On Hell's Cartographers

I stumbled on Hell's Cartographers in the strangest way. I was looking for some book about speculation, and I discovered that the library catalog system has something akin to a science fiction criticism designation. It was all essay collections from authors (Samuel Delaney was well represented), and amidst all of the predictable pieces I saw a grey spine with a title glued to it. I don't know what happened to this book since its publication in 1975, but some real shit went down since that time, and the book took a beating.

I grabbed it, opened it up to read "Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers" as the subtitle, and added it to the stack. I didn't even check who the writers were. A collection of little biographies seemed like it would be a fun thing to read, and that initial estimation wasn't wrong. The writers who talk about their work in this book -- Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, and Brian Aldiss -- are all men of a certain age. Crucially, they remember what life was like before the New Wave of science fiction that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Silverberg tells a story about how he was, at one point, cranking out better than a million words a year in short stories, novels, and nonfiction books. This is, to me, an unthinkable amount of writing, but his explanation makes sense: Everything he wrote would be published, he never wrote more than one draft of anything, and he didn't want to do any other kind of labor. So the words poured out of him. His is not the only story that features word counts of that magnitude.

Hell's Cartographers drives home the parochial nature of science fiction in the period between the 1930s and the 1960s. There were a small number of people with very similar references and inspirations writing very formulaic work for an incredibly wide audience that simply ate it up for decades. It seems that, for the most part, these people were not living very exciting lives. Instead, they were just cranking out space adventure tales at a mile a minute.

Alfred Bester's biography illuminates this. Bester is unique in his generation of writers, at least as far as I can tell, because he was good at something other than writing science fiction stories. He worked in superhero comics, wrote for television and radio serials, and was an advertiser for a number of years. He understood how the whole industry that he was based in and around worked, rather than being someone who was just writing or editing, and that shows up in an anecdote where he talks about one of his few meetings with John W. Campbell. Bester, coming out of television and the advertising world, was used to a little bit of flash when it came to his lunches. After Campbell elaborated a strong defense of dianetics, he took Bester to "a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks" where he got a "liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a coke."

Bester left that meeting no more convinced of dianetics. He "returned to civilization where [he] had three double gibsons and don't be stingy with the onions."

That's the kind of book that Hell's Cartographers is. It shows the interior life of these science fiction people, and they all have fun anecdotes to tell about the world that was before this one (or, really, the world before the one that was before this one).

It's also remarkable how similar these stories are. As you can see from the list of participants, they're all men. More than one mentions how lucky they are to write science fiction and spend time with beautiful women. [As an aside, what a strangely 20th-century brag for the nerd set. It's the perfect distillation of the casual misogyny that made that entire world go round.] It is notable, however, that some people I'd imagine who would be in there are missing. No Harlan Ellison? No Gene Wolfe? They were certainly of the younger generation here, but it seems like they fit as much with that group as Silverberg does.

I'm rambling. The book is this strange and wonderful look into the manias that these science fiction people were concerned with during their lives. You can see the birth of sf fandom, the weird interiority of publishing, and the shoestring lives that all of these people ground their bones to dust in order to support. I don't think these people died hyper-wealthy, but they died with money, and they might be of the last generation where you could be a middle of the road sf writer as a full-time job and still live comfortably until your body gave out.

The life of the mind and some modicum of material happiness. How novel.