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By Root 490 0

just for escapism, of course. Faulkner—though not most of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—was a huge enthusiasm, and I had others, including Twain, of course, together with Sinclair Lewis and his generation of realists. There were many I found in the pulps. I had loved the full-blooded science fantasies of Leigh Brackett and the work of the young writer she had befriended, Ray Bradbury, who often appeared in the same issues of Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. It only occurred to me later how so much that was good about Anglophone fiction came out of California. It wasn’t just the great movies being made there from the beginning of the twentieth century. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars wasn’t too far away in the deserts beyond Tarzana, and both Brackett and Bradbury grew up there, making of Burroughs’s Mars what others made of Dickens’s London. Like his Vermilion Sands, Ballard’s Mars is as Californian as the language that influenced the likes of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and all those other Americans whose tone can still be heard, faintly perhaps in English literary fiction, to this day.

Before I came to write the first Elric stories I was already absorbing the kind of literature which influenced my generation, including that of the great French Existentialist writers and film-makers. I made my first trip to Paris at the age of fifteen. I went to see Sartre’s Huis Clos and Camus’s Caligula. I read their novels. I became an enthusiast for the likes of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Blaise Cendrars and William Burroughs. Although no great fan of most of the Beats, I had met some of them in Paris and had friends who were huge admirers. Later, I did come to know and like Burroughs. I absorbed the ideas of the time as much through conversation as by reading and, when I had gone from editing Tarzan Adventures to becoming an editor at Sexton Blake Library (a pulp series that had begun before World War I and that had published many of those Zenith stories before World War II), I had lost my taste for most fantasy fiction. SBL publishers, Amalgamated Press, at that time the largest periodical producers in the world, were horribly overstaffed in those easy years. Editorial offices were full of young men like me who came to journalism through juvenile publishing but who were huge enthusiasts for surrealism and the situation-alists, for Brecht and Beckett and Ionesco. They would go on to do great things, not always as journalists.

We went to Paris every chance we had. At George Whitman’s Paris bookstore (then called Mistral but now known as Shakespeare & Company) I would busk with my guitar, seated on a chair outside the shop (George didn’t mind since he knew all the money went back to him), and then as soon as I had enough, buy a couple of paperbacks for the rest of the day. It was there, in the shadow of Notre Dame, that I read my first true SF story, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, and wondered what I’d been missing. As it turned out, Bester was one of the few SF writers of his day that I enjoyed. He was a sophisticated, much-traveled man. He was associated with a group who published primarily in Galaxy magazine and included Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. During the shame of McCarthyism, they were amongst the earliest to raise literary voices to examine modern times often far more rigorously and amusingly than literary writers had done. There were a few brave voices who, like their Russian counterparts, found places to publish and speak to a public who mourned what was going on.

I wasn’t the only one to see some sort of literary salvation in science fiction. That Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin shared enthusiasm for certain kinds of SF is well-known, but many of us found it sketchy and condescending (Amis hated Burroughs and the Ballard of Atrocity Exhibition). But less obvious people, including Doris Lessing (then known only as a realist), were keen SF readers. Considered by many to be the finest literary writer of his day (and a prescient SF writer,