Further, a novel—in particular the sf novel—creates an entire world, with countless petty details—petty, perhaps, to the characters in the novel, but vital for the reader to know, since out of these manifold details his comprehension of the entire fictional world is obtained. In a story, on the other hand, you are in a future world when soap operas come at you from every wall in the room… as Ray Bradbury once described. That one fact alone catapults the story out of mainstream fiction and into sf.
What an sf story really requires is the initial premise which cuts it off entirely from our present world. This break must be made in the reading of, and the writing of, all good fiction… a made-up world must be presented. But there is much more pressure on an sf writer, for the break is far greater than in, say, Paul’s Case or Big Blonde—two varieties of mainstream fiction which will always be with us.
It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels that worlds occur. The stories in this collection are a series of events. Crisis is the key to story-writing, a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happenings so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out… usually. He can get them out; that’s what matters. But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one (such long, long stories as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice are, like the Styron piece, really short novels). The implication of all this makes clear why some sf writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories. It is because anything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event. So, in terms of actions and events, the story is far less restrictive to the author than is a novel. As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do—not what he would like them to do. This is on one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness. (1968)
STABILITY written 1947 or earlier [previously unpublished].
ROOG written 11/51. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Feb 1953. [First sale.]
The first thing you do when you sell your first story is phone up your best friend and tell him. Whereupon he hangs up on you, which puzzles you until you realize that he is trying to sell stories, too, and hasn ‘t managed to do it. That sobers you, that reaction. But then when your wife comes home you tell her, and she doesn ‘t hang up on you; she is very pleased andexcited. At the time I sold Roog to Anthony Boucher at Fantasy and Science Fiction I was managing a record store part time and writing part time. If anyone asked me what I did I always said “I’m a writer.” This was in Berkeley, in 1951. Everybody was a writer. No one had ever sold anything. In fact most of the people I knew believed it to be crass and undignified to submit a story to a magazine; you wrote it, read it aloud to your friends, and finally it was forgotten. That was Berkeley in those days.
Another problem for me in getting everyone to be awed was that my story was not a literary story in a little magazine, but an sf story. Sf was not read by people in Berkeley in those days (except for a small group of fans who were very strange; they looked like animated vegetables). “But what about your serious writing?” people said to me. I was under the impression that Roog was quite a serious story. It tells of fear; it tells of loyalty; it tells of obscure menace and a good creature who cannot convey knowledge of that menace to those he loves. What could be more serious a theme than this? What people really meant by “serious” was “important.” Sf was, by definition, not important. I cringed over the weeks following my sale of Roog as I realized the serious Codes of Behavior I had broken by selling my story, and an sf story at that.
To make matters worse, I now had begun to nurse the delusion that I might be able to make a living as a writer. The fantasy in my head was that I could quit my job at the record store, buy a better typewriter, and write all the time, and still make the payments on my house. As soon as you start thinking that they come for you and haul you away. It’s for your own good. When you are discharged later on as cured you no longer have that fantasy. You go back to work at the record store (or the supermarket or polishing shoes). See, the thing is, being a writer is—well, it’s like the time I asked a friend of mine what field he was going into when he got out of college and he said, “I’m going to be a pirate.” He was dead serious.
The fact that Roog sold was due to Tony Boucher outlining to me how the original version should be changed. Without his help I’d still be in the record business. I mean that very seriously. At that time Tony ran a little writing class, working out of the living room of his home in Berkeley. He’d read our stories aloud and we’d see—not just that they were awful—but how they could be cured. Tony saw no point in simply making it clear that what you had written was no good; he assisted you in transmuting the thing into art. Tony knew what made up good writing. He charged you (get this) one dollar a week for this. One dollar! If ever there was a good man in this world it was Anthony Boucher. We really loved him. We used to get together once a week and play poker. Poker, opera and writing were all equally important to Tony. I miss him very much. Back in 19741 dreamed one night that I had passed across into the next world, and it was Tony who was waiting for me to show up there. Tears fill my eyes when I think of that dream. There he was, but transformed into Tony the Tiger, like in that breakfast cereal ad. In the dream he was filled with delight and so was I. But it was a dream; Tony Boucher is gone. But I am still a writer, because of him. Whenever I sit down to start a novel or a story a bit of the memory of that man returns to me. I guess he taught me to write out of love, not out of ambition. It’s a good lesson for all activities in this world.
This little story, Roog, is about an actual dog—like Tony, gone now. The dog’s actual name was Snooper and he believed as much in his work as I did in mine. His work (apparently) was to see that no one stole the food from the owner’s garbage can. Snooper was laboring under the delusion that his owners considered the garbage valuable. Every day they’d carry out paper sacks of delicious food and carefully deposit them in a strong metalcontainer, placing the lid down firmly. At the end of the week the garbage can was full—whereupon the worst assortment of evil entities in the Sol System drove up in a huge truck and stole the food. Snooper knew which day of the week this happened on; it was always on Friday. So about five A.M. on Friday, Snooper would emit his first bark. My wife and I figured that was about the time the garbagemen’s alarm clocks were going off. Snooper knew when they left their houses. He could hear them. He was the only one who knew; everybody else ignored what was afoot. Snooper must have thought he inhabited a planet of lunatics. His owners, and everyone else in Berkeley, could hear the garbagemen coming, but no one did anything. His barking drove me out of my mind every week, but I was more fascinated by Snooper’s logic than I was annoyed by his frantic efforts to rouse us. I asked myself, What must the world look like to that dog? Obviously he doesn ‘t see as we see. He has developed a complete system of beliefs, a worldview totally different from ours, but logical given the evidence he is basing it on.