Before 12:01 and After

by Richard A. Lupoff

Genres: Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

Before 12:01 and After is a collection of science fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror stories by Richard A. Lupoff, collecting the best of his short fiction from his long writing career. It contains the following stories: "Mr. Greene and the Monster""BOOM!""Incident in the 14th St. BMT""After the Dreamtime""12:01 P.M.""Venus-Ah, Venus!""With the Evening News""Saltzman's Madness""God of the Naked Unicorn""Nebogipfel at the End of Time""Mort in Bed""Stroka Prospekt""Two Sort-Of Adventures""Blinky Henderson Again""The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick""Snow Ghosts""Triptych""The House on Rue Chartres""The Doom That Came to Dunwich""The Woodstock West Killer""Easy Living""Dogwalker""A Funny Thing Happened..."

Release date: April 28, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

It is a far, far better thing, I once said, to be the most underrated writer in science fiction than to be the most overrated one.

I was talking about myself, of course. (This was around 1972, I suspect, or perhaps even earlier — at some point in my career, at any rate, before the full tide of awards and honors had begun to flow my way.) I wasn’t fully serious even then, except in the sense that every writer, in the secrecy of his heart, believes throughout some or all of his career that he’s terribly underrated by the critics or by the public or by his family or by his cat, and that seems to hold true whether he be Joe Blow or Arthur C. Clarke or Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. I used to think so myself, though I don’t worry much about such problems these days.

But I think a strong case could be made for putting Richard A. Lupoff high up on the most-underrated-writer list, the real one, not the highly subjective list that every weary writer starts to draw up in his mind on the bad days with his own name at the top, but the list that measures objective achievement against objective reward.

Consider. After a thirty-year career of producing stories and novels of striking originality in an assortment of genres, Lupoff remains Richard Who? to most readers of those genres. Your neighborhood bookstore does not have a three-foot shelf of Lupoff novels, newly reprinted with gaudy foil lettering featuring the single dramatic word LUPOFF in brilliant turquoise on the cover. His short stories are rarely reprinted in anthologies, nor have they been collected in a broadly representative retrospective volume until now. You will not find the name of Lupoff on the list of Hugo or Nebula winners, except in the esoteric category of Best Fanzine of 1962 (for Xero, which he and his wife Pat edited in that antediluvian time.) I suspect that papers on the Work and Thought of Richard A. Lupoff are presented only rarely at the convocations of our academic fantasy scholars. And so forth. The entry under “Lupoff” in the most recent edition of the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction sums up his career by noting, “There still remains in [Lupoff’s] work a sense of focus frustrated, of ambition deferred.”

All this could, of course, be evidence of the fact that Lupoff is a second or even third-rate writer, a quickly forgettable mediocrity, someone who through perseverance has managed to get a lot of stuff published over a long period of time but whose work nevertheless is barely worth reading as much as once. I don’t think that that’s the case. The man himself — he’s been my friend for some 35 years — is intelligent and perceptive, a sharp observer of the world around him, well versed both in the arts and in the sciences.

His books and stories, I can testify, having read a great many of them and published some myself, almost unfailingly display not only his intelligence and perceptivity, but also the grace and charm of his wit, the skill of his narrative technique, and the exemplary individuality of his ideas. That is to say, he’s a damned good writer.

So what has gone wrong? Why has his remarkable body of work been so largely neglected?

I can offer a bunch of reasons for that.

The most significant one, I would say, is the extreme originality of his work — his reluctance to do the same thing twice, his restless eagerness always to set out on new departures. As Martin Morse Wooster notes in his essay on Lupoff in Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers, “Richard Lupoff is a protean writer. He does not belong to any particular school of SF, and was one of the few writers who belonged to the ‘New Wave’ and the ‘Old Wave’ at the same time. Because he has not developed a distinctive style, he has not earned the importance he deserves.” John Clute makes much the same point in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — “It is at times difficult, despite his clear and abundant intelligence, to identify a unique RAL voice.”

There is a paradox at work here, and not to Lupoff’s benefit. If it is true, as Martin Morse Wooster says, that “he has not developed a distinctive style,” it is because he has such a wide range of styles, appropriate to the wide range of material he deals with, that his stories tend to fail to sound all alike. And much of his work — by no means all — is pastiche or parody; and the writer who aims for striking originality while at the same time speaking with the voice of another writer is performing an act too taxing for most readers (I am not speaking of Wooster or Clute here!) to follow. He seems merely imitative, when in fact he is carrying out complex experiments in re-creation.

Lupoff the pasticheur is visible all over this present collection. We find here Lupoffian takes on the work of Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and H.G. Wells; and probably there are other parodies or pastiches that I am not qualified to find, for Lupoff’s personal explorations in taste roam the far reaches of pop culture well beyond my own deliberately limited ken.

But is pastiche a mere derivative art? Tell it to Max Beerbohm; tell it to James Joyce; tell it to Lewis Carroll. Lupoff has, I suspect, been unfairly tagged as a hitchhiker on the creativity of other and greater writers. That would be true, perhaps, if his entire oeuvre were nothing but a series of in-jokes. But that would be to slight Lupoff the creator of startlingly original science-fictional concepts, which brings us to the second problem: I know of no writer who has had such astoundingly bad luck in his publishing relationships.

At least twenty-five years ago Lupoff told me of a science-fiction trilogy that he planned to write — a grand, sweeping epic, bristling with brilliant inventions, something that, in my memory, at least, would have had much the same sort of range and scope of Gregory Benford’s In The Ocean Of Night series. He sold it to one of the leading paperback companies of the time, which then was an important player in science fiction. In short order he wrote one volume of the series, or maybe two. But before even the first could be published, the publisher discontinued its science fiction line, leaving Lupoff’s magnificently inventive series in limbo. Eventually the opening volume of the trilogy was (briefly) published by somebody else, and after a time the second volume managed a quick appearance on the stage, but he never had the opportunity to write the third at all.

He regrouped and started over with a novel that eventually was called Space War Blues. A good chunk of it had appeared in Harlan Ellison’s notable anthology Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972; two other substantial pieces of it saw print in my own New Dimensions anthology series. Lupoff’s attempts to find a publisher for the complete book entangled him in a saga of frustration and disappointment that I don’t have the fortitude even to summarize here; Lupoffian scholars will find all the details in the book itself, which finally appeared in 1978 with a 16-page explanatory introduction by Ellison and seven more pages by Lupoff himself, re-explaining the Ellisonian explanations. (The book is worth finding just for those two documents!) The publisher, incidentally, was the very same one that had torpedoed Lupoff’s trilogy a decade earlier; having gone through about five changes of editorial command in the meanwhile, it had begun to publish s-f again, and came back into the field just long enough to release Space War Blues, kill its science-fiction line again, and send the novel into instant oblivion.

And so on and so on. Lupoff’s snakebitten career as a novelist has been marked by the decision of one publisher after another to abandon science fiction just about the time it was doing a book of his, or to change its general publishing policy, or to sell itself to somebody else who would proceed to gut the existing list. (Much of the damage was done by that one publishing house that kept reincarnating itself every few years and making new overtures to him, always with the same lethal result for his books.) In a piece written around 1984 to accompany his entry in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, Lupoff said, “In terms of my own career, 1981 proved to be a year of bitter irony. I had spent decades learning the craft of fiction, and felt that I had finally reached a satisfying level of competence. The last three books that I had written — Circumpolar!, Lovecraft’s Book, and Sun’s End — were by far the best I had ever written. My prices had risen, critics and fans were expressing approval, foreign sales were gratifying.

“At this point, due to general economic conditions, there was a collapse in the marketplace. All three books were canceled, contracts for two further novels were canceled, and the What If? anthology series that I had been editing was canceled. Everything that I had in print went out of print, and my career was in effect terminated. My income dropped to nothing and I faced economic disaster.”

But he is a resilient man, and the least self-pitying person I know. If he gets angry, from time to time, when he reflects on the odd course of his life as a writer, even his anger is rational and controlled; and then he gets back to work. So, in the face of all those difficulties, he reconstructed his career one more time and continued on his way. Despite all obstacles, he has for the last four decades been producing the Collected Works of Richard A. Lupoff, one word at a time, and if his failure to repeat himself has cost himself the popularity of a give-us-the-same-thing-again fandom, so be it; he has not chosen to seek their approval, now or ever.

So here is a big book of varied short stories to testify to the enormous versatility and skill that have, I’m afraid, been his undoing in the conventional sense of a career. You will find in it a story that became one segment of the novel that the publisher called Space War Blues, and various samples of his parodies and pastiches, and the cunning time-travel story “12:01 PM” that has much the same theme as a certain successful science-fiction movie written by other hands a few years after Dick’s story appeared; you will find horror stories and mystery stories and a tale of New Orleans that is in itself a parody and a pastiche and a horror story and a mystery story and a time-travel story and several other things. (Someday I will tell you the story of how Richard A. Lupoff, who is my neighbor here in the San Francisco Bay Area, unexpectedly materialized himself before my very eyes as I was sauntering through the French Quarter in New Orleans.)

Anyway, here’s a nice fat book full of good stories by a sweet guy and fine writer who has magnificently survived all sorts of dreary publishing-world grief and very much deserves the attention of discerning readers like you. He deserves a couple of fat movie deals and new editions of his best novels, too, and if he gets them it will demonstrate at long last that virtue triumphs in the end.

But I don’t think Dick is holding his breath while he waits for the good times to start rolling. He lives his life one day at a time, one story at a time. I think he’s a happy man and I know that he’s a good writer. That’s better than being the miserably depressed author of a lot of highly successful but utterly contemptible garbage, right, Dick? Right?

Robert Silverberg

July, 1995

Everyone in our extended family read. Books, newspapers, magazines, I was surrounded by printed material from my earliest days. My grandmother, Austrian-born, had English as a second — actually, third — language. Each day she plowed diligently through the liberal New York Post. My Uncle Sam — really — read the Communist Daily Worker. My mother and her sister, my Aunt Marion, shared the latest novels of Pearl S. Buck and Betty Smith. And my father studied each day’s newspapers, growling at the excesses of the Mirror and the Journal-American until he could stomach no more, then canceling our subscriptions and switching to the literate and elegant Herald-Tribune and the well-intentioned, silly PM. From the news and editorial pages he would turn, finally, to the sports section and follow the doings of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

My brother, Jerry, three years my elder, was already in school. On Sunday mornings we would sprawl on the Persian rug in the living room and crawl around the comic pages. Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Superman. I admired the handsome men and the beautiful women, the space ships and prowl cars, Flash and Dale’s tights and Dick Tracy’s fedora and Tess Truehart’s perky little tam. And if you’re a collector and a scholar, and it turns out that Tess didn’t wear a tam … don’t tell me. These are my recollections that we’re talking about.

But Jerry could read by now. I could only look at the pictures and infer what the stories were about. Jerry could look at those mysterious little squiggles in the speech balloons and the narration panels and read. There was magic there. There were men and women, expressions of intellect or passion, there were cities and rivers, airplanes, jungles and oceans teeming with great beasts, mighty suns and fantastic planets. Universes were locked up in those little curlicues, and my brother could unlock them with the power of reading, and I could not.

I think I went mad at that realization, if a four-year-old can go mad. At least, I was obsessed. I had to learn to read. I embarked on a campaign, demanding to be given the great secret. I was promised that I would learn when I started school, but from this promise I took no consolation. I must learn to read now. I raced from one family member to another pleading my case, and at last my grandmother yielded.

I recall the event with great vividness. It was a lovely, sunny day, the household was (relatively) tranquil, and we sat down after lunch and Grandma simply showed me the letters and told me their names and the sounds they made and explained that they went together and made words. That was all. By dinner-time I could read.

People have told me that this is impossible, that my memory must be grossly distorted if not outright false. But others have told me that they had the same experience — a pent-up desire to learn to read, a kindly mentor willing to show them how — and it is done.

The thrill of reading satisfied me only until I realized that there was a greater secret still hidden from me. By reading I could find the people and objects and worlds hidden in books. But where did those books come from? What Godlike being, in what miraculous act of creation, had put those people and worlds into the books?

Somebody wrote those books!

This was as staggering a discovery as I could possibly make. Now that I could read, I had to learn to write. But reading involved only learning 26 letters and their sounds, and once that secret was mastered, it was actually a lesser task to learn to put the letters together to make words, the words to make sentences, the sentences to make men and women and automobiles and airplanes, baseball games and pirate ships and cities and continents and worlds. My recollection is that, once Grandma had taught me to read in an afternoon, I taught myself to write in an hour.

Don’t say it — we both know the drill.

I must have written BOY and GIRL and DOG and CAT and read and written SEE SPOT RUN along with millions of other children of my generation, but my most vivid memory of the process was sitting in the living room with crayons and construction paper and writing my first book. It was called An Adventure and it concerned a boy not unlike myself, visiting famous sites. Even then I was secretive about my work. No one must see it until it was finished.

My mother was in the kitchen and I shouted my request for spelling aid. “How to you spell stach?”

“There’s no such word,” my mother replied.

“How would you spell it if there was such a word?” (Don’t expect a four-year-old to comprehend the use of the subjunctive.)

“I suppose it would be, S-T-A-C-H.”

A pause for the industrious pursuit of precocious calligraphy. And then, “How do you spell you?”

“Y-O-U.”

And in due course, “How do you spell liberty?”

And in further due course my book emerged, complete with an illustrated visit to THE STACH YOU OF LIBERTY.

Soon I was reading about the Teenie Weenies and about Captain Marvel and Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, and I was writing and drawing my own comic books and making up other stories as fast I could go. If you count what bibliographers call juvenilia, then once An Adventure was finished, I went on to ghosts and haunted houses, stories about witches and football players and boxers, war stories and space adventures and mysteries.

The first mystery I ever wrote appeared in a mimeographed newspaper at summer camp. It was a brain-teaser. You know the kind: Three travelers arrive in town by railroad. One is wearing a bowler hat. One has a smudge of soot on his forehead. One is carrying an umbrella. It goes on from there, and ends with, “Who tipped the bellboy?” I don’t remember any details of the one I wrote, except that I managed to drag in a crime and a private eye named Nick Train.

I remember a piece of social realism that I wrote for a school assignment in that era, the story of an immigrant family arriving in New York in the 1840s, and their rise to wealth in the Land of Opportunity. I made my first try at a novel, too. A scathing look at life in a boys’ boarding school, featuring a merciless portrait of a particularly nasty bully on the faculty. That project got to the middle of page 2 before I gave it up. And all for the best, I’m sure.

My first professional writing appeared on the sports pages of some important newspapers while I was still in high school. The New York Times, the Herald-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Bulletin. Don’t head for the newspaper morgue to check me out — these were one-paragraph squibs about high school football games, track meets, and the like. Nary a byline there, but they paid real money for my stuff, and I had the satisfaction of appearing cheek-by-jowl with the likes of Jimmy Cannon and Stanley Woodward and Red Smith.

In college I wrote for the Coral Gables, Florida, Times, and for the 6:00 o’clock news five days a week at WIOD, Miami, owned by the Wonderful Isle of Dreams Broadcasting Company. It was pretty heady stuff for a 19- or 20-year-old to finish his last class of the day, head down to the studio, get on the phone and talk to judges and mayors and police chiefs. I used to finish my work by 5:55, turn in my copy to Gene Struhl, our news director, then get in my rusted lime-green Henry J and listen to my words as I drove home for dinner. Once in a while I’d stay at the station to keep tabs on a late-breaking story, and sneak into the studio with update copy while either Gene or one of our staff announcers was on the air. It was like living in a movie.

Over the years I wrote whatever I had to that would earn me a paycheck, everything from magazine articles to computer manuals to speeches for corporate big-shots.

We’re talking about the Eisenhower Era now, and in those Cold War days part of every young man’s life (or nearly everyone’s) was a tour in uniform. I spent a few fairly comfortable years variously at Fort Benning and Fort Gordon, Georgia, and Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. Hey, I can still sing our informal class anthem at the Infantry School …

High above the Chattahoochee

Near the Upatois

Stands our dear old alma mater

Benning School for Boys …

I have no military horror stories to tell. The Korean War was over, we weren’t fighting yet in Viet Nam, but we knew who our potential enemy was and we trained against soldiers wearing Soviet uniforms and carrying Soviet weapons.

But those army days were my first taste of life in the real world, away from home and off the campus. We got up well before dawn and scrubbed our barracks, took our rifles apart and cleaned and oiled them and put them back together, did an hour of calisthenics before breakfast and then set off on a cross-country hike with heavy packs on our backs and iron pots on our heads.

And if we got a weekend pass it was off to the fleshpots of nearby Columbus, Georgia. We thought we were incredibly grown up. Eventually I made my way from Corporal to First Lieutenant and enjoyed such perks as a room with maid service and lunch at the Officers’ Club. All on a starting salary of $222.30 a month.

But I didn’t see myself as a career soldier, and in 1958 I packed my uniform away and started looking for a job as a writer or editor. I would have loved working for John Campbell or Anthony Boucher or Horace Gold as an assistant at one of the science fiction magazines of the day, but instead I fell into a job as a technical writer for what was then Sperry Univac.

We tech writers were considered junior executives, suit-and-tie types, and the starting salary was $350 a month. More than the army had paid me, but most of the perks were gone. Of course the first thing I did was get married. Fortunately, in 1958 it was possible for a young couple to lead a very pleasant upper-middle-class life on that salary.

In that job I got my first look at a computer. Univac I. It had 1000 words of memory, roughly the equivalent of 12 kilobytes. The storage medium was a mercury delay line, and if you wanted to see the memory you had to open a door in the side of a garage-sized metal structure and walk inside. It held half a dozen people comfortably, and there you stood, inside the memory.

Wow!

By the late 1960s I had left Sperry and was working for IBM. There I wound up writing and directing movies about new products, including what I believe was the first movie of a holographic image ever made. Virtual reality, 1970 model.

But somewhere along the way I had also wandered into the science fiction fan community. I became caught up in the whole apparatus of local and national science fiction clubs, fanzines, conventions and fan politics. I took as my personal heroes writers like Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Edward Elmer Smith, Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth and Judith Merrill, and editors like Horace Leonard Gold and Anthony Boucher.

Pat and I published a successful fanzine called Xero, and wound up winning a Hugo for our efforts. In later years, when feminist politics invaded the science fiction community, some fannish scholar combed the records and discovered that Pat Lupoff was the first woman ever to win a Hugo. But at the time, nobody thought this was at all remarkable.

We published material by the leading fans and professionals of the day: James Blish, Avram Davidson, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter. One promising young science fiction writer, Don Westlake, got so fed up with the conditions in the field that he departed for greener pastures, leaving a blast in the pages of Xero: “Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You.” He told off one editor after another, naming names and detailing their foibles.

The day after the issue went into the mail, Westlake’s agent phoned me at home and asked if there was any way the article could be stopped. I told him it was too late — hundreds of copies were already in the mail.

“Oh my God,” Don’s agent moaned, “he’s killed himself.”

So much for prophecy.

In due course I began writing fiction of my own, and sending it off to market. It seemed natural, almost inevitable, that I would write science fiction.

For a number of years I enjoyed considerable success as a science fiction writer, from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, when inflation during the Carter administration gave way to the recession courtesy of Ronald Reagan. The result was the collapse of the literary market. I realize that I was far from alone as a victim of this phenomenon; I was hard hit by it, and wound up doing office work for four years to make ends meet. But in due course the market recovered and editors began buying again.

But the science fiction field is a volatile one. Hot writers come and go. Generations of readers tumble on one another’s heels and each new generation has its own favorites. A few writers can survive, even prosper for decade after decade, but the used paperback section of your local bookstore is littered with the detritus of discarded authors. When the market came back to life I discovered that I was a back number.

The fans had found themselves new heroes, and the critics, whose darling I had sometimes been, had found new objects for their affections. I wasn’t seeing many contracts, and those that were offered me were affronts to the dues I had paid and the skills I had (I thought) developed.

So I turned elsewhere and discovered, to my delight, that I was welcomed warmly into the field of mystery fiction. In short order I had established a successful detective series, and I began selling short fiction as well. I’ve yet to haul old Nick Train out of the locker where he has lain in cryogenic preservation for the past half century, but I just might thaw him out one of these days.

I still write a science fiction short story every now and then, and if the right publisher came along with an attractive offer, I would find room on my calendar for a new science fiction novel. I’ve got the sketches of several in my notebook, on my hard disk, or tucked away in a quiet corner of my brain. But my primary work now is in the mystery field, with an occasional testing of mainstream waters. There is no way that I could or would label myself a full-time science fiction writer again, if in fact I ever was one.

But I had many wonderful friends and colleagues in the science fiction field. My first mentor, James Blish, who heard my tale of frustration as an unsuccessful short story writer and offered the obvious (but for some reason not obvious to me) solution: write a novel. The editor who bought that first novel, Larry Shaw, a man who remained my friend for life. Other editors I worked with and respected and liked: Don Bensen, David Hartwell, the brilliant David Harris, Robert Silverberg (as talented a teacher and critic as he is a writer), Victoria Schochett, Terry Carr, Maxim Jakubowski, Nick Austin, Marcial Souto. Good friends like Tom Disch and Chip Delany, and Sam Moskowitz with whom I once feuded but later came to appreciate. Older writers who were endlessly kind and generous to a beginner: Edward Elmer Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Jack Williamson, Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson …

I have walked with giants.

Incidents emerge from memory like gems from the dust.

One evening in 1962 or so, Don and Elsie Wollheim and Pat and I were walking on a quiet street in Manhattan. Don put his hand on my arm and pointed up at the dark sky. Among the unmoving stars, one brilliant point of light made a flashing arc, then disappeared.

“Do you know what that was?” Don asked.

“It’s a Soviet satellite,” I replied. I did read my New York Times every morning and I knew what was in orbit as well as the next fellow.

Wollheim shook his head. “That’s a spaceship, and there’s a spaceman in it.”

We have eyes, but do not see.

I remember standing on a grassy lawn in Florida in 1956, looking at the sky, and hoping that I would live a long life, because someday … maybe as early as the first decade of the 21st Century … humans might walk on the moon. And we did, not in 2009 but in 1969.

And a quarter century later, I met and shook hands with Alan Shepard, who had walked on the moon. And played golf there. I walked down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley with Shepard, acting tacitly as a bodyguard because the street is dangerous at night. Then I gave him highway directions, and urged him to drive carefully because California was having its first rainstorm of the season and the roadways would be slippery.

And I thought, afterwards, that moment was passing strange. Stranger still, and tragic, that a quarter century after we reached the moon, we had lost our vision and our commitment to go out to the wonder-filled universe, and become intent, instead, on killing each other off with bullets and pollution and overpopulation.

There was a rainy afternoon that Pat and I spent in a cozy living room in Sonoma, with Phil Dick and his friend Joan Simpson, Phil describing his early days among the Berkeley literati, afraid to tell them that he read the works of E. E. Smith and A. E. Van Vogt for fear of being made a pariah.

My writing nowadays is devoted mainly to the crime-and-detection field. I make occasional forays into fantasy, whimsy, and mainstream fiction. I’ve never done a mainstream novel, but I’ve tried it in shorter lengths with some success and considerable pleasure. One of these days I may just hitch up my britches, spit on my hands, and give that book a try.

And long after my stint at WIOD on Miami, I went to work for KPFA in Berkeley, where I’ve done a books-and-authors show since 1977. In part through that show and in part through my more recent connections with the mystery field, I’ve met a whole new population of inspiring writers. Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, William Kennedy, and a brilliant parade of others.

Sometimes there’s a surprise. Youthful super-novelist Michael Chabon walked into the studio. My producer introduced us, and Chabon’s eyes popped. “Richard Lupoff! Richard Lupoff! I lived on your book All in Color for a Dime when I was in the sixth grade!”

Another day our guest was Donald E. Westlake, by now a world-famed caper novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter.