To Tree or Not to Tree

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Seven, November 1990.

I spent most of last Saturday underneath my house in the company of cobwebs and spiders and the occasional cat, chopping down a tree. After a while, the torch battery got quite weak and I started to feel like Indiana Jones exploring the Temple of Doom while nasty creepy crawlies dropped down on him from a great height and slithered underneath his shirt. To take my mind off things, I began mentally to construct a column for Phlogiston.

You could legitimately ask why I was chopping down a tree underneath my house. That’s a very interesting question, but the answer is quite complicated. It all started when Rosemary decided that the house needed painting…

But before we go into that, let’s talk about science fiction. There are two questions that people who get introduced to my library almost invariably ask (apart from “Why do you go underneath your house to chop down trees?”—I’ve never really understood why the sight of a room full of books should induce such a question). The first (very stupid) question is “Have you read all of them?” I’m often tempted to reply “Of course not—I’m illiterate”. The other (and much more interesting) is “Who is your favourite writer?”

I find that question almost impossible to answer because I’m not sure I really know who my favourite writer is. Indeed, I’m not sure I have a favourite writer. However I have recently realised that it is actually possible to deduce just who my favourite writers might be by examining my book buying habits. Like most of the rest of us, I tend to buy mostly paperbacks simply because of the price. However there are a handful of authors whose books I invariably buy in hardback as soon as they are published. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that these are my favourite writers. As a rule of thumb, it is as good as any other, though like most good rules I’m fairly sure that it has exceptions. Interestingly, the writers have absolutely nothing in common, other than the fact that I buy their books in hardback. Riddle me that one if you can!

Once Rosemary decided that the house needed painting, we thought we’d go about it in an organised and logical way. We’d get some quotes from several painting firms and choose the best. Best, we decided, was probably a synonym for cheapest. Several people turned up and measured and calculated and quoted. Interestingly an equal number of people did not turn up, despite having promised that they would (it has been my experience over the years that a great many New Zealand businesses appear actively to discourage people from trading with them by neglecting to keep promises, missing appointments, refusing to answer letters or return phone calls and generally being sloppy and unprofessional—no wonder the country is in such an economic mess). The quotes were very interesting—the cheapest was $2000 and the most expensive was $9500. Given such a vast range, there was only one thing to do, so we did it and chose the median value. (Not the mean, and not the mode. I’ve read Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics; I know all about averages.) The trouble started the day they turned up to water blast the house…

Philip K. Dick has published almost as many books since he died as he did while he was still alive. Over the years, he wrote a lot of mainstream novels, none of which were published in his lifetime (except for Confessions of a Crap Artist and that was marginally SF). However after he died, these books started to appear, generally in hardback and often published by small press houses. By following up rumours buried in the small print of specialist magazines and by spending rather more money than I should have, I have managed to track all of these down, and I own a copy of all the Philip K. Dick works that have been published to date. The effort I’ve expended in gathering these together suggests that Philip K. Dick must be high on my list of favourite writers. Was it worth the effort? Most definitely! There are some real gems among those books. I will never understand why they were rejected during Dick’s lifetime. Mary and the Giant, for example is a very brave novel of miscegenation written at a time when the subject was all but taboo in polite society (maybe that’s why it never saw the light of day before). A brilliant, brilliant book. (So is The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike—the other thing Philip K. Dick was good at was titles.)

“That tree,” said the water blasting man, “has got to go. It’s too close to the house. We can’t paint behind it.”

We looked at the tree. I thought it was quite pretty, but there was no denying that it grew right up the side of the house. When the wind blew, we could hear the tree scrape on the weatherboards. Reluctantly I agreed—the tree would have to go. I got out my trusty saw (the Sacred Silver Saw of San Sebastian, or SSSSS for short. This sibilant saw has put the fear of God into many an innocent plank of wood) and prepared to attack.

A lot of people dislike Michael Moorcock’s books, and those who like his stuff often say that they prefer the fantasies he was writing in the 1960s to the stuff he is producing now. I can understand that point of view to an extent, but I can’t share it. I find those early fantasies clumsy and derivative and almost unreadable (mind you, I will never forgive him for killing the Warrior in Jet and Gold). Moorcock himself feels much the same way about them. He freely admits that many of them were commercial books written to a commercial formula. They were written solely for the money, and the money was used to help support New Worlds magazine which Moorcock was in the process of turning into an avant garde literary journal. That was where the so-called “new wave” of SF was born, and it was for New Worlds that Moorcock produced his best work. The fantasies were largely hackwork, but Jerry Cornelius was art.

The Jerry Cornelius stories mark the beginning of Moorcock’s maturity as a writer (the fourth Jerry Cornelius novel, The Condition of Musak won a literary award) and the start of my real interest in Moorcock’s work. He has written in a vast range of styles about a vast range of subjects. The Gormenghast-like fantasy of Gloriana—the Unfulfilled Queen, the fin-du-siecle wit and energy of the Dancers at the End of Time stories, the feminism of The Adventures of Catherine Cornelius and Una Persson in the Twentieth Century and the allegorical The Warhound and the World’s Pain, to mention just a fraction of his huge output. My own particular favourites are the historical/sociological novels centered around Colonel Pyat—Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage. I look forward with eagerness to the next book in this series.

His latest novel, Mother London, is an elegy to the city he loves above all others and is likely to bring him new respect in the mainstream literary world. He is moving further away from SF with every book he writes, but the journey is so fascinating that I fully intend to follow him all the way. Those of you who are still stuck with the stories of the Eternal Champion should give his later works a chance. Who would ever have believed that the hack writer of the Runestaff stories could have produced a book as brilliant as The English Assassin?

That was when I discovered that the tree wasn’t growing in my garden—it was growing right out of the side of the house, between the chimney stack and the wall. Oh dear.

I sawed away as much of the tree as I could get at, and gloomily prepared to go under the house to find out just what was going on. I postponed the expedition for a few days because I needed to buy some new batteries for my torch. Meanwhile the painters turned up and started to slap paint on everything (when I got home one evening, my ginger cat had a blue head). Eventually it could not be put off any longer and down I went. The tree had taken root in the most awkward place imaginable. It was growing up between the wall of the house and one of the posts that support the house on its piles and it had pushed the post about three inches backwards, and it was teetering on the edge of its pile. Obviously the whole tree had to come out before it grew any more and pushed the post right off the pile and the house fell down. Equally obviously there was no way that SSSSS was ever going to get at it—there simply wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre. A pretty puzzle.

I’ve been buying Frederik Pohl’s novels in hardback ever since Man Plus in 1976. In that time he has published eighteen books (I’ve just counted them—I have sixteen of them in hardback. The other two appeared in paperback before they appeared in hardback) and the latest issue of Locus contains adverts for two more to be published soon. The man is a terrible danger to my wallet. Nonetheless I keep on buying them, and I have never been disappointed. In many ways Pohl is a traditional golden age writer and he writes about the traditional golden age subjects (even if he does disguise it sometimes with “modern writing techniques”—the novel Gateway, for example, is very fragmented, and I think it is all the stronger for it). Of all the survivors of the golden age, Pohl is the only one who can still turn on my sense of wonder; the only one who still gives my spine that particular tingle that we all keep searching for so avidly. There is nothing wrong with tradition.

This particular Saturday, one of the painters (by name Fred) was very hungover. He informed me that he had enjoyed himself hugely last night and he would never do it again until the next time. He did a lot of supervising that day while his colleague slapped the paint on. Meanwhile I was under the house with a hammer and chisel (the only tools that would reach the tree). It turned out that I had to cut the tree both above and below the beam it was growing behind—it wouldn’t come out any other way. It took me about four hours and the chisel was significantly more blunt when I’d finished than it had been when I started. Every time I hit the chisel the whole house reverberated to the sound and (said Rosemary) Fred winced as his hangover throbbed in sympathy. After four hours I crawled out covered in cobwebs and proudly clutching the demolished tree. Fred eyed me sourly. “Persistence pays”, he grunted, his face white and strained. I don’t think he enjoyed that particular Saturday very much.

There is a tendency to sneer at Stephen King—probably because he is so popular. It never seems to occur to the knockers that he is popular simply because he is very good at what he does. King himself has no illusions—he has often said that he considers his books to be the literary equivalent of a big mac with fries. Well so they are, and in a book review I read recently, the reviewer took King at his word and started referring to his books as “fearburgers”. I strongly suspect that King would enjoy that joke almost as much as I did. I’ve bought the last eight of King’s fearburgers in hardback, and I have another one on order even as I write (and if it arrives before I finish this article, you won’t be reading my deathless prose in this issue of Phlogiston). King writes scary books—it is that simple. They grab you by the scruff of the neck and they never let go. Sometimes they are gross (“Oh yuck!”) as he describes something best not described and sometimes the psychological tension reaches screaming point and carries on upwards from there. And always he finds exactly the right image to carry the maximum punch. The clown figure in It, for example is terrifyingly apt. (King was interviewed shortly after It was published. “Would you like to say something about your new book?” asked the interviewer. King thought for a moment. “It’s awfully big,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to drop it on your toe.”) He is the best of the horror writers and is rapidly becoming a cultural icon. (Mick Farren, in his novel Mars—The Red Planet describes Stephen King’s rather unusual death.)

The painters did a first class job and the house looks very proud in its new colours. The tree beneath the house is successfully chopped down and the house isn’t going to fall down this year.

I’ve just bought Arthur C. Clarke’s latest last novel The Ghost From the Grand Banks, a novel about the Titanic. In hardback, of course, just like all the rest of his last novels.