Books Acquired

  • Robert Paul Weston Zorgamazoo (hardcover amazon)
  • Jeff Kinney Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School (hardcover amazon)
  • Stephen King The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (kindle)
  • David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress (paper amazon)
  • Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings (hardcover library)
  • Ludmila Ulitskaya The Big Green Tent (hardcover library)
  • David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (kindle overdrive library)
  • Stephen Graham Jones The Least of My Scars (kindle)
  • Katherine Applegate Crenshaw (kindle)

Books Read

  • Reginald Dwayne Betts Bastards of the Reagan Era (poems paper)
  • Fred Saberhagen Berserker (collection of stories kindle)
  • Stephen King Bazaar of Bad Dreams (kindle)
  • David Finkel Thank-You for Your Service (kindle)
  • Jeff Kinney Diary of a Wimpy Kid Old School (hardcover)
  • Charles McCarry Miernik Dossier (kindle)
  • David Mitchell The Bone Clocks (kindle)
  • The Bumber Vol 1 (comic)
  • Ali Benjamin The Thing About Jellyfish (hardcover)
  • Fred Saberhagen Berserker (kindle)

Perhaps my favorite book this month was Benjamin’s book. I don’t read children’s novels that often these days; but this one is worth the time. Definitely. You learn about grief, the challenges of early adolescent girls, and quite a bit about jellyfish. Worth the time.

I wrote a separate post with some thoughts about Danielewski’s the Familiar Volume 1.

I came across one memorable quote in Thank-You for Your Service:

[In Iraq] Michael Emory was shot in the head and the bullet ruined the part of the brain that … regulates emotions and impulse control. It also left him partially paralyzed. [He wears] a T-shirt that says “What have you done for your country?” on the front and”I took a bullet in the head for mine” on the back, so people who stare at him won’t think they’re looking at the results of some drunk in a car wreck.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks was a satisfying read in many ways. But two things about the book disappointed me. The first was that I really did not come across any lines that impressed me so much that I just had to write them down; in a book of literary fiction that exceeds 500 pages, I think such a thing is reasonable to expect. The second thing that disappointed me about Mitchell’s book was that he had some trouble handling the fantasy/sci-fi elements in the story. He wrote some less than elegant lines like this:

“Give me a minute,” murmurs D’Arnoq. “I need to revoke my Act of of Immunity, so we can merge our psycho voltage (p. 519).

or this:

The monk’s skin is emerging and the gold halo is starting to shine. Worse, the black dot of the Chakra-eye’s returning. Once it’s fully dilated, the Cathar will be able to decant us one by one (p. 529).

Here’s a short article that Saberhagen wrote reflecting on his Berserker stories in 1977 in a now forgotten magazine called ALGOL:

The Berserker Story by Fred Saberhagen

Time: early summer, 1962. Place: the sweltering (or freezing, it must have been one or the other) Chicago apartment of neowriter Saberhagen, who is laboring over what he considers to be a jim-dandy of a story idea, viz: the construction of a functional, checker-playing computer without any hardware more advanced than a game board (simplified from regular checkers), a few small boxes, and a stock of beads of various colors.

Having got well along with plotting and writing the story, which he has chosen (without thinking about it) to make an adventure set in interstellar space, Saberhagen realizes that he has yet to name, describe, or even begin to think about the deadly menace whose destruction by his clever hero is already scheduled for the penultimate page.

“I know what,” says Saberhagen to himself, off the top of his then-ungrayed and crewcut head. And without giving the matter any more conscious deliberation than that he types a new opening paragraph:

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar… Men called it a berserker.

The rest, as someone has said in another context, is history. Or at least it has been going on ever since. Some fifteen years and eighteen stories (if my count is correct) later, readers in Japan, England, Brazil, France, and who knows where have had a chance to read about berserkers. Some of them (and even some editors) are still asking for more. There are now berserkers in computer games, though I believe that in that alternate universe they are still vastly outnumbered by the Klingon forces. What was to have been an ephemeral menace has turned into something approaching a lifelong career.

I still have Fred Pohl’s acceptance note for that first berserker story, which he bought and renamed ‘Fortress Ship,” a title I still have not learned to love. The note reads, in part:

I like the berserker ship in ‘To Move and Win”1 very much; I’m not quite as fond of the rest of the story. (The concept of the wild, huge ship seems to promise much more color and drama than the checker game provides.)

In subsequent notes (and in conversation, when Fred and I finally met at a convention) he urged me to write more berserkers, and solemnly assured me that a series of connected stories was the most certain road to fame.

And you know, he was right. Or, anyway, the berserker series has, and has rubbed off on me, a name-recognition potential far greater than anything else that I have ever written, though the series actually makes up less than half my published output of science fiction. That first berserker has brought in many times the $50 earned by its first showing in Worlds of If, and new requests for reprinting are still at hand in 1977.

In mathematics there are series that converge and others that diverge. So, I think, it is in story-telling. In a convergent series of the literary type (I had one, I believe, in my trilogy The Broken Lands, The Black Mountains, and Changeling Earth) the writer sooner or later feels increasingly constricted by what he has already put down about his characters and settings. As in real life, choices once made must be lived with. Not as in real life, the author retains the prerogative of bailing out of his cornered position in that world, to another world that he already knows; and sooner or later the prerogative is exercised.

The divergent series of stories, on the other hand, is more like the succession of football seasons, or Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. One chapter’s victories or zdisasters mean nothing when the next chapter starts.

Sherlock Holmes grew old, converged, and retired, though he had the (in his case, delightful) habit of coming back for a long succession of last bows. How can the berserkers grow old? It’s been established that in their secret automated bases they can repair and improve themselves, and add to their numbers by new construction. Fred Pohl, in his editorial capacity, was a little worried upon reading one of the stories (“Stone Place,” If, March 1965) that I had decided to wipe out the berserkers and wind the series up. No, by then I was already too smart for that. The metal killers came back from near-extinction as briskly as dandelions. Nor are they presently an endangered species.

A few hours ago (as I write this) I mailed off to my agent a new berserker short story, called “The Smile.”2 I’m also working on Berkerker Man, a novel which I think may be the best of the family to date. With a whole galaxy to range over, containing scores (at least) of Earth-colonized planets, and an occasional alien race if I need one, I don’t feel the least bit crowded. Particularly with several thousand years established as a rough time-frame.

This is not to say that suitable ideas for new stories are always at hand. I believe it works something like the nation’s proven reserves of oil; at times there may seem to be no more anywhere, but let a whiff of money stir the air, the metaphorical rod smiteth the rock, and lo, the needed material gusheth forth. Or trickleth, anyway; enough to meet the absolute necessities of the time.

Lack of ideas as a difficulty is peculiar to the series story, of course. About the only difficulty I can think of that is, other than convergence, is really no more than an irritant.

It has to do with background material; the establishing of the story’s setting for the reader. For example, in how many different ways (limiting oneself to the English language) is it possible to repeat, restate, or paraphrase that explanation that the machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, et cetera? You can’t leave the background out, or new readers won’t know what is going on, and some of them will care. You can’t keep sticking in the same sentences and paragraphs, or old readers (not to mention editors) may have the sensation of dropping their money in a too-familiar turnstile. So the writer, the one being paid here to do some work, has to keep on making the same old beloved background look fresh each time it is revisited. Of course when series stories are gathered into a book, even varied discriptions of the same thing quickly become too numerous, and background material so carefully created for the individual stories must be taken out. No more, as I said, than an irritant.

To return to origins. The idea of automated war machines that no one can turn off was original with me, in the sense that at the moment I began to use it I was not aware that anyone else had done so. There seems to be no doubt that I was wrong. I stand ready to be corrected, not having the evidence before me, but I believe Sturgeon’s “There Is No Defense” is an example of an earlier use, dating from 1948. Others have used the same basic idea since I began, and others will use it in times to come.

The point I want to make, though, is that this idea fit me, worked well for me, almost became identified with me, precisely because it came out of the bottom of my subconscious and through the top of my head. Writers who have had things suddenly go right, as if of themselves, will know what I mean.

To repeat another bit of advice, this one, as I recall, from Damon Knight: Find something that you do well, and stick with it, or at least come back to it. For myself, I seem to do best with the far, far out; with ungodly and unlikely worlds and monsters; robot killers, the demons of Changeling Earth, sympathetic vampires. (My own feeling is that The Dracula Tape may be my own best book. Publishers’ Weekly liked it. You’ve never seen it in a bookstore? Neither have I. Another story.)

  1. How’s that for a title?
  2. Somewhere, someday, you may see it in print as “Fortress Face.”

Copyright (C) 1977 by ALGOL magazine; reprinted here by permission of Andrew Porter, the publisher, and Fred Saberhagen, the author.