The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  The Star-Spangled Future

  Norman Spinrad

  Dedicated to my parents

  MORRIS AND RAY SPINRAD

  … by way of explanation.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: The Star-Spangled Future

  PHASE ONE: Science Fiction Time Introduction

  Introduction to Carcinoma Angels

  Carcinoma Angels

  Introduction to All the Sounds of The Rainbow

  All the Sounds of the Rainbow

  Introduction to The Perils of Pauline

  The Perils of Pauline

  Introduction to The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

  The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

  Introduction to Holy War on 34th Street

  Holy War on 34th Street

  Introduction to Blackout

  Blackout

  PHASE TWO: New Worlds Coming Introduction

  Introduction to The National Pastime

  The National Pastime

  Introduction to It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane!

  It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!

  Introduction to The Entropic Gang Bang Caper

  The Entropic Gang Bang Caper

  Introduction to The Big Flash

  The Big Flash

  Introduction to No Direction Home

  No Direction Home

  PHASE THREE: Those Who Survive Introduction

  Introduction to Sierra Maestra

  Sierra Maestra

  Introduction to A Thing of Beauty

  A Thing of Beauty

  Introduction to The Lost Continent

  The Lost Continent

  Acknowledgements

  “Carcinoma Angels” was first published in Dangerous Visions, copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison, reprinted in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, copyright © 1970 by Norman Spinrad.

  “All the Sounds of the Rainbow” was first published in Vertex, copyright© 1973 by Mankind Publishing, Inc., reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright © 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” was first published in New Worlds, copyright © 1969 by New Worlds, reprinted In The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, copyright © 1970 by Norman Spinrad.

  “The National Pastime” was first published in Nova 3, copyright © 1973 by Harry Harrison, reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright © 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane” was first published in Gent, copyright © 1967 by Dugent Publishing Company, reprinted in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, copyright © 1970 by Norman Spinrad,

  “The Entropic Gang Bang Caper” was first published in New Worlds, copyright © 1969 by New Worlds, reprinted in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, copyright © 1970 by Norman Spinrad.

  “The Big Flash” was first published in Orbit 5, copyright © 1969 by Damon Knight, reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright © 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “No Direction Home” was first published in New Worlds 2, copyright © 1971 by Michael Moorcock, reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright© 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “Sierra Maestra” was first published in Analog, copyright © 1975 by the Conde Nast Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Thing of Beauty” was first published in Analog, copyright © 1972 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright © 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “The Lost Continent” was first published in Science Against Man, copyright © 1970 fay Avon Books, reprinted in No Direction Home, copyright © 1975 by Norman Spinrad.

  “Blackout” was first published in Cosmos, Volume 1 number 3, September 1977, copyright © 1977 by Baronet Publishing Co., Inc, Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Perils of Pauline” was first published in Swank, May 1976, copyright © 1976 by Swank Magazine Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Holy War on 34th Street” was first published in Playboy, March 1975, copyright © 1975 by Playboy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Introduction:

  The Star-Spangled Future

  I’ve always been resistant to the notion of writing a series of short stories around a theme or a “future history” and doing them up in a book as if they were some kind of “episodic novel.” To me, that would be like sitting down to write 26 episodes of the same television series, one right after the other. Durance vile!

  Good Lord, I’ve never been able to write short stories to order one at a time for other people’s theme anthologies! I never know when I’m going to come up with an idea that moves me to write a story. It comes to me, or it doesn’t, and I have no control over the process. The panoply of hack devices for generating a “story idea” in an empty brain strikes me as pure-blind lunacy. You know, open a book at random, type the first paragraph you come to and “springboard” from there… or put down a random word, then a second, and a third, and keep typing this jabberwocky until it starts to make sense or they take you to the funny farm… or as a last resort start typing the telephone book to flagellate yourself into creativity.

  Seems to me, you simply can’t make yourself experience the magic moment that gives a story life by intellectual process or ex-lax generated logorrhea. It’s like trying to will yourself in or out of love. Stories written without genuine inspiration will be golems, literary television, Velveeta for the mind. And usually unsalable.

  When I in my total naivete began writing science fiction, I was determined to write at least three stories a month to maximize my mathematical chances for breaking into print. Some of the stories I wrote under this regime came to me with that burst of creative insight that emotionally involved the writer, and hence the reader, with the story. Without exception, these eventually sold and were anthologized many times. The stuff I churned out in between based upon the mandatory “sf notion” of the week never sold and is now mercifully lost to posterity. This taught me a lesson in the monetary practicality of esthetic morality which I try to remember.

  Once, however, I was tempted. I had just finished “The Lost Continent,” and, upon evening contemplation of the title and all that it meant to me, I thought about writing a series of stories taking the reader on a grand tour of the future ruins of America, and calling the book The Lost Continent. I had the title novella already, “A Thing of Beauty” fitted perfectly, and the basic image that was to become “Sierra Maestra” was already rattling around in my brain, lessee, that’s 28,000 words maybe, two more novellas would make—

  Fortunately, that’s as far as it got, and with the dawn I came to my senses. You don’t write stories that way, kiddo. You couldn’t even if yon wanted to.

  So I never churned out those two other novellas and this book isn’t called The Lost Continent

  And yet…

  And yet it didn’t start out as The Star Spangled Future either. James Baen, the esteemed editor of Ace science fiction, simply wanted to do a collection of my best science fiction stories. We had no title or theme in mind or even the idea of looking for one.

  And yet what we came up with was a book called The Star Spangled Future, a definitive collection of all my short science fiction about America. Fourteen stories, northward of 90,000 words of fiction, a rather weighty tome.

  For when I sat down to ponder all my short stories, written over a period of fifteen years, in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, there this book was.

  With few exceptions, all the stories that Jim and I considered were my best were set in America—somewhere, somewhen, some transmutation. Truth be told, maybe two-thirds of all the short stories I had written had to do with some kind of transmogrified
American reality. A collection of my best short stories had organized themselves into a book of science fiction about America called The Star Spangled Future as if possessed of independent will.

  Maybe this is true on some level. All these stories were written by the same process I’ve not described. Which is to say a creative inspiration came to me from somewhere and I then applied intellectual processes to its development. These stories were written at diverse times in diverse environments and equally diverse headspaces. The one time I had the conscious notion of doing anything like writing a book of short stories about America, I shitcanned the idea.

  And yet here it is.

  You will notice that all of the terms in this literary equation are defined except one: creative inspiration. But of course that’s the key to the whole process and very little about it seems to operate on a conscious intellectual level at all.

  What is creative inspiration anyway? This Faustian question has long obsessed me. After all, if one knew how creativity worked, one might be able to make oneself creative on demand, reason oneself into the fulltime possession of the illusive magic, and banish the very concept of writers’ block. One might be able to teach creativity. All people of a sufficient intellectual level might be able to be creative whenever they wanted to, and then we’d really be mind-mutants with transcendent powers.

  Unfortunately, the only answer I’ve found to this question is too Zen to be taught by the Famous Writers School or even a Clarion Workshop. Which is that creativity, like science fiction, like human consciousness itself, is a product of the interface between the human psyche as created by genes and memory, and the ever-changing external environment, which is far beyond our will to control.

  Each of us is the product of genetic endowment and the story of our lives. We have no control over our heredity at this writing, and since the story of our lives is also the story of other people’s lives, even the most egomaniacal and charismatic among us can never really write his own scenario.

  So this flood of data from a mutating external environment pours in on us and interacts with what we’ve become at any given moment to form our consciousness. When the interaction is synergetic, an inspiration, a leap of consciousness takes place, a magical something is called into being that is not implicit in the data, and this is what we mean by creativity.

  This is why creativity is a will o’ the wisp, why it can neither be taught nor analyzed. For it is the dynamic between what we are and the flood of data impinging on our consciousness as we move and mutate through time.

  But is this data random? Maybe it only seems so at the time. Take the stories in The Star Spangled Future. Most of them didn’t seem to be connected to anything else or to each other when I wrote them. And yet through hindsight, a pattern emerges, and not one that I consciously created.

  For me, the impulse to write science fiction is somehow deeply involved with some longstanding gestalt of perceptions and feelings about American realities.

  But what is the central gestalt that caused this book to be written. What is America?

  It’s like asking what creativity is or trying to define science fiction.

  Definition of America: a certain nation-state, a political entity with clear, legally-defined geographical borders.

  Or is it? Europe is becoming infested with Holiday Inns and McDonald’s golden arches. The Japanese play baseball. Every rock musician in Europe wants to be a star in the United States, And during the nadir of the Viet Nam War yet, a New Guinea cargo-cult tribe inquired as to whether they had enough cowrie shells to purchase Lyndon Johnson from the United States to come and be their god.

  I was in Europe during a piece of the Viet Nam War, in London when America put the first men on the Moon. The war had created a lot of European anti-Americanism, which of course was to be expected. But the tenor of it was peculiar. The real gut-feeling had little to do with the plight of the Vietnamese. It was a feeling of sorrow, of loss, of betrayal. Europeans felt diminished by what America was doing, abandoned by the “leader of the Free World,” let down by something they had believed in.

  Well there might have been a certain ho-hum attitude in the States when America landed the first men on the Moon, but let me tell you they went bugfuck over it in England. They were proud of America. They were relieved that America had once more given them something to be proud of, America for the moment had once more taken up the mantle of its own myth.

  A myth of America that exists in countries all over the world. America, the demon of dehumanized technology. America, the hope of the underdog. America, the gobbler of the planet. America, where you go to become a star. The land of opportunity and the belly of the beast.

  Mythic America extends far beyond the borders of the United States. America is not Just another nation. America first impinged on world consciousness as a fabulous new world where the streets were paved with gold, a self-created new Atlantis. The myth has mutated many times, but its power still holds. Out there, America is an object of love, hate, admiration, loathing, envy, and longing wish-fulfillment. What is in short supply is indifference.

  So no outside viewpoint is going to give you a definitive definition of America. It’s an image implanted too deep in the collective unconscious of the species for anyone to be cool and objective about it.

  And can Americans define themselves any better? It doesn’t look that way. How many Americans even define themselves as Americans? We’ve got Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans and Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans and Greek-Americans. We’re blacks and Nisei and Amerinds and Latinos. The only Americans that don’t self-hyphenate themselves are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the rest of us call them WASPS. And even WASPS subdivide themselves in Easterners and Westerners, Yankees and Southerners, hillbillies, Hoosiers, rednecks, and Southern Californians.

  Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Indians—most of the other great nations of the world speak a national language, eat a characteristic cuisine, have national music, one or two characteristic religions, and an indigenous literature and culture.

  The same parameters define a sense of “national identity” for most of the nations on Earth. We all know what they are. Nationalism is the style, the very look of a people. Who would mistake a Swede for your average Turk? A street scene in Moscow looks nothing like a street scene in Marakesh. France, Germany, Spain, Italy—most of the western nations are the recognizable brand-names of a people.

  But… the United States? What other country in the world has a name that’s pure political definition, devoid of ethnic image? Only the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” with whose national karma we seem inextricably entwined, and there you have an ideological nationalism in words of one syllable.

  In a certain sense, there is no real America. Not the way there’s a France or Sweden or Poland.

  When the mutant hordes of Europe overran the native American Indian culture, this continent’s continuity with a millennial past was broken, and what emerged after the dust had settled was a huge empty new world populated by religious refugees and zealots, political Utopians, losers in Europe’s many wars, land-hungry ex-serfs, exiled troublemakers, wheelers and dealers, impoverished minor noblemen, and just plain pirates. Weirdos and malcontents from all over Europe in a magic new land of endless bounty, theirs for the taking.

  For which they showed great enthusiasm. Taking Manhattan for 24 bucks, buying the vast Louisiana Territory for a song from a Napoleon who didn’t exactly own it, and finally forthrightly ripping off great big chunks of Mexico. And dragooning slave labor from Africa all the while. Finally, mass waves of immigrants swept in to populate the empty golden continent.

  And here we are today, a quarter of a billion of us, the descendants of the footloose, freebooting, utopian hippies of the eighteenth century and refugees from most of the nations of the Earth, and nobody is in the majority. With the exception of a few pitiful American Indian enclaves, everything that makes America America w
as brought here from somewhere else. Or mutated under the skies of the New World in the past three hundred years. We have no common past stretching back into the dim millennial mists. We are bits and fragments of the rest of the world thrown together here in dynamic instability to interact in quicksilver new combinations.

  We’re not just a new nation, we’re a new kind of nation. By the traditional parameters of nationhood, America does not exist. The genes of the species intermingle freely here, and so do national styles. We are the test tube baby of the human species, the mutant child of the nations of the world, the homeland not of the time-honored past but of the transnational future.

  In America, men first learned to fly. Here was the awesome power of the atom first placed in men’s hands for good or ill. Here the first transnational mass culture was created by American rock music. Here the secular democracy was invented. Here western science and eastern mysticism are engaging in their first meaningful dialectic. And from America the human species launched its first expedition to another planet.

  All a chain of coincidences or some deep mythic truth buried in the pre-cog collective unconscious of the human race?

  Trying to define America is like trying to define creativity… or science fiction.

  They all tend to merge into the same illusive indefinable. America is a nation which fits no conventional definition of nationality. Science fiction is the only branch (mode? genre? form?) of literature which cannot be defined by parameters of form, style, or content. Both “science fiction” and “America” are multiple states of mind; indeed the only way to define either of them is by their very multiplicity.

  Inevitable then that both science fiction and America embody humanity’s dreams of its future and its nightmares as well.

  The essence of science fiction is the speculative’ element. Something new under the human sun must be generated by the interaction between the psyche of the writer and his environment. Which brings us back to creativity. Because creative mental mutation is science fiction.