Rain Check On Pop-Up Event, Reading Diary and Ufology/Paranormal Offerings
Humane Society Fur-Fest Vendor Fair Rain Date Is Saturday June 8
Hello all! The main thrust of this special edition of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter is that what was going to be tomorrow’s Humane Society Fur-Fest Vendor Fair has been moved to Saturday, June 8th due to the possibility of inclement weather. So if you were planning on coming down to the Peddler’s Mall and seeing me tomorrow, don’t! I won’t be there. But do mark your calendars for June 8th.
Reading/Listening Diary
I continue to plod along reading as I make time. I finished up The Syndic by C. M. Kornbluth. It was a fascinating and at points frustrating read which I hope gives me some of the juice I need to work on a fanzine pitch I’m theoretically supposed to have together by the end of the month.
On that same tip, I’ve read the first chapter of Kornbluth’s collaboration with Frederik Pohl The Space Merchants (1953 book publication and revision of 1952’s Gravy Planet). And on another reading project, I’ve also started Terry Bisson’s novel Voyage to the Red Planet (1990) in hopes of finishing it by Wednesday for my Terry Bisson reading group. The Space Merchants is a satire about ad men and I think intentionally a little dizzying and oppressive. As is usual with Bisson’s science fiction, Voyage to the Red Planet goes down smooth but packs a punch. It’s a satire where Hollywood has bought the space program. It will be interesting to read satirists from different parts of the 20th century in tandem. What were the salient absurdities of capitalist political economy in 1952 versus 1990?
I had time to take in two short stories as well, which I’ll detail briefly below.
“The Advent On Channel Twelve” by C. M. Kornbluth - Star Science Fiction Stories No. 4 (1958) - My friend Jesse Willis of British Columbia,
hostquartermaster of the SFFAudio podcast, read this four page Canadian public domain story aloud to me over the air on Sunday. According to the whims of bankers, an indebted animator fully submits his Mickey Mouse-like creation to market mechanisms before ultimately bringing it into reality by having its rapt devotees pray to it as a god. I think this isn’t a science fiction story so much as a realistic story about how the private sector has used sigil magic to dangerous advantage. Kornbluth could cut ‘em deep when he wanted to.Lost Sci-Fi Podcast episode: “The Last Plunge” by S. J. Sackett - Imagination Oct. 1955 - The plot of this one is kind of perfunctory but the story has its moments and is interesting for a very particular reason. The protagonist Nils Borgmann is a working class man who is in a dangerous job hunting an endangered species on Uranus to sock away money to educate his seven children. Ever since reading The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester for the first time, I’ve been toying with the concept of proletarian science fiction. My notion is that this kind of science fiction would take the proletarian perspective of a worker rather than the technocratic middle stratum perspective of a scientist or space captain. The Stars My Destination does this deliciously by portraying the criminalized and amoral space sailor Gully Foyle’s quest for revenge from which he ultimately course corrects unlocking high levels of human potential and demanding that all common people must take responsibility for society or die a fiery death. In essence, Gully Foyle rejects bourgeois values in order to constitute a new set of proletarian ones. Heady stuff. “The Last Plunge” is less heady. Nils Borgmann is an older worker risking his health for money. Against doctor’s advice, he keeps working and sees a friend die on the job. He earns the final bonus he needs to educate his children by putting himself in a situation in which he thinks he is going to die. Ultimately his coworkers save him and he retires. What I am butting up against in my analysis of this story is the insufficiency of some kind of working class identity politics in defining a concept of proletarian science fiction. Nils Borgmann is so driven by the dream of upward mobility for his kids and so stressed by the cost of tuition that he is willing to die but he is not in tension with bourgeois society. Even though told from a worker’s perspective, this is a story about the drama that arises from a worker staying in his place.
Ufology, Ancient Astronaut and Paranormal Offerings
Right now I am doing a purge of Fortean literature. Last year I was working on a novel and acquired a lot of Ufology paperbacks and paperbacks in the area of Ancient Astronaut theory. My basic concept was to have New Left Vietnam veteran grocery store workers from Kentucky meet millennia old aliens but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it and the more I found myself merely reproducing concepts from Zechariah Sitchen’s The Twelfth Planet, the more I thought better of it. And don’t get me started on The Sirius Mystery.
I came into even more Fortean literature recently when a collection science fiction digest magazines I purchased also included a bunch of issues of the vintage paranormal magazine Fate: True Stories of the Strange and the Unknown. Over all, the issue with this stuff is that most of it is pseudoscience and therefore deleterious. X-Files’ slogan, “I Want To Believe” had it right—the tenor of ufology, ancient astronaut theory and most areas of paranormal interest is basically religious.
That said, we’d be remiss to dismiss any widespread social phenomenon out of hand. I must admit to finding myself drawn to this literature. Part of this is that it cribs a lot of ideas from science fiction and fantasy and reconstitutes them as “nonfiction.” For example, Italian ancient astronaut theorist Peter Kolosimo was a science fiction writer first. See also The Shaver Mystery. Another aspect of my interest in this stuff is that it reflects people grappling with reality in different historical moments. What did it mean in 1964 to publish an article about weeping madonnas and “cosmic consciousness?”
Interesting as all this may be, I still need to liquidate it to finance my business and so that I can have more room for stock that is more in my line. If you’re interested in any of these offerings shoot me a message here or reply to this email.