People might be looking at my column here and asking something like this: “Well, Mr. Kraemer, you’re running a thing called ‘the Spaced-Out Library’; why do you call it that and what books do you have in your own collection?”

     To answer the first question first, I call this by that name because I am referring to the effect the influx of the psychedelic culture has on science fiction and, withal, fantasy.  I’ve been studying the changes that occurred in science fiction and fantasy during the 1960s and seeing where these changes have led.

     In the 1960s one could note the introduction of the avant-garde into both fields—writers like Cordwainer Smith, Vance Aandahl, Anthony Burgess and Harlan Ellison and the like, as well as more standard authors taking on an avant-garde outlook, as, for example, Frederik Pohl with THE COMING OF THE QUANTUM CATS.

     Also there were new formats and new objectives in the magazines and they seemed to be welcoming authors who were writing as differently as possible.

     At the same time, there was the rise of a form of writing that was the exact opposite of the avant garde, namely writing of the kind that has come to be called “mundane science fiction”, some of which proceeded out of fantasy and made its gateway chiefly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whereas the avant-garde seemed to have entered by way of Galaxy.  There was also a crossover from literary magazines, similarly supported by the broad policies of F&SF.  This, of course, brought controversy if not warfare to the SF “field”, which we find continued now in the forums. “Spaced-Out” signifies having been spaced, not going into space voluntarily, which is why this conflict is an essential in the naming of this column.  

     Then there is the “hip” form of writing, and, as you may know, that is what accounts for the exact word choice in my titling.  That, or the hip viewpoint, was noticeable first in Robert Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.  After this ground-breaking, one found oneself with writers like Samuel Delaney and Terry Pratchett, the former showing a similarity other writers have shown to the writings of William S. Burroughs (designated by critics as a beat generation writer), whose works combined fantasy and science fiction and depicted infernos and mass destruction, which undeniably existed in the world of that time.  Pratchett has an attitude similar to Kenneth Patchen, similarly a beat generation affiliate.  In some of his works Delaney might almost represent United Mutations, a group manifestation popularized by the singing group The Mothers of Invention, a group whose name bore reference to science fiction.

     There was also a step-up in futuristic art, commencing with a form of art called “futurism”, which seemed to have a lot in common with science fiction, as did surrealism with fantasy.  Dadaism, too, was of interest to both fields, as it seemed to react scientifically to holocaustic conditions and otherwise to be strongly based in fantasy.

     The effect of these art forms can best be seen in HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (the term “hitchhiker” gets past spell-check), DR. WHO, and SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, though futurism is what is most visible in CAPRICA.  Surrealism is frequently seen now on covers for Fantasy and Science Fiction. It used to be found in the art of Richard Powers, particularly the work he did for Beyond.  These impinging art forms are “far out”, even in comparison with standard SF art, which insists on maintaining strong affinities with reality.

     Also, Aldous Huxley was highly noticeable in the psychedelic revolution; one might say that along with Timothy Leary he was a chief influence in that revolution.  One need only study his essays collected in THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION to see how.

     These have all had such an impact on present-day science fiction that it is easy to see why I would call my column “The Spaced-Out Library”, making use of a term in use by psychedelicists in my title. (That and the fact that the zine in which it’s “printed” appears on the internet, which is kind of spaced out. My “paper” review column, not available on the net, is called “Scheherazade’s Reading Room”.)

     Now as to the books on my own shelf, I have closets full of books, but on display due to being the objects of my current interest, I have the following books, all of which I consider of timely interest:

     FLASHFORWARD and WWW WAKE by Robert J. Sawyer, ARCHITECTS OF EMORTALITY by Brian Stableford, THE CONSCIOUSNESS PLAGUE by Paul Levinson, THE LAST THEOREM by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, NEWTON’S CANNON by J. Gregory Keyes, THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED and THE GREEN EYES OF BAST by Sax Rohmer, THE BIG EYE by Max Earlich, FINITY by John Barnes, THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown, WHEN GOD LAUGHS by Jack London, THE FREE FALL OF WEBSTER CUMMINGS by Tom Bodett, ALWAYS COMES EVENING by Robert E. Howard.

     MEN FROM EARTH by Buzz Aldrin, TOPOLOGY AND ITS APPLICATIONS by William F. Basener, THE ANNOTATED FLATLAND by Edwin A. Abbott, THE BLACK BOOK by Lawrence Durrell, VERSE AND UNIVERSE, edited by Kurt Brown, ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, EQUATIONS OF ETERNITY by David Derling, BLACK SEAS OF INFINITY by H.P. Lovecraft, BLACK HOUSE by Stephen King and Peter Straub, THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST by Robert A. Heinlein, NORTHWEST OF EARTH by C.L. Moore, AGES IN CHAOS by Immanuel Velikovsky, TYPEWRITER IN THE SKY by L. Ron Hubbard, and THE COMPUTER CONNECTION by Alfred Bester.

     And now on to some books I would call to the attention of cybernauts of the SF net.

CRO-MAGNON by Brian Fagan, sub-titled How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, is a work by an expert on the Ice Age who has been on the notorious New York Times best-seller list with a work about climate shifts called THE GREAT WARMING.  He is almost part of a genre which includes THEY ALL DISCOVERED AMERICA (by Charles Boland) and PRE-COLUMBIAN CITIES, that genre being science fact about hypothetical histories, which as we know has Darwin as a strong influence, as well as Leif Ericson with KON-TIKI.  Fanatic works of this type include Velikovsky’s AGES IN CHAOS.

     Fagan’s volume is highly readable, a book in the old-fashioned sense of the term, showing a wish to maintain reader interest.  If you want a book on the topic, this is the one to get.  Bloomsbury Press, New York, Berlin, London, 2010.

HUBBLE, sub=titled Imaging Space and Time, by David Devorkin and Robert W. Smith, National Geographic Press of Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2008, is a book of interest mainly for the kind of book it is, a prime example of a book gotten together in the particular manner it has been produced.  How it was compiled is invisible to the standard book publishing industry.  Inside are photos described as having been taken by means of the Hubble Space Telescope, but the photos are inferior to many gotten on Earth; some look like paintings and others seem to contain wax.  Have a look if you wonder what I mean and can get the book, which sells at fifty dollars.

FOOLS’ EXPERIMENTS by Edward M. Lerner, TOR Books, 2008 is saved from being describable as creating paranoia about the Internet by being a work of science fiction, hence that much more speculation that can be discounted. 

     The book is an interesting read in that it has computer sentience in it, which earned him a commendation on its dust jacket from Robert Sawyer, though those were the days before Sawyer became paramount in that subject. At that time he was noted for ROLLBACK rather than his own works on intelligence awakening in the computer system.  Stanley Schmidt also endorses the book, which shows a pre-publication behind-the-scenes publicity campaign formerly notable in the paperback reprint industry and book club editions, but like pre-dating magazines, we get the modern SF rush here.  Not every author gets this treatment, though; computers are a big interest.  Lerner is a writer than can handle the job, and the book is a page-flipper.

CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES by Arthur Goldwag, Vintage Books/Random House, 2009, has in it societies you will recognize—the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, Dianetics and Scientology, Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley.  It’s a good factual guidebook in this era of THE DA VIONCI CODE and DESTINATION TRUTH.  The author is highly into change, including the rise of the primeval. 

ROD SERLING AND THE TWILIGHT ZONE by Douglas Brode and Carol  Serling, 50^th Anniversary Tribute, Barricade Books (certainly an honest outfit) of Fort Lee (Robert E. Lee, one presumes), New Jersey, 2009.  As one might expect, it is a definitive work on the man, who might be seen as one of the most highly influential precursors of present-day televised SF.  I’ve noticed that it is down-stressed that he went on to do a longer and more elaborate program after Twilight Zone, and people are starting to say that someone else was into doing that next show.  It reminds me of the complaint made by the staff of Mad comics in their collected work from MAD books, which Ballantine Books brought out after Mad was made into a magazine with a new staff, that their names were being removed from the annals of Mad. It’s the same sort of process, done for reasons known to those who do it.

     I’ve been having a cynical look (for want of a better term) at the new season in television, speaking of televised SF—shows like CAPRICA, STARGATE UNIVERSE and MERLIN…I’d call my look jaundiced except that I don’t have the yellow jaundice, and I, like other critics, have learned to avoid using this term.  I might be wanting “jaded”, or to say that I have a blasé  attitude toward it. 

     But isn’t it true that the series epics they promise us seem always to be going farther and farther into disaster (not excluding the runs of the shows, often enough)?

     Look at the basic plots of these shows.  In CAPRICA, a major technological industrialist who is just in the process of introducing Cylons into the culture of the planet named, about sixty years prior to the upheaval that commenced BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, loses his daughter to both the STO, a cult-like organization devoted to the One True God and being in conflict with Caprican society at large, and to a bombing incident on a city transport which kills everyone. He falls into the company of Adama’s father, who has lost his daughter the same way.  Also he finds the avatars of both daughters on his daughter’s virtual reality setup and tells Adama about it, but both are unsuccessful in reclaiming these remains of their daughters, who are in revolt against the Caprican culture and are fleeing their heritage.  In the season finale last year, at least three of the main characters die, or at least seem to, just as it was with the people on Battlestar Galactica.  Who can forget Callie being spaced?  Do we really appreciate watching people dying and mutating that much?

STARGATE UNIVERSE opened with a young scientist being dragooned by the old team for a space mission.  Everybody ends up on an alien spacecraft following an unknown course.  A congressman who has been on the ship dies averting a disaster, reminding one of the deposed vice-President being made a Goa’uld host on the earlier Gate series.  The first season ended with the commander abandoning the chief scientist on an unknown world because the scientist had been trying to frame him in the murder of an important character. 

     The present season opened with a conflict with an alien vessel that has been tracking them.  It uses transport equipment to abduct the dead congressman’s daughter and in rescuing her the commander finds that the scientist is also a prisoner on the ship.  Both are in immersion tanks.  The commander rescues them and then confronts with a mutiny and deals with it by making some arrangements with the scientist.  The main conflict is whether they will continue the discovery mission or find a way to get back to Earth.  Aside from that they just aren’t able to get along and are apt to fight over most anything, there is the feeling the Gate has always had, that there will be no solution to any of the problems mankind has.  So far the scientist has not had any story about how he got on that craft; maybe they haven’t time for it with the other matters at hand. Next he announced that they’d jumped into a region not near any stars but that statement met with a lot of objection and the next thing a lot of them landed on an Earthlike planet and then refused to leave it, saying they thought they had been guided to where they were to live.  Following that the original Gate people reappear in a deus ex machina sort of effect.

MERLIN opens with a man being executed for sorcery and introduces a king who will do that to anyone he finds engaged in such practices.  Merlin, who has just arrived in Camelot, is a sorcerer and has to hide his tendencies. (He doesn’t do a real good job of hiding all his tendencies.)  He and Arthur meet rather badly, but he becomes Arthur’s “manservant” and the two carry on in a very gay manner, with humorous insult being the order of the day.  A series of adventures commences, with Merlin behaving like the ghosts on TOPPER.  The show has a complete rewrite of the legends, with Guinevere and her father being of an Africanic race, recalling the change of gender of Boomer and Starbuck on the new series BSG.  There isn’t much fealty to background and tradition here.  On the whole, the series is gloomy, because everybody on it is sold out to wrong ways and honor is fealty.  If the legend is fulfilled, Arthur corrected all of this, but it doesn’t look like the Arthur in this series will do that.

     Keeping up with the magazines as well as we are able, the most recent issues are rather apocalyptic, in this reviewer’s estimate.

     The June Analog, after an editorial suggesting that we are not in good contact with whatever runs our lives, leads off with a story by Bond Elam which will leave its reader shaken but not stirred, “The Anunnaki Legacy”, a piece of semi-nihilism wherein there is a conflict between archaeologists and miners ending with a sort of alien contact, just one month after a story with about that plot appeared in Asimov’s, and four months after a story with about that plot appeared in Analog.  Is this particular notion being pushed?

     “Space Aliens Taught My Dog to Knit” by Jerry Oltion and Elton Elliott mentions Seattle, NASA, SETI, the Catholic Church, and Elvis Pressley in a story of cosmic paranoia blurbed by the editor simply “What if they’re right?”

     “Heist”, by Tracy Canfield, is similarly a vast paranoia about the Internet featuring virtual reality and suggesting that the real world is a whole lot like virtual reality.

     Richard Foss presents another fishing boat dealing with extraterrestrials yarn and Jeffery Kooistra puts global warming somewhat aside to talk about how much he liked Alfred Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION in his alternate view column, which the editor has been somewhat assailing.  Edward Lerner does a piece about a man trapped in a virtual reality which complements Canfield’s piece, Kyle Kirkland does a grand piece on computer espionage in which the computer network is seen as having created its own world around it, and Michael Flynn portrays a world leveled by technological malfunction engaged in cruel primitive rites.  The science piece is on gender in linguistics, perhaps a matter of some interest in the issue at hand, as Don Sakers pauses in his reviews to say what his husband thought of something, reminding us that he has claimed to be a woman writing under a male pen-name, which the magazine doesn’t seem to need—if you’re going to say you’re doing it, why not just use a real name?  It sounds like a demo otherwise.

     Sheila Williams writes about her pets in the editorial in the June Asimov’s, a timely enough topic as readers have been commenting more and more in the magazine’s forum about the upsurge of animal tales in science fiction.  Robert Silverberg’s reflections follow, this month about a town’s attempt to exorcise the devil.  James Patrick Kelly’s column follows this and concerns how much on the Internet is free, which suggests that the net is somehow above the monetary system.  Allen Steele’s “The Emperor of Mars” is the lead story, about a fellow who goes insane on Mars due to learning of the loss of his family and decides to make himself the emperor of the planet, influenced by some science fiction he has read.  The milieu is existentially one of utter despair and the others groove with him somewhat, making for a rather interesting story that could even be successfully made longer.  “Petopia” by Benjamin Crowell justifies the editorial but not itself, being a work of ill-told folderol.  “Monkey Do” by Kit Reed has this effect too, but one can see what it’s about, an ape developing intelligence.  A poem by Geoffrey Landis puts down psychic “talent”.  “The Peacock Cloak” by Chris Beckett shows a man strutting around in a virtual reality.  People sail out of a Flatland environment to the moon in a story by Peter Friend.  The imagination is sort of trashed in Anna Tambour’s ill-written story “Dreadnought Neptune”.  “Earth III” is not much better than Earth II in Stephen Baxter’s story of that name, an alternate reality created to show that the author is able to do so.

     The editors of the Dell magazines have been asked how they’re getting along in their new office in Lower Manhattan, which has the staffs of Analog, Asimov’s, Hitchcock’s, and Ellery Queen’s on the same floor of the same building, but they have not answered the questions.

     Moving on to Fantasy & Science Fiction, we find one of Gordon Van Gelder’s rare editorials in the Mar/Apr issue; methinks, based on recent experience, that I won’t get the May/June one in time to review it.  The editor writes about attending the World Fantasy Convention and about his search for information about J. Francis McComas, one of the founders of the magazine.  He also mentions that the Slush God, John J. Adams, is giving up that position at least.

     “Amor Fugit” by Alexander Duncan describes the woes of a person named Ourania living in a strange non-world which she finally departs, in some ways a female similitude of Lovecraft’s Outsider.

     Elizabeth Hand’s reviews feature four books about Rod Serling including the one I reviewed in this column, and she shows herself equal to the task of giving the man a going-over.

     Albert Cowdry does another horror fantasy set in the Southland.  It is as if he had an ax to grind.  Tim Sullivan’s “Star-Crossed” shows lovers wading through alternate realities and surviving.  Michael Reaves has one of those autobiographical ghost tales, which leads us right into a tale by Richard Bowes, growing famous for autobiographical fiction, “Waiting for the Phone to Ring”, about non-talent being scuttled.  There’s a buncombe fantasy by Ramsay Shehadeh containing fantasy’s traditional mockery of royalty, complemented by a cartoon on the same theme at the tale’s conclusion.  It’s followed by two modernized fairy tales, the second with fembots in it and an industry manufacturing them for sexual purposes.  “Blue Fire” redoes some of Walter M. Miller’s religious concepts in Bruce McAllister’s own way.  “Class Trip”, the last story in the issue, is absolute blather.

     So that does it for another four months, but it seems to have been a banner tri-yearly period in time, and I’m looking forward to see what the next session in time will bring.  Adios until September.