For the moment,
however, Robinson has removed himself from science fiction’s insider
skirmishes, preferring to publicize “The Gold Coast” and complete work on a
new volume, the third in what is proving to be a thematically related
trilogy of novels set in Orange County. The new book, several drafts old
but as yet unnamed, is, ironically, a utopia. “Having set myself up as a
critic of the way things are,” Robinson explains, “I felt I had to make
some positive suggestions as well. In this novel, everything, starting from
now, goes right. Americans, using local power and small-scale government,
employ high-tech to create a better quality of life for themselves instead
of military goods. They learn how to recycle resources, how to design a
town in which people can use bicycles instead of cars. Genuine utopias are
a rarity in science fiction because perfection tends to be boring. Robinson
admits that imbuing a utopia with drama is a challenge. “But no matter how
good things get for society, people will still experience unhappiness. We
will still die, we will be rejected by those we love, disasters will befall
the innocent. I’m trying to invest it with the standard elements of fiction
— love, death, social life, family concerns, politics. There’s no reason
why it shouldn’t be as entertaining as your usual science-fiction
nightmare.”
GRAPHIC: Photo, Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson with his new
book, “The Gold Coast,” his vision of the nightmare to come in Orange
County. BRIAN VANDER BRUG / Los Angeles Times Unknown. Teitelbaum
Mainstream Clips (Kindle Locations 5266-5278).
Copyright 1988 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times January 17, 1988, Sunday, Home Edition SECTION:
View; Part 6; Page 1; Column 1; View Desk LENGTH: 2050 words
HEADLINE: OUT OF SCIENCE FICTION, A NEW VIEW OF CONTEMPORARY REALITY?
BYLINE: By SHELDON TEITELBAUM
BODY: When William Gibson began writing in 1977, he did not set out to
reform science fiction or ignite a controversy. In retrospect, however, it
seems clear to him that he could never have written the kind of material he
had devoured as a youngster. “So much of the stuff I was buying off the
Woolworth’s rack had been written during the 1940s by people like Robert
Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury — writers who came out of
small towns in the Midwest,” he said. “Virtually none of it was written
with the urban sensibility I think is needed to describe most contemporary
reality.” What Gibson came up with to describe that reality — and a future
one — was a book called “Neuromancer” (Ace), a highly stylized vision that
catalogues the wonders of the new New Age, including designer drugs,
designer memory implants, and even designer personalities. Published in
1985, the book hit the insular community of science-fiction writers like a
bucket of ice water and went on to win many awards. Soon after the book’s
appearance, Gardner Dozois, a well-known science-fiction editor, announced
that “Neuromancer” had generated a new trend in science fiction and coined
the term cyberpunks to describe the small coterie of writers whose stories
— like Gibson’s — deal with the feel of life in the information age. In
their view, technology has affected the surface texture of contemporary
life in addition to the core of human existence. To communicate this vision
of the techo-turbulent ‘80s, they have assumed a style that is hard-boiled
and street-smart but also information-dense, hallucinatory and fast-paced.
George Slusser, an English professor at UC Riverside, and curator of the
Eaton science-fiction collection there, recently described cyberpunk as
“optical prose” depicting a new reality and reflecting “an increasing
fusion of electronic matrix and human brain, the world of the global
village, and its electronic nightside — rock music, artificial stimulants
and vicarious sex.” Crossover Phenomenon Indeed, in recent years, cyberpunk
has leaked out of the realm of science-fiction writing and into the
Zeitgeist to become what some trend-spotters characterize as a cultural
crossover phenomenon — a controversial one at that. Echoes of the genre
have been popping up outside of literature in movies like “Blade Runner,”
“Brazil” and “RoboCop,” and in television, commercials, music videos by
Peter Gabriel and Sisters of Mercy, the compositions of John Cage, Laurie
Anderson and Brian Eno, and the gyrations of performance artist Stelarc. A
Religious Experience In fact, drug-guru-turned-technophile Timothy Leary
said cyberpunk is to the ‘80s what the Beats were to the ‘50s and the
hippies to the ‘60s. He said reading William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” was,
for him, a genuinely religious experience. “Like St. Paul, I was converted.
Not only has Gibson given us a sociology and culture of the 21st Century,
but a theology as well.” The term cyber, he said, comes from the Greek “to
pilot.” “And if you’re going to pilot your way through the 21st Century,
you have to know how to move electrons around. “Gibson intuitively
understands cybernetic technology,” Leary said. “He knows where this
technology is going, and he has an extraordinary sense of street smarts,
which most science-fiction writers lack. But he hasn’t invent ed this stuff
— it’s just out there, like rain clouds. And Gibson is the weather
reporter.” Because he was among the first to articulate this sensibility in
commercial fiction, Gibson is regarded — however reluctantly — as
cyberpunk’s founding father. But the 39-year-old Vancouver, Canada, writer
does not look like the leather-clad literary terrorist his fans and
detractors often expect. Thin and lanky, his manner low-key and affable,
Gibson is still faintly embarrassed by the success of his first novel.
After devouring the literature of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and J.
G. Ballard, Gibson said he eventually returned to his roots. “I came to the
conclusion that we need something like science fiction to describe the
world we live in. And it never occurred to me that ‘Neuromancer’ was
anything other than science fiction. I just never expected it to be wellreceived. It didn’t seem to play with the usual deck.” With its punk
sensibilities and noir outlook, the movement he inspired is not without its
detractors. David Brin of Los Angeles, a science-fiction writer and
astrophysicist, calls Gibson the “most brilliant metaphorist in the English
language” but is critical of the pessimism and pretension of cyberpunk. “I
have never seen a better-managed campaign by a group of young writers
claiming they invented things they never invented,” he said. “The gritty,
rhythmic style, the emphasis of metaphor overlaid by metaphor, the glitzy,
high-tech future, the predominance of style and gloss over plot — these
were done better by people like John Brunner, J. G. Ballard and the late
Alfred Bester years ago. “There appears to be a common need particularly
endemic among artistic young men for ego aggrandizement. Cyberpunk
represents a pandering to the old song of youth egocentrism — young males
giving the finger to society. And there is a real need in the world for
young men’s ego-rage. But let’s face it — Jonathan Swift was doing it
centuries ago.” Underground Attitude John Shirley, a 34-year-old novelist
and former New Wave musician now living in Thousand Oaks, is among
cyberpunk’s proponents and believes the subgenre represents a significant
development. He and his fellow cyberpunks represent a new kind of sciencefiction writer, he said. “We tend to share a global view of the world. We
write with an underground attitude, with an intensity and tone sometimes
taken for punk, and with an undercurrent of anger. Our sources of
information are generally alternate to those employed by other S-F writers.
We are influenced by writers outside the genre, and by the better aspects
of the rock culture. “Ours is the perspective of the new, constantly
transforming flux of worldwide media. And the fact that all of this sounds
horribly pretentious shouldn’t stop us. A movement is always going to sound
pretentious. But maybe it’s important to be a bit histrionic, to shoot off
a few flares.” Shirley, whose most recent novel is “Eclipse” (Pocket
Library), said politics are at the crux of the controversy over cyberpunk.
“What’s at issue here,” he said, “is (science fiction’s) insularity. The
people attacking it prefer science fiction to remain their own personal,
pleasant, escapist playground. They resent what we’re doing and feel
threatened by it. They like their middle-class heroes.” Political in
Nature Norman Spinrad of Los Angeles, one of science fiction’s reigning
iconoclasts, agreed that most objections about cyberpunk have been
political in nature. “The politics in their stuff,” he said, “is way to the
left of center. You see this most clearly in Shirley’s work — he’s halfway
to being a Marxist, though he would describe himself as a Fabian socialist.
That is not a mainstream view in S-F, which has a real conservative streak
running through it.” The characters in cyberpunk literature are clearly not
yuppies, said Spinrad. “They may have the money of yuppies and the toys of
yuppies, but they are outsiders, bandits, punks. And that word — punk —
still raises a red flag with many people.” Gregory Benford, a physicist at
UC Irvine and a prominent science-fiction writer, isn’t bothered by the
anti-heroes who populate cyberpunk but objects to “a marketing strategy
masquerading as a literary movement. (Cyberpunk) pretends to be a new
direction in science fiction. In fact, it stands at the end of a long
tradition within the field.” Benford said that members of the movement have
failed to define the term cyberpunk, although they never run short of
adjectives to describe it. He defines it as “a mid-‘80s, manifestoed
movement advertising a hard-edged style, an aesthetic of surfaces, and an
absorption of the implications of machine-intelligence. “My problem with it
is that it is also another reductionist literary movement announcing that
the vanguard of history has arrived, folks, and everybody else had better
shuffle off into the ash heap.” David Brin is alarmed by what he views as
the anti-science bias of cyberpunks. “In cyberpunk, mankind is doomed to
make the same mistakes over and over again. Society has gotten glitzier,
more technologically sophisticated, and yet has not learned a thing, has
gained no wisdom. “The fact is that we have gained wisdom, though perhaps
not fast enough to save ourselves. We have the only culture in human
history that worries about problems before they become catastrophes,” Brin
said. “We’re worried about holes in the freaking ozone layer, although no
one has been killed by them yet. And yet we’re acting on it.” Brin and
Benford are astounded that the controversy about cyberpunk continues to
rage. “I’ll give them this,” Brin said. “I thought all this talk and jabber
would be over by now, but it hasn’t let up.” Bruce Sterling, another of
cyberpunk’s premier propagandists and a resident of Austin, Tex., said he
continues to notice shades of cyberpunk in “a broad range of contemporary
artistic expression” and is disturbed by the speed with which cyberpunk has
been co-opted and transformed by the cultural environment. Used in
Commercials ” ‘Max Headroom’ — at least the British pilot for the series —
was hard-edged cyberpunk. But when Max was featured on American TV, his
fangs were drawn. Max ended up being a spokesman for Coca-Cola, which is
the ultimate in commercial absorption. And the Road Warrior is selling
gasoline for Amoco.” Gibson, who said he never had a stake in the “polemic
of cyberpunk,” thinks the genre has become a stylistic commonplace. “The
trouble with the label, though, is that it leads people to assume there’s a
sort of center for this stuff. In fact, the label has been applied to an
existing phenomenon.” A famous science-fiction writer once said that when
it’s raining chicken soup, the wise man buys a bucket. Indeed, Gibson and
Shirley have found cyberpunk to be a useful springboard for launching filmwriting careers. Gibson is hammering out the script for “Aliens III,” which
producer Walter Hill says will inevitably and directly reflect cyberpunk
issues and aesthetics. Shirley and Gibson are also adapting one of Gibson’s
short stories, “The New Rose Hotel,” for a film version slated to be
produced by Ed Pressman (“Salvador,” “Wall Street”) and directed by Kathryn
Bigelow (“Near Dark”), a professed Gibson devotee. But Gibson, Shirley,
Sterling and the other writers associated with cyberpunk appear to be
moving beyond it. Gibson, for instance, plans to write a playful alternate
history of the Industrial Revolution. Shirley, meanwhile, has plunged into
surrealism with his upcoming novel, “A Splendid Chaos,” to be published in
the spring by Popular Library. “The attention I’ve received from this thing
has blown it for me,” said Gibson. “I doubt I’ll ever write anything like
‘Neuromancer’ again.” With an irony that is particularly apt because it
reflects how most movements have mutated or stagnated by the time they have
been recognized by the culture at large, cyberpunk is only now making a bid
for recognition within the arena of American letters. Editing Special Issue
Larry McCaffrey, an English professor at San Diego State University, is
editing a special issue about cyberpunk for the literary journal
Mississippi Review. “Most contemporary fiction,” McCaffrey said, “does not
attempt to deal with the fundamental way that technology has changed our
lives. The only recent novel I can think of that addressed the issues
cyberpunk tackles was Don Delillo’s ‘White Noise.’ Meanwhile, the trend in
post-Modernist literary criticism these days seems to be to identify the
places where literature intersects with rock music, film, jazz, TV and
image making. “I think that if cyberpunk leaves any lasting legacy, it will
be this breakdown of barriers, both between science fiction and non-generic
fiction and between the written word and the rest of the arts.”
GRAPHIC: Photo, William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” is a highly stylized vision
of the wonders of the new New Age. ALEX WATERHOUSE-HAYWARD; Photo, John
Shirley says cyberpunks “share a global view of the world.” SHELLY STOLL;
Photo, Elements of cyberpunk: Above, a high-tech Laurie Anderson in movie
“Home of the Brave”; left, techo-human being and robot pitchman
Copyright 1987 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times All Rights
Reserved Los Angeles Times July 30, 1987, Thursday, Valley Edition SECTION:
View; Part 5; Page 12; Column 6 LENGTH: 1183 words HEADLINE: WRITER CREATES
ULTIMATE MALL FOR FUTURE’S JADED SHOPPER BYLINE: By SHELDON TEITELBAUM,
Teitelbaum is a North Hollywood free-lance writer. BODY: Somtow
Sucharitkul would trade the Sherman Oaks Galleria and 10 like it for just
one week in Mallworld. Mallworld is a totally awesome, 30-mile-long
shopping plaza afloat in deep space. With some 20,000 stores in an almost
bottomless array of shopping levels, it is the place for tomorrow’s glitzconscious consumer. And if Sucharitkul — a science fiction writer who set a
popular series of satirical stories in Mallworld — could actually live
there instead of in his modest Van Nuys apartment, life would be grand.
Where else, he asks, could you be a human pinball in a pinball machine the
size of a football field? Or contemplate a noble death at the hands of a
vampire in a suicide parlor that guarantees your prompt return to life?
‘Important New Writer’ “It beats the hell out of Lazer-Maze,” says the 34year-old writer. Sucharitkul settled in the San Fernando Valley a year ago
to pursue what is proving to be one of the most varied careers in science
fiction today. In a field whose reigning enfants terrible are becoming
disturbingly long of tooth and blunt of bite, Sucharitkul shows signs of
becoming a ranking satirist. Robert Bloch, author of “Psycho” and an
honored name in the genre, calls Sucharitkul “a brilliant and important new
writer whose work is like a bolt of lightning — it is both illuminating and
electrifying.” In 1981, Sucharitkul received the John W. Campbell Award for
the genre’s best new writer, and has twice been nominated for its Hugo
Award, science fiction’s equivalent of the Oscar. “Mallworld,” published by
Donning in 1982 and reprinted by Tor in 1984, brought Sucharitkul
international acclaim as a science fiction satirist. “The French are very
fond of ‘Mallworld,’ ” he said, “and it’s the only fiction of mine to have
been published dispatched by his father for the purpose of obtaining a
first-rate British education. And though his Latin was weak and his social
standing not quite up to school standards, young Sucharitkul prevailed,
eventually graduating from Cambridge with a master’s degree in music.
Avant-Garde Composer After returning to Thailand, where he learned his
native language and traditional Thai music, he became, according to the
magazine Asia Week, one of his country’s top avant-garde composers. “I had
initially envisioned myself becoming the Kwisatz Haderach (the Hebrew term
for a future-day messiah used in the science fiction novel “Dune”) of Thai
music,” he said. “But I burned out at about the same time that my music,
which in some traditional circles was accused of being sacrilegious or even
Communist-inspired, seemed to be falling out of favor.” Sucharitkul turned
to writing upon discovering about eight years ago that a poem he had
composed as an 11-year-old had been reprinted as the epigraph to actress
Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography, “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain.” His poem
had appeared in the English-language Bangkok Post, and he surmises that it
must have caught MacLaine’s attention as she was passing through Thailand.
“Oh, I expect she thought these were the words of some ancient sage
possessing the mysteries of the East,” he said, laughing. He received the
princely sum of $200 for the poem, still the most per-word he’s ever been
paid for his writing. Sucharitkul dabbled in science fiction, which he had
read diligently as a child, churning out a pastiche of works by his
favorite writers in order to teach himself the form. In 1981 his first
novel, “Starship & Haiku,” was published by Pocket Books. Unknown.
Teitelbaum Mainstream Clips (Kindle Locations 5680-5692). Written for
Television Since moving to the Valley, Sucharitkul has written several
scripts for upcoming Saturday morning TV cartoon shows, among them a
syndicated animated series “Dinosaucers.” He has also sold a script to
Tercel Productions, a Los Angeles-based company, for a very low-budget
feature film tentatively titled “Lizard Ninja.” But though he has a love
for schlock, Sucharitkul has not abandoned his novel writing. He has
published 15 books and they reflect an eclectic range of interests. His
“Aquilad” series posits an alternate history in which the Ancient Romans
settled North America. In upcoming novels, according to Sucharitkul, they
will build a railway across Nebraska and will ultimately settle Mars.
Covers Serious Topics He has written in a more serious vein as well. His
young adult novel, “The Fallen Country,” deals with domestic violence and
is frequently cited by educators, social workers and child psychiatrists.
Another novel due in October, “Forgetting Places” is about teen suicide.
Meanwhile, he has begun a cautious return to music. He has written the
lyrics for a Thai tourism jingle aimed at a yuppie American market, and is
now hard at work in his Haskell Avenue home composing birthday music for
the King of Thailand. Both projects are signs, he says, that his work is
back in favor in Thailand. He has not seriously contemplated a sequel to
“Mallworld,” however. Mallworld was a pleasant pipe dream, but there are
new books to write. “They’ll never build the place, of course,” he says.
“But I’d be happy if they simply threw a dome over Ventura Boulevard and
kept it air-conditioned.” GRAPHIC: Photo, Science fiction writer Somtow
Sucharitkul, under Sherman Oaks Galleria skylights, says he has “few doubts
that the Galleria performs the functions of a cathedral during the Middle
Ages.” BOB CAREY / Los Angeles Times
The Jerusalem Report
July 29, 2002
DICK AND THE JEWS
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 10
LENGTH: 616 words
During his short and troubled yet wildly imaginative life, California writer Philip K. Dick, whose work inspired
such memorable Hollywood blockbusters as "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and, currently, Steven Spielberg's
"Minority Report," juggled an assortment of alternating and often mutually exclusive worlds with breathtaking
aplomb.
Not least among these was an abiding passion for German culture and music - Dick was a devotee of Richard
Wagner, defending the composer against charges of anti-Semitism and during the first years of World War II,
extolling the cacophonous sturm und drang of the Nazi regime. But this morphed into an eventual loathing for
fascism and appreciation for Jews and Judaic values.
An Episcopalian, in 1974 Dick underwent a revelatory mystical event he would refer to as his "Exegesis" and
document in a trio of later novels. In one of his final interviews before succumbing to a massive stroke in 1982,
the then 54-year-old recalled becoming enraptured by the "Guide to the Perplexed." His wife suggested he was
probably the only human being on the face of the earth who at that moment was reading Moses Maimonides. "I
was just sitting there eating a ham sandwich and reading it," Dick recounted in a magazine interview. "It didn't
strike me as odd."
No more odd than his subsequent interest in the Holocaust experiences of Martin Buber and the Biblical
commentaries of Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz, formerly Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, on Deuteronomy,
which for Dick belied the Christian contention that the justice proscribed in the Old Testament was harsh and
loveless.
Obliquely or concretely, Jews figured prominently in Dick's fiction, an opus of some 40 novels and 110 short
stories largely ignored by the literati while he lived, but now a veritable field of dreams for Hollywood's bonepickers.
Dick rooted the persecuted androids of his novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968), adapted as
"Blade Runner," in the experience of Jews under German rule. He addressed that experience more directly earlier,
in the seminal "The Man in the High Castle" (1962). In this book, set in what was then the present, the Axis
powers triumphed in World War II, with the Nazis occupying the U.S. East coast, the Japanese the West. The
novel offers a sympathetic depiction of the plight of a Jewish craftsman who strives to avoid extradition to the
East.
In Dick's last novel, "The Transformation of Timothy Archer" (1981), the protagonist is based on his friend, the
lapsed Catholic-cum-Episcopalian bishop James Albert Pike, who died after becoming lost in Wadi Duraja, near
Bethlehem, in 1969. Pike was buried in Jaffa.
There's a Jaffa connection to "Minority Report," which is based on one of the stories Dick penned during his early
career. In the film, Samantha Morton portrays the precognitive Agatha, who holds the key to anticipating murders
that have yet to occur. Morton was in Jaffa shooting director Amos Gitai's "Eden" when Spielberg called offering
her the role. For Morton, that seemingly far-fetched prospect seemed like something out of, well, a Philip K. Dick
novel.
Still, within the multiverses of Dick's imaginings, there were Jewish-made hells as well, none of them more
terrifying than that which befalls a Jewish character in "The Divine Invasion" (1981), one of Dick's Exegesis
novels about the return to Earth of God in the guise of a 10-year-old amnesiac. Here, the hapless Herb Asher holes
up in a tiny, solitary bunker, where he finds himself subjected to an endless 87-string rendition of "Fiddler on the
Roof." Not even Spielberg could have come up with that.
Sheli Teitelbaum
LOAD-DATE: September 23, 2002
LANGUAGE: English
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 2002 The Jerusalem Report
The Jerusalem Report
January 1, 2001
MEN IN TIGHTS
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 47
LENGTH: 1821 words
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon - Random House - 639 pp.; $ 26.95
Michael Chabon says the Golem is more than a character for him. It also represents the threat of his own art
turning on him.
BAM! POW! SWOOSH! PHwaaak! Comic book sonics? You betcha! But they're also the sounds of Michael
Chabon's latest novel, the best-selling "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," as it tears headlong
through the world of contemporary American letters.
"Kavalier & Clay" is a big, boisterous, purple-prose paean to American popular culture of the 40s and 50s. In
particular, the book revives the Golden Age of the American comic book, an art form created and propelled by a
largely Jewish group of artists, writers and publishers. The New York Times Book Review called the 37-year-old
author's book "a novel of towering achievement," and Newsweek's Susannah Meadows probably spoke for many
others when she concluded that Chabon, whose 1995 "Wonder Boys" inspired the acclaimed Michael Douglas
film now in re-release, "has pulled off another great feat."
Title character Sam Clay, ne Klayman, is the polio-disfigured son of a Jewish circus strongman who, like so many
other young squires of Flatbush, dreams of escape. Sammy's ticket out turns up in his very own bed one night in
1939 in the guise of his refugee Czech cousin, Joe Kavalier. Joe is a former art student, lock-picker and escape
artist who eluded Hitler's clutches, we learn, at the same time he spirited the actual Golem of Prague out of
Europe in a coffin. He now hopes to use the more prosaic means of bribery to effect the release of his parents and
younger brother.
Sammy, the teenage comic book maven and master of a thousand schlocky plots, and Joe, the would-be painter
and comics neophyte, put their heads together, and over a single weekend come up with a superhero they hope
will knock Superman down a peg or two, earn Joe some much-needed cash and help the effort to defeat Hitler.
Equipped with a mask, cape, pair of blue tights and a golden skeleton key, their character, part Moses, part
Houdini (and maybe a little Robin Hood and Albert Schweitzer thrown in for good measure), becomes the
Escapist, a man charged with the archetypal task of freeing people from whatever bondage afflicts them. On the
cover of the first issue, which they persuade Sam's boss, a cheap novelty distributor, to publish, and which after
the war will auction for some $ 42,000, the Escapist starts off modestly - he punches Hitler's lights out.
Although the cousins (like Superman's creators, Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel) are eventually cheated out of
ownership of their Escapist alter ego, Sammy and Joe create a whole line of second-string superheroes, whose
earnings Joe sets aside to finance his family's eventual resettlement.
Joe's own efforts to bribe Nazi officials and gain their release prove no less fruitless than his fantasies of waging
war against Hitler with a gaggle of imaginary superheroes. Despairing, he leaves his lover, the surrealist painter
Rosa Luxemburg Sachs, and their unborn son, to cousin Sammy's care, and enlists in the U.S. Navy. He is
dispatched to an isolated base in Antarctica, where instead of wreaking revenge upon the Nazis, he continues to
unravel.
After the war, Joe re-ensconces himself in his secret Empire State Building lair, where he seeks to revive the
medieval tale of the Golem as a sort of graphic novel. In the historical backdrop, we have the publication of
psychiatrist Frederick Wertham's anti-comic book diatribe, "The Seduction of the Innocent," and, later, in 1954,
the Kefauver Congressional hearings on the supposedly deleterious effects of comics on juvenile readers (both
resulting in actual book burnings on American soil). Left to hold down the fort, Sammy finds himself under siege
not only because of his initially stalwart defense of the "men in tights" genre, but because his own homosexual
inclinations may indeed have had some small bearing on that genre's early aesthetics.
Chabon (it's pronounced "Shay-bin") argues that there's a homoeroticism underlying the entire superhero genre, at
the same time he acknowledges its presence in much of his own earlier work. In fact, the preponderance of gay
characters in his work, combined with his pretty-boy looks, have led to a lot of speculation about his sexual
orientation. He is, however, married, to Ayelet Waldman, an Israeli-born lawyer and mystery novelist, and the
couple have a young daughter and son.
Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," an MFA thesis that became a national bestseller in 1988,
abounded with bisexual grappling, and earned the 24-year-old writer comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald and
John Cheever. A subsequent collection of short stories, "Werewolves in Their Youth," suggested certain pulpish
affectations, a Gothic bent and the author's empathy for the fantasy worlds concocted and inhabited by boys.
Of Chabon's jettisoned novel, "Fountain City," one can only marvel at his ability, after five years and 1,500 pages,
to bounce back and produce a book like "Wonder Boys." A moving yet comic tale of an academic writer grappling
with his own physical and mental dissipation, "Wonder Boys" is also as unabashed in its admiration for horror
writers as "Kavalier and Clay" is for the purveyors of comic books. As Time Magazine would pronounce in its
own review of that book, "He... seems to understand intuitively that in the U.S., popular culture is the culture, and
there is no point pretending it is not."
"BOYS AT WHOM COMIC books have been aimed," Chabon told The Report, speaking by phone from his
home in Berkeley, California, "have always been filled with feelings of attraction to members of their own sex.
The comics tapped into, or generated, feelings that I think are common to all men at all times of their lives. But
this was so obvious that after a while, it was no longer helpful or applicable. Much more germane is that Batman
and Robin are, in reality, father and son. To some degree, sons are always looking for their fathers, who have a
kind of secret, or hidden emotional life."
An exploration of the world of the father lies very much at the heart of "Kavalier and Clay," and accounts in part
for Chabon's enthusiasm for the world of Golden Age comic books, and his fascination with that very particular
time and place that spawned them. Chabon's father, who was born in Brooklyn in 1938, and who eventually
became a physician as well as a lawyer, was exposed to comic books through his own father, who worked at a
printing plant that produced several different lines.
As a result, he explains, "my father thought that comic books were extremely worthy reading material. I
remember being 7 or 8 and having these long, detailed, serious discussions with him on the clinical effects on
Superman of different kinds of Kryptonite."
Meanwhile, Chabon recounts, "I was reading these huge, hundred-page comics that consisted of a new story and a
lot of reprints. And I realized at some point that I was actually reading the comics my father had read when he
was 10." The family was living in Columbia, Maryland, "which during the late 60s was this kind of planned
quasi-utopian, multiracial interfaith suburb located between Baltimore and Washington. These comic books,
though, offered me my first direct access to the fabulous world of my father's youth."
That much of this world was Jewish went without saying, even for a boy growing up in a deliberately
multicultural environment. That the brash new universe of American comic books would, like the movies or Tin
Pan Alley before it, prove no less Jewish, one could discern not only from the names of the people listed on their
mastheads, but from the distinctive and often peculiar conventions they embraced.
"It's tempting and attractive to make the argument that comics are, or were, a Jewish-derived art form, at least to
some degree," confides Chabon. Or as Sammy queries Joe, "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over
from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick out a name like that for
himself."
"This whole business of having a dual identity," says Chabon, "of changing your name and wearing a mask, of
assimilating and reinventing yourself - it's impossible not to see these things as allegorical of the immigrant
experience."
But what are we to make of his use of that prototypical Jewish superhero, that dumbstruck protector, the Golem?
Was he, as Chabon seems to suggest, the dutiful template for an entire genre of characters with scarlet capes and
feet of clay, sworn protectors of humanity who, like the "X-Men," are feared as its potential scourge?
Maybe it's no accident that Chabon had actually been commissioned by Fox to try his hand at an early treatment
for Bryan Singer's recent feature adaptation of Marvel's "X-Men" comic book series. The result, purportedly
restrained, thoughtful and intellectually challenging, rendered it immediately inappropriate for a summer popcorn
movie.
"I think it's pretty clear in the book," Chabon told the Report, "that the Golem is a son, a kind of Pinocchio, who
was always a variant on the Golem story." Indeed, for Chabon himself, the Golem functions as a stand-in for
artistic creation that have the potential for turning on their creator. In a short essay on his web site called "The
Recipe for Life," Chabon wrote of the Golem as pure literary construct:
"Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about the things that really happened to me, about things that I
really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another
entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind
that have no real basis in my life at all, but which I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when
they read what I have written.
"Even if I assume that readers will be charitable enough to absolve me from personally having done or thought
such things - itself a dubious assumption given my own reprehensible tendency as a reader to see autobiography
in the purest of fictions - the mere fact that I could even imagine someone having thought or done them, whispers
my fear, is damning in itself."
The legendary comic artist Will ("The Spirit") Eisner once told Chabon that the Jews have a history of producing
impossible solutions to insoluble problems. Chabon believes that as long as his books continue to make him
uncomfortable, he must be doing something right. Now that he has been commissioned by Paramount and Scott
Rudin to adapt "Kavalier and Clay" as a screenplay, one can only hope that the task keeps him awake at night. For
it is then, as we now all know, that men in tights do some of their best work.
LOAD-DATE: January 2, 2001
LANGUAGE: English
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 2001 The Jerusalem Report
The Jerusalem Report
February 5, 1998
IL YIDDISHE POSTINO
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 40
LENGTH: 1598 words
In the book on which Kevin Costner's new big-budget movie is based, it's a Jew who doesn't allow rain, dark of
night - or apocalyptic war - to keep him from his appointed rounds
IN HIS LATEST POST-CATASTROphe (and we're not just talking box office) movie, "The Postman," actordirector Kevin Costner plays a variant of the "Man with No Name" archetype popularized in Westerns.
This is interesting, though the plot of this $ 80-million post-doomsday science-fiction movie, which The New
York Times dismissed as "cloying" and "sentimental," seldom does more than rehash, albeit with some new twists
in political perspective, the familiar themes of a literary subgenre as old as sci-fi itself.
But the 1985 novel of the same name by David Brin - which won or was short-listed for a whole slew of sciencefiction awards - offered a twist that didn't quite survive the transition to celluloid.
As conceived by Brin, Costner's character does have a name. And as Brin told The Jerusalem Report in a recent
series of interviews conducted by E-mail, in the original book, the Costner character, who unwittingly inspires a
rebellion against a racist feudal army of stockpiling survivalists, is deliberately and decidedly Jewish. In this
regard, he is reminiscent of the founder of the Catholic Order of Leibowitz in Walter M. Miller's classic 1960
after-the-Bomb fable, "A Canticle for Leibowitz."
In Brin's post-catastrophe America (which anticipated the actual militia movement), Gordon Krantz ekes out a
precarious living posing as the official representative of a supposedly restored federal postal service. Delivering
mail among scattered strongholds just barely hanging on after more than a decade of war, plague and assorted
ecocatastrophes, Krantz gains free passage through a blasted landscape, and occasional sustenance from the
decent, if justifiably fearful, folks he meets along the way.
But eventually, these besieged communities (which, this being a Hollywood production, all appear to have
retained ample access to modern dental care) begin to see Krantz as a symbol of hope. If the mails are running
again, how long before some of the other amenities of civilization - like TV, freeways and even the flying of the
now-illegal Stars and Stripes - make a comeback as well?
And who best to lead the way if not the embodiment of what was once euphemistically known as
"cosmopolitanism" - that stalwart of apocalyptic literary mythology, the Wandering Jew?
Brin, 47, is the son of Herb Brin, the founder and publisher of "Heritage," a small, Los Angeles-based
independent Jewish newspaper chain that has been defending Israel in print for half a century. An astrophysicist
by training, during the 80s David emerged as one of the leading practitioners of a science-driven subgenre of
science fiction known as "hard (core)" SF.
Brin's second novel, "Startide Rising," won the coveted Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in 1980, as did a
sequel, "The Uplift War" (1987). The authoritative "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" calls "Startide Rising,"
about a starship crewed by genetically enhanced dolphins and humans, "one of the most rousing space operas ever
written."
Other Brin novels include "Earth" (1990), possibly the first work of fiction to anticipate the impact of the yet-tobe invented World Wide Web, and several others set in the popular "Uplift" universe of man-dolphin-ape
interdependence, notably "Brightness Reef" and "Infinity's Shore."
But Brin insists that "The Postman," an uncharacteristic venture into the realm of "soft," or more sociologically
oriented, science fiction, sprang directly out of his own uniquely Jewish experience coming of age in Los
Angeles.
"GROWING UP JEWISH IN CALifornia in the 1950s and 1960s," says Brin, "was probably different (from) any
other Jewish experience in history. Except for brief and rare encounters with true anti-Semitism, it felt safe,
secure, unthreatened - except for the ever-present danger of nuclear annihilation that everybody shared, Jew and
Gentile alike.
"I felt truly American. That is not to say that there was ever a temptation to assimilate, or forget my roots. That
would not have been in question, even if my father had not been a prominent Jewish journalist. Rather, that sense
of safety provoked reflection. It struck me as somehow bizarre - almost surreal - against the backdrop of violence
and persecution of the last two thousand years. And especially the death of so many cousins, whose passing in the
Holocaust predated my comfortable birth.
"It occurred to me that something special might be taking place. Perhaps a new kind of civilization. I looked
around me and was appalled to see how many Americans - and especially Jews - did not seem to grasp how
special this nation was, in the context of human societies.
"We took for granted things that would have seemed miraculous in ages past - flying through the sky, making
light fill a room with the flick of a fingertip, living and working in places where your grandparents would never
have been allowed. A flawed civilization that seemed ever conscious and self-critical of its flaws.
"I suppose that is where the germ of 'The Postman' came from - and its Jewish main character. It seemed to me
that no one was talking about how much we would miss all the little things, if this civilization ever fell. Little
things like electricity, tolerance...and the mail."
Brin acknowledges that Krantz, more than most, may pine for the old American order precisely because of the
unparalleled protection it afforded to Jews. And as Krantz discovers in a not-so-brave new world overrun by the
followers of a militia-era white supremacist called Nathan Holn, once society crumbles, Jews, African-Americans
and other minorities become fair game.
Not, says Brin, that Jews in the Diaspora - and of Israel's fate in this scenario there is no mention - don't
contribute to their own vulnerability.
"Our geniuses almost always put some big-mouthed Jew in a prominent position in almost any ideology," he
observes, "from laissez-faire capitalism (Milton Friedman) to socialism (Karl Marx), giving opponents a chance
to vilify 'Jews' as responsible for their pet hate."
BUT THERE IS STILL ANOTHER reason for his having made the Postman a Jew, despite Costner's directorial
decision to universalize the character and his cultural predicament.
"Jews are forbidden, by dietary laws, ever to become hunter-gatherers!" Brin says. "Hunting is extremely difficult
to do kosher. (But) this can be taken (also) as an injunction to protect civilization." Krantz symbolizes that
civilization and its amenities, which are almost wiped out in the apocalyptic scourge that anticipates the action of
the book and the movie. The Jews will not simply be able to pick up a gun, or bow and arrow, in order to feed
themselves. Brin: "We do not have an option, if (civilization) falls."
Fans of Brin's fiction will note his other uses - some more fleeting than others - of Jewish themes and characters.
In "Startide Rising," these were subtle. In one scene, a character intones Kaddish over the dead. In another, one of
the dolphins implies that he had been circumcised while converting to Judaism. But it wasn't until "Heart of the
Comet," co-written with fellow physicist and hard SF-writer Gregory Benford that he would place another type of
Jew - an Israeli this time - at the heart of a novel.
"Heart of the Comet," says Brin, "portrays the possibility of a second Diaspora in the next century. In the novel's
background, many Jews still live in Israel, but they have kicked out the secular Jews and those whom they call
'Pharisees' (Jews who maintain belief in the democratic rabbinical tradition).
"The Jews who remain in Israel have joined forces with fundamentalist Christians and an Islamic sect in order to
rebuild the Temple and reinstate the Cohenic priesthood. My character, Saul Linowitz, reflects on his sense of
banishment and loss, and how much he misses his Sabra homeland.
"The novel is actually the most Biblical of my books in its tone, since it depicts a tribe of humans - eventually led
by Saul (like a new Moses) - who have been cast out to the desert of space, where they must make a new society,
in a new promised land."
Although Brin himself does not feel that the transformation of "The Postman" into a major motion picture has
brought him quite into the promised land of Hollywood fame - it took him 12 years since the rights were optioned
just to meet the executive producer - he is quite pleased with the film.
"It's a good movie that deals with important issues and is more faithful to the book than I'd have imagined at any
point in the last decade. It is also visually one of the most beautiful motion pictures in years.
"I might have had an idea or suggestion to contribute, if asked. But it's vastly more important that Costner 'got' the
basic message of the book. If he wants to make changes - the movie's ending, for instance, is all his - the man who
brings $ 80 million to the table can make changes! As long as the heart is still there.
"One thing is certain. The right wing will hate Costner for slapping down the militia-solipsist movement and (the
idea of) tolerance under the protection of the U.S. flag. Cynics will carp against the 'goody' morality tale.
"Too bad. A 95-percent-terrific movie is a terrific movie. Moreover, in these days of solipsism, when so many
people claim to despise our civilization, the message Costner is telling needs to be heard."
LOAD-DATE: November 24, 1999
LANGUAGE: English
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 1998 The Jerusalem Report
The Jerusalem Report
August 22, 1996
HARRY'S WAR OF THE WORLDS
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 46
LENGTH: 1706 words
The "Worldwar" Tetralogy
(all published by Del Rey):
Worldwar: In the Balance,
488 pp.; $ 21 (cloth), $ 5.99 (paper)
Worldwar: Tilting the Balance,
481 pp.; $ 6.99 (paper)
Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance,
481 pp.; $ 23 (cloth)
Worldwar: Striking the Balance
Forthcoming in December
Harry Turtledove's alternate histories' have a noble lineage, with echoes in works as popular as this summer's
movie blockbuster Independence Day'
IN A 1993 NOVEL CALLED "THE Guns of the South," writer Harry Turtledove explored what might have
transpired had 21st-century Afrikaner reactionaries used a time machine to supply Robert E. Lee's nearly defeated
Southern armies with Soviet-style assault rifles. That exercise, though, was just a warm-up for his latest effort, a
sweeping tetralogy of quasi-historical extrapolations called "Worldwar," a series of science fiction novels that
ponders how the world of 1942 might have developed had a race of technologically advanced aliens suddenly
invaded the earth. The first book was published in 1994, and the fourth and final volume is due out from Del Rey
in December.
Turtledove is Jewish, and the effect the alien invasion has upon the Holocaust becomes one of the series' central
concerns.
For instance, the first volume, called "Worldwar: In the Balance," follows real-life Jewish resistance leader
Mordecai Anielewicz when he is busy organizing Jewish forces in the Warsaw Ghetto against further Nazi
deportations, shortly before the planetary invasion. The aliens, a species of reptile who call themselves "the
Race," quickly discern the purpose of Treblinka. Realizing the Jews may be motivated to serve their purposes,
they cynically offer the hard-pressed Anielewicz food, arms and logistical support. In return, all they require is a
public declaration of Polish Jewry's voluntary collaboration with their own planetary occupation - a conquest that
will result in the perennial enslavement of all humanity.
Anielewicz's dilemma: Does he side with the scaly, cold-blooded invaders from the stars, securing relief from the
Nazi death machine, at the price of near-universal human enmity to Jews as traitors to the species? Or, taking his
cue from Ben-Gurion's response to the British White Paper of 1939, does he fight the Nazis as if there were no
aliens, and combat the aliens, or "Lizards," as earthlings have dubbed them, as if there were no Nazis?
Clearly, these are not the kinds of questions that would ever be debated in the halls or learned journals of
academe. But Turtledove, a 54-year-old San Fernando Valley resident and California native who holds a PhD in
Byzantine history from UCLA, finds himself operating within a substantial and long-lived intellectual tradition
created by a coterie of esteemed historians and writers.
The genre in which he has toiled for most of his professional career is called alternate history, and Turtledove is
described on his book jackets as science fiction's "master alternate historian." The genre, which has attracted a
number of serious and respected practitioners during the 20th century and even earlier, looks in essay, story and
even film at how human history might have proceeded had history taken a sudden turn off its track at some
pivotal juncture. The Discovery cable channel in the U.S., for example, plans a three-part series this fall called
"What If?," which considers how history would have turned out had certain major events not happened.
Scenarios explored by writers as diverse and distinguished as Andre Maurois, Winston Churchill, John Hersey
and Vladimir Nabokov have included a Chinese Communist takeover of America, the emergence of the atomic
bomb and computers (steam-powered) in Victorian England, and even the dire implications of an Arab victory in
the Six-Day War. But by far the most popular and enduring theme has the Nazis victorious in World War II.
Dozens of novels and stories and several anthologies based on this premise, including "The Man in the High
Castle," by Philip K. Dick, "SS-GB," by Len Deighton, and "Fatherland," by Robert Harris, have seen light since
the Allied victory.
In most of these stories, of course, one of the most common outcomes of the Nazi victory is the decimation, if not
complete obliteration, of world Jewry. In Dick's "High Castle," for instance, a small remnant of American Jews
continues to live through the 1960s on the West Coast of the United States, which remains under quasi-benign
Japanese rule. An even smaller coterie of Jews, one discovers, has succeeded in infiltrating the German High
Commmand, wresting control of the Nazi Party from the fingers of a doddering Fhrer. In Harris's "Fatherland," in
contrast (a thriller, not science fiction), the systematic decimation of European Jewry becomes the mystery a
German police officer must solve.
Turtledove says the research for his "Worldwar" series actually inspired one such effort, a short story he published
in the early 90s called "In the Pres- ence of Mine Enemies." The story, which stemmed from his reading of the
diaries of Warsaw Ghetto survivors, and of the writings of Albert Speer, envisioned a small remnant of Jews who
survive a Nazi victory as Marranos.
TURTLEDOVE REALIZES THAT BY placing the Holocaust in the context of fantasy and science fiction, he
risks accusations of exploitation or irreverence. He tries to circumvent this by playing out his plot in as
straightforward and serious a fashion as possible. His use of the alien invasion - a stock science fiction theme
straight out of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" - seems to gain some of its resonances from the 1983 TV movie
"V" and its 1984 sequel. These, in turn, may have been inspired by the 1935 Sinclair Lewis Nazi victory story "It
Can't Happen Here," but substituted reptilian aliens for Nazis, and persecuted scientists for Jews.
Turtledove, who does not watch a great deal of television, insists he never saw the two "V" movies, nor the
subsequent spin-off series. Nor has he yet seen the summer sci-fi blockbuster "Independence Day," by director
Roland Emmerich. "ID4," as fans now refer to the film, is in a large sense the "Worldwar" plot set in the present
day.
In Turtledove's series, for instance, Jews and Nazis reluctantly join efforts to smuggle plutonium from a downed
alien aircraft to scientists in the Reich and the U.S., where, it is hoped, they will be able to produce atomic
weapons for use against the invaders. In ID4, similarly, there is a scene in which the battered remnants of the
Israeli and Arab air forces gather in the Iraqi desert for a final desperate assault against the seemingly invincible
aliens. (And as a cute sidelight, ID4 also boasts actors Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith in the roles of a Jewish
scientist and a hotshot African-American fighter pilot who, la Michael Lerner and Cornel West, successfully
revive the Jewish-black alliance of yesteryear by bringing down the alien "mother ship.")
A native of Gardena, California, whose ancestors arrived in Winnipeg, Canada from Romania shortly before the
turn of the century, Turtledove, ne Turtletaub, became a fixture of the alternate history field in 1987, when he
began publishing the Videssos Cycle and the Krispos series, both of which drew upon his expertise in Byzantine
myth and lore.
Turtledove has also worked with Richard Dreyfuss on an alternate history novel about the American Revolution.
The actor (and Peace Now activist) had suggested they collaborate after reading an article about Turtledove's
work by this writer in the Los Angeles Times. "The Two Georges" relates how George Washington and George III
had reconciled their differences, leading to a 20th-century North America still firmly in the clutches of the British
Empire. The story involves a threat by latter-day American separatists.
"I went into it dubiously," he says, "because a lot of times when a writer hears, I have this idea, are you interested
in it?' the idea is not good. This time I was lucky - it was. And it worked out pretty well as a novel."
Turtledove got the idea for "Worldwar" back in 1977. "I was interested in looking at the difficulties faced in
conquering an industrialized planet from space," he explains. He says he did "homework" for 14 years because "I
wanted it to feel real," and because, he admits modestly, he sensed that "I was not nearly a good enough writer to
do what needed doing, to treat it at the scope I needed."
"I think the Holocaust is a legitimate subject for examination, for looking at in any shaped mirror one can bring to
bear on it. And the rather funhouse mirror of alternate history lets you look at history in a way that you can't in
any other way," he told The Jerusalem Report.
In volumes three and four of the series, Moishe Russie, a Jewish protagonist named for one of Turtledove's Polish
relatives, finds himself in Palestine, which eventually ends up under Lizard rule. In a contemplated fifth book,
Turtledove says he intends to settle whether a Jewish state ever emerges from the melee.
But "Worldwar" does not look at only the Jews. Rather, it traces the process by which humanity slowly unites
against the alien menace through the eyes of a number of characters, including an American minor-league
baseball player, a Chinese peasant woman "mated" by the aliens with an American man, a female Russian pilot,
and a German tank officer. A number of real-life characters, such as Churchill, von Ribbentrop, Edward R.
Murrow, and many of the Manhattan Project's participants, also appear.
Turtledove won't speak about the series' final outcome, but a hint may perhaps be found in the fact that in so
many of Turtledove's extrapolations, contending forces grapple with one side using superior tactics, the other
possessing superior weapons. In "Worldwar," innovative human tactics are used in last-ditch efforts against a race
of beings with overwhelmingly superior technology, but whose ability to adapt to change or innovate on the
battlefield is limited both biologically and culturally.
"I wouldn't think that it boils down," he says, "to who has the bigger stick. It's not who has the biggest stick, but
how they use it."
LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1999
LANGUAGE: English
GRAPHIC: ID4': The hit movie is like Turtledove's Worldwar' set in the present
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 1996 The Jerusalem Report
The Jerusalem Report
February 22, 1996
"YOU JUST DON'T GET IT"
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 37
LENGTH: 1406 words
Israel's fictional end comes when she ignores the to-the-death nature of the national struggle, and neglects Jewish
unity
DURING A RECENT VISIT to Jordan, Israeli novelist Amos Oz participated in a televised roundtable discussion
with local TV pundits. When one of his interlocutors asked what held the greatest fear for Oz, as an Israeli, the
writer said it was the prospect that Israel might prove to be a temporary episode in world history.
Although the Israeli literary establishment has traditionally expressed profound contempt for most forms of
commercial fiction of a speculative nature, the notion that Israel might eventually go the way of the Crusader
kingdom has inspired a surprising number of Hebrew-language "Dreadful Warning" stories, to use the British
term for the genre coined at the turn of the century. Given the inherent precariousness of the Zionist endeavor and the deep-rooted anxieties it's engendered - the real surprise may be that there haven't been more of them.
A number of dystopian novels were published during the 80s - Amos Kenan's "The Road to Ein Harod," Benjamin
Tammuz's "Jeremiah's Inn" and David Melamud's "The Fourth Dream" are three of the most notable examples and generally they had a left-wing sensibility to them. It wasn't until about two weeks before Yitzhak Rabin's
assassination that the Israeli right finally weighed in for the Israeli Dystopia Derby. That was when Zev BenYosef's "Peace unto Israel" was published.
The year is 2045, and the Jewish state is unraveling with astonishing alacrity. Israel has been at peace with the
Arab world for a half century. But it has been at war with itself for almost as long. After ceding part of the Galilee
to the Palestinian state, Israel has cut itself into two quasi-independent cantons. The rump Israeli republic,
militarily defanged by its own faith in its peace agreements and ceding control of the streets to organized crime, is
devoutly secular. The "Guardians of Israel" enclave, with its population concentrated in Bnei Brak, Me'ah
She'arim and on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is grimly messianic.
Conflict between them escalates when the otherwise autonomous religious-nationalists demand foreign and
military independence. Their economy ruined and army and police exhausted from decades of internecine strife,
the besieged secular Israelis ask the Palestinians to send in troops to help restore order. The Palestinians, who
have gotten on famously with them for decades, comply happily. And then, of course, they refuse to leave.
"We, the entire Arab peoples," observes the triumphant Palestinian leader, Dr. Walid al-Husseini (he's named for
Haj Amin al-Husseini, late mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler supporter, but has the smiley-faced affability of the son
of the mufti's cousin, Faisal al-Husseini) "had always been united in our hope to be rid of you, to purify our land
of marauders. We never hid this from you. But you wanted to be moral, pure. You were better at worrying about
us and other people than about yourselves. In that way, you made it easier for us, for the Germans, and for the rest
of the world's anti-Semites."
Yes, the Germans. Or didn't I mention that by 2045, Germany and Japan have regained their stature as world
superpowers, resurrected the Axis, and, with their triumphant uber-technology, have lovingly rebuilt the ghettos
and death camps of yesteryear?
BEN-YOSEF, A SENIOR OFFICIAL in the World Zionist Organization, chronicles the demise of Israel through
the attendant demise of a notable secular Israeli family. The patriarch of this dysfunctional clan is Dr. Shlomo
Ariel, a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist who, with his childhood cronies, ends up running a morally
bankrupt, and deeply inept secular Israeli government. Wrapped up in his own career, he fails to notice that his
wife has detached herself from him, and that his children have become troubled and estranged, lost in a land of
depleted values and deteriorating social and economic conditions.
Ariel, in case you fail to notice, is a LEFT-WING SECULAR LIBERAL HUMANIST UNIVERSALIST (BenYosef is big on affixing Rush Limbaugh-like labels on people and institutions he disapproves of) who subscribes
to the (actually libertarian) notion that no state or people has the moral right to impose its will on other states or
people - not even on groups residing within its own borders. So when the Arabs living in a quasi-independent
canton in the Upper Galilee demand the right to merge with independent Palestine, Ariel's left-wing associates can
think of no better reason to prevent their departure than they could to hold off on an earlier decision to recognize
Palestinian independence. This does not distract the government, however, from imposing a secular-humanistic
curriculum on all state-supported schools, thereby forcing the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox to bolt as well.
THE REAL PROBLEM, AS UNDERstood by Ben-Yosef and as articulated, with no intended irony, by a 21stcentury Nazi philosopher he conjures up, is that there are peoples and races that survive by placing their own
interests and welfare first, and peoples and races doomed to extinction because they value the welfare of others
more than their own. As Palestinian President Walid al-Husseini later expounds to Ariel during a tour of the death
camps similar to the one taken by his real-life ancestor, the grand mufti, a full century earlier: "Maybe now you'll
understand why opponents of the Jews throughout the generations, who were called anti-Semites, including us
Palestinians, called you The Children of Death.' You were a people who didn't know how to live, and therefore
were not deserving of life.
"You simply never succeeded in understanding that the relationship between you and the Arab peoples was based
on one fundamental principle - a total life and death struggle. Either you, or us. You deluded yourselves when you
believed that dividing the land would bring peace, and that this peace would survive... You should have followed
our example in the matter of the sanctity of the land. We were never willing to seriously consider giving up any of
our land. We decided that the land of Palestine was holy, every pebble, the holiest of holies...
"Instead of unifying like us around a goal - the dedication of the entire people to the sanctity of the land - you
broke up with undue haste into groups and subgroups, bickering with each other instead of the real enemy. In this
manner, you lost the elementary right even to be called a people."
ALAS, BECAUSE SO MUCH OF Ben-Yosef's book consists of this kind of gabby polemic, "Peace unto Israel"
loses the elementary right to call itself a proper Dreadful Warning story of the kind made famous by George
Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell's "1984" viscerally evoked the stink of rotting cabbages and the forbidding
shadows of bombed-out postwar London slums. "Peace unto Israel," in contrast, fails to conjure up the elaborate
sense of time or place a story like this needs to generate real horror. The 21st century depicted here is virtually
identical, in tenor and texture, to the world we live in now. This is odd, considering the protagonist, Dr. Ariel, has
in fact invented a machine that creates free and limitless energy. In real life, this would usher in a material golden
age for Israel and the world not seen since the invention of the Epilady hair-removal system by Kibbutz
Hagoshrim. In Ben-Yosef's fable, though, it not only fails to transform human life: Ariel conveniently forgets, for
most of the narrative's duration, that he has converted it into a death ray that could be used to smite any enemy of
Israel or Jewry anywhere on the globe with virtual impunity.
Ben-Yosef's polemic is further undermined by his contempt for those who would seek any end to Israel's conflict
with the Arab world that is not based on the subjugation of one by the other. Shimon Peres's recent impromptu
declaration that he might surrender Israel's nuclear option in the event of genuine peace notwithstanding, it
remains unlikely any future Israeli government would ever commit the kind of systematic national seppuku
depicted here. It is even more unlikely that discerning readers will accept Ben-Yosef's underlying belief that
Israel's appointed task in this universe is to keep on waging World War II with the rest of the planet for eternity.
LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1999
LANGUAGE: English
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 1996 The Jerusalem Report
The Jerusalem Report
November 30, 1995
COUNT CODRESCU
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 52
LENGTH: 1867 words
Ex-Romanian commentator and writer Andrei Codrescu should be feeling good - but he sees anti-Semitism
everywhere.
VAMPIRE MAVENS RECOGnize the Sign of the Cross as the traditional, if increasingly ineffective or even
laughable, first line of defense against the undead. For New Orleans-based poet, essayist, teacher, radio
commentator and now novelist Andrei Codrescu, though, it is a toss-up which generates greater dread: the
mythical "nosferatu" of his native Transylvania or the almost universal gesture used to ward vampires off.
Known for his deadpan, absurdist pontifications on National Public Radio, Codrescu, 49, recently published "The
Blood Countess" (Simon & Schuster, 347 pp., $ 23), his first novel, and one based on the exploits of real-life
blood fetishist Elizabeth Bathory. This 17th-century Hungarian noblewoman gained notoriety during her day by
bathing in the blood of dozens of young virgins in a deranged attempt to sustain her own life and beauty. British
writer Bram Stoker considered basing a vampire novel on Bathory's life, but eventually deemed her crimes too
repugnant for delicate Victorian sensibilities.
Leaving Bathory for Codrescu to rediscover a full century later, Stoker drew his inspiration instead from a 15thcentury ruler of the Wallachian principality, Vlad IV, also known as Vlad the Impaler because during his reign he
impaled over 30,000 of his enemies. Ironically, Elizabeth Bathory could claim real blood ties to Prince Stephen
Bathory, who helped "Draculya" (son of Vlad Dracul - which means "dragon" or "devil"), or Count Dracula, as he
would become known in Stoker's fiction, regain his throne.
Bathory was also an atheist who apparently spent the latter part of her life arguing the absurdity of Christian
theology with clergymen who placed her under house arrest after her crimes became known. Like such modernday literary vampires as L'Estat in Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire," or Barlow in Stephen King's "Salem's
Lot," she would not have been deterred by the Sign of the Cross.
The same, alas, may not be said of Codrescu.
"My Jewishness," he recounted in a recent series of E-mail encounters with The Jerusalem Report, "began with
the remark by two boys pissing crosswise on a street corner in Sibiu, Transylvania.
" Every time you piss like this, a Jew dies,' one of them said, in my direction." Codrescu was 6 at the time.
Codrescu's Jewishness, which is rarely absent from his writing, finds pointed expression in "The Blood
Countess." One of his protagonists is Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory's, who fled
Hungary for the U.S. in 1956, and who returns after the collapse of communism, becoming enmeshed in the
dreams of certain Hungarian intellectuals
of restoring the monarchy. After a short time in his native land, Bathory-Keresh tur begins to realize that real
vampires continue to feed on Eastern Europe. Communism is a vampire only partly vanquished by the collapse of
the Soviet empire. And although a stake was driven through its heart only half a century ago, fascism, too, has
begun once again to stir in the crypt. But no set of fangs has endured longer, or sunk deeper into the cultural
jugular, than those of anti-Semitism. Says Codrescu about it: "It's so deep it will take an operation the patient
might die from."
Like Bathory-Kereshtur, who though not Jewish becomes convinced in his anguish that he must be, Codrescu still
bears their mark. They are embedded in his name, which evolved from Perlmutter to Steiu - courtesy of the Red
Star Writers' Wednesday Workshop, to which he belonged in his teens.
"Alas, Steiu when written in cursive," he explained, "looks just like Stein (stone). Not far enough. After years, I
settled on Codrescu, which resembled Codreanu, the founder of the Iron Guard, a great anti-Semite. The choice
was unconscious. But when I realized it, I kept the name, so as to make Codreanu a footnote in my history.
"In America, I could have ditched the name. I didn't, and am the first of my line." In Romania, Codrescu's parents
were both photographers. "He had the fancier studio downtown," he recalls, "she had the run-down one by the
train station." Codrescu's father hailed from a family of observant Jews who owned a stall in the town market. But
neither parent, he once quipped, could be construed as "good Jews," both having chosen a profession that ran
counter to the prohibition against making graven images.
His father, moreover, compounded his sins by sporting leather jackets and tooling around in a black Packard. In
rural Sibiu, an old walled medieval fortress town in the Carpathians, this kind of attire and transportation usually
marked one as a member of the secret police. Whenever the elder Perlmutter passed by, doors would click shut
and people would cross themselves. But Codrescu's father was neither a vampire nor, his son says, an agent.
"My father was a Communist, at least theoretically, but in essence he had the bohemian vocation. He had a black
car, a motorcycle, 100 girlfriends,
played poker all night with Communist Party brass, and, generally, according to my mother, wasted his life,"
Codrescu recounts.
Codrescu left Romania for Detroit, assuming his rightful place in an American Bohemia thanks to a cash advance
from the State of Israel, which under Ceausescu in 1966 began ransoming its Jews to Jerusalem. Codrescu, who
with his mother made a beeline to the States instead, once boasted having cost the Jewish state $ 10,000. When
asked when it might expect restitutio n, however, he reassessed the price of his freedom to about $ 3,000.
"I think I was exaggerating because I felt that I was worth, well, more, you know," he told The Jerusalem Report.
"I will begin to pay it back once I get an advance for my next novel, (tentatively entitled) Messiah Throng.'" The
book, which Codrescu researched during a trip to Israel last year, is about an adolescent female wannabe messiah
who sojourns briefly in Jerusalem before heading "where any hip messiah would - to CNN headquarters in
Atlanta." That's all he will say about the book.
CODRESCU, WHO PLANS TO return to Israel for further research, has never lived near Ted Turner. But for a
guy who only recently began to drive, he does manage to get around. In America, Codrescu quickly fell under the
tutelage of poets Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg, and was befriended by Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg. A stint as a
visiting writer at Johns Hopkins University begat an op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun, which, in turn, brought
him to the attention of National Public Radio.
Listeners to "All Things Considered," NPR's evening news and features magazine, still recall the time he
characterized "Wheel of Fortune" hostess Vanna White as his "favorite Dadaist artist." Codrescu eventually wrote
a play, "The Marriage of Joseph Stalin and Vanna White," in which he considered Stalin's writings against
excerpts from White's memoir, "Vanna Speaks." Asked to explain the rationale behind the incongruous pairing of
the two, Codrescu explains that "Vanna White is the apex of commercialism, an ideology resembling Stalinism in
ways it would take too long to enumerate. Suffice it to mention the apathy of the consumer classes, and the
pervading fears associated with one's credit (party) card."
Fans also recall the time Codrescu matter-of-factly explained the line "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" which
had been repeatedly intoned by the two men who otherwise inexplicably beat up CBS-News anchorman Dan
Rather outside a New York hotel in 1986, and has since become a national catchphrase.
"The suspicion gnaws at me," announced Codrescu in a masterful stroke of demystification, "that Kenneth' just
may be the name of that demon that hides inside all of us media people. All the news you hear comes from
Kenneth. Kenneth is plugged into the central frequency of the world brain."
Codrescu achieved cult status, however, in 1993, when he became convinced he should stop mooching lifts from
his friends and learn how to drive. He rented a red 68 Cadillac convertible and allowed himself to be filmed
driving across an American landscape and visiting individuals and sites only a Transylvanian Jew teaching
English in Louisiana could imagine, never mind actually locate. The 82-minute documentary, "Road Scholar,"
generated major buzz at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival, and was shown in art film houses and on
public television. It also cemented Codrescu's burgeoning reputation as latter-day Alexis de Tocqueville with a
Kafkaesque eye for the absurd, a wry paranoia distilled from a Philip K. Dick novel, and an accent "Rocky and
Bullwinkle's" Boris Badunov would have killed for.
Asked about his unique status as America's only "Romanian-born, American-adopted multimedia pundit," as he
was once referred to by the Los Angeles Times, Codrescu once said, "I made it all up, it wasn't something that
was there before. It's a very American idea - invent a need and then fill it."
But Codrescu, who teaches at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, while editing a literary journal called
"The Exquisite Corpse," takes great umbrage at suggestions that the uniquely Jewish experience and sensibility so
evident in his writing may not come through quite so clearly - and perhaps for good reason - in his radio work.
AS A SHARP-TONGUED ROMANIan intellectual who appears to have inadvertently inherited the "Letter from
America" mantle left by the BBC's Alistair Cooke, Codrescu easily invokes the romance, irony and dark sarcasm
one expects from someone hailing from Dracula's old haunts.
Indeed, in vampire-savvy 90s America, an exotic accent can actually provide an advantage. But would that
advantage suffer, I wonder, if fans were to perceive Codrescu not as a charmingly accented media iconoclast, but
as yet another funny-talking Jew putting his classic alienation to good use?
"You insinuate," he responds acidly, "that I'm more Romanian than Jewish on the radio, as if this was a conscious
mercantile decision to charm the suckers who listen. I find this both offensive and stupid. I do what I do because
only I can do it. You can't, and neither can millions of others, no matter what they decide is commercially
appropriate."
Despite his singular talents, Codrescu is not sanguine about the future, whether viewed from the vantage point of
a Jew or a poet. As a Jew living in America, Codrescu does not imagine himself to be beyond the clutches of
renascent fascism. "The American potential for turning on Jews," he insists, "is great and increasing, in direct
ratio to the rise of fascism around the world."
The world's propensity for turning on its poets, meanwhile, may be even greater. Codrescu attributes the testiness
of his response to my query, for instance, to a "cranky academic conference" he attended in St. Paul, Minnesota,
where he says literature professor and Palestinian ideologue Edward Said proposed assigning a cultural
commissar to every poet to ensure political correctness.
"To this time-warp Marxism," says Codrescu, "there is barely any answer save yech!'"
LOAD-DATE: November 12, 1999
LANGUAGE: English
GRAPHIC: RANSOMED BY ISRAEL: Codrescu owes' the state thousands
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
The Jerusalem Report
April 23, 1992
ISAAC ASIMOV'S GALACTIC TALENT
BYLINE: Sheli Teitelbaum
SECTION: Pg. 31
LENGTH: 985 words
His first hero was named Schwartz, but the sci-fi writer wasn't proud of his heritage. Isaac Asimov is credited
with having single-handedly humanized the literary world's regard for robots, which before he wrote his famous
robot stories in the 1940s ran amok like crazed mechanical monsters. He was also the first to lay out the ground
rules for the daily operation of pan-galactic empires, for which film makers and science fiction writers who
followed are duly grateful. Asimov, who died on April 6 in New York of heart and kidney failure at the age of 72,
had no equal not only as a science fiction writer, but as an explainer of science more than half the 500 or so books
he churned out during his stellar career dealt with science fact and the real world. He also wrote knowledgeably
about Shakespeare, the Bible and the naughty limerick. "As an explainer," says MIT artificial- intelligence maven
Marvin Minsky, who calls himself a robot psychologist - a profession literally invented by Asimov - "he was a
colossus." But according to fellow New York science fiction writer and former Omni Magazine fiction editor Ben
Bova, what few seem ever to recall is that Asimov was also the first to bring ethnicity to the genre. His first novel,
"Pebble in the Sky" (1950), had as its protagonist one Joseph Schwartz, a meek Jewish tailor suddenly transported
into the distant future and drawn into a plot by Earth's ruling zealots to avenge centuries of anti-Terran
discrimination by unleashing a plague upon the galaxy. For Asimov in this formative novel, Earth was a metaphor
for ancient Judea - one battered by radiation poisoning and forced to employ institutionalized euthanasia, but also
one capable of wreaking havoc on its galactic captors. Asimov openly lifted his concept of interstellar empire
from Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "In the late 1930s," recounts
Bova, "the average science fiction hero was heavily Anglo-Saxon, broad of shoulder, square of jaw and capable of
fixing an interstellar spaceship with some chewing gum while working his slide rule furiously. Isaac broke that
mold. And he did so with an editor (Astounding's John Campbell) known to be not only heavily Anglo-Saxon, but
a Celt who believed that Scots were the best people of all." Ironically, though, the son of poor Russian-Jewish
immigrants to Brooklyn never held his own people in similar regard. Asimov often proudly contended that he was
not a good Jew. Science fiction writer and critic James Gunn, author of "Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of
Science Fiction," wrote: "Asimov attends no Jewish religious functions, follows no Jewish rituals, obeys no
Jewish dietary laws, and yet he never, under any circumstances, leaves any doubt that he is Jewish." "I really
dislike Judaism," Asimov once said. "It's a form of particularly pernicious nationalism. I don't want humanity
divided into these little groups that are firmly convinced, each one, that it is better than the others. "Judaism is the
prototype of the 'I'm better than you' group - we are the ones who invented this business of the only God. It's not
just that we have our God and you have your God, but we have the only God. I feel a deep, abiding historical guilt
about that. And every once in a while, when I'm not careful, I think that the reason Jews have been persecuted as
much as they have has been to punish them for having invented this pernicious doctrine." Not surprisingly,
Asimov never visited Israel. But the main factor in his avoidance of the Jewish state may have been his lifelong
fear of flying. It was difficult to get him to go anywhere, let alone leave his beloved typewriter. When the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot asked him to contribute to its quarterly magazine, Rehovot, during the
early 1980s, he declined gracefully, citing prior obligations and failing health. On the few occasions when he was
called upon by Israeli newspapers to comment upon the Zionist endeavor, however, he made it plain that he
wasn't a big giver to the Jewish National Fund. Always the rationalist, Asimov recognized the unusual harshness
of these views, and acknowledged that he sometimes felt himself to be a traitor to Judaism. He said he tried to
make up for this "by making sure that everyone knows I'm a Jew, so while I'm deprived of the benefits of being
part of the group, I am sure that I don't lose any of the disadvantages, because no one should think I am denying
my Judaism in order to gain certain advantages." Indeed, any advantages Asimov gained in life he earned. Born in
Russia, he emigrated to the United States with his family when he was three, and spent his formative years
alternately impressing and harassing his teachers with his keen intelligence and hermetic memory. Asimov spent
most of his after-school hours in his father's Brooklyn candy store, where he first encountered and developed an
abiding love for the science fiction pulp magazines of the 1930s. Asimov received an undergraduate degree in
science from Columbia University in 1939, and a doctorate in biochemistry in 1948, after serving with the U.S.
Naval Air Experimental Station during the war alongside sci-fi titans Roert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. He
joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949, but resigned in 1958, having concluded
he'd make a mediocre researcher, and would do better writing. "The guy was everywhere, omnipresent," says
Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk. "He had a finger in every
scientific pie, and a lot of literary ones too." Adds David Brin, a Los Angeles SF writer: "He was always an
optimist. He always believed in human beings, in our ability to reason out solutions to our problems. The
optimism, the vigor, the fact that he conveyed a love of the universe, will continue for all time."
LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1999
LANGUAGE: English
PUB-TYPE: Magazine
Copyright 1992 The Jerusalem Report
Privacy
Is History - Get Over It The issue isn't privacy, according to science fiction writer
David Brin, it's equality of exposure.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
Wired: In your introduction to The Blinding Fog, you project two
disparate visions. One foresees police cameras on every lamppost. In
the other, average citizens can access universal tools of surveillance.
Is this our choice - Big Brother, or a world of Peeping Toms?
Brin
: Make no mistake, the cameras are coming. Already a dozen British
cities aim police TV down scores of city blocks. Crime goes down, but
how long before those zoom lenses track faces, read credit card
numbers, or eavesdrop on private conversations? You can't stop this
Orwellian nightmare by passing laws. As Robert Heinlein said, the only
thing privacy laws accomplish is to make the bugs smaller. In a
decade, you'll never know the cameras are there. Those with access
to them will have devastating advantages. The only alternative is to
give the birdlike power of sight to everybody. Make the inevitable
cameras accessible so anyone can check traffic at First and Main, look
for a lost kid, or supervise Officer McGillicudy walking his beat. Only
this way will the powerful have just as much - or little - privacy as the
rest of us.
Members of the cypherpunk movement have been promoting
encryption as a safeguard of personal privacy. But you don't buy it.
Foremost among reasons why encryption won't work is that secrecy
has always favored the mighty. The rich will have resources to get
around whatever pathetic barriers you or I erect, while privacy laws
and codes will protect those at the top against us. The answer isn't
more fog but more light: transparency. The kind that goes both ways.
You think privacy will become extinct? Like the dodo. But there is a
way to limit the damage. If any citizen can read the billionaire's tax
return or the politician's bank statement, if no thug - or policeman -
can ever be sure his actions are unobserved, if no government agency
or corporate boardroom is safe from whistle-blowers, we'll have
something precious to help make up for lost privacy: freedom.
You wrote Earth in 1988 before the Web became a media catch
phrase. As a science fiction writer, where did you get it right? And
wrong?
I thought Earth would get attention for the ecological speculations and
such. Surprisingly, my depictions of a future infoweb raised the most
interest. My WorldNet seemed to me a natural outgrowth of what
people do with new technology. Some waste time. Others try to
elevate the human condition. But most use it as simply another tool, a
necessity of life. A routine miracle, like refrigerators and telephones.
What intrigues me is how society's contrary interest groups might use
infotech - first to mobilize, but then to argue, expose lies, and hold
each other accountable. Mutually enforced accountability is the key to
running a complex society that can no longer afford big mistakes.
What do you mean by mutual accountability?
In all history, humans found just one remedy against error - criticism.
But criticism is painful. We hate receiving it, though we don't mind
dishing it out. It's human nature. We've learned a hard lesson - no
leader is ever wise enough to make decisions without scrutiny,
commentary, and feedback. It so happens those are the very
commodities the WorldNet will provide, in torrents. Try to picture
multitudes of citizens, each with access to worldwide databases and
the ability to make sophisticated models, each bent on disproving
fallacies or exposing perceived mistakes. It's a formula for chaos or
for innovative, exciting democracy - if people are mature enough.
There's been buzz comparing your 1985 novel, The Postman, to
statements from the militia movement.
One of a writer's greatest satisfactions comes from inventing
interesting villains. But the American mythos always preached
suspicion of authority, a basically healthy social instinct that helped
keep us free. But the message turns cancerous when it turns into
solipsism - the notion that an individual's self-righteous roar has more
value than being a member of a civilized society. Solipsism is a rising
passion as we near the millennium. In countless popular books and
films, the individual protagonist can do no wrong, but every institution
is depicted as inherently corrupt. Yet, despite this pervasive
propaganda, many resist the sweet lure of self-centeredness. Instead
of rage, they offer argument, passion, criticism, even cooperation.
The Postman was about choosing between solipsism and rebuilding a
living community. We all choose each day, in less dramatic ways.

Sheldon Teitelbaum (shelit@aol.com) is a Los Angeles-based senior
writer for The Jerusalem Report and a special correspondent for Sci Fi
Universe.
Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights
reserved.
Copyright © 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.