Fantastic Metropolis

Continued from “The Bayley-Moorcock Letters: An Old Farts’ Fireside Chat.”

 

Michael Moorcock: I was thinking of our fascination with pseudo-science and how we found ourselves meeting some odd people in those early days. I remember that you independently invented the famous Dean non-reaction drive which John W. Campbell publicised in Astounding in the 1960s. So you were able to refute Dean fairly swiftly! Do you remember that? How old were you when you came up with the idea originally?

Barrington Bayley: Yes, in my mid-teens, I think. I’m one of countless people to have got the same crackpot idea, including I believe rocket pioneer Goddard, America’s counterpart of von Braun. My diagrams were identical to ones later published by Campbell and to descriptions of Dean’s design. I imagined two counter-rotating ellipsoidal weighted rotors with movable axes of rotation able to take up positions in the centre and both extremities of the rotors, so that the rotors’ upswing would consistently involve the greater mass. At the same time each rotor would restrain the other from turning about its centre of gravity. I was never naïve enough to think Newton’s third law of motion could be sidestepped so easily, but what puzzled me for quite a long time was that I couldn’t see why it wouldn’t work. Whenever I tried to follow the interplay of forces the result seemed to be a net impulse in one direction. It was a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. A connected system still has a centre of gravity, now matter how its parts are rearranged.

Dean is one “inventor” of the non-reaction drive who went ahead and tried to construct it. I remember you and I talking one day to a visiting American who had met Dean (can you remember who that was?) and had him demonstrate his gadget crawling along the floor, forgetting, I would presume, that the floor gave it something to react against. Such a gadget would travel even if mounted on a trolley (I myself have crossed a room standing on a small trolley, holding on to the hand rail and jerking back and forth). Given enough power, it could leap into the air (only to fall back down again).

Michael Moorcock: I think the visiting American who told us about the Dean Drive might have been Burt Filer. Or was it before we met Burt?

Barrington Bayley: The guy who met Dean was someone I never heard of before and would have no idea of his name now, so Burt Filer is a possibility, though that might be a young sf writer who came along later and asked me did I write science fantasy or clank-clank (his term for hard sf). He pronounced himself a writer of clank-clank.

Michael Moorcock: Sounds like Burt’s sense of humour. He was the first person I ever met who made a living as an inventor. When asked what he did, he said “I’m an inventor”. He’d designed some interesting stuff and sold his patents to a backer who specialised in payrolling inventors! He was building a circular flute the last I saw of him. He had the model all ready. It was designed to increase the range of the conventional flute without extending the tube, as it were. Mike Harrison and I went up to Scotland with Burt, walking around Ben Nevis. It was a great trip, even if Burt nearly got bashed to bits by a bunch of repressed Scots at a Saturday Night Dance. He tried to pick up a girl, not knowing that all the girls stuck together on one side of the floor and all the lads on the other, yet many of them were engaged! Mike and I had warned him. We left the dance early but Burt was determined. Next we saw of him he was pale and shaken while downstairs outside some poor bugger was getting the shit beaten out of him (maybe Burt’s substitute). I went down to try to help the bloke and all the bouncers were inside, hiding. I got out there eventually and all I found was blood and a pair of smashed glasses… Burt got involved with a school-teacher in London and slipped off into the night. I remember that he had a bit part in the movie of Death of Grass (Cornell Wilde!) because he could ride a motorbike. Wonder what happened to him. Maybe he was swallowed by one of his own inventions. The Moebius Flute? I know he shared our enjoyment of wacky pseudo-science.

Barrington Bayley: Pseudo-science is a fascinating field, synthesised from the elaborated development of the exact sciences and an inexhaustible human resource: looniness. It’s a sort of mixture of hopefulness and “scientism”: an imagined idea of hard knowledge. We are going to see more and more of it mixed with ill-disciplined experimentation (recent examples are the “cold fusion” and “memory water” claims).

In West Kensington library I found a delightful book written by, an Austrian I think, who had invented a machine for producing limitless energy out of nothing. He called it “the stator” and had tried to persuade the UK government to fund its construction, offering to defend the British Empire. I can’t remember the principle on which it was to work, but like the Dean Drive it almost certainly depended on a delirious overthrowing of the basic principles of physics.

Campbell also championed what in Britain is known as radionics, developed by de la Warr (maybe that’s the other machine you mention). I’ve read one of de la Warr’s books. He comes across as probably a likeable and sincere person, but quite nutty. When confronted with an experimental result which contradicted his theory (he tried to kill disease bacteria with “radionic radiation”) he wrestled with his soul until he came up with a radionics-saving explanation. And he soon learned not to go near medical scientists who offered to subject his claims to clinical trials.

Current radionics practitioners I know of are not nice, however: evil charlatans exploiting sick, desperate people for mercenary gain and sexual predation.

It would be comforting to think that “real scientists” are completely sane and well-balanced, but alas it is not so. That kind of level-headedness is restricted to us science fiction writers, as far as I can see! (Yet how often have you been targeted with the exasperated words, “But you must believe in flying saucers! You’re in science fiction!”) The towering intellect of the scientific age, Newton, was distinctly odd. I wonder if the years he spent labouring in his alchemical laboratory, which must have involved long-term exposure to mercury, might have had something to do with his subsequent mental breakdown. His later years were devoted to Biblical exegesis, from which he calculated the world is scheduled to end in 2060 AD. Beat that for divorce from reality!

Michael Moorcock: Remember that guy who gave us a go on the E-meter and how we learned it was an old US Army lie detector which could be bought cheaply as army surplus?

Barrington Bayley: He was a young Dane or Swede called Jan, if I remember. It was you who had the e-meter “processing”; I wasn’t there (maybe you could talk about it). But he was quite an engaging fellow and I used to run into him in a cafe near Notting Hill tube I used sometimes.

Late one night a big goony guy came rushing in, pent up, yelling “I need you, Jan! Now!” Jan promised to come round to him as soon as he had finished eating. I took him to be one of Jan’s scientology clients and thought, Wow, this thing really builds up dependency. But he turned out to be somebody Jan had rented a room to next to his own along the street, and was unhappy about the arrangement. Jan became nervous and was glad to accept my offer to accompany him back. When we got there the two of them started arguing in scientology speak (he accused Jan of “playing a low-tone game”) but Jan was better at it and soon was able to manipulate him.

Another night we were standing chatting on the corner having come out of the same cafe when an elderly, very well-dressed man collapsed on the pavement, clinging to a lamp-post and begging hoarsely, “Please don’t let me die in the street.” I thought Jan’s total lack of reaction rather callous. I nipped into the tube station and phoned for an ambulance. When I got back Jan was still there, but the old fellow had gone. It seems a couple of coppers had come along, yanked him to his feet and hauled him off to a taxi drivers’ hut there was nearby. They were familiar with him and his sympathy act. “I knew straight away he was a fake,” Jan said cheerily. “Still, you played an interesting game, Barry.” (Everything to a scientologist is a game, apparently.) Then I had to explain it to the ambulance men.

Jan related a similar incident. “I was walking along and came to a knot people gathered round a young woman lying on the pavement. None of them knew what to do.” Jan used his scientology training. “I went up to her and said, “What is it you want?” She said, “I want two shillings for my fare home.” I gave it to her and she got up and walked away.” A “touch assist” in reverse!

Jan needed a job and an acquaintance of mine told me of an opening where he worked, so I made introductions, and he to his (Jewish) employer. Later Jan phoned me. “This old Jew is a really square fellow, Barry.” It seems he had wanted Jan to work without pay and live off social security until he had learned the job (silk screen printing). Probably, though, he could see Jan wouldn’t stick it, and wanted to get rid of him.

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.

Barrington Bayley: Well, in a novel of yours you serialised in New Worlds (the protagonist was able to tunnel between realities) someone was using a portable computer while a passenger in a car. So it’s not true none of us anticipated the PC. You anticipated the laptop!

(You also anticipated the current view that every galaxy has a black hole at its centre which eventually will devour it, leaving the universe devoid of anything but black holes.)

But it does seem true that sf writers generally failed to foresee the current state of computing. This is because they imagined electronic machines would get bigger and bigger, whereas they got smaller and smaller. A pulp mag novel which impressed me when young was Raymond F. Jones’s The Cybernetic Brains in Startling Stories. It depicted a future in which the brains of dead people were used as control systems for industrial processes, it not being known that thereby the brains became conscious again and went insane through being unable to communicate. About then, I read an article discussing how small a thermionic valve might be made. Could it be made as small as a grain of rice? It got replaced by the transistor, of which there are thousands on a chip.

Michael Moorcock: We came up with “Duel” around 1961 didn’t we, while I was staying with you at the House of Usher. The whole place would shake when even a motorbike went by outside and the landlord’s name actually was Usher. I was in a sleeping bag on your floor. I used to open my eyes slowly in the morning so as not to disturb the mice who had gathered around to stare at me. I felt a bit like Gulliver. I think it was you who discovered we could get maximum protein for the least money by buying bacon scraps from the local butcher. I remember being stimulated by your ideas a lot during that period. I also remember how much we put in to “Duel Among the Wine Green Suns” and how shattered we were when Carnell rejected it.

Barrington Bayley: I seem to remember the genesis of “Wine Green Suns” was material you wrote immediately after returning from Sweden where you lived for a while, or brought back from there. Its computer or “facsimile cabinet” for rehearsing societies, personalities and wars was an early if unpublished prefiguring of the misnamed “virtual reality” that has become commonplace ever since Gibson’s Neuromancer (the current film version is The Matrix) though I say that with trepidation, as somebody likely knows of other cases. Mind you, this “virtual reality” is only the computer-age version of the older sf theme where the characters contend in a shared dream. In Wine Green Suns the reader is left not knowing if the fabulous story really did take place or is a rehearsal in the facsimile cabinet. As we said before, as silicon chips hadn’t been invented, miniaturisation was achieved by means of “electron resonance plates”. My idea was that electron quantum states could be used to hold information stored and retrieved by “resonance”. It’s more or less the same idea as the quantum computer people are now trying to develop, which if feasible will make present-day computers look like a two-string abacus. I think they’ve probably got it to add one and zero so far.

Those mice, of which the house had droves, were very canny. One hint of human movement and they were off through their holes with unbelievable speed. They could also leap from the floor on to the table top (either that or they could walk up vertical surfaces and along the undersides of horizontal ones). Yes, I recall that getting something to eat was occasionally a problem in those days. Later I became adept at living on 10 shillings (50p) a week, and that included paraffin for the heater (as well as a big heap of bacon scraps). One day, in the same house, we had invited Pete Taylor to “dinner”. I was quite perturbed when you impressed on me, in some anxiety, that Pete would actually expect to be fed. Somehow we found enough money to buy some potatoes and something to go with them. On another occasion we gathered together all edible resources for something to eat that day. I can’t remember what I ate, but you ate a bowl of cocoa powder mixed with sugar. This was a familiar repast for me; I’d once lived on it for three days. I remember this occasion, though, because of you’re asking, in a sing-song Chinese voice, “How eat cocoa powder with chopsticks?”

You used to enjoy your ability to reduce me to a collapsed heap of uncontrollable laughter. One day you launched into a skit of what these days is known as a “wigger”—a white man trying to enter black American culture. Your spiel ended with: “Just ‘cos ah’m white don’t mean to say ah ain’t black!”

Michael Moorcock: After that it was Look and Learn for a while and “Round the Universe on a Ray of Light” (one of yours) or “Anudhaphura; Lost City in the Jungle” (one of mine). We had a living to write. Remember going to see that guy who was then editing Eagle and saying we wanted to get Dan Dare back to his former glory. He told us Dan Dare was fine as he was and it was just nostalgia on our part. Poor Frank Hampson, the creator of Dare, was thoroughly screwed by them. They essentially used him and threw him out. His self-confidence was so poor he never really got close to his glory days again. Remember when we suggested Boys World give away a B-52 bomber as a prize in competition? You could buy them for next to nothing, apparently. We pointed out that you’d never have to deliver since the kids’ parents would never allow them to have the plane in the back garden. Did you have any favourite stories you were writing then or were they pretty much all journeyman work?

Barrington Bayley: It would have to have been a B-29. The Yanks are still using their B-52s to kill people! I do remember our bravely complaining to Eagle’s editor of the sadly deteriorated Dan Dare strip. Maybe that’s why we never got much work there! As for all those stories, I recall being pleased with some I did, but there were so many it’s hard to know what, although the Astounding Jason Hyde serial, which ran for three years, had its moments. Juha Lindroos recently sent me a story from an old annual supposed to be mine. As it’s derived from another of my serials it probably is, but I couldn’t recognise it, not at all. If it was mine (or yours) it had been seriously mauled by the copy editor. I don’t believe either of us would have left the reader without the information necessary for the story to make sense.

A story I do remember was Tunnel To The Moon, about a tunnel from Earth to the moon through which trains ran and airliners flew. But I remember it because my wife Joan turned out to have read it!

One thing that did happen through doing that stuff was that I learned to write more and more quickly (a trick I have now forgotten). The weekly paper Valiant, in which the Jason Hyde serial ran, planned a “boom” issue and asked me to turn in two episodes that week. Late one morning I got a phone call.

“Do you have those two episodes yet?”

You like to seem reliable, so I said, “Yes.”

“We’ve got a flap on. Can you bring them into the office by two o’clock?”

“All right,” I heard myself saying, feeling no doubt of it. So I sat at the typewriter and wrote two episodes (five thousand words) in two hours, without even feeling the strain. Nuthin’ to it! To you, of course, that’s a regular pace.

Michael Moorcock: In the sixties a lot of hippies were convinced I’d written those books on acid. I used to have to tell them that I’d done it on adrenaline, sugar and caffeine. It’s a wonderful banisher of self-consciousness that kind of work but, of course, it helps to know it’s all being published anonymously. I remember how horrified we were when we discovered that we were getting by-lines to some of our work! Especially since you’d written under my name or I’d written under yours. And now, as you say, people show us the stuff and we actually don’t know whether it was us or somebody adapting something of ours. And was a regular pace is the operative word there. Having neither the deadlines, the anxiety nor the sugar and caffeine, I tend to go at a relatively slow pace, these days. My last Elric novels actually took months. I think that’s the first time a fantasy novel has gone over a month. Not worth doing any more. Maybe that’s why I’m not planning to write another after the next. Maybe we should start trying to collaborate again, now that we’re getting closer in speed. What do you think?

I wonder why we collaborated so successfully. We got on from the first time we met. I know that interest in barmy sciencet is one of the things which helped us get on so well when we first met. Where was that? I suspect we met at the Globe. I know we hit it off immediately. I’m trying to think of the first story I read of yours and I think it was one of those you published in Vargo Statten’s Magazine when you were still a teenager. We both shared that precocity but your career was sadly interrupted by doing National Service (which I barely escaped, having wasted time in the Air Training Corps in anticipation of a call-up which never came). I know I found your ideas fascinating and highly stimulating. I think they definitely raised the level of my ambition. You seemed the most erudite person I’d ever met. You introduced me to a lot of very different writers from Hesse to Balzac. Extraordinary, really.

Barrington Bayley: Let me make a little disclosure. I recall when you and I met up with Jim Cawthorn and you described to him a fantasy story you were working on, involving the hero’s sister who was in a permanent sleep (wasn’t this the inception of the whole Elric saga?). Seeing Jim’s fascination (and feeling my own), I thought, I’d like to do that! I’d like to meet with friends and tell them about a story I’m working on and get this kind of reaction. Some years later I was writing “The Ship of Disaster”, a story I never would have written without being influenced by you, as it has elves and trolls in it. I used to hear you talking of elves, “eyes gazing into infinity”. We were at the Globe and I started telling you and someone else about it (could have been Jim!). I was knowingly playing the role I had promised myself a few years before, getting your attention, getting the approving murmur “sounds good”. Of such small triumphs is life made!

Michael Moorcock: Well, it’s better than worrying I was going to take it into the toilet and dispose of it (as with “All The King’s Men”). I published “Ship of Disaster” in New Worlds 151. Not long after I’d taken over the magazine. I remember the response was tremendous. Mike Harrison said, as I recall, that “Ship of Disaster” and “All The King’s Men” were two of the most stimulating sf stories he’d ever read. When he was doing his own early work he said that a lot of what he was trying to do was reproduce the frisson he’d felt. So clearly you had your wish granted more than you’d hoped. Dave Britton says the same about that story, how it made him shiver. Nobody expected you to do an elves and trolls story which was not only science fiction but also had your familiar philosophical content. A great story. Was it reprinted in one of your collections? We ought to reprint it somewhere, if not. Certainly I had the same response when you were telling me about The Soul of the Robot. Your ideas just knocked me out. Not because you had the idea of robot discovering his soul, as it were, but because of the quality of your thinking. This is something not mentioned enough, I think. You could also discover the essence of something in another writer’s story and sometimes make the story sound a lot more interesting than it was. There was a James Blish story you liked in one of the pulps, Planet or Super Science or Thrilling Wonder—the magazines which published what people these days call “cross-over” fiction—a bit of everything in those stories, which is why I always preferred them to Analog and the rest. That’s certainly where I read the Leigh Brackett stories which combined fantasy, horror, science and, being Leigh, a bit of western thrown in as well (all written in a noir-ish prose which she did her detective stories in—the stories which made Hawks want to use her on the script for The Big Sleep). Maybe that was another enthusiasm which brought us together. Speaking of which, I wonder, too, whether you’d read Mervyn Peake before we met. And had you read Peake by the time I first took you round to Drayton Gardens to meet Maeve?

 

To be continued…