Science Fiction Writers

  Not for the first time in my writing career, however, I found myself losing interest in something just as I gained access to its inner circle. Fortunately, the London science-fiction community had no shortage of burned-out cases and perennially promising talents, and since I was as keen a collector of science-fiction first editions as ever, the writers and fans accepted me amiably enough, though my tendency, noted by Kingsley Amis, to linger all night over half of a lager meant I was always looked on a little askance.
   This cut both ways, since science-fiction and fantasy writers don’t make the best company. Those who aren’t scholarly and dull are usually in some way psychologically maimed. ‘All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men,’ wrote Damon Knight, the doyen of science-fiction critics. ‘[Robert E.] Howard [author of the stories about Conan the Cimmerian] was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide. [H.P.] Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine: [A.B.] Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo. The trouble with Conan is that the human race never produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.’
   None of the writers I met qualified for the description ‘sick’, but, for many, a career on the margins of literature had taken its toll. In his long career, Harry Harrison, for instance, had dabbled in just about every form of fiction from comic-book dialogue balloons to a ‘Saint’ novel ghosted for Leslie Charteris. The result was evident in his books. His novel The Stainless Steel Rat and its sequels squirmed with his cynicism, as did his Deathworld trilogy. ‘Slippery’ Jim diGriz of The Stainless Steel Rat is a cosmic con man whose larcenous skills are co-oped to help govern the galaxy, while, in the Deathworld books, colonists land on a planet where every plant and animal is bent on their destruction. Only in the third book do they discover that both flora and fauna can sense the emotions of the invaders; registering Man’s innate hostility, they return it with interest. The message of both series is clear: everyone in authority is a crook, and everything is out to get you.

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005), pp. 210-211.