Herovit's World

Book 292: Gateway Essentials

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Jonathan Herovit is a science fiction writer in a state of deep personal and professional crisis. Whilst struggling to deal with his wife's post-partum depression, his own alcoholism and a long-overdue novel that he has no motivation to write, the pseudonym under which he writes begins talking to him...

Release date: October 29, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 151

Sample

There’s a Long Way Between Declining and Death. Isaac Bashevis Singer

At the second annual cocktail party of the New League for Science-Fiction Professionals, Jonathan Herovit finds himself accosted by two angry readers who also despise his work. “You stink, Herovit. You’ve been doing this damned crap for so long it molders, and you’d better get yourself out of science fiction before we throw you out,” the taller and stronger of the readers says…and, quite possibly drunk, hurls more than half a glass of scotch and soda into Herovit’s thin, querulous face; then, realizing the apparent seriousness of the action, he apologizes suddenly and backs away, his face now fallen to sadness, looking just like Mack Miller’s when the Team came across a seemingly insoluble problem. “But then again…” the boy says. “Well, then again, I guess everybody has a right to live.”

The other reader, a girl similarly dressed, touches Herovit by her vague expression of concern. “You shouldn’t take this too seriously, Mr. Herovit,” she says. “Bill’s just so involved with all of you writers and science fiction, but the fact is that you are losing your grip just a little, don’t you think?” Then she leaves the room quickly, dragging the trembling Bill by the hand.

No one seems to have noticed this. All of the Science-Fiction Professionals are off in corners with editors or antagonists, promoting their careers, renewing old hatreds. Herovit takes a handkerchief from a rear pocket, shakes it open in spurts, and begins careful work on the stain which is already congealing rather thickly in places on his suit jacket. After a time of hopeless patting, however, he decides to leave it be.

It is a symbolic stain. He will wear it as a badge. Events in the room continue. Perhaps all of this occurred only in his mind or was otherwise hallucinative. This is what comes of having been a science-fiction writer for twenty years: it is difficult to take oneself altogether in earnest.

It is all typical of the kind of trouble he has been having recently and for quite a while back. He finishes his drink, wondering exactly how in hell readers were able to get into this party anyway. It was described in all of the mailings as a meeting for only the most serious editors and writers in the field, those who were central to science fiction and who, each in his own way, were completely dedicated to its advancement.

More and more as he edges forty—now thirty-seven, nothing quite as it used to be biologically and otherwise—Herovit feels like a main character in one of his old serials for Tremendous Stories. Events press upon him; utterly alien and bizarre forces impinge. His grip, like Mack Miller’s, is loosening through too many bad episodes. The very fabric of his existence is rent; still, what else is there to do? His public depends upon him. He must press on in order to resolve matters and bring a good report to Headquarters.

The trouble is—he is beginning to admit that he has trouble—that the characters in his serials always had machinery. In the hold, in some abscess of the ship or available by plans to one of the engineers, was a device which could be used to disperse the aliens once they got it going; failing all else, the alien forces menacing old Mack (he wishes that he could meet old Mack so that he, Jonathan Herovit, could kill him) would turn out to have had benign motives from the start. It was simple: put it together at 15,000 words and sell it to Steele; string it up to 60,000 and go for the book rights. Or both. Why not? Usually both. You could always get book rights on something Steele bought if you were willing to sink low enough.

But Mack Miller’s case—always remember this—is not his own. Herovit can hardly use machinery to escape the circumstances surrounding, and whatever the nature of those mysterious forces, they are hardly benign. (At odd moments he can feel them clambering inside; benignity is not their custom.) Nevertheless, like Mack Miller, he must press on, if for different reasons.

Press on. He is one of the ten to fifteen most prolific science-fiction writers in the country, with an audience of somewhere between seventy to eighty thousand for the paperbacks—to say nothing of the magazines. How many truly serious writers had that much of an audience? Did seventy thousand read Stanley Elkin? Evan Connell? There they are, stuck in hardcover—where ten thousand was a remarkable sale and paperback came late, if ever—while Herovit is a mass-market writer. People read him on buses and in public rest rooms. It could hardly be the fault of his career that all of this was happening to him; rather, he must look elsewhere, into the root causes. Still, it was hard to do this kind of job; most of his characters were not at all introspective. Introspection would only hold back the plot.

In his more surreal moments, Herovit feels that the West Side of the city itself has become an alien planet, populated by archetypes or artifacts speaking languages he does not know with gestures which can only terrify…but he has a wife and now, damn it, a child; he is committed to Manhattan since it is central to his life, to say nothing of his work, and he pushes off these moments as neurasthenia. Once he had looked it up in a medical dictionary. It was a great word. It gave dignity to his situation.

Herovit pushes on past page forty of his new Mack Miller Survey Team novel, which Branham Books hopes to publish under his pseudonym of Kirk Poland. Originally, he had wanted to write science fiction exclusively under his own name, but John Steele, the venerable editor of Tremendous Stories when Herovit broke in, had advised him that Jonathan Herovit did not have the right sound for the image of the magazine being developed, and it would be best to use a pseudonym with which the engineers and disturbed adolescents who read Tremendous could fully identify.

“You see, son, Jonathan Herovit sounds too urban, uh, too European and cosmopolitan for this book,” Steele had said, winking madly and lifting his enormous arms toward the ceiling as he expanded his large chest with cigarette smoke. “It has a very New-Yorkish type of ring, if you follow what I’m trying to say here, and our magazine goes nationwide. We even do nicely in the South, and then the Army picks up thousands of copies for overseas distribution through regular channels.”

Herovit—no fool he—guessed that he had gotten the implication. “Sure,” he said, “I guess that we could shorten it, then, to something Germanic like John Herr once I start selling. Or even—”

“Now what you want, son,” Steele said, “is something which is all-American.” He had a very bad habit, Steele did, of continuing a line of discussion no matter what the response, but this, Herovit had decided, was one of the elements of the man’s greatness. Why should a John Steele listen when his circulation was in the high sixties and everyone else’s in the low forties or worse? Sure he was being pushed a little by the newer magazines like Thrilling or Thoughtful, but he was still the grand old man of the field, always would be. “Maybe just a little trace of the peculiar on the edges, something exotic, you know, but never threatening for the guys. If you can’t think up a good one on your own I’ll decide for you like I’ve done for a lot of the others, but first you’ll have to sell me a yarn, of course. That always comes first, doesn’t it? I’m a little overstocked now but you’re certainly welcome to try. Anyone’s welcome to try, got to keep on pushing for the new blood,” Steele had said and then sent Herovit—at that time twenty-two and single—on his way from the gigantic chain of pulp-magazine offices in which Steele’s cubicle had been in an insignificant place, wedged between the mailroom and a messengers’ comfort station.

Herovit had at the time been extremely anxious to break into science fiction, so he had listened to everything Steele had to say. This was not only a matter of achievement: he had just then been fired from a probationary position with the New York City Department of Welfare, and at this period in his life saw absolutely no way of generating the fast income he needed unless he could work into the pulp market, which no one knew was then on the verge of complete collapse.

Thus he had settled—too much pride to let Steele pick his name—on Kirk Poland both because some kind of trouble in the damned Gomulka government was making the newspapers at that time, and his landlord, a creditor at that time, had been named Joe Poland. Under that name—Kirk, not Joe, this was—he had sold Steele his first novelette only a month after their conference. Kirk was a good first name. Nothing insoluble could ever happen to a man named Kirk once he put his mind to things.

Subsequently, Herovit had sold five hundred and three additional magazine pieces as well as ninety-two science-fiction novels, all of them by Kirk, whom he had visualized from the start (perhaps in a dream, although origins had never been his strong point) as a tall, thin guy, fairly wiry, with devastating hands and huge sunken eyes. A guy who never had trouble coming, be it fast or slow. Sex stuff, on the other hand, Kirk had never been able to write; it gave him (or at least it gave Herovit) cold sweats and a livid feeling of embarrassment—a sensation that his mother-in-law, for instance, was inspecting copy over his shoulder as it came from the typewriter. Now that the sex market is gone, and it is entirely too late to crawl from under the pseudonym to find another identity, however, Herovit regrets following Steele’s suggestion so unquestioningly. On his own, he might have been a fine writer.

But then again (and he reminds himself of this all the time), there are many thousands, if not millions, of people who have tried and failed to make full-time careers as writers, so he certainly has a lot to be thankful for, even if he only made eleven thousand four hundred dollars last year, and only a very few sophisticated fans and readers in the field know that it is he, Jonathan Herovit, who originated Mack Miller’s Survey Team. Not Kirk Poland. In seventeen years of professional writing, Kirk has received exactly twelve fan letters and one sexual proposal from a’ woman who said that she was forty-one years old but devoted to machinery and, thanks to Process Training administered in the middle 1950’s, still quite ready to go.

“Lothar, go down below and examine the table of elements. Check it out thoroughly to find if tanamite can be found on it. Do this right away, crewman,” the Captain said determinedly in his quiet voice, Herovit now writes and then comes again to a dead halt in this accursed ninety-third novel. He must establish the physical-science basis for the plot at this point. The thing to do—he has been this way so many times before; why then is it bothering him so?—is type a long scene between the Captain and his first mate, Lothar, both of them highly unsympathetic aliens, explaining the mysterious substance that one hundred and fifty-nine pages later will signal their doom…but Herovit, looking at the twenty-first page in the typewriter, realizes that he cannot do it. Not yet again. Is there such a thing as tanamite or is it a fool’s construct? Lothar wondered idly as he then scurried off in loyal slave’s fashion to do his captain-master’s bidding. He is not up to this really, not at all. He cannot face one more line of exposition, nor is there any way in which he can take either of these characters seriously, Lothar and the Captain being individuals who under various names have already been included in at least seventy-three full-length, never-before-published adventures. Someday he would take his revenge upon the Captain and it would be terrible, restoring the balance between them, but it could not be on this expedition, Lothar feared, listening to the hum of those giant engines as tirelessly they brought them ever closer to their destination and the inevitable conflicts which awaited. He simply cannot do this kind of thing anymore.

The trouble is (and he might as well face it; he will not be a self-deceiving man) that he is falling apart. Through the clear and dark portholes, shaped like abcissa, he could see the constellations of a different galaxy, sense a thousand new suns and the adventures which would follow. The thought of them filled him with humility and awe, low-rated as he was. The psychic strain of production, the insularity of the field of science fiction, and the difficulties in his own personal life have closed around him within recent months; now Herovit is not so sure that he can take himself, let alone his work, seriously. It was something to think about, the look of those stars. Few had gazed upon them, fewer still would return to the familiar galaxies to bear the tale. The novel which he is supposed to be writing is number twenty-nine in the Survey Team Conqueror Series. For this, his agent has negotiated a standard advance of two thousand dollars as against four and six percent of paperback royalties, payable one thousand upon signature and another thousand on delivery. He needs that second thousand desperately and is already forty-five days late (compulsively he counts everything) on the delivery, but he finds that the very thought of plowing on with this novel, to say nothing of actually finishing it, makes him quite ill. Twenty-one pages completed (of course he never rewrites) and a month and a half late. This is pitiful, no doubt about it.

This is pitiful. Truly pitiful, Lothar finds himself thinking and thinking then for the twenty-ninth time that if only Colonial Survey had not been so authoritarian he would have had his last slave-voyage several moons ago. He hopes that this thinking is not an omen of worse things to come but suspects that as always his mood is a good barometer of what will follow.

Heat sneezes in the pipes of Herovit’s office. He hears his wife of a decade again cursing their six-month-old daughter. Herovit can make out some of the words. Lothar thought that he could make out some of the words the Captain was saying in relation to his slave-status, and he tried to block all of them out of his mind. He did not want to hear them.

He decides to leave the Captain, not to say Lothar, to their own devices for a time. The bottle of scotch is on his desk. He drinks.

That night he tries again rather reluctantly but persistently to get things started again in the sex department with his wife, but Janice turns from him deftly, talking, inexhaustibly talking, as he tries to fondle her breasts and finally, in disgust, quits.

“I won’t have any of that,” she says in a high voice, protecting herself, “and who do you think you are anyway, Jonathan? I’m at the end of my patience, you know. You can’t ignore me during the day and treat me like some kind of housekeeper—some kind of housekeeper, that was the word I wanted to use, and you’d better not miss it—and then expect me to be passionate on your demand, can you? Is this normal thinking? Do you really think that you’re being quite rational? You have some sensitivity left in you, I hope, so you must think that I’m really quite stupid or that I’ve got such lust for you that I can’t resist, but that isn’t a good way of looking at it. I gave up everything for you and all that you can do is think that I’m an object for your desires. I’m a slave without any pay, that’s all I am!”

Since the pregnancy and subsequent birth of their daughter Natalie, which forced Janice’s resignation from the product division of a second-rate public relations agency, she has been quite nervous and. . .