The Iron Chancellor Read online

  The Iron Chancellor

  The Galaxy Project

  Robert Silverberg

  Series Editor Barry N. Malzberg

  Copyright

  The Iron Chancellor

  Copyright © 1958 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, renewed 1986 by Agberg, Ltd.

  THE IRON CHANCELLOR: Professionalism at the Level of Genius

  Copyright © 2011 by David Drake

  Jacket illustration copyright © 1951 by the Estate of Ed Emshwiller

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  Special materials copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321771

  Contents

  About Galaxy Magazine

  About Science Fiction Novelettes and Novellas

  About the Author

  About the Author of the eForeword

  About the Jacket

  eForeword

  The Iron Chancellor

  ABOUT GALAXY MAGAZINE

  The first issue of Galaxy, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine Astounding, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction “Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or The Saturday Evening Post of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary.” The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

  Galaxy published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others. Galaxy revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel, The Demolished Man, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with Astounding and remained an important editor, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (inaugurated a year before Galaxy) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but Galaxy was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions. Galaxy had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by Galaxy. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

  At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

  ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

  In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s…and probably in any decade.

  The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and Galaxy writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s Galaxy were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first story to Nebula in 1954 and two years later won the Most Promising New Author Hugo Award. He published more than a dozen novels and several hundred short stories in the genre before 1960, and then embarked upon an early retreat, returning at an entirely new level of literary accomplishment in 1962 with the famous short story “To See The Invisible Man” (published in Galaxy’s sister magazine Worlds of Tomorrow). Over the next fourteen years, Silverberg produced in science fiction an unparalleled body of work at the height of literary achievement and conceptual rigor. Forty novels and three times as many short stories plumbed every aspect of science fiction and significantly advanced it: Born with the Dead, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Thorns, The Stochastic Man, Up The Line, and finally Shadrach in the Furnace in 1976. He won every award in the field multiple times. After Shadrach, Silverberg went silent for two years, then returned with the long fantasy novel Lord Valentine’s Castle and went on to a major career in fantasy, while continuing to publish science fiction novels, three of them in collaboration with Isaac Asimov. He continued to win Hugo and Nebula Awards at the shorter lengths and published a dozen stories in Playboy. He has also edited notable anthologies such as The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Legends, and two Nebula Award annuals. A resident of California since the early seventies, Silverberg continues to write and edit prolifically. A novelette titled “The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar” appeared in 2009 in the 60th anniversary issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Subterranean Press is publishing his science fiction short stories in several volumes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE eFOREWORD

  David Drake, a veteran of the Vietnam Tank Corps, is the author of the Hammers Slammers series which over the last quarter century has become the most successful military science fiction series in the history of the genre. He has also published many bestselling fantasy novels and short stories in Omni, Analog, and elsewhere.

  ABOUT THE JACKET

  COVER IMAGE: “Relics of an Ancient Race” by Ed Emshwiller

  Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was Galaxy’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best realization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist thr
ough the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

  THE IRON CHANCELLOR: Professionalism at the Level of Genius

  Robert Silverberg has been one of the most respected figures in the science fiction field since he sold his first story in 1954. The next year his first novel was published, and the year after that he won the Hugo Award for Best New Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention.

  The science fiction field has changed a great deal since Silverberg entered it, and he has remained on top of it by changing also—more radically and more successfully than any other writer of his day. There have been three very different Robert Silverbergs writing science fiction, all of them the same man. Most recently—say, from the publication of Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980—Silverberg has been the writer of sprawling, colorful fantasies. Highly literate and intelligent, these novels are calculated to leave readers with a good feeling. This is an amazing difference from the Silverberg of the 70s, who wrote some of the most brilliant and probing novels of the human mind, human cultures, and humanity itself ever published in the field. Silverberg’s focus was generally too tight for these novels to be called dystopian, but “bleak” is a fair (perhaps even mild) description of their spirit.

  But the Robert Silverberg we have here, the Silverberg who wrote The Iron Chancellor, is the original model: a writer just starting out and rising immediately to the top, not only through native talent but also by the intelligent analysis of the field’s requirements and the professional execution of stories which met those requirements. Silverberg (writing to other professionals) gives his own description of his technique in the March 1961 issue of The Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies:

  “A writer can make a great deal more money in New York than anywhere else, provided he’s the kind of writer who’ll write to editorial order.

  “I am, of course.”

  And:

  “Since 1958 or so, 98% of my published material has been first-drafted. (And since 1958 I’ve sold 98% of the wordage I’ve offered for publication.)”

  This Silverberg was omnipresent in the magazines of his day not because he wrote vast quantities of material daily, but because he wrote precisely what a particular editor was looking for. Note here that the basic requirement which every editor needs is work of publishable quality: editorial foibles and slants are secondary. Silverberg’s work was always of publishable quality straight from the typewriter.

  Super-Science Fiction (SSF) is not a well-known magazine today, but in the late ’50s its word rate was bettered in the field only by Astounding and Galaxy (the top markets in prestige as well as payment). Harlan Ellison, a regular in SSF, described its editorial requirement as “puerility,” and Algis Budrys accused W. W. Scott, the editor, of harming the field because he paid so well. Silverberg had a story in every issue of SSF except the second, in which he had an article. Furthermore, he had two or three stories (under various pen names) in most issues. He was making a very good living instead of complaining about the situation. I want to emphasize that these were good stories. If Scott wanted monsters (the last four issues of SSF had an all-monster theme), Silverberg provided horrible, ravening monsters—but there was also real tension, real characterization, and a solid structure to the stories in which those monsters appeared.

  Occasionally there are aspects which might cause a reader today to blink. Silverberg wrote “The Loathsome Beasts” as Dan Malcolm for the October 1959 SSF (one of his two stories in that issue). The story is set on a recently colonized planet, but one doesn’t have to look very hard to realize that the monsters which are horrifically crushing and dismembering the happy crowd on the beach are really giant six-legged sea turtles. After the carnage, the hero realizes that the solution is to dig up the turtles’ egg clutches and drive the species to quick extinction.

  This brings up a second critical point: not only are stories written for editors, they are written in—and effectively set in—their own times. I don’t believe writers can avoid discussing their own present in their fiction, whatever their pretended past or future settings. Even someone who quarrels with that opinion will admit that writers cannot sell stories to popular magazines that do not address the concerns of the people reading those magazines.

  The Iron Chancellor is set in 2060 AD, but it appeared in the May 1958 issue of Galaxy, and the concerns of the characters are those of a suburban family of 1958. The surface concern is dieting (exercise as a way to control weight is dismissed with barely a nod), but the underlying theme of the story is a fear that at the time was second only to nuclear holocaust: The Machines Are Taking Over.

  The Iron Chancellor is an example of Silverberg writing a story for H. L. Gold, the most respected editor in the science fiction field, and for Galaxy, the most admired magazine in the science fiction field. I will stand by those statements, but both require qualification: Galaxy and Astounding were by general agreement at the top of the field (and paid more, sometimes considerably more, than the other science fiction magazines), but they were at opposite poles from one another.

  In the 1950s, Astounding, under John W. Campbell, published excellent stories by excellent writers, but the magazine’s emphasis was on continuity with its past. The Golden Age of Science Fiction, as it is described now, was basically a creation of Astounding in the late 30s/early 40s, so there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this continuity; but it would be fair to say that by the 50s Astounding lacked excitement.

  Galaxy made waves before the first issue appeared in October 1950 because Gold was offering a higher word rate than ever before seen in the field. (Campbell, complaining, was forced to raise Astounding’s rate to match.) More important, Gold emphasized change rather than continuity, boasting that Galaxy would be like no previous science fiction magazine. Despite cavils (at the time as well as later), Galaxy pretty well justified that boast.

  But while Gold was unquestionably respected, he was the most generally execrated editor in the field also. He had a vision for Galaxy, and he was determined to make every story in the magazine conform to his vision. He edited stories ruthlessly, no matter who the writer was, and if the writers didn’t like it, they could go elsewhere. He preferred colorful extrapolation, even wild extrapolation, to plodding realism: if people wanted a magazine edited by an engineer for engineers, they could read Astounding. Writers claimed Gold was whimsical, but the consistency—and consistent excellence—of Galaxy while he was editor make that unlikely. It may be that Gold’s editing—meddling, some called it—made some stories less good than they would otherwise have been, but all one can say with certainty is that those stories differed from their writers’ conceptions when they appeared in Galaxy.

  Silverberg didn’t complain: he wrote. The Iron Chancellor is witty, wryly humorous, and crisply written, making it a perfect example of a Galaxy story. The themes are addressed with skill; the characters are believable within the context of a satirical story; and the plot twists, twists again, and ends on a mordant note.

  It is precisely the sort of story that a professional writer of genius would sell to Galaxy.

  —David Drake

  The Iron Chancellor

  The Carmichaels were a pretty plump family, to begin with. Not one of the four of them couldn’t stand to shed quite a few p
ounds. And there happened to be a superspecial on roboservitors at one of the Miracle Mile roboshops—40% off on the 2061 model, with adjustable caloric-intake monitors.

  Sam Carmichael liked the idea of having his food prepared and served by a robot who would keep one beady solenoid eye on the collective family waistline. He squinted speculatively at the glossy display model, absentmindedly slipped his thumbs beneath his elastobelt to knead his paunch, and said, “How much?”

  The salesman flashed a brilliant and probably synthetic grin. “Only two thousand nine hundred ninety-five, sir. That includes free service contract for the first five years. Only two hundred credits down and up to forty months to pay.”

  Carmichael frowned, thinking of his bank balance. Then he thought of his wife’s figure, and of his daughter’s endless yammering about her need to diet. Besides, Jemima, their old robocook, was shabby and gear-stripped, and made a miserable showing when other company executives visited them for dinner.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Care to trade in your old robocook, sir? Liberal trade-in allowances—”

  “I have a ’43 Madison.” Carmichael wondered if he should mention its bad arm libration and serious fuel-feed overflow, but decided that would be carrying candidness too far.

  “Well—ah—I guess we could allow you fifty credits on a ’43, sir. Seventy-five, maybe, if the recipe bank is still in good condition.”

  “Excellent condition.” That part was honest—the family had never let even one recipe wear out. “You could send a man down to look her over.”

  “Oh, no need to do that, sir. We’ll take your word. Seventy-five, then? And delivery of the new model by this evening?”