Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

Callahan’s

Crosstime

Saloon

By

Spider Robinson

Spider Robinson:

The SF Writer As Empath

By Ben Bova

When Analog magazine was housed over at Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue, our offices were far from plush. In fact, they were grimy. Years worth of Manhattan soot clung to the walls. The windows were opaque with grime. (What has this to do with Spider Robinson? Patience, friend.)

Many times young science fiction fans would come to Manhattan and phone me from Grand Central Station, which connected underground with the good old Graybar. “I’ve just come to New York and I read every issue of Analog and I’d like to come up and see what a science fiction magazine office looks like,” they would invariably say.

I’d tell them to come on up, but not to expect too much. My advice was always ignored. The poor kid would come in and gape at the piles of manuscripts, the battered old metal desks, and mountains of magazines and stacks of artwork, the ramshackle filing cabinets and bookshelves. His eyes would fill with tears. His mouth would sag open.

He had, of course, expected whirring computers, telephones with TV attachments, smoothly efficient robots humming away, ultramodern furniture, and a general appearance reminiscent of a NASA clean room. (Our present offices, in the spanking new Conde Nast Building on Madison Avenue, are a little closer to that dream.)

The kid would shamble away, heartsick, the beautiful rainbow-hued bobble of his imagination burst by the sharp prick of reality.

Still, despite the cramped quarters and the general dinginess, we managed to put out an issue of Analog each month, and more readers bought it than any other science fiction book, magazine, pamphlet, or cuniform tablet ever published.

And then came Spider Robinson.

Truth to tell, I don’t remember if he sent in a manuscript through the mail first, or telephoned for an appointment to visit the office. No matter. And now he’s off in Nova Scotia, living among the stunted trees and frost heaves, where nobody-not even short-memoried editors-can reach him easily.

Anyway, in comes Spider. I look up from my desk and see this lank, almost-cadaverous young man, bearded, long of hair, slightly owlish behind his eyeglasses, sort of grinning quizzically, as if he didn’t know what to expect. Neither did I.

But I .thought, At least he won’t be put off by the interiordecor.

You have to understand that those same kids who expected Analog’s office to look like an out-take from 2001: A Space Odyssey also had a firm idea of what an Analog writer should look like: a tall, broadshouldered, jutjawed, steelyeyed hero who can repair a starship’s inertial drive with one hand, make friends with the fourteen-legged green aliens of Arcturus, and bring the warring nations of Earth together under a benignly scientific world government-all at the same time, while wearing a metallic mesh jumpsuit and a cool smile.

Never mind that no SF writer ever looked like that. Well, maybe Robert A. Heinlein comes close, and he could certainly do all of those things if he’d just stop writing for a while. But Asimov is a bit less than heroic in stature; Silverberg shuns politics; Bradbury doesn’t even drive a car, much less a starship.

Nevertheless, this was the popular conception of a typical Analog writer. Spider Robinson was rather wider of that mark than most.

He had a story with him, called “The Guy with the Eyes.” There wasn’t much science fiction in it. But it was one helluva good story. About a crazy bunch of guys who get together at a truly unique place called Callahan’s.

We went to lunch, and Spider began telling me how he worked nights guarding a sewer ‘way out on Long Island. Far from being a dropout, he was writing stories and songs, as well as sewer-sitting. He’s a worker, and he knows science fiction very well, a fact that surprised a lot of people when he started reviewing books for Galaxy magazine. He’s also a guitar-strummin’ singer, and I found out how good he is at many a party. But that was later.

I bought “The Guy with the Eyes.” When it came out in Analog, it caused a mild ripple among our readers. I had expected some of them to complain because it wasn’t galaxy-spanning superheroic science fiction. Instead, they wrote to tell me that they got a kick out of Callahan’s Place. How about more of the same?

Now, an editor spends most of his time reading lousy stories. John Campbell, who ran Analog (nee Astounding) for some thirty-five years, often claimed to hold the Guinness Book of Records championship for reading more rotten SF stories than anyone else on Earth. (Most likely he could have expanded his claim to take in the entire solar system, but John was a conservative man in some ways.)

So when you spend your days and nights-especially the nights-reading poor stories, it’s a pleasure to run across somebody like Spider: a new writer who has a good story to tell. It makes all those lousy stories worthwhile. Almost.

It’s a thrill to get a good story out of the week’s slushpile-that mountain of manuscripts sent in by the unknowns, the hopefuls, the ones who want to be writers but haven’t written anything publishable yet.

But the real thrill comes when a new writer sends in his second story and it’s even better than the first one. That happens most rarely of all. It happened with Spider. He brought in the manuscript of “The Time Traveler,” and I knew I was dealing with a pro, not merely a one-time amateur.

We talked over the story before he completed the writing of it. He warned me that he couldn’t really find a science fiction gimmick to put into the story. I fretted over that (Analog is, after all, a science fiction magazine), but then I realized that the protagonist was indeed a time traveller; his “time machine” , was a prison.

Just about the time the story was published, thousands of similar time travelers returned to the U.S. from North Vietnamese prisons. Spider’s story should have been required reading for all of them, and their families.

Sure enough, we got a few grumbles from some of our older readers. One sent a stiff note, saying that since the story wasn’t science fiction atall, and he was paying for science fiction stories, would we please cancel his subscription. I wrote him back pointing out that we had published the best science fiction stories in the world for more than forty years, and for one single story he’s cancelling his subscription? He never responded, and I presume that he’s been happy with Analog and Spider ever since.

Callahan’s Place grew to be an institution among Analog’s readers, and you can see it-and the zanies who frequent Callahan’s-in all their glory in this collection of stories. What you’re reading is something truly unique, because the man who wrote these stories is an unique writer. It’s been my privilege to publish most of these stories in Analog. Several others are brand new and haven’t been published anywhere else before.

It’s also been a privilege, and a helluva lot of fun, to get to know Spider personally. To watch him develop as a writer and as a man.

He went from guarding sewers to working for a Long Island newspaper. When that job brought him to a crisis of conscience-work for the paper and slant the news the way the publisher demanded, or get out-his conscience won. He took the big, big step of depending on nothing but his writing talent for an income. But Spider writes; he doesn’t talk about writing, he works at it.

It wasn’t all that easy. He had personal problems, just like everybody else does. Not every story he put on paper sold immediately. Money was always short.

One summer afternoon he met a girlfriend who was coming into town from Nova Scotia. She had never been to New York before. Spider greeted her at Penn Station with the news that his lung had just collapsed and he had to get to a hospital right away, he hoped she didn’t mind. The young lady (her name is Jeanne) not only got him to a hospital; she ended up marrying him. Now they both live in Nova Scotia, where city-born Spider has found that he loves the rural splendor of farm life. (Me, I stay in the wilds of Manhattan, where all you’ve got to worry about is strikes, default, muggings and equipment failure. Nova Scotia? In winter? Ugh!)

Meanwhile, Spider’s stories kept getting better. He branched out from Callahan’s. He turned a ludicrous incident on a Greyhound bus into a fine and funny science fiction story. He wrote a novel with so many unlikely angles to it that if I gave you the outline of it, it would probably drive you temporarily insane. But he made it work. It’s a damned good novel, with bite as well as humanity in it. We’ll publish a big slice of it in Analog, and it will come out both in hardcover and paperback later on.

And his stories were being noticed, appreciated, enjoyed by the science fiction fans. At the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 he received the John Campbell Award as Best New Writer of the Year. At that time-he had only published three or four stories, but they were not the kind that could be overlooked.

What does it all add up to? Here we have a young writer who looks, at first glance, like the archetypical hippie dropout, winning respect and admiration in a field that’s supposed to admire nobody but the Heinleins and Asimovs.

It just might be that Spider Robinson represents the newest and strongest trend in science fiction today. He’s a humanist, by damn. An empath. He’s sensitive to human emotions: pain, fear, joy, love. He can get them down on paper as few writers can. -

The SF field began with gadgeteers and pseudoscience. It developed in the Thirties and Forties with writers such as Heinlein and Asimov, who knew and understood real science and engineering, and could write strong stories about believable people who were scientists and engineers. In the Fifties and Sixties we began to get voices such as Ted Sturgeon, Fred Pohl, Harlan Ellison-writers who warned that not everything coming from the laboratory was Good, True and Beautiful.

Now here’s Spider Robinson, writing stories that are-well, they’re about people. People in pain, people having fun, people with problems, people helping each other to solve their problems. Spider is a guy who can feel other people’s emotions and help to deal with them. He’s like a character out of an early Sturgeon story-kind, down-to-earth; very empathic. Literarily, he is Sturgeon’s heir.

That’s the good news. He is also an inveterate punster. You’ll see his puns scattered all through the Callahan stories. In fact, there are whole evenings at Callahan’s devoted to punning contests. Nobody’s perfect.

I remember getting a newspaper clipping from Spider which showed a NASA drawing of the design for a toilet to be used under zero gravity conditions in the Skylab satellite. (NASA has problems that thee and me can’t even guess at.) The cutaway drawing of this engineering marvel showed that there was a rotating blade inside the toilet bowl, to “separate the liquid from the solid wastes,” as NASA’s engineers euphemistically put it.

Spider, in his scrawly handwriting, had scribbled across the top of the clipping a brief note, followed by an arrow that pointed unerringly to the bowl and the separator blade. The note said, “Ben: Near as I can figure, the shit is supposed to hit the fan!”

As I said, nobody’s perfect. But Spider comes pretty damned close. Read about him and his friends at Callahan’s Place. Enjoy.

April, 1976

New York City

Foreword

by Spider Robinson

Books get written for the damndest reasons. Some are written to pay off a mortgage, some to save the world, some simply for lack of anything better to do. One of my favorite anecdotes concerns a writer who bet a friend that it was literally impossible to write a book so B*A*D that no one could be found to publish it. As the story goes, this writer proceeded to write the worst, most hackneyed novel of which he was capable-and not only did he succeed in selling it, the public demanded better than two dozen sequels (I can’t tell you his name: his estate might sue, and I have no documentation. Ask around at any SF convention; it’s a reasonably famous anecdote).

This book, as it happens, was begun for the single purpose of getting me out of the sewer.

I mean that literally. In 1971, after seven years in college, with that Magic Piece of Paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, New York—guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system.

What with one thing and another, I seemed to have a lot of time on my hands. So I read a lot of science fiction, a custom I have practiced assiduously since, at the age of five, I was introduced to Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo. One evening, halfway through a particularly wretched example of Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of science fiction-of anything-is crap”), I sat up straight in my chair and said for perhaps the ten thousandth time in my life, “By Jesus, I can write better than this turnip.”

And a lightbulb of about two hundred watts appeared in the air over my head.

I had written a couple of stories already, acquiring just enough rejection slips to impress friends with, and had actually had one printed in a now-defunct fanzine called Xrymph. (Hilariously enough, one of the crazies who produced Xrymph was the editor who bought this book that you hold in your hands: Jim Frenkel.) But my entire output at that time could have been fit into a business envelope, and its quality might be most charitably described as shitful. On the other hand, I had never before had the motivation I now possessed: I Wanted Out Of The Sewer.