INTRODUCTION
“M Y GOD, HE’S COMMITTED science fiction.” So wrote Harry Crews in 1971 in his review of Gray Matters for the New York Times Book Review. Of course, it helped that he went on to say the novel “turns out to be not SciFi, but an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.” Still, Crews had a point to make. Writers of serious literary fiction weren’t supposed to dirty their lily-white hands with generic trash. It didn’t matter that such fine work as The Oxbow Incident and The Bronc People were westerns, that both 1984 and Brave New World should be classified as science fiction, and that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both wrote what anyone would define as detective literature. Genre fiction remained something one despised and avoided at all costs. Even the slightest exposure might infect a writer with a bad case of brow-lowering.
I just didn’t get it. Anyone who reads for enjoyment (and what other reason is there for opening a work of fiction?) knows not to risk such premature judgment. Otherwise, we all would have to give up on the manifold pleasures of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, John le Carré and Stanislaw Lem, to mention but a few of the “serious” writers who have ventured into forbidden genre territory. I first encountered science fiction at a summer camp when I was twelve. Among the handful of battered secondhand books in the mess hall library was a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published three years earlier. From the opening blasts of “Rocket Summer” to the final loneliness of “There Shall Come Soft Rains” and “The Million-Year Picnic,” I was spellbound. Before this, I had read only comic books, golden age cape-wearing superheroes and the more disturbing psychosexual horrors of the EC canon. Bradbury introduced me to the joys of literature and he remains a favorite author to this day.
In high school, I devoured the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger (who had also attended McBurney), but in many ways, my heart still belonged to Bradbury. Yet, when I first began writing fiction with a certain seriousness myself, my models were Hemingway and Salinger and not the cherished Ray. I knew well enough to avoid science fiction’s curse. By my mid-twenties, I had written two fairly conventional novels that went nowhere (although the second earned me a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford), and when at twenty-seven I found that the only job for which I qualified was as a stock boy in a grocery store, I realized I had ruined my life with the pursuit of literature.
Writers never choose to write. Rather they discover over time that, for better or worse, writing is in their nature. They simply can’t help themselves. Although I had abandoned all hope of ever earning a living from my writing, I nevertheless continued to write. Every afternoon, when I returned home from a day of trimming lettuce and stamping prices on the tops of canned dog food, I’d sit down at my portable Royal and rattle off a page or two purely for my own pleasure. And here came the breakthrough failure had compelled me to confront. Because I no longer contemplated a writing career, I was free to abandon all the “rules” I had acquired preparing for it: always write what you know, write from experience, never write when stoned, keep a notebook handy. I gave up the misguided notion that writing is hard work. From now on, I wrote for the fun of it, for the sheer exuberant pleasure of making things up. I wrote when I was high as a kite. Best of all, I wrote what I didn’t know.
The outcome of all this rule-breaking fooling around was Alp, a zany sex-farce set in a mythical Switzerland, work that led John Leonard to call me “a satanic S. J. Perelman … by way of Disney and de Sade.” The path my little comic novel followed to a review in the New York Times seemed as haphazard and accidental as the
“M Y GOD, HE’S COMMITTED science fiction.” So wrote Harry Crews in 1971 in his review of Gray Matters for the New York Times Book Review. Of course, it helped that he went on to say the novel “turns out to be not SciFi, but an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.” Still, Crews had a point to make. Writers of serious literary fiction weren’t supposed to dirty their lily-white hands with generic trash. It didn’t matter that such fine work as The Oxbow Incident and The Bronc People were westerns, that both 1984 and Brave New World should be classified as science fiction, and that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both wrote what anyone would define as detective literature. Genre fiction remained something one despised and avoided at all costs. Even the slightest exposure might infect a writer with a bad case of brow-lowering.
I just didn’t get it. Anyone who reads for enjoyment (and what other reason is there for opening a work of fiction?) knows not to risk such premature judgment. Otherwise, we all would have to give up on the manifold pleasures of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, John le Carré and Stanislaw Lem, to mention but a few of the “serious” writers who have ventured into forbidden genre territory. I first encountered science fiction at a summer camp when I was twelve. Among the handful of battered secondhand books in the mess hall library was a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published three years earlier. From the opening blasts of “Rocket Summer” to the final loneliness of “There Shall Come Soft Rains” and “The Million-Year Picnic,” I was spellbound. Before this, I had read only comic books, golden age cape-wearing superheroes and the more disturbing psychosexual horrors of the EC canon. Bradbury introduced me to the joys of literature and he remains a favorite author to this day.
In high school, I devoured the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger (who had also attended McBurney), but in many ways, my heart still belonged to Bradbury. Yet, when I first began writing fiction with a certain seriousness myself, my models were Hemingway and Salinger and not the cherished Ray. I knew well enough to avoid science fiction’s curse. By my mid-twenties, I had written two fairly conventional novels that went nowhere (although the second earned me a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford), and when at twenty-seven I found that the only job for which I qualified was as a stock boy in a grocery store, I realized I had ruined my life with the pursuit of literature.
Writers never choose to write. Rather they discover over time that, for better or worse, writing is in their nature. They simply can’t help themselves. Although I had abandoned all hope of ever earning a living from my writing, I nevertheless continued to write. Every afternoon, when I returned home from a day of trimming lettuce and stamping prices on the tops of canned dog food, I’d sit down at my portable Royal and rattle off a page or two purely for my own pleasure. And here came the breakthrough failure had compelled me to confront. Because I no longer contemplated a writing career, I was free to abandon all the “rules” I had acquired preparing for it: always write what you know, write from experience, never write when stoned, keep a notebook handy. I gave up the misguided notion that writing is hard work. From now on, I wrote for the fun of it, for the sheer exuberant pleasure of making things up. I wrote when I was high as a kite. Best of all, I wrote what I didn’t know.
The outcome of all this rule-breaking fooling around was Alp, a zany sex-farce set in a mythical Switzerland, work that led John Leonard to call me “a satanic S. J. Perelman … by way of Disney and de Sade.” The path my little comic novel followed to a review in the New York Times seemed as haphazard and accidental as the
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