The House of Rumour A Novel

16

the tower





The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.

Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius



Larry Zagorski is a prolific author who has enjoyed intermittent commercial success and some critical acclaim (mostly in Europe and Japan) but owing to his chosen field remains largely unrecognised by the American literary establishment. ‘I always looked for the obscure, for something hidden from view,’ he said in 1989. ‘It’s little wonder that I was claimed by what I sought.’1

Born in Los Angeles in 1922 to estranged parents of Polish descent (Zagorski is a topographic name meaning ‘one who lives on the other side of the hill’), he found refuge in fantasy and speculative writing from early childhood. When at the age of seven he was isolated and bedridden for three weeks with a severe case of mumps, his constant companion was a copy of Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales with full plate illustrations. Later influences were the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Wonder Stories.

By his own account he was a sickly child who lived mostly in his own imagination. The young Zagorski’s search for the unknown was also a quest for an absent father. Zagorski senior left the family home when Larry was barely three years old with a chaotic trail of rumour and hearsay in his wake. ‘I was told variously by my mother that he was a private detective, a gold prospector, a circus horseman, and God knows what else. I eventually learnt that he was none of these things, merely a cheap conman, but as a child to me he was some kind of totem, a mysterious monolith. I looked for him in comic books and adventure stories.’2

His first published story, ‘The Tower’ (printed in Amazing Stories in 1939 when he was seventeen), is a reworking of ‘Childe Rowland’ from the Jacobs stories of his childhood. A fatherless group of children find themselves trapped in a dark tower, the enchanted domain of the elfish ones. The interior is described (as in the original) as a wondrous fretwork of precious stones, magical lamps and illuminated crystals. It becomes clear (in Zagorski’s version) that this is the control panel of a spacecraft and the elfish inhabitants are visiting aliens, physically weak but able to bewitch with drugs and hypnotism. The children overcome the elfish extraterrestrials and escape as the tower blasts off into the firmament.

‘Childe Larry to a dark tower came,’ Zagorski writes in a later author’s note on this story, linking it to his fruitless attempts at understanding his relationship with a lost parent. It was a process that transformed Larry’s attitude so that from then on, rather than identifying his missing father as the hero of pulp stories, he instead becomes the strange creature, the alien. This liberated his creative sense, launching it into outer space. He joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society and began to sell stories regularly to Amazing Stories and Fabulous Tales, replete with ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. But science fiction was itself undergoing a transformation, and was about to enter what some were to call its ‘Golden Age’.

Generally agreed to have commenced when MIT physics major John W. Campbell Jnr assumed editorship of Astounding magazine in the late 1930s, the Golden Age3 brought about what came to be known as the ‘hard science’ school of speculative fiction. While recognising the need for some background logic in SF, Zagorski was never entirely at ease with the tendency towards pseudo-rationality and technology fetishism, or a new orthodoxy with strict rules for robots and regulations on how to solve faster-than-light travel. To focus on scientific feasibility rather than the potential of the imagination went against his instincts as a writer. As Jorge Luis Borges observes, the fiction of Jules Verne speculates only on future probability (the submarine, the trip to the moon, the talking picture), while the work of H.G. Wells surpasses it by conceiving ‘mere possibility, if not impossibility (the invisible man, a crystal egg that reflects the events on Mars, a man who returns from the future with a flower from the future, a man who returns from the other life with his heart on the right side, because he has been completely inverted, as in a mirror)’.4

Zagorski, however, was intrigued by the opportunities that quantum mechanics offered SF at this time. The first of two great inspirations for him in this period was Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, serialised in Astounding in 1938. Though heavily freighted with all the clichés of the pulp era, The Legion of Time breaks new ground in SF in its treatment of the Uncertainty Principle, alternate futures and parallel worlds. Other authors have cited its importance (Brian Aldiss declared that ‘its influence of later time stories has been strong’5) and it created a new term in the SF world, the ‘jonbar point’ – a point of divergence where history can go either way, in this case towards utopia or dystopia.

The possibility of a dystopic future was, of course, a very real danger at this time and Zagorski’s second big influence in the late 1930s was the novel Swastika Night, first published in 1937 under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Reclaimed as a lost feminist classic in 1985 when it was revealed that it had been written by Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night is probably the first and certainly the most frightening of the many novels based on the premise of a Nazi victory. Zagorski acknowledges that it inspired him to write his first successful full-length work, Lords of the Black Sun (serialised in Fabulous Tales in 1940, first reprinted as a novel in 1948). ‘It might seem a fairly crass attempt at this now familiar conceit,’ he wrote in the introduction to the 1978 reissue, ‘but bear in mind that at the time of writing this was neither an alternate history nor a counter-factual exercise; this was the possible future.’

It was probably the recognition he received for Lords of the Black Sun that gained him entry to Robert Heinlein’s celebrated SF salon in Los Angeles – the Mañana Literary Society. In Anthony Boucher’s roman-à-clef Rocket to the Morgue (1943), based on the Mañana group, Zagorski is clearly identifiable as Matt Duncan, the ‘up-and-coming young science-fictioneer’, alongside fictional versions of Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Williamson and the rocket scientist Jack Parsons. There was much interest in alternate realities among this circle, as well as in the exploration of propagations of influence and even complex quantum notions like backward causation. In Boucher’s novel, Austin Carter, Heinlein’s alter ego, writes a story that proposes a world where far-left democrat Upton Sinclair wins in California while Roosevelt loses in 1936, causing a schism in the nation, civil war and the eventual ‘establishment on the West Coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic’. It was to be called ‘EPIC’ (with a nod to the End Poverty in California campaign that Heinlein had been part of).

‘Heinlein was something of a radical back then,’ Zagorski was to recollect in the 1960s. ‘I don’t know what happened to him later.’ It was at Heinlein’s salon that he first met friend and erstwhile collaborator, the Cuban SF writer Nemo Carvajal. ‘Interesting times for American science fiction,’ notes Carvajal. ‘The future was bound up in ideology, so even the space-opera writers could scarcely avoid a political critique in their work.’6 Indeed, the genre itself was ideal for geopolitical speculation and there emerged a collective and progressive approach to a world-view made possible by projections in time and space.

Larry was in love with Mary-Lou Gunderson, a fellow writer (later director, producer and television executive), but it remained unrequited. The year 1941 saw the emergence of jonbar points, in Zagorski’s life as well as that of the planet. ‘He was a shy and sensitive kid,’ remarked Gunderson, ‘the last person you would imagine going to war.’7 Yet the day after Pearl Harbor, that great point of divergence in American history, he signed up with the USAAF for combat duty.

Zagorski served as a radio operator in a B-24, flying bombing missions over Germany and occupied Europe. It was a harrowing experience as the conditions under which the air war was fought were extremely harsh. The long-range sorties were exhausting, some lasting over eight hours and in sub-zero temperatures with the crews wearing electrically heated suits and oxygen masks. Larry was to describe the experience as a ‘lethal parody of all my childhood dreams of flight and space travel’. Any simple technical malfunction could prove fatal and frozen oxygen lines could cause death from hypoxia. Then there were the swarms of enemy fighters and the flak from 88mm anti-aircraft batteries or the 108mm radar-controlled guns. The chances of surviving the thirty-mission requirement were very slim indeed.

‘Along the azimuth arc, from zenith to horizon flew death, and down below we saw planetary destruction, cities turned to moonscape, and we smiled.’ So begins ‘Fee, Fi, Foo, Fum’, one of the few stories he wrote that directly recall his experience of the war. The crew of a B-24 witness strange craft in the stratosphere:



‘Foo! Foo!’ went the call on the intercom. That nonsense word from some alien dialect. But the radioman knew what it meant. He had tuned himself in to them, ignoring all the arguments about whether such things were hallucinations, Nazi prototypes, or from another world. He knew what foo meant: it meant the future. Something had broken through the space–time continuum; that’s what they were seeing. A vision of what was to come, of the even greater terrors that awaited them in the heavens.



Returning home, Larry took his share of a collective post-war trauma. For a year or so he lived with his mother, supporting them both on his GI Bill allowance. And for some time he turned away from SF. All its predictive powers seemed used up, its dread fantasies of power made real. The future seemed a bleak choice between unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

Between 1946 and 1947 he attempted a mainstream novel. The Attendant is set in an unspecified institution where the protagonist Tommy Buhl works, having been invalided out of the military following a nervous breakdown. He tries to make sense of what has happened to him as he plods through a dreary daily schedule. In a series of recollections, he is constantly in search of the point in his life where it all went wrong. The Attendant meanders aimlessly in its surviving 436-page draft, though it features several strong supporting characters, most notably the Mexican fortune-teller Angel Fernandez and the army air force chaplain Ignatius Creed. Zagorski failed to find a publisher for it.

It was during a trip to Mexico in 1948 that Nemo Carvajal and Larry came up with the story that was to become the script idea for the film Fugitive Alien. Directed by Mary-Lou Gunderson, starring Trey Anderson and Sharleen Stirling, Fugitive Alien (1950) is one of the many B-movies that cashed in on the flying saucer craze. It was cheaply made and rich in the Cold War atmospherics of paranoia and suspicion. Unlikely stories about its production persist to this day, most notably the rumour that there are references in the dialogue to an actual secret air force memorandum on UFOs.8

What is certain is that Nemo and Larry argued quite vehemently over proposed script changes during the shooting. Larry fell in love with the leading lady. He married Sharleen Stirling on 4 October 1951. Nemo Carvajal went back to Cuba that same year.

The 1950s were an extremely productive time for Larry, though not all of his work saw the light of day. In a decade he wrote nineteen novels (five of which were published), fifty-seven stories (twenty-eight of which he managed to sell), and eleven scripts for the Dimension X radio programme (two of which were made).

Larry found something of a champion for his work in Anthony Boucher, whom he had known from the Mañana days and who had begun editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) in 1949. Urbane and generous of spirit, Boucher was to nurture many of the more left-field SF writers, most notably the young Philip K. Dick. Boucher favoured intelligent fantasy over the ‘hard-science’ school and was keen to promote a more literary style within the genre. He had, after all, produced the first English translation of Borges and sold it to what was more or less a pulp magazine (his rendering of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948).

F&SF was an ideal home for Larry’s work at this time. His stories had become increasingly fractured and recursive. Zagorski insisted to Boucher that he was no longer interested in prophecy, but rather ‘prodrome, that is, the early symptoms of an oncoming disease, an aura of disquiet’. He never liked to distinguish between what was ‘fantasy’ and what was ‘science fiction’. He confided to F&SF’s editor that the stories he placed with them were ‘inner projections of character, memoirs of the imagination’. In ‘Dummy’ (1954), a prisoner convicted of an unnamed crime and convinced of his innocence digs a tunnel via the ventilation grille in his cell. He makes a dummy to leave as a decoy for when he escapes. The construction of the mannequin starts to obsess him, particularly the sculpting of the face, which takes on a ‘lurid grimace that seemed to mock his protestations of guiltlessness’. One morning the guards search his cell. The tunnel is revealed but the dummy is missing. It has escaped, and in the months that follow the prisoner begins to hear of ghastly misdeeds committed by his puppet doppelgänger.

The other main market for Larry’s work in the 1950s was Ace Books, where they were a good deal less sensitive with his material. One of the editors there, Donald A. Woolheim, a science fiction fan and veteran of the pulp years, would publish SF in ‘Ace Doubles’, a cheap format that bound two novels together, head to toe, with lurid covers on both sides. Titles were regularly changed to match the glib and sensationalist cover art, so that Zagorski’s Parker Klebb’s Purgatorio became A King of Infinite Space (1955) and his With Splendour of His Precious Eye was transformed into The Prophet from Proxima 6 (1956). One of Woolheim’s fellow editors at Ace, Terry Carr, is reported to have remarked: ‘If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double, it would be cut down to two twenty-thousand-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as “Master of Chaos” and the New Testament as “The Thing with Three Souls”.’ By the end of the decade, professionally at least, things were looking up. In 1957, Larry secured a two-book deal with the prestigious hardcover publisher Doubleday, the second of which was to prove his breakthrough novel. But in the meantime his private life was falling apart.

All through the 1950s his prolific output was fuelled by a considerable intake of amphetamines. This was augmented by a heavy barbiturate habit that Larry relied on to bring him down from all the uppers he was taking, and a steady recreational use of marijuana and alcohol. Consistently existing in an altered mental state often inspired astonishing bursts of creativity, but it proved profoundly destructive in his emotional relationships.

He had married Sharleen Stirling in haste, after a brief but intense infatuation. ‘She had an unearthly, ethereal beauty,’ he recalled. ‘If I’m honest she reminded me of those beautiful alien girls I’d gawped at as a teenager on the cover of Wonder or Planet Stories. I loved her but I was still emotionally immature and weighed down with psychological problems I hadn’t dealt with.’ Sharleen herself had long-term mental health issues and her once promising acting career was falling apart. ‘She believed what I wrote was real and I fed off her psychosis as inspiration for my characters. It was parasitical.’

The Translucent Man (1957), the first of his books for Doubleday, was indifferently received but American Gnostic (1958) achieved considerable critical acclaim and went on to become a paperback best-seller. This success, however, coincided with Sharleen’s mental breakdown and their subsequent divorce in 1960.

A harsh satire on the nation’s perverse relationship with both materialism and spirituality combined with a dystopian vision of the near-future, American Gnostic is an exemplar of what Kingsley Amis described, in his 1962 critique of SF, New Maps of Hell, as a ‘comic inferno’. Set in a twenty-first century where religion and culture are based on a ‘pulp mythology’ (fictional entities like Doc Savage and Batman are accepted as historical figures, while real people such as John Wayne and Greta Garbo have been transformed into deities), the established church is the Cult of Futurology founded by SF writer Lucas D. Hinkel. The economy is centred on sacramental consumerism and an overambitious space programme that is not only draining industrial and natural resources but is in stasis due to technological shortcomings (spacecraft landings on other planets are faked in ‘holovision’ studios). There is a growing faith in the coming of a being from outer space to save a polluted and overpopulated world, and fraudulent appearances are reported every week. John Six, a real extraterrestrial, finally does appear and, after a brief spell as the ‘Space Messiah’, elects to become the host of the holovision game-show All-American Alien.

The success of the novel crossed over into mass consciousness, particularly among younger readers, and it became a cult book of the 1960s. Overnight Larry Zagorski was hip, and American Gnostic, like Stranger in a Strange Land and Naked Lunch, became one of the iconic SF titles talked about in coffee bars and passed around college campuses.

Three novels with Doubleday followed: Stupor Mundi (1960), Psychopomp (1961) and Laugh at This Hereafter (1962). Zagorski was adopted by the nascent hippie movement and he rapidly adopted their style. Despite having just turned forty, he moved into a shared house in Venice Beach and began what was to be an eight-year stint of communal living. He weaned himself off the uppers and downers; he began experimenting with mescaline, LSD, counter-cultural pursuits and radical politics.

Soon after the terrifying jonbar moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, he attempted to set up the Non-Aligned Science Fiction Writers Association with his old friend Nemo Carvajal. The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem rejected an invitation to join because of his extremely low opinion of American SF. The proposed NASFWA did not last very long in any case. Zagorski quickly fell out with Carvajal who, in accordance with the principles of the Posadist Fourth International of which he was a member, believed that nuclear war could be a good thing in that it might ‘finish off capitalism for good’. Larry was horrified by Nemo’s insistence that the NASFWA should issue a statement, declaring that ‘Atomic War is inevitable, humanity will quickly pass through this necessary stage into a new society – socialism.’ He swiftly disbanded the association and responded with the story ‘Sycorax Island’, which appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1963.

Set in a parallel world where the Missile Crisis has escalated into all-out nuclear war, a disparate bunch of survivors find themselves stranded on an idyllic island in the Caribbean. American embassy staff and their families, a detachment of Cuban women’s militia and a group of Russian technical advisors overcome their initial hostilities and attempt to build a new world together. They find traces of a long-dead culture on the island: the circular ruins of some kind of temple that becomes the focus of the emerging community. At the end, just after one of the militia women has given birth to a mutant baby of uncertain paternity, a unit of US Marines arrives and promptly kills all the Cubans and Soviets. ‘Hey!’ their captain calls out to reassure his now hysterical fellow Americans. ‘It’s all right! You’re safe! Didn’t you hear the news? We won! Yeah, we really clobbered the bastards!’

In September 1964, Larry attended the Twenty-Second World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland and met Philip K. Dick for the first time. They indulged in a long and drug-addled conversation concerning Dick’s most recent book Man in a High Castle, a counter-factual novel where the Nazis and the Japanese have won the Second World War. Zagorski had assumed that this had been influenced (as his own first novel had been) by Swastika Night. Dick assured him that he had in fact been guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching.

It seems clear that this is what inspired Larry to start work on what was to become The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski (1966), a cycle of twenty-two interconnecting stories structured around the trump cards in the Tarot deck. Zagorski spent longer on this novel than any other and he was never happy with it.



It started with such promise, I mean it just seemed to write itself until I got up to the sixteenth card, and then – wham! It was the Tower! I was back at my first story, back trying to find my lost father. I felt that I was being led into a hall of mirrors, stuck in some awful time warp. I’d been doing primal therapy, rebirthing, stuff like that, and, of course, ingesting huge quantities of LSD. I used Crowley’s Thoth pack, which is pretty psychedelic anyway – and there it was: the ego, the phallus, that vision of authority I could never overcome, plus I’d just learnt that I was infertile so I felt emasculated and cut off from fatherhood at both ends of the continuum. I found myself wandering up and down Venice Broadwalk, muttering, ‘The tower must fall, the tower must fall.’ I had an overpowering sense of doom – after all, the Tower represents ruin and catastrophe. I got through it but after that it was a hard book to finish.9



Now the Tower had perhaps become a symbol of an existential despair in the midst of apparent success. As Blaise Pascal had written: ‘We burn with a desire to find a secure abode, an ultimate firm base on which to build a tower which might rise to infinity; but our very foundation crumbles completely, and the earth opens before us unto the very abyss.’

The critical reception of The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski was mixed. Village Voice declared it a ‘meta-fictional masterpiece’; The New York Times called it ‘a confused and self-indulgent mess’. It was joint winner of the Hugo Award for best novel awarded at the SF Worldcon in Cleveland, Ohio in 1966.

Much of Zagorski’s work was now being hailed as part of the ‘New Wave’ of SF writing. Larry certainly liked to be seen as radical and he pushed the idea of an ‘alchemical reaction between pop culture and the avant-garde’. His stories found their way into Michael Moorcock’s militantly nouvelle vague journal New Worlds and he was asked to contribute to Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). But already one can detect an uneasiness concerning the permissive age in Zagorski’s writing. His Dangerous Visions story, ‘The Crazy Years, Mass Psychosis in the Sixth Decade’ (named after Robert Heinlein’s uncanny prediction for the 1960s in his 1941 ‘Time-Line of Future History’), depicts an increasingly barbaric youth cult called the Subheads, whose idea of liberation is to progressively burn out their brains with highly potent hallucinogens. It was also a desperate reflection of his fears concerning his own drug addiction.

In 1968, Larry married Wanda Ferris, a sculptor aged twenty-eight who had been a long-time resident of the commune in Venice. They moved into a beach house in Malibu together. Wanda recalls:



We’d had this freewheeling kind of affair for years. Larry was great company, so full of ideas, funny and charming. To be honest I was happy with an open relationship. But he was never any good with the free-love ethic. Oh, he wanted to be but he just couldn’t do it. Basically he craved emotional security. He kept on at me about living as a couple, just the two of us. He made it sound like a wonderful dream and I knew that the idea of it would make him happy so in the end I agreed. But it was a big mistake.10



As the sixties drew to a close Larry became more and more paranoid. He was convinced that he was being watched by the FBI and the Church of Scientology. He had a high-security fence rigged up around the beach house and began to amass a small arsenal of firearms. Wanda remembers asking him: ‘ “What’s all this really about, Larry?” and he replied: “Guilt”. “Guilt, what about?” “I don’t know, everything”.’ In 1969, during the Tate/LaBianca murder investigation, it was revealed that the Manson Family used names and rituals from Stranger in a Strange Land as part of their cult, and a heavily annotated copy of American Gnostic was also found in their Spahn Ranch headquarters.

The Peregrinations of Percival Pluto (1970) was completed during a sustained LSD binge that was excessive even by Zagorski’s standards of the time. Despite the gruelling complexities of his last novel, Larry was determined to continue to stretch the boundaries of the SF form by attempting what he explained as ‘a science fiction version of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival’.



I’d thought long and hard about the term ‘space-opera’ and how it’s a pejorative term, but I thought what if you wrote something truly operatic? So Peregrinations became this Wagnerian project. It was insane! It was this interplanetary quest and I really did want to explore spirituality and symbolism on some deep level but it ended up in a whole series of psychological dead ends. And yes, Childe Larry to a dark tower came once more. This time it was the Grail Castle with its castrated king. I didn’t have any answers. I’d forgotten what the question was.11



Despite being scarcely readable, the novel sold steadily throughout the 1970s. It was thought to contain many hidden messages and references to self-awareness and spiritual growth. ‘It was a mess,’ was Larry’s later verdict on it, ‘but its success had a woeful effect upon me. For a while I was convinced that I had this visionary gift so the writing really suffered.’

From Here to Alternity (1972) features a time-travel organisation called the Office of Counter-factual Affairs, which intervenes at volatile moments in history such as the Battle of Hastings or the Third Crusade of 1198. The novel’s protagonist, Baxter Brahma, jumps from one unstable jonbar point to another, occasionally falling into an alternate universe that he has to escape from. Brahma holds the key to scientia media, or middle knowledge, a concept devised by the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Luis Molina, to reconcile divine providence and free will: that God has prevolitional knowledge of all conditional contingents and possible counter-factual worlds.

‘I spent most of the 1970s doing a lot of coke and developing a warped understanding of Renaissance philosophy and particle physics.’ Larry became convinced that alchemy and astrology had a deep connection with quantum mechanics and believed that occult and hidden traditions could provide some unifying theory. In 1973 he experienced a series of hallucinations that elemental forces were attempting to contact him with the information that God existed on a subatomic level. In The Hieroglyphic Monad (1974), Zagorski uses Elizabethan magician John Dee’s universal symbol of the cosmos, a unifying motif that attempts to connect a series of discursive stories set in a twenty-second-century Europe where the Enlightenment never happened.

Wanda Ferris left Larry Zagorski in 1976. ‘He was a pharmaceutical mess, yes, that was for sure; he was slowly but surely killing himself. But the worst thing was that he’d lost all his charm. He’d become grandiose and insufferable.’ By the end of the decade he had descended into near madness and degradation. His old friend Mary-Lou Gunderson was shocked when they met in April 1978.



I’d just got a new job as a television producer at one of the main studios and suddenly science fiction was on the rise again after the massive success of Star Wars – there was big money ready to finance TV franchises like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. So I took a meeting with Larry, which I thought would be fun, imagining that we’d catch up on the past and talk about rehashing all the pulp and space-opera ideas from when we’d started out. But it was awful. Larry was this jibbering wreck, constantly wandering off to the restroom, obviously to take drugs. He kept muttering that this heretic monk had been in touch and had a message for me.12



In June, Zagorski was admitted to Los Robles Hospital with diluted cardiomyopathy. He was told that if he did not change his lifestyle he would be dead within six months. ‘I’ve not much to live for,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘so I guess I should prepare myself for death.’

Then in November came the appalling news of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Larry’s first wife Sharleen had been a resident of the Peoples Temple community and was one of the 918 victims. ‘Utopia turned into a death-camp,’ Larry later commented. ‘Jim Jones twisted idealism, calling mass-murder “revolutionary suicide”. But out of the darkness came one small spark of hope.’

Martin Stirling Johnson, Sharleen’s son by Cato Johnson, was among the few survivors. Earlier in the year Larry had joined the Concerned Relatives group that had voiced fears about the welfare of family members in Jonestown and he now involved himself directly in the care of the twelve-year-old orphan.



It took a lot of work convincing the social workers that I was up to it but, after an initial period of fostering under supervision, the California Department of Social Services authorised my legal guardianship of Martin. Of course I had to turn my life completely around and the irony is that it was my own life I was saving. At last I had a purpose. All those years of feeling sorry for myself and thinking that the universe was out to get me had been a complete waste of time.13



Zagorski got a part-time job lecturing on science fiction at UCLA as part of their creative writing programme and devoted the rest of his time to the challenging task of raising a deeply traumatised adolescent. Beyond the obvious psychological problems Martin had to contend with, Larry noted that the young man had ‘lost a normal capacity for imagination; in warding off nightmares he cannot permit himself dreams’. In trying out many types of play and art therapy, Larry noticed that his own faculties had somewhat diminished. ‘I realised that since the mid-sixties my work had become increasingly pompous. I’d lost so much of the capricious energy that had drawn me to SF in the first place. Luckily I wasn’t too old to learn from the young.’

And it was not only watching Martin grow up that gave him inspiration. He was picking up new ideas from his students at UCLA and other young Turks on the SF scene. He appeared on the now notorious Cyberpunk Panel at the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention in Austin, Texas, sporting a shaved head and mirror shades, declaring: ‘I’m a punk. I’m an old punk but a punk nonetheless.’ It’s fair to say that his two subsequent attempts at the form, The Cut-Throat Laser (1987) and Zap-Gun Boogie-Woogie (1990), rather fall short of cyberpunk. They do, however, conjure a sharp and highly entertaining pastiche of mid-twentieth-century futurism.

In 1996, Zagorski provided an introduction to Beach 16 by Nemo Carvajal, a SF novel set in Cuba during the ‘Special Period’ of post-Soviet austerity. In his preface to Carvajal’s book, Zagorski uses the term ‘post-utopian’ (first coined by art critic Gerardo Mosquera) as a way of describing the theme of the novel and also as a possible new point of departure for SF: ‘What then is the future of the future? If, as Fukuyama insists, we are at the end of history, how can we think about tomorrow? What is the point of any fiction, let alone speculative fiction, unless we can find new ways of dreaming, new ways of imagining the universe?’14 In 1998, Zagorski co-edited with Carvajal an anthology of new short stories by writers from North and South America, titled Post-Utopian SF. A second collection was planned but abandoned after Carvajal’s death in 1999.

In 2000, Fugitive Alien was remade by Multiversal Studios with British singer Danny Osiris in the role of Zoltar the extraterrestrial.

The House of God was published in September 2001 and caused a certain amount of controversy at the time. Its cover depicted an image of a falling tower from the Tarot, and a central event in the book is the destruction of a skyscraper by a fanatical religious sect. It was inevitable that people would draw parallels with the events of September 11. But, as Larry would later explain, that wasn’t what got him into trouble.



I was very clear in interviews that it certainly wasn’t meant as any kind of prediction. The House of God is an alternative name for the Tower in the Tarot but the cover image was unfortunate. I’d actually intended that an image from the Minchiate deck be used, which depicts Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, as the book had a strong post-utopian theme. But instead we had the falling tower and, yes, there is a nod in the novel to the Tower of Babel story where a monolithic culture collapses into chaos. But there it was, that ill-omened card turning up once more. I pointed out that in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow the Tower becomes the rocket, the V2, the avenging missile. It represents catastrophe, and I’ve had my share of that. Susan Sontag said that science fiction stories are ‘not about science. They are about disaster which is one of the oldest subjects of art.’15 Interestingly the word disaster comes from the Italian disastro, meaning the unfavourable aspect of a star or planet. And I would have been fine continuing to intellectualise about the ‘aesthetics of destruction’ like this but instead I went on to make an unintentionally provocative comment. All I’d meant to say was that the attack on the World Trade Center was a ‘science fiction moment’ but then I added that ‘some disaffected people would see it as Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star’. And a great many took offence at that, mostly Star Wars fans.16



A volume of autobiography, Leaving the Twentieth Century, was published in 2002. Zagorski has sometimes insisted that The House of God is to be his last work of fiction, though he has also given enigmatic hints of a novel in progress. ‘A great unfinished work,’ he told a journalist in 2006, ‘that will remain unfinished.’ Pressed as to whether this was a comment on his life, he said: ‘Oh no, I’m still writing, still speculating. But I’m just a contributor, you know, just one of the voices.’

The span of his career has seen SF go from being about the probable, the possible, the impossible, the metaphysical to the ordinary, the everyday. It seems the one form that can truly grasp the essential strangeness of modern living, the cognitive dissonance that seems all-pervasive. ‘Perhaps one can use the narrative projections of SF to reverse-engineer a sense of reality into contemporary culture,’ says Zagorski. ‘I think it was William Gibson who said that SF is set now to become an essential component of naturalism in fiction.’ Now more than ever, Zagorski’s writing deserves to be rediscovered and re-evaluated, though he remains phlegmatic about his position in American literature. ‘Almost all my work is now out of print. I’m unlikely ever to be taught in schools or studied in universities. But I’m out there where I belong. In thrift stores and yard sales, in battered paperback editions with lurid covers and yellowing pages. Part of that story told by the lost and forgotten, the cheap pulps, the junk masterpieces.’



NOTES

1. Larry Zagorski, Leaving the Twentieth Century (2002), p. 4.

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of SF is usually seen as the mid to late 1950s when there was a rapid contraction of the inflated pulp market. Various critics have commented that the ‘Golden Age of SF is twelve’ in the harsh judgement that the genre forever belongs to early adolescence.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937–1952 (1964), p. 86.

5. Brian Aldiss, ‘Judgement at Jonbar’, SF Horizons magazine (1964).

6. Nemo Carvajal, introduction to Post-Utopian SF (1998).

7. Mary-Lou Gunderson, Small Screen Memories (2000), p. 34.

8. In the film, an air force officer of unspecified rank mentions ‘the Magenta Memorandum’, explaining it as a ‘top-secret document on these flying saucers’. This is thought by some to be a reference to a highly confidential briefing in 1948 by CIA director Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter to President Harry S. Truman, concerning ‘Operation Magenta’ – a top-level investigation into UFO activity that is said to have uncovered evidence of actual human contact with extraterrestrials. An FBI investigation of copies of this alleged document concluded that they were forgeries, pointing out formatting errors and false chronologies.

9. Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 114.

10. Wanda Ferris, interview with the author, June 2010.

11. Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 196.

12. Small Screen Memories, p. 301.

13. Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 234.

14. Larry Zagorski, introduction to Beach 16 by Nemo Carvajal (1996).

15. Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, in Against Interpretation (1966), p. 216.

16. Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 301.