DONALD REMEMBERS VINTAGE SCI-FI

I was 12, and the Science Fiction Book Club had just sent me my first monthly selection, Anthony Boucher's two-volume anthology, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. There was this one story by Phillip K. Dick called The Father-Thing: An eight year-old boy, Charles, knows that the sullen, soulless thing that looks like his father isn't really his father. It so happens that the bogus dad, having just emerged from an egg deposited in the garage by a bug-like alien, has eaten out his real father's insides and taken his place. Charles tries to warn his mother, but of course she doesn't believe him. With the help of two neighborhood pals, Charles destroys the extra-terrestrial bug, the Father-Thing, and a couple more eggs containing the partially developed simulacrums of Charles and his mother. The kids have saved the world from an alien takeover. A 1956 film based on a Jack Finney novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the one featuring Kevin McCarthy and a town invaded by Pod People - was another take on the same scary idea.

Contrary to all the popular depictions of the fifties as a time when teens danced on the counters of a thousand pastel-dappled soda shops to the sounds of twangy guitars, the decade was, in fact, characterized by a nail-biting paranoia. The Father-Thing and Finney's Body Snatchers played off the fear of discovering a Commie trained in the art of mind control behind every hedge. In a way, the suspicion that one's neighbor might be one of those nefarious Reds was even more disturbing than the threat of thermonuclear war.

The Father-Thing, though, affected me on a much more personal level. My father had recently moved us into a brand new housing development down on the Central Jersey flats, far from our home town near Manhattan. Indeed, he'd secured a position as comptroller for the man who'd built the thing. An instant neighborhood with hundreds of more-or-less identical homes on half-acre lots set along the gently winding streets, it wasn't exactly finished when we moved in. The tracts where the lawns were supposed to go were still square patches of dark mud, and there was a big mound of the stuff on every corner.

Driving to the new house on the day of the move, I had tried (as I'd tried many times before) to dissuade my parents from making this terrible mistake. This time, I played all my cards, reminding them that we were cutting ourselves off from our extended family back in Bergen County, from my uncles, aunts and cousins; that a change of schools would irreversibly disrupt my academic trajectory; and that the place they'd chosen to live, this "Kendall Park", was an accursed wasteland that would suck the life out of our heretofore vital family and transform it into a cryptful of mindless zombies, etc., etc. Sadly, my appeal fell on deaf ears.

At this point, I should probably disclose that, in truth, both my parents, though not without their eccentricities, were basically a couple of sweethearts. My dad, like a lot of Depression-bred ex-G.I.s, was simply looking to plunk his family down on a clean, safe, green patch that was within his means. Nevertheless, at the time, their rotten little bookworm of a son saw the move as a grand betrayal. In fact, I began to imagine that this was only the latest in a series of metamorphoses that was gradually transforming my parents into… Parent-Things.

In an old bleached-out color photo from the late thirties, my mother is standing in the sun in a cotton dress, laughing, her curly, reddish-brown hair worn long in the style of the era. From age five to fifteen, she had worked every summer as a singer at a hotel in the "Jewish Alps" of upstate New York. As she got older, her professional past was still detectable in her good looks and the way she carried herself. But by the mid-fifties, a combination of forces began to effect a curious mutation.

There were the new technologies, e.g., the advent of aerosol hairspray (and the accompanying hairstyles) that turned my mother's once silky locks into a rigid, lacquered hive. Around the same time, her flowing cotton print dresses began to be replaced by brightly colored jackets and pants that were apparently made of the same polymeric stuff as the beige carpet that covered almost the entire floor of our house. Despite my protests, I, too, was obliged to deck myself out in a pair of macromolecular "slacks" (beige, natch) for special occasions. Beige was the default color of the decade. The coolest girl in my high school used to throw herself down on her mom's Sahara-colored wall-to-wall carpet and crawl from one side of the living room to the other, croaking, "Water… Water!"

As a housewife, my mother was the ideal target of the not-so-hidden persuaders of Madison Avenue, and she enthusiastically bought the whole Cold War package: The house always reeked of Lemon Pledge; my sister and I drank huge glasses of milk laced with Bosco, except for the month or two we were sipping it though those conspicuously toxic "Flavor Straws"; my mother's cooking schedule really lightened up when she realized she could feed us Swanson's TV Dinners (with apple cobbler) and the limp fishsticks of Mrs. Paul. Desert anyone? She bought Twinkies and Yodels by the box-load.

More disturbing was my parents' eagerness to assimilate, to blend in with mainstream American society. After all, as second and third-generation American Jews, they were already most of the way there - they didn't even look particularly Jewish. On the other hand, I sure did, and my father, unconsciously at least, was determined to deal with it. When he was a kid, his father's paint store had been burned to the ground by homegrown Nazis, and this, combined with the trauma of his wartime experiences, left him with a complicated attitude toward his Jewish identity. It's not that he wanted to hide me in the cellar or anything. But in order to, you know, dial it down a little, he was determined to militarize my appearance until I looked like Flat-Top Joey, our newspaper boy and my father's template for cheerful, obedient, hard-working youth. So, every two weeks or so, in a supreme ritual of humiliation, he'd march me down to the barbershop for a severe crewcut. No matter: no one was ever going to mistake me for Neil Armstrong.

One of my primary doors of escape was science fiction (others were the piano, contemporary jazz and building plastic models of fighter jets). But, mainly, I read books: the encyclopedia, novels, biography, history, and sci-fi. In a used bookstore in nearby Princeton, I soon found an antidote to The Father-Thing in a novel called The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt (a lot of sci-fi authors seemed to have exotic, musty-sounding names with a lot of initials). One of the strangest pulp creations of all time, it had first appeared as a serial in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945 and was published as a hardcover novel in 1948.
Apparently, van Vogt used to wake himself up every ninety minutes so he could write down his dreams. He'd then work the dreams into a narrative until he'd achieved what he liked to call "pulp music". Maybe that's why The World of Null-A reads like a combination of Raymond Chandler, Through the Looking Glass and Duck Soup.

In the year 2560, Gilbert Gosseyn arrives in the City of the Machine to join in the annual competition to determine who tests highest in the skills of General Semantics, a Null-A (non-Aristotelian) discipline that's been adopted as the philosophical foundation of Earth society. The highest scorers get to go to Venus where an experimental, all-Null-A society has been established. But before Gosseyn gets a chance to show his skills, he's beset by a series of mind-blowing calamities. On page five, an official lie detection device informs him that he's not who he thinks he is: the machine tells him he's not from a small town in Florida; his wife's not dead, as he believed; in fact, he was never even married. Those are just memories implanted in his brain by an unknown "cosmic chess player".

A confirmed fraud, Gosseyn's thrown out of his hotel. He meets a girl who turns out to be the woman he thought was his dead wife. He's kidnapped by a gang of conspirators and accused of being an agent of the "Galactic League". They hook him up to a machine that analyzes his nervous system and then throw him into a dungeon. During an escape attempt, he's cut to pieces by machine gun fire and, for good measure, fried by an energy beam.

When he wakes up, he's in a Venusian forest, in a spanking new body, a clone of the first. Thus far, he's been murdered, resurrected in a new body and transported to another planet, but, no worries - it's all good: Gosseyn's rigorous training in the mind-body coordination techniques of General Semantics has rendered him immune to trauma. All he needs to do is take a brief "cortico-thalamic pause", and he's ready to face the next bizarre plot twist. Eventually, we find out that Gosseyn is a mutant, the next stage in human evolution, a super-being with an "extra brain" who's being manipulated by the cosmic chess player in order to combat galactic conspirators who want to wipe out the General Semantics crowd and take over the universe. Got that, chillun'?

Wow, I thought, this is great. This "cortico-thalamic pause" business would be of enormous value in dealing with Parent-Things, Teacher-Things and Life-Things in general. Moreover, the idea of neutralizing the reactive part of the brain so as to adapt instantaneously to any given situation dovetailed nicely with the concept of Cool as practised, or so I believed, by the jazz musicians I idolized. And, like Gilbert Gosseyn, I could be a good mutant and combat the forces of evil throughout the galaxy. But how do I get the training? There was no Institute of General Semantics. It was just something out of A.E. van Vogt's imagination.

Wrong, little Donny. If I'd just done a little research, I would've found out that a very real Institute of General Semantics was housed in a country estate in Lime Rock, Connecticut, a few hours drive from Kendall Park. It seems that van Vogt was using his novel to illustrate his greatest intellectual passion: the system of General Semantics as described in Science and Sanity, a very thick book by a jaunty Polish aristocrat, Count Alfred Korzybski.

After serving in the Polish Army during World War I, Korzybski decided that people had better find a way to get along with each other. Of course, the same impulse had generated Communism, Fascism, Anarcho-Syndicalism and a hundred other political "isms". The Count, though, saw all problems in human relations as problems in semantics, i.e., the fact that words meant different things to different people. Moreover, General Semantics, his own invention, would also take into account neurological events: the ways in which people reacted to new words, new information and new situations. Confronted with a stressful stimulus, one's reflexes and/or conditioned behavior often preempted the appropriate measured response.

Korzybski wondered if there was a way to align the cortex, the part of the brain that has dominion over rational thought, and the thalamus, the seat of emotions (hence, van Vogt's cortico-thalamic pause). For starters, people had to change the way they perceived and evaluated the world around them. Rather than employ Aristotelian logic - i.e., the binary, yes/no, black vs. white type of thinking - the Count favored multi-valued, pluralistic thought that was modulated by - but not ruled by - subjective feeling. Basically, Korzybski was saying, hey, be cool: "Don't get mad - get Null-A!"

One of the Count's most quoted sentences is, "The map is not the territory". In other words, don't confuse the word with the object, the description with the thing itself. People who want to sell you something intentionally take advantage of this confusion. For instance, political speeches, TV commercials and Fox News use language rife with "truthiness" instead of truth and containing "factoids", not facts.

General Semantics also advances the concept of time-binding: The fact that humans can leave books and recordings and films to transmit knowledge to successive generations give them an enormous evolutionary advantage, one that musn't be squandered. Then there's the related concept of abstraction: when we see an event, we never see its essence, but abstract just a slice of the whole. In order to make use of this knowledge, the Count believed that one must be re-educated to process information with an open mind, with a minimum of unhealthy ego and in a spirit of cooperation, not competition. Although he suggests a number of different learning techniques, one of the most important tools was a discussion group that was part seminar and part group therapy. If you were lucky, the group leader was the Count himself.

If this is starting to remind you of any number of human potential movements that sprung up during the latter part of the twentieth century, it's no accident. The editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell, the man who's vision ushered in the "Golden Age of Science Fiction", was obsessed with the Nietszchean concept that called for a class of supermen at the top of the social hierarchy. When Campbell read Korzybski's book, he envisioned Null-A Training as the first step to some sort of actual Uber-Mutancy, and urged his team of writers, including Robert Heinlein, Lester del Rey, L. Sprague DeCamp and van Vogt, to work the concept into their stories. Another of his Astounding writers, L. Ron Hubbard, had an even better idea: He co-opted some of the Count's more accessible ideas, threw in some basic Freud, and wrote Dianetics. In 1950, the charismatic Hubbard even convinced his old pal van Vogt to run his California dianetics operation. Later, the two pulp writers had a falling-out when Hubbard, dismayed by diminishing sales figures, propped up dianetics with the overarching concept of Scientology, a fanciful religion that might have been taken right out one of his space operas.

Many "legit" psychologists have acknowledged a debt to General Semantics: Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy, Esalen), Albert Ellis (Cognitive Therapy) and Neuro-Linguistic Programmers Bandler and Grinder were all heavy Korzybski-ites. So were Buckminster Fuller, S.I. Hayakawa, Alvin Toffler, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, philosopher Alan Watts, literary theorist Kenneth Burke and the originator of the Tonight Show, Steve Allen (smock-smock!). Additional science fiction writers who we're influenced by General Semantics and/or A.E van Vogt: Frank Herbert, Phillip K. Dick (very big on amnesiac mutants), Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert Anton Wilson, Poul Anderson, Philip Jose Farmer and many more. In recent years, a new generation of sci-fi writers have been exploring the latest pimp-my-human movement. It's known as Transhumanism and has a logo every bit as snappy as Null-A: H+.

After Science and Sanity became a runaway hit with the egghead crowd, the Count, in 1938, established the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago (it moved to Connecticut in 1946). In attendance at his summer lecture series of 1939 was Harvard student William S. Burroughs, the future writer of Junkie, Queer, Naked Lunch and other works. Several of the core concepts that Burroughs would preach to his flock - the idea that language is a virus, the routine about the "IS of identity" and the "EITHER/OR" problem - certainly had their origins in General Semantics. So, if we are alert to the fact that Burroughs was an idol of both J.G Ballard and William Gibson, we can trace Null-A's influence back through three generations of sci-fi greats.

A note: In the mid-60s, Burroughs joined the Church of Scientology and was a member until 1972 when, disgusted with Hubbard's increasingly megalomaniacal statements and behavior, he moved on to higher ground, so to speak. Apparently, he was still quoting Korzybski through his last days.

In September of '66, my formerly tweedy, graying poetry professor, Anthony Hecht, showed up for the new term in black and white-striped Uncle Sam bellbottoms, a bright paisley shirt, a suede vest and Beatle boots. We all assumed that these, along with a new laid-back, goofy expression, were the souvenirs of a summer spent among the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, a section of San Francisco that was just starting it's climb to glory. Of course, my pals and I had to check it out as well. So, a few months later, I drove out there with a couple of friends.

The scene, made eerily vivid by the combination of psychdelic drugs and its own outrageous novelty, was pure sci fi: all these dazzling young girls dressed up in home-made outfits inspired by Pocahontas, Maid Marion, Annie Oakley and whoever. Tall, bony drug dealers with ponytails would walk past you muttering the names of their wares without the vowels, just in case you were a narc: Hsh! - Grss! - Zd! - Spd!. Blue Cheer, a group that touted itself as the loudest band in the world, was playing down the street at the Straight Theater.

It was fascinating, for about a week, anyway. Then you started to notice that a lot of the kids looked all waxy and wild-eyed, and that they were talking much too slow or much too fast and then you got that Oh Shit feeling like Lou Costello thinking he's talking to Abbott and then realizing he's talking to the Wolfman. On the corner, you'd spot the hustling predator (whose consciousness hadn't been raised as yet) looking to score off the middle-class kids who'd walked right onto their turf. It was over, bro, before it even hit Life Magazine.

By 1968, the paranoia was thick. The Vietnam War was escalating, Kennedy II and King were assassinated and both the right and the left were caught in a cycle of fear and fury. Several gruesome murders (the "Groovy" murders, Manson) broke the spirit of the alternative community. Almost immediately, the counterculture, this alliance of aspiring mutants, seemed to have a nervous breakdown and fragment into claques devoted to one authority figure or another: You could sign up with the Maharishi, Meher Baba, Rajneesh and his Orange People, Sun Myung Moon, the Sufis, the Jesus Freaks, the Hari Krishnas and various sects of Buddhists. Alternately, there were the human potential movements already mentioned, plus EST, Arica, Primal Therapy and scores of others. In the political sphere, you had the Panthers and the Weathermen. All this provided me and my droll companions with a lot of great material for after-dinner analysis, with or without herbal mood augmentation. Not that we all weren't feeling a little shaky ourselves. Now everyone had a map, but, as the Count liked to say, the map is not the territory. After a while, there wasn't any territory, either.

There were a few writers, like anti-authoritarian satirists Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, who wouldn't buy into John Campbell's dream of a mutant utopia. In the early fifties, when Philip K. Dick tried to sell Campbell a story about a post-atomic mutant - a perfect being who turns out to have no use for the human race - Campbell wouldn't allow it. Dick's comments:

Predictably, Campbell thought Dick's stories were "not only worthless, but nuts"; Dick, as much as he enjoyed van Vogt, eventually came to see both Campbell and his pal Heinlein as dangerous wingnuts.

In the same anthology that contained The Father-Thing, there was a complete novel, The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, a young, hip Manhattanite who also wrote for radio, comics, the slicks and early TV. In 1953, "Alphie" Bester won the very first "Hugo" award for his novel, The Demolished Man, a dark tale of a powerful, wealthy man who is defeated by his own self-annihilating Id. These two novels (as well as some terrific stories) were distinguished by a manic style and an arch urban humor that were not lost on the cyberpunkers to come.

Like most of his young colleagues, Bester idolized Campbell, though they'd never actually met. Shortly after he sent Campbell a few stories, the great man called and asked him to come into the office to talk about some changes. Bester was psyched. Being more of an uptown gent than most of the geeks in the field, Bester was astonished when the "editorial offices" of Astounding Science Fiction turned out to be a small, scuzzy room in the bowels of an industrial printing plant out in Jersey. Campbell told Bester he liked one of his stories, but was unhappy that the main character's behavior was driven by unconscious, "Freudian" impulses. Years later, Bester described the conversation:

"You don't know it," Campbell said, "you can't have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished… destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time."

"What's that?"

"Dianetics."

"I never heard of it."

"It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it," Campbell said solemnly.

"The peace prize? What for?"

"Wouldn't the man who wiped out all war win the Nobel peace prize?"

Campbell then handed Bester the galley proofs of Hubbard's first dianetics piece, which was to appear in the next issue of Astounding, and told him to read it. Afterwards, he took Bester downstairs to the printer's cafeteria for lunch, where, then and there, Campbell tried to "clear" him of his "engrams" (emotional blockages). Desperately trying not to laugh, Bester finally begged off, explaining that his emotional wounds were too much to bear. He raced back to the city and consoled himself with "three double gibsons".

While it's true that Bester's plots tended to follow a psychoanalytic model - which is another way of describing classical heroic tragedy - he never seemed to care much for systems or politics. His self-made supermen are lone wolves, and their rebirth is always bought by trial and error, and at great cost. Gully Foyle, the brutish protagonist of The Stars My Destination doesn't have a clan or a training manual to help him on his journey toward cosmic destiny: All he has to work with is his rage at the Vorga, the passing cruiser that left him to perish after being shipwrecked in deep space. In Bester's 25th century, there's nothing like a tradition of General Semantics to hold society together. People are as they've ever been: greedy and impulsive, vicious, self-interested, loving and scattered. Here is Bester's mock-Dickensian prologue:

Back in my room, in Kendall Park, reading by the light of a tensor lamp, I thought: he's describing the twenty-fifth century, but…maybe, out there somewhere, across Route 27, just around the next curve of space-time, the second half of the twentieth century might be just as exciting - even though nobody thinks so. Imagine the remarkable technologies; intrepid spacers walking on the moon; the loud, electric music, the sex, the social and cultural upheavals, the colors, the freaks, the fun - in short, the adventure.

D.F.
NYC August 2010

The Cortico-Thalamic Pause: Growing Up Sci-Fi

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