Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (510 page)

Turning from them to look across the tables, Kessel sees a little man sitting alone beside the dance floor, watching the young couples sway in the music. To his astonishment he recognizes Wells. He’s been given another chance. Hesitating only a moment, Kessel abandons his friends, goes over to the table and introduces himself.

“Excuse me, Mr. Wells. You might not remember me, but I was one of the men you saw yesterday in Virginia working along the road. The CCC?”

Wells looks up at a gangling young man wearing a khaki uniform, his olive tie neatly knotted and tucked between the second and third buttons of his shirt. His hair is slicked down, parted in the middle. Wells doesn’t remember anything of him. “Yes?”

“I—I been reading your stories and books a lot of years. I admire your work.”

Something in the man’s earnestness affects Wells. “Please sit down,” he says.

Kessel takes a seat. “Thank you.” He pronounces “th” as “t” so that “thank” comes out “tank.” He sits tentatively, as if the chair is mortgaged, and seems at a loss for words.

“What’s your name?”

“John Kessel. My friends call me Jack.”

The orchestra finishes a song and the dancers stop in their places, applauding. Up on the bandstand, Ellington leans into the microphone. “Mood Indigo,” he says, and instantly they swing into it: the clarinet moans in low register, in unison with the muted trumpet and trombone, paced by the steady rhythm guitar, the brushed drums. The song’s melancholy suits Wells’s mood.

“Are you from Virginia?”

“My family lives in Buffalo. That’s in New York.”

“Ah—yes. Many years ago I visited Niagara Falls, and took the train through Buffalo.” Wells remembers riding along a lakefront of factories spewing waste water into the lake, past heaps of coal, clouds of orange and black smoke from blast furnaces. In front of dingy rowhouses, ragged hedges struggled through the smoky air. The landscape of laissez faire. “I imagine the Depression has hit Buffalo severely.”

“Yes sir.”

“What work did you do there?”

Kessel feels nervous, but he opens up a little. “A lot of things. I used to be an electrician until I got blacklisted.”

“Blacklisted?”

“I was working on this job where the super told me to set the wiring wrong. I argued with him but he just told me to do it his way. So I waited until he went away, then I sneaked into the construction shack and checked the blueprints. He didn’t think I could read blueprints, but I could. I found out I was right and he was wrong. So I went back and did it right. The next day when he found out, he fired me. Then the so-and-so went and got me blacklisted.”

Though he doesn’t know how much credence to put in this story, Wells’s sympathies are aroused. It’s the kind of thing that must happen all the time. He recognizes in Kessel the immigrant stock that, when Wells visited the U.S. in 1906, made him skeptical about the future of America. He’d theorized that these Italians and Slavs, coming from lands with no democratic tradition, unable to speak English, would degrade the already corrupt political process. They could not be made into good citizens; they would not work well when they could work poorly, and given the way the economic deal was stacked against them would seldom rise high enough to do better.

But Kessel is clean, well-spoken despite his accent, and deferential. Wells realizes that this is one of the men who was topping trees along the river road.

Meanwhile, Kessel detects a sadness in Wells’s manner. He had not imagined that Wells might be sad, and he feels sympathy for him. It occurs to him, to his own surprise, that he might be able to make
Wells
feel better. “So—what do you think of our country?” he asks.

“Good things seem to be happening here. I’m impressed with your President Roosevelt.”

“Roosevelt’s the best friend the working man ever had.” Kessel pronounces the name “Roozvelt.” “He’s a man that—” he struggles for the words, “—that’s not for the past. He’s for the future.”

It begins to dawn on Wells that Kessel is not an example of a class, or a sociological study, but a man like himself with an intellect, opinions, dreams. He thinks of his own youth, struggling to rise in a class-bound society. He leans forward across the table. “You believe in the future? You think things can be different?”

“I think they have to be, Mr. Wells.”

Wells sits back. “Good. So do I.”

Kessel is stunned by this intimacy. It is more than he had hoped for, yet it leaves him with little to say. He wants to tell Wells about his dreams, and at the same time ask him a thousand questions. He wants to tell Wells everything he has seen in the world, and to hear Wells tell him the same. He casts about for something to say.

“I always liked your writing. I like to read scientifiction.”

“Scientifiction?”

Kessel shifts his long legs. “You know—stories about the future. Monsters from outer space. The Martians. The Time Machine. You’re the best scientifiction writer I ever read, next to Edgar Rice Burroughs.” Kessel pronounces “Edgar,” “Eedgar.”

“Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

“Yes.”

“You
like
Burroughs?”

Kessel hears the disapproval in Wells’s voice. “Well—maybe not as much as, as
The Time Machine
,” he stutters. “Burroughs never wrote about monsters as good as your Morlocks.”

Wells is nonplussed. “Monsters.”

“Yes.” Kessel feels something’s going wrong, but he sees no way out. “But he does put more romance in his stories. That princess—Dejah Thoris?”

All Wells can think of is Tarzan in his loincloth on the movie screen, and the moronic audience. After a lifetime of struggling, a hundred books written to change the world, in the service of men like this, is this all his work has come to? To be compared to the writer of pulp trash? To “Eedgar Rice Burroughs?” He laughs aloud.

At Wells’s laugh, Kessel stops. He knows he’s done something wrong, but he doesn’t know what.

Wells’s weariness has dropped down onto his shoulders again like an iron cloak. “Young man—go away,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Go back to Buffalo.”

Kessel’s face burns. He stumbles from the table. The room is full of noise and laughter. He’s run up against that wall again. He’s just an ignorant polack after all; it’s his stupid accent, his clothes. He should have talked about something else—
The Outline of History
, politics. But what made him think he could talk like an equal with a man like Wells in the first place? Wells lives in a different world. The future is for men like him. Kessel feels himself the prey of fantasies. It’s a bitter joke.

He clutches the bar, orders another beer. His reflection in the mirror behind the ranked bottles is small and ugly.

“Whatsa matter, Jack?” Turkel asks him. “Didn’t he want to dance neither?”

* * * *

And that’s the story, essentially, that never happened.

Not long after this, Kessel did go back to Buffalo. During the Second World War he worked as a crane operator in the 40-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel. He met his wife, Angela Giorlandino, during the war, and they married in June 1945. After the war he quit the plant and became a carpenter. Their first child, a girl, died in infancy. Their second, a boy, was born in 1950. At that time Kessel began building the house that, like so many things in his life, he was never to entirely complete. He worked hard, had two more children. There were good years and bad ones. He held a lot of jobs. The recession of 1958 just about flattened him; our family had to go on welfare. Things got better, but they never got good. After the 1950s, the economy of Buffalo, like that of all U.S. industrial cities caught in the transition to a post-industrial age, declined steadily. Kessel never did work for himself, and as an old man was no more prosperous than he had been as a young one.

In the years preceding his death in 1946 Wells was to go on to further disillusionment. His efforts to create a sane world met with increasing frustration. He became bitter, enraged. Moura Budberg never agreed to marry him, and he lived alone. The war came, and it was, in some ways, even worse than he had predicted. He continued to propagandize for the socialist world state throughout, but with increasing irrelevance. The new leftists like Orwell considered him a dinosaur, fatally out of touch with the realities of world politics, a simpleminded technocrat with no understanding of the darkness of the human heart. Wells’s last book, Mind at the End of its Tether, proposed that the human race faced an evolutionary crisis that would lead to its extinction unless humanity leapt to a higher state of consciousness; a leap about which Wells speculated with little hope or conviction.

Sitting there in the Washington ballroom in 1934, Wells might well have understood that for all his thinking and preaching about the future, the future had irrevocably passed him by.

* * * *

But the story isn’t quite over yet. Back in the Washington ballroom Wells sits humiliated, a little guilty for sending Kessel away so harshly. Kessel, his back to the dance floor, stares humiliated into his glass of beer. Gradually, both of them are pulled back from dark thoughts of their own inadequacies by the sound of Ellington’s orchestra.

Ellington stands in front of the big grand piano, behind him the band: three saxes, clarinet, two trumpets, trombones, a drummer, guitarist, bass. “Creole Love Call,” Ellington whispers into the microphone, then sits again at the piano. He waves his hand once, twice, and the clarinets slide into a low, wavering theme. The trumpet, muted, echoes it. The bass player and guitarist strum ahead at a deliberate pace, rhythmic, erotic, bluesey. Kessel and Wells, separate across the room, each unaware of the other, are alike drawn in. The trumpet growls a chorus of raucous solo. The clarinet follows, wailing. The music is full of pain and longing—but pain controlled, ordered, mastered. Longing unfulfilled, but not overpowering.

As I write this, it plays on my stereo. If anyone has a right to bitterness at thwarted dreams, a black man in 1934 has that right. That such men could, in such conditions, make this music opens a world of possibilities.

Through the music speaks a truth about art that Wells does not understand, but that I hope to: that art doesn’t have to deliver a message in order to say something important. That art isn’t always a means to an end but sometimes an end in itself. That art may not be able to change the world, but it can still change the moment.

Through the music speaks a truth about life that Kessel, sixteen years before my birth, doesn’t understand, but that I hope to: that life constrained is not life wasted. That despite unfulfilled dreams, peace is possible.

Listening, Wells feels that peace steal over his soul. Kessel feels it too.

And so they wait, poised, calm, before they move on into their respective futures, into our own present. Into the world of limitation and loss. Into Buffalo.

* * * *

for my father

* * * *

Copyright © 1991 by Mercury Press, Inc.

James Gunn: Shaping Science Fiction

During his still-lively, 60-year career, James E. Gunn has been a major force in shaping science fiction. Author of 26 books, more than 100 stories, and hundreds of articles and introductions appearing in all the major SF publications, Gunn’s writing has permeated the field. He also edited 18 books including the essential
Road to Science Fiction
series. Four of his works were adapted to radio (for
X Minus One
, 1956-1957), one play to live theater at the University of Kansas (KU’s first student-produced play, 1947), and two to television (Desilu Playhouse, 1959; ABC Movie of the Week, 1969; plus a later television series). Most of his fiction has been reprinted - some as many as a dozen times - in Australia, China, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, South America, Spain, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. As of this writing, Gunn nears completion on a twenty-seventh book, a novel entitled
Transcendental
, chapters of which have already seen print.

At least as influential as his writing and editing is Gunn’s teaching. Over the years, he has touched the lives of almost everyone involved in SF, from the millions who read his stories and books to the thousands who have been his students. Dozens of his students have gone on to enjoy success as authors, editors, scholars, and educators in their own rights, including Pat Cadigan, Bradley Denton, Kij Johnson, John Kessel, and Ann Tonsor Zeddies.

Despite prolific output, Gunn only wrote full-time for four years prior to retirement. He served in the United States Navy from 1943–1946, and when he returned from the war as a Lieutenant he earned a B.A. in Journalism in 1947 then an M.A. in English in 1951 from the University of Kansas, and did graduate work in theater at KU and Northwestern. He spent a couple of years working as an editor in Racine, Wisconsin, before his period of writing full-time in Kansas City. In 1955, Gunn returned to KU as first an assistant instructor, then managing editor of the Alumni Association, then assistant to the Chancellor for University Relations during the turbulent years of 1958-1970. He taught his first SF class in 1969, and began teaching full-time in 1970. He was named Professor of English in 1974 and continued in this role until 1993, when he officially retired—though he continues to serve KU in a variety of capacities to this day as Emeritus Professor. Gunn also served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) from 1971–72 and was President of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) from 1980-82, the first ever to preside over both organizations.

In 1970, Gunn began filming the
Literature of Science Fiction (now available on DVD), a series of interviews with and lectures from a variety of important SF personalities, to assist his teaching. Most important, “Gunn was embarked on an even larger quest,” says Paul Di Filippo in a review of the series, “preserving a vast horde of knowledge locked up in the brains of these men… In effect, Gunn was creating an oral history and exegesis of the genre that would preserve seminal information and critical thoughts about the field for all who came after.”

Also in 1970, the KU libraries made their first major SF acquisition, which James Gunn needed for his new class. Gunn collected his lectures, along with images from the KU Spencer Research Library, into the 1975 book,
Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
, which was honored with the Special Award during the 1976 Hugos.

SF Programs and Awards at the University of Kansas

In 1975, Gunn held his first Intensive Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction (originally co-teaching with Steve Goldman, later with Chris McKitterick). In 1977, the Institute became an annual event that continues to this day as a two-week course offered each summer at KU for undergraduate or graduate credit, alternating each year between the SF novel and the SF short story. In 2006, these courses became available to distance-learners via KU Continuing Education.

The Institute begins with an event called the Campbell Conference, held each July at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In 1979, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction novel of the year was presented for the first time at KU as part of this weekend conference devoted to teaching and writing SF. The Conference has since grown to three and sometimes four days, twice held in conjunction with the SFRA Conference and once with the Heinlein Centennial.

The Campbell Award was created in 1973 and previously presented in various venues around the world, including Oxford, Dublin, and Stockholm, to honor the late editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine (now named
Analog
). Writers and critics Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss established the award in Campbell’s name as a way of continuing his efforts to encourage writers to produce their best possible work. This juried award remains one of the genre’s most-respected honors.

The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short SF of the year was added to the Conference’s award ceremony in 1987. Gunn and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his widow Jayne Sturgeon and Sturgeon’s children, saw this as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction. Sturgeon’s connection with KU continues to this day, not only through the annual award in his name (also juried), but also through the deposit of his papers with KU’s Spencer Research Library.

The Conference brings winners of both awards to Lawrence, along with other professionals in the field. The guest list reads like a “Who‘s Who“ of the world’s top SF writers, a record of whom is available on the Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s website (). Related events include signings, readings, talks, receptions, and more.

From 1996–2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame recognition was also presented during the Conference’s award ceremony. In 2005, the inductions moved to Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

In 1985, Gunn held the first annual Writer’s Workshop in Science Fiction, and in 1996, authors Chris McKitterick and Kij Johnson joined him in teaching the workshop as well as assisting with Gunn’s other SF projects. This intensive workshop continues to run during the two weeks prior to the Campbell Conference, with Bradley Denton joining the teaching team starting in 2011. Workshoppers enjoy the unique opportunity to meet and often work with the Campbell and Sturgeon award-winning authors, as well as other professionals attending the Conference. Many students who attend the Workshop have gone on to publish their work and win awards, including three recent graduates who won the grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest.

Starting in 2003, Johnson began teaching a new Science Fiction & Fantasy Novel Writers Workshop during the two weeks of the short-fiction Writing Workshop. She has since added a follow-up “Repeat Offenders” workshop, which runs during the first week of the Institute.

In 2006, Gunn and McKitterick teamed with Philip Baringer (Professor of Physics) and other KU professors to create a cross-curriculum course entitled, “Science, Technology, and Society: Examining the Future Through a Science-Fiction Lens.” This course is offered every spring semester at KU.

Throughout the year, Gunn and McKitterick both serve as undergraduate and graduate SF thesis advisors, and McKitterick offers directed-study opportunities for SF scholars and writers. Other professors occasionally offer courses suitable for scholars wishing to expand their understanding of the genre.

Since 2005, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction offers a writing prize to the author of an outstanding SF story written for an English class. The James E. Gunn Award for Science Fiction Writing is named in honor of the man who has worked tirelessly to establish KU as a locus for SF education.

Finally, starting in 2009, the Center offers a substantial scholarship for studying or writing SF at KU. The Scholarship in Science Fiction Studies is given by a KU alumnae friendly to the Center and the English Department.

During the summer, a serious student of science fiction could participate in three different writing workshops, the Campbell Conference, and the Intensive SF Institute for a month of total immersion in the genre. Remaining in Lawrence, this same student could continue SF studies every semester, possibly supported by scholarship.

The Center for the Study of Science Fiction

As a focus for the growing diversity of SF-related programs and activities at KU, Gunn founded the Center for the Study of Science Fiction in 1982, which he serves as Founding Director. In 1991, Dr. Richard W. Gunn, a retired physician in Kansas City and James Gunn’s brother, created an endowment for the Center, and it was renamed the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction in honor of their parents. This initial gift was followed by half of the residue of his estate.

The other half endowed the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture series. This annual lecture has sponsored speakers including scholar Fredric Jameson, the William A. Lane Professor at Duke University; Bill Brown, the Edgar Carson Waller Professor at the University of Chicago; China Miéville, the British author who launched the “New Weird” genre; and Shakespeare scholar and author James Shapiro.

When Johnson and McKitterick moved to Lawrence in 2002 to work with Gunn, he named them the Center’s Associate Directors. Johnson serves on the Sturgeon Award jury, McKitterick (now Center Director) on the Campbell Award jury, and Gunn chairs both juries.

About SF

In 2005, the Center established AboutSF, a resource center designed to coordinate volunteer activities promoting reading, teaching, and understanding science fiction. It is supported by donations used to fund two half-time students: the AboutSF Coordinator whose mission focuses on educational outreach, and the Web Developer/Designer responsible for developing the website () and promoting AboutSF’s mission.

AboutSF is a joint project of the Center, SFWA, and SFRA, with generous support from Tor Books, The Heinlein Prize Trust, Kansas City’s ConQuesT convention, and several individual donors.

Projects include resources and workshops to help educators learn more about teaching SF at all levels, a speaker search to help educators find authors and thinkers willing to present on speculative literature, and tools for facilitating literature donations to libraries and youth centers as well as coordinating volunteer efforts across the field - especially to increase SF readership among young people.

AboutSF’s mission continues to grow, with new audio, video, and other materials appearing on the website almost every week.

CSSF Library Collections

Since 1970, KU’s Spencer Research Library has served as the North American repository for World SF, SFRA, SFWA, and the Science Fiction Oral History Association. Since then SF has become the fastest-growing special collection at Spencer Research Library, mostly through gifts. Spencer now houses more than 200 linear feet of manuscripts and papers from Brian W. Aldiss, Lloyd Biggle, Algis Budrys, Thomas Easton, James Gunn, Hunter Holly, Lee Killough, P. Schuyler Miller, T.L. Sherred, Cordwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, Donald A. Wollheim, the Robert Mills Agency and the Richard Curtis Agency, and SFRA. Spencer also houses approximately 20,000 SF-related books, including fiction, reference works, and critical volumes. Other print holdings include more than 120 separate magazine titles going back to the first issues of Astounding, a large collection of fanzines and convention literature, and official papers from the SFWA presidencies of James Gunn, Frederik Pohl, and Jack Williamson. In addition to print materials, the collection holds at least 500 audio recordings and original films, as well as miscellaneous items such as buttons, posters, prospectuses, and a Nebula award statuette. Current efforts are focused on acquiring manuscripts, papers, award-winning volumes, and pre-1950 books and magazines. Parts of the collection may be browsed via the library website at .

In 2007 when Spencer narrowed its acquisition efforts, the Center moved for the first time to a physical space at KU. In 2009 it opened a comprehensive lending library of SF books and magazines that is now in process of being catalogued. Here SF scholars visiting campus also have access to materials and work space, including a private desk and computer, across the street from Spencer. The CSSF collection began with donations from its directors and grew by some 8000 books thanks to a 2009 donation by Anna England in honor of John H. Beyer Jr., who had built the collection. This donation expanded the available magazine collection to many thousands of issues, ranging from the 1940s through today. The Center’s library also holds many years of audio and video recordings from the Campbell Conference and Awards Banquet, author-interview DVDs, a collection of photographs from the files of Science Fiction Chronicle contributed by Andrew I. Porter, miscellaneous papers, photos, art, and more.