Fantastic Metropolis

Although Jan was keenly interested in “self-development”, I don’t think he took scientology very seriously. He told me he’d gone all the way through to “power processing”, whatever that is, and concluded it was a lot of fuss about nothing. He showed me a list of rules and instructions written by Hubbard for a course he had taken. They started off quite cogently (one was a ban on sexual liaisons with classmates), then towards the end became rambling. When I pointed this out, Jan said it was typical of Hubbard.

As far as I can make out the E-meter puts a small voltage across the skin and uses a galvanometer to measure the resultant current. It would only cost a few pounds to make, though I’ve read Hubbard made an enormous profit on it. Human skin’s electrical resistance changes in response to emotional reaction (perhaps because the sweat glands then secrete, water being a good conductor), a phenomenon which is promising as a lie detector. I think it’s one part, together with monitoring of blood pressure and heart rate, of the reputedly unreliable polygraph the US police use. Scientologists, however, claim to be expert interpreters of the needle’s movements. Remember Glyn Davies, the astrologer and Cabalist? He told me he had met some scientologists who were praising the E-meter’s powers, which Glyn, after his habit, scoffed. “All right.” they said, “let’s see if we can find out your birthdate.” (This is nothing too impressive. A trained stage magician can find out your name, birthdate, etc. by observing your involuntary reactions to questions.) What they hadn’t known was that Glyn himself didn’t know when he was born. So he made up a date and tried to “hide” it in his mind. And of course they found it.

Michael Moorcock: Jan had this list of typed questions to ask. They were supposed to measure engrams. But the questions were all highly emotive. “Do you love your father?” Stuff like that. Naturally you were going to respond fairly dramatically, as far as the needle on the “e-meter” was concerned. It was such an obvious fraud. I don’t remember Jan doing anything but agree. I know I was incredulous then that sf people should have bought the notion. Since then, of course, lots of people have bought it. All these cults seem to operate on a miserably low level. Makes you realise that there aren’t that many smart people about! Or if they are there’s a hefty proportion of them are soup sandwiches. We’re already living down the rabbit hole. Nobody remembers anything. One nutty cult follows another. The same issues are recirculated in the press about every twenty five years (if not more rapidly). Depressing, really, all those famous film stars and people who put so much of their money into that stuff. Maybe we should have learned our lesson in those early days and taken a leaf out of Hubbard’s book. As it is, we almost starved in near-garrets and saw our hunger-crazed notions patented by others! Just like Arthur Clarke. We hard sf guys have got a lot to be bitter about. Still, there’s something very attractive about loonies, especially the harmless ones.

Barrington Bayley: Did you know that one of the natural philosophy clubs which promoted science centuries ago called itself The Lunatic Society? But that was because its members travelled the countryside at night to meet up, and so met during the full moon.

Our own lifetimes have seen the emergence of a whole living class of “mad scientists” in the Nazi era, of course. I think future generations will see more of that.

Michael Moorcock: I think you’re right. A new breed of “Elmer Gantry” demagogues. I remember having a go on some other machine Campbell, the Astounding/??Analog?? editor, brought to the 1965 World Science Fiction Convention in London, where he discovered logical opposition to his ideas apparently for the first time. I was on a panel with him. He blustered about various nonsensical notions, including his own “barbarian” ancestors (apparently unaware of the nature of the traitor Campbells!) and then called on God to be his witness, since nobody else would be. An extraordinary display, rather prefiguring Doctor Strangelove in some ways!

And those old sci-fi buffs said we weren’t interested in technology! I remember how we seemed to be the first sf writers seriously interested in computers. Remember the compact computer we had in our unpublished “Duel Among the Wine Green Suns”, which I later put into The Final Programme. “Duel”! I was reading an article somewhere, while researching for a short article I was doing on science fiction predicting real science (pretty poor show all in all) that writers hadn’t anticipated the PC at all. We didn’t do that, but we did shrink at least one computer to manageable size (even if the parties inside believed they were “real”) while otherwise dealing with those massive old cryogenic Leos and so on. I wonder why so few writers anticipated computers and not one of us anticipated the PC, as far as I know.