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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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.

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Works Cited

• Campbell, John W. (February 1959). "Non-Escape Literature". Astounding Science Fiction. Vol. 62 no. 6. pp. 5–7, 161–162.
• Mailer, Norman (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.