The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When Genres Collide

Written by
Michael L. Shuman

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Abstract: Norman Mailer’s first treatment of science fiction, “The Last Night,” appeared at an important point in the development of modern speculative fiction, and in many ways demonstrates both the early condition of the genre and how a great author may combine traditional literature’s considerations of the human heart with the cosmic implications of science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Andre Norton, producing a medium of revelation and prophecy. “The Last Night” helps to merge science fiction with mainstream literature, two genres colliding in Campbell’s era, into a single form capable of informing a technological culture. The motifs of the generational starship carrying passengers from a dying earth may have developed in the mid-century science fiction context, but Mailer excels in using the conventions of the genre to present a prescient recognition of mankind’s essential misjudgment and treachery, against his fellows and ultimately against the planet that gave us birth. The suspect science of Mailer’s treatment, along with the indeterminate time of the story’s setting, contributes to the aura of myth and heroism that transforms the work into a document of prophecy.

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URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13shu

John W. Campbell, editor of the magazine Astounding and its later incarnation, Analog, was perhaps the dominant voice in the science fiction community as the genre endeavored to attain legitimacy. For more than three decades, between 1937 and his death in 1971, Campbell offered an aspirational venue for writers who wanted to combine speculative inquiry into scientific and technological advances with fictional plots that were engaging enough to command a paying audience. Campbell’s editorial policy, maintained by providing plot ideas to prospective authors and the liberal use of his editorial authority to suggest revisions, demanded that fiction should be grounded in scientifically plausible developments that would withstand an engineer’s close examination. “As an editor,” writes Alec Nevala-Lee, “he wanted good writing, accurate science, believable characters, and stories that logically accounted for multiple variables.” The era of popular fast-paced adventure stories, emphasizing ray guns and action, was nearing its end. The approach worked, attracting an extensive readership of technical professionals. One legend common within the science fiction community maintains that, in the early 1940s, Campbell could tell that some grand scientific project was underway as his office received a rush of change-of- address forms with a post office box in Santa Fe—near Los Alamos—as the new address. The tale may well be apocryphal, but Nevala-Lee’s account of the rumor does much to affirm Campbell’s attention to his subscribers as well as his readership of scientists and engineers.

The scientific authority of stories published in Astounding supported Campbell’s defense of science fiction amid critical claims that the genre consisted of little more than escapist imaginings, a common late-1950s perception sustained by the monster-and-space-suit covers of pulps and comic books lining newsstand shelves a decade earlier. The real escapist literature, he maintained in a 1959 editorial, was fiction published in popular, slick-paper magazines and consumed by mainstream readers unaware of the implications of technological advancement. “It happens that science fiction’s core is just about the only non-escape literature available to the general public today,” he maintains, emphasizing that scientists writing reports on manned space stations, bases on the Moon, and antigravity devices have a nearly emotional connection to the social changes ahead. The authors of these technical reports, according to Campbell, “find themselves grimly, terribly, forced to face the woeful reality that things change, and new factors come into action . . . there is no security in knowing all the answers to all the known forces . . . because new forces arise.” Campbell flips the prevailing notion of popular fiction on its head, and then spins it around a few times for good measure. Mainstream literature, he argues, is based upon what he calls The Ancient Fundamentals, and thus is “almost one hundred per cent purely escape literature” given the pace of technological advancement.

General circulation magazines of the mid-twentieth century, indeed, mostly avoided science fiction and instead published, in Campbell’s reckoning, only “soft, almost formless, nearly pointless stories” predicated on certain principles of life that were deemed unchanging by authors and editors. Men’s magazines were the exception, as presumably their target audience intersected with the readership of magazines such as Astounding and their editors sometimes were science fiction professionals working outside of genre. A notable example is Harlan Ellison, the celebrated infant terrible of the science fiction world, who began editing Rogue in 1959 and published an extensive list of science fiction authors, including Algis Budrys, Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clarke, and J. G. Ballard. Rogue founding editor Frank M. Robinson, whose 1950 short story “The Maze” was published in Astounding, later edited Cavalier and, in the early 1970s, disbursed witty guidance as the author of “The Playboy Advisor,” a Playboy column with dedicated readers no doubt unaware that their mentor in the ethics of masculinity happened to be gay. Playboy also published science fiction authors such as James Blish, Fredric Brown, and Robert Sheckley, although sometimes these stories fit more comfortably in the categories of horror and the supernatural. Esquire, perhaps emulating the example set by the popular press, published only such prominent science fiction authors as Ray Bradbury, whose “The Dragon,” “Mars is Heaven,” and “The Playground” are good examples of the twelve Bradbury short stories published in Esquire during the early 1950s.

Mailer’s own, often volatile relationship with Esquire began with the April 1953 publication of “The Language of Men,” a short story about an Army base cook that conforms with the expectations of mainstream fiction and would fit comfortably between the covers of a Saturday Evening Post or an issue of Cosmopolitan from that era. But “The Last Night,” written in 1962 and published in the December 1963 issue, is a curious combination of science fiction, politics, and environmental concerns presented as an example of Mailer’s experimental nature and his interest in film. In his prefatory note, Mailer acquaints readers with the notion of a film treatment, a narrative devoid of authorial style and intended to convince studio executives of the marketability of a story idea. He then offers a treatment that is unabashedly science fiction, a remarkable departure from Mailer’s work at that time.

Mailer is intentionally vague about the date of the treatment’s action, noting only that the events take place sometime within the next one hundred years. The plot presents a world nearly uninhabitable due the radioactive fallout from atomic bombs. “[E]ven the apples on the trees turn malignant in the stomach,” he writes. “Life is being burned out by a bleak fire within, a plague upon the secrets of our existence which stultifies the air.” Mailer emphasizes that this dire situation was created by a series of apparently trivial decisions by government officials attempting to conceal the truth of eventual global catastrophe, “ten thousand little abuses of power, ten thousand moments in history when the leaders had decided that the news they held was too unpleasant or too paralyzing for the masses to bear.” In a rare adoption of worldwide legislation, each country dedicates all its economic and scientific capitol toward building a fleet of spaceships as a caravan to Mars, where a small colony of astronauts have succeeded in building a self-sustaining base. The process of selection would be emotionally brutal, with just one hundred thousand of the remaining one hundred million citizens accepted for the life-saving journey to the Martian base. As the narrative advances, government officials discover that no planet in our solar system has survived the effects of extreme radiation, and therefore the plan is altered to carry human beings and their culture to another star.

The essential plot elements of spaceship migration from a dying Earth, while not exactly common in science fiction of the era, nevertheless has several notable precursors. When Worlds Collide, a novel by Edwin Balmer and Phillip Wylie, was first published serially in six issues of Blue Book magazine in 1932 and 1933, later appearing in book form and, in 1951, adapted into a movie produced by the prominent science fiction filmmaker George Pal. The novel dramatizes the approach of two rogue planets, Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta, toward Earth and the anticipated destruction caused by the twin bodies’ gravitational pull. Bronson Beta appears inhabitable and likely to avoid damage from the cosmic collision, and Cole Hendron, an American physicist, begins to direct a team of workers building an enormous spaceship that will carry only a few of them to safety. Scottish novelist J. T. McIntosh’s “One in Three Hundred,” a short story published in the February 1953 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, similarly deals with a natural catastrophe, this time from an occurrence of solar flares predicted to boil away the Earth’s oceans. Hundreds of spaceships are constructed to make an escape journey to Mars and, as with Mailer’s story, the emphasis is upon the moral and ethical decisions that government officials must make when selecting passengers from a cohort of citizens who have earned their chance for consideration through a national lottery.

Both of these examples deal with escape to a planet relatively close to Earth, but Mailer’s notion of a generational starship—an interstellar vehicle capable of supporting human life during its centuries-long journey to another solar system—is the central plot of Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, originally published as two stories in separate numbers of Astounding in 1941 and collected in book form in the United States in 1962. Heinlein examines the psychological and political ramifications of such an extended, multi-generational journey and explains that an eventual mutiny onboard created such a chaos in leadership that, hundreds of years later, the ship’s residents had forgotten their original mission and had reverted to a superstitious, nearly-medieval culture. The ship, to its residents, had become the universe, with only a surviving cluster of mutants vaguely aware of its original purpose. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party,” from the May 1946 issue of Astounding, once again deals with Earth on the threshold of destruction from the exploding sun. The story is cleverly narrated from the point of view of aliens who, aware of the impending disaster, come to Earth in faster-than-light ships to rescue as many humans as possible, only to find that the planet’s population already has built a fleet of chemically-fueled generational starships for their own salvation. J. G. Ballard, one of the first authors to successfully navigate the divide between science fiction and mainstream work, is preoccupied in his early novels with the various ways that Earth may come to an end. The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), and The Crystal World (1966) all have a characteristic style and narrative sophistication that, later, appeared in notable and often controversial works such as Crash (1973), High-Rise (1975), and Empire of the Sun (1984). Ballard’s own generational starship story, “Thirteen to Centaurus,” was published in the April 1962 issue of Amazing Stories and, in an inversion of Heinlein’s narrative, involves a crew of three families who believe they are aboard a generational starship, when in fact they inhabit a sealed dome on Earth as an experiment to test the feasibility of a centuries-long trip to Alpha Centauri. In addition to the psychological effects of multi-generational travel, Ballard also explores the governmental challenges, with one crew member becoming an incipient tyrant while, on Earth, public opinion and budgetary concerns lead to the eventual termination of the project.

Disasters, both man-made and nature-borne, may be a common motivation in escape-from-the-planet narratives and, as with Mailer, generally there is an emphasis upon the ethical considerations of choosing members of a population for survival. Mailer’s one hundred thousand out of one hundred million becomes McIntosh’s one in three hundred, neither being comforting odds to the individual submitted to that singular survival lottery. Some authors, however, choose to take a more familial approach, with small groups of families trying to avoid some form of certain destruction caused by headstrong world leaders. “The Million Year Picnic” by Ray Bradbury, part of his collection of integrated stories published in 1950 as The Martian Chronicles, relates the story of a politician fed-up with corruption and public complacency and certain that world destruction is imminent. He takes his family to Mars on an implied fishing trip, ultimately to join another family intent upon leaving the corruption of Earth permanently behind and, taking the place of an extinct race, they become the new Martians. Richard Matheson’s “Third from the Sun,” similar to Bradbury’s story in plot and theme, first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction’s inaugural issue in October 1950 and, a decade later, was filmed as an episode of Rod Serling’s influential TV show The Twilight Zone|. The story concerns the chief test pilot for a new spaceship, a man unnamed in Matheson’s story, who is certain that nuclear war is imminent. He colludes with a neighbor to steal the ship and escape, with their families, from their doomed world to begin new lives on another planet, thus continuing their race. This episode of The Twilight Zone, unlike Matheson’s story, centers on emotionally intense scenes where the plan is likely to be discovered by officials, thus emphasizing the destructive political and scientific short-sightedness that Mailer underscores in his own treatment. In a plot reversal ideal for The Twilight Zone’s narrative approach, Matheson at the end reveals that Earth, in fact, is not the planet doomed to destruction but rather the absconding families’ destination, a new world to populate with their alien kind.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay. Artwork Copyright © Lail Finlay.

Perhaps the best example of science fiction anticipating Mailer’s narrative, however, is The Stars Are Ours!, a novel by Andre Norton first published in hardcover in 1954 and later reprinted, without the titular exclamation point, as a paperback from Ace Books. Norton describes a politically divided Earth with a subjugated class of scientists resisting political, racial, and religious divisions advocated by predominant nationalists. Following the near-total destruction of the planet when a renegade group captures a space station, turning it into a giant weapon, the surviving population becomes even more fragmented, devolving into a nearly feudal social order dismissive of science and technology. One scientist, Lars Nordis, manages to escape with his family to a small farm and there works with others to build an interstellar ship that, they hope, will take them off-planet and to safety. Instead of intending a generational voyage, as with Heinlein, Clarke, and Ballard, the team develops a system of suspended animation that allows individuals to survive an interstellar voyage. The cover of the first edition, by the iconic science fiction artist Virgil Finlay, not only accurately portrays the nick-of-time launch of the scientists’ spaceship in Norton’s book, but also is a remarkable representation of the events in Mailer’s treatment. Finlay’s painting illustrates, in a distinctive and colorful style reflecting his pulp magazine background, the science fiction motifs of Mailer’s story. We observe the launch pad concealed among underground tunnels, a patch of starry sky above looming mountains; the imposing spaceship and the dynamos providing power to the facility, both testaments to the scientists’ technical capability; the boarding passengers, all selected geographically by the President’s agonizing deliberation; the falling stones, red hot, implying the impending destruction of Earth; and the square-jawed scientists themselves, their sensible safety-glasses above distinctively high cheek bones indicative of good judgment and noble intent.

Mailer’s treatment not only shares science fiction artifacts with Norton’s novel but, at the same time, emphasizes the political corruption and treachery central to both Norton’s and Ballard’s stories. In “Thirteen to Centaurus,” Dr. Francis purports to be a member of the starship crew but, in fact, is one of the researchers assigned to observe the thirteen test subjects who believe they are on their way to another star. Moreover, the entire population of the earth apparently is aware of the experimental ruse and only later exhibits the moral courage to demand the termination of the project. Dr. Francis vindicates himself in the end, but Mailer’s Anderson Stevens, the President’s most trusted technical advisor, remains duplicitous for much of the narrative. Stevens, we learn, has known all along that the entire solar system was polluted with radiation and is thus uninhabitable, yet conceals this singularly important finding, believing that “the general despair would be too great and would paralyze the best efforts of his own men to find another solution.” He also conceives of, and conceals, the unimaginably audacious plan to explode the earth as a way of increasing the thrust of the spaceship’s acceleration and, in perhaps the ultimate treachery against his country and the president he serves, first recommends it to the Russians. Mailer notes the eventual extent of this treacherous secrecy as “hundreds and then thousands” of scientists and engineers working on the spaceship project conceal, from a worried public, the impossibility of surviving on Mars as well as their own efforts to construct a vehicle for escape. “So an atmosphere of secrecy and evasion began to circle about the capital,” Mailer writes, “and the mood of the nation was effected.” Unlike the complicit public in Ballard’s story, the citizens of Mailer’s narrative remain completely unaware of the situation and powerless to voice an objection, surviving in an environment of unease and suspicion nearly as caustic as the poisoned air around them.

Most of Stevens’s plans are as suspect, technologically, as his unaccountable secrecy and duplicity are ethically. Mailer’s science, indeed, is wonky throughout the treatment and no doubt would have been subjected thoroughly to Campbell’s editorial pen had Mailer submitted the work to Analog rather than Esquire. Mailer, at various points in the story, suggests that nuclear fallout produced by detonating atomic weapons on our planet would inevitably spread throughout the solar system. In fact, any such radiation would remain primarily in the Earth’s atmosphere, nor would enough fallout be produced by any number of nuclear explosions to corrupt other planets. The scientists in Mailer’s treatment also suggest that, to reach another star, all the thrust producing momentum must be generated during the initial ascent, not considering that, once in the vacuum of outer space and away from atmospheric resistance, the amount of propulsion necessary to maintain or even increase that momentum is virtually negligible. Such a questionable determination also extends to the construction of the starship’s hull. “No metal existed,” Mailer writes, “which could withstand the heat of the excessive friction created by the extreme velocity necessary to blast a ship through the atmosphere and out beyond the gravitational attraction of the sun and its planets.” Stevens’s plan to dig a ten-mile long tunnel into the Earth’s surface to increase the rocket’s momentum, while later revealed as a ruse to test a more nefarious proposal, is similarly misguided. The scientists theorize that “the tunnel would act like the muzzle of a rifle and fire the rocket as if it were a shell,” and “taking advantage of the earth’s rotation about its own axis and the greater speed of its rotation about the sun, the rocket ship might then possess sufficient escape velocity to quit the gravitational pull of the sun and so move out to the stars.” Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and award-winning science fiction author, dismisses the idea as scientific gobbledygook. “Even using a ramp to accelerate,” Benford says, “like [the film] When Worlds Collide, is little help unless you have very low thrust. Von Braun laughed, I hear, at the idea.”

Mailer, whose research skills and attention to detail is inarguable, certainly could have verified scientific details of his treatment if they were important to the goals of his work, but apparently they were not. His primary intention here, aside from developing his familiarity with an important aspect of film production, is to offer his warning about the dangers of too much secrecy, too much governmental good intentions that go awry amid human frailty and misguided decisions. Mailer’s language at times even appears to violate the rules he lists for a successful treatment, with emphasis on evocative and poetic expression at odds with his notion that the form should be devoid of character introspection and rhetorical style. “Perhaps we shall find a way to drive a tunnel into the center of the earth,” the Russian Premier says at one point, “in order to burn all impurities out of ourselves.” Mailer assumes the role of prophet rather than technical expert in a medium of communication intended for a readership of film producers creating an after-all commercial form of art rather than a population anxious for prophecy. “Assume then,” Mailer advises in a headnote to the treatment’s appearance in Cannibals and Christians, “that the errors in reasoning and/or judgement you have detected for yourself in these pages are equaled only by the numerous errors you failed to detect. That, scientist and friends, is bound to be the measure of the error in the next prophecy.”

Reading Mailer’s story, whether in that 1953 issue of Esquire, or reprinted in the 1966 collection Cannibals and Christians, or now, in The Mailer Review, the challenges of filming Mailer’s action with the film technology available in the mid-twentieth century seem nearly insurmountable. When Worlds Collide and The Day the Earth Stood Still, both released to theatres in 1951, did admirably well representing one spaceship and one robot, each, with the special effects technology of the time. This Island Earth (1955) ranged a bit wider, with credible aliens, a flying saucer, and action transpiring on two different planets, but the lower budget and pulpy action eventually intrudes, leaving the impression of a film intended for a Saturday afternoon matinee rather that an example of mature cinematic science fiction. Even the early 1960s television dramas The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, while frequently offering stories with significant themes and philosophical implications, suffered at times from unconvincing visual effects. Mailer’s tunnels, ten miles deep into the earth, his cannon-fired missiles and his massive starships, certainly would have required a budget beyond what even his impressive literary stature could have commanded at the time. The only apparent option would be to present the drama as more of a stage play, restricted to the characters’ interaction as they describe fantastic events occurring off-screen. This approach, however, would inevitably eliminate the sense of grandeur, the perception that we are witnessing events of a cosmically-significant and mythical nature. Mailer was working outside genre, incredibly so, and The Deer Park, written just a few years later and adapted by Mailer into a play produced at the Lucille Lotrel Theatre in early 1967, is more consistent with his body of work. So, why did Mailer choose a science fiction context for his treatment at all?

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Works Cited

Ballard, J. G. (April 1962). "Thirteen to Centaurus". Amazing Stories. Vol. 36 no. 4. pp. 24–47.

• Campbell, John W. (February 1959). "Non-Escape Literature". Astounding Science Fiction. Vol. 62 no. 6. pp. 5–7, 161–162.
• Mailer, Norman (1966). "The Last Night: A Story". Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial. pp. 380–397.
• — (April 1953). "The Last Night". Esquire. pp. 151, 274–280.
• Nevala-Lee, Alec (2018). Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. HarperCollins.