Summer Reading List No. 6-Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson

The club story is not really a genre but a type. There are club stories in science fiction and fantasy, but they might just as easily be in any genre. Think of "The World of Commander McBragg" on one end of the spectrum and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) on the other. There is another club story of sorts coming our way in this series, so stay tuned.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson (Ace Books, 1987) is a collection of club stories set in just one place, the interior of a fictional (and fantastical) bar in the author's native Long Island. Many or most of these stories appeared originally in Analog magazine, then edited by Ben Bova (1932-2020). It is to the late Mr. Bova that Spider Robinson (b. 1948) dedicated his book. The original publication in book form was in 1977.

We think of Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne or H.G. Wells as being the originator of science fiction. Weak or strong, a case could be made that Charles Fort (1874-1932) actually played that role. Without a doubt, Fort's name came up again and again in science fiction and pseudoscientific writing in the twentieth century, maybe more often than the names of the others I have listed here. Fort's name occurs not once but twice in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. These occurrences are set on two foundation blocks laid down by Charles Fort, blocks upon which so much science fiction has been constructed in the years since he first wrote.

Before being called science fiction, everyone's favorite genre was sometimes referred to as pseudoscientific literature. Before he researched and wrote The Book of the Damned (1919), Charles Fort was a science fiction writer. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entry on pseudoscience, giving Fort his due (or "dew"--see Callahan's, page 61). "The two areas of his theorizing," the encyclopedists write, "that have most influenced [science fiction] are ESP/Psi Powers and the notion that we are being secretly observed, and perhaps controlled, by mysterious intelligences." Spider Robinson covers both of these areas, to wit:

• On page 61, referring to mutants who possess so-called psychic powers, a character says: "You've probably heard of them, maybe seen one on T.V. or read about 'em in places like Charles Fort."

• On page 151, another says: "No, my friend, Charles Fort was quite correct: you are property, and on the whole not very bright property."

So, Science Fiction Plot #1: Endowed with hidden, latent, or unrecognized powers (and by extension, with his own special knowledge, or gnosis), the Superior Man struggles until, realizing his powers, triumphs, meaning, of course, that he is recognized for his superiority, and all of humanity gives way. We have in the real world men and women who believe themselves to be morally, intellectually, or racially (thus physically) superior to the masses of humanity. They believe it only right that we yield to their superiority. (Sometimes they even write books about their struggles.) Carried to its logical conclusion, Science Fiction Plot #1 may mean the establishment of Utopia. That Utopia may be societal--i.e., the typical Progressive Utopia, also known as Dystopia--or personal, i.e., perhaps the Conservative Utopia, as in the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the real world, the Superior Man Plot leads either to Dystopia, as in the late Soviet Union, or Apocalypse, as in the final days of Nazi Germany.

And, Science Fiction Plot #2: Superior races or species from other planets own us, or aspire to own us or our world, and so they invade Earth to take what they own or wish to own. Unfortunately, the results are the same, i.e., either Dystopia (as in Stephen Baxter's sequel to The War of the Worlds, The Massacre of Mankind, from 2017) or Apocalypse (as in Robert Bloch's sequel to "The Call of Cthulhu," Strange Eons, from 1978).

I'm sure there are other possibilities--we want other possibilities, or at least I do. Maybe I have blinders on right now because of the current topic. Then again, maybe we are driven by our nature to perish either in fire or ice, at least whenever we live at the extremes of our nature.

* * *

Science fiction from mid century and after in which so-called psychic powers play a part, usually as a lead-in to the "superior man" kind of plot, can be pretty tiresome. I begin reading, and then I think, "Oh, no, here we go again." Psychic powers are not scientific. At best they are pseudoscientific. Incorporating them into a science fiction story immediately turns it into a non-science-fiction story. Using psychic powers in a story limits its appeal. It invokes boredom in the reader. It demonstrates a lack of imagination on the part of the author by providing him or her with an easy way out of the difficulties of plotting his or her story. Psychic powers are a twentieth-century version of magic--and just as baseless and arbitrary as magic--all gussied up in the clothing of science. (They have even found their way into the mythology of flying saucers, thus a fusion of Charles Fort's two foundational ideas.) Maybe all of that was under the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr., Campbell who seems to have believed in the concept of the superior man. Maybe the insecure man, the man who believes himself actually to be inferior, is drawn to the idea that if only he can cultivate his latent powers--if only he can get everyone to see how truly great he is--he might jump over his fellows in a kind of moral, intellectual, or physical/racial game of leapfrog. Yeah, that'll show 'em, all of those people who made fun of me, stood in my way, frustrated my ambitions, failed to recognize my superiority. Maybe he imagines that once he's on top, like Yertle the Turtle, he will be happy. Yes, only then will he be happy. And maybe there are similarities between the Inferior/Superior Man of science fiction and the True Believer of Eric Hoffer's--and John W. Campbell's--time. And not just of their time but our own as well. (1, 2)

* * *

Anyway, Charles Fort was on the minds of science fiction writers during the twentieth century. I wonder now whether they wrote largely under his sway, whether there was any escaping him, or even whether there would have been a twentieth-century American science fiction as we know it without him. Fort will show up in the next book I will write about in this series. Edgar Rice Burroughs, another founder of our science fiction, will also make his return.

Notes
(1) The Campbellian Golden Age of Science Fiction, 1938 to 1950, is inclusive of the arc of War, the perpetrators of which were the immediate subject of Hoffer's analysis.
(2) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer was published in 1951, the year after "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science" by L. Ron Hubbard appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1950). The science fiction author is of course a man (or woman) of words and not of action. But in his fiction, the man of words can make of himself a man of action: he can turn himself into his own hero. Maybe science fiction is after all an adolescent power fantasy in the same way that socialism and similar beliefs are such fantasies--one difference being that science fiction writers don't typically murder great masses of their fellow men.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson (Ace Books, 1987), with cover art by Vincent DiFate (b. 1945).

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley