The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

We erect tombstones for our dead relatives and build monuments to our dead leaders. When a beloved writer dies, we read his works, again. A writer, if what he says is worth the hearing, and if his skill is sufficient to make it worth hearing twice, builds his own memorial while he lives.

Shirley Jackson, that second-sighted recorder of tragedy and terror and of the gibbering courage with which we greet them, died, too soon, in August, 1965—and I began to understand that if is neither cynicism nor innate perversity that causes publishers to rush out new editions of old books before the ink on the obits is dry. It is the need we have, the readers, knowing there will be no new work, to reassure ourselves that what remains is still intact, and did not wither with the flesh.

So it was that Shirley Jackson was in my thoughts when the Big Blackout hit New York. I never met her but I could almost hear her chuckle at the inevitability of that particular bad joke. I was thinking of “Pillar of Salt,” in which she prophesied, years earlier (by way of a dismembered corpse and other horrors), the crumbling disintegration of New York.

The city, and the people in it, were all “falling apart.” (. . . Passing through the outskirts of the city, she thought. It’s as though everything were traveling so fast that the solid stuff couldn’t stand it and were going to pieces under the strain, cornices blowing off and windows caving in. . . )

She did not mention a power failure. But of course it Is not just the blackout, and not just New York. It is transit strikes and news strikes and power failures and blizzards, water shortages, telephone foulups, train wrecks, plane crashes, H-bombs in the Mediterranean, the long long list of computer-funnies (the post office in Providence where a curious reporter found he could send his mail with crayoned stamps; the people gelling multiple income-tax rebates) the court-clerk-computer in Phoenix listing convictions for people who hadn’t been tried—those things). Or, the telephone: How many wrong numbers have you been getting lately? Do you find direct dialing saves you time? How often have you acted on information from a telephone “service” (train, bus, store, anything) only to find when you got wherever it was to do whatever you had in mind, that the information was wrong?

(It’s not you: It’s the system. Everything’s falling apart.)

Another mordant prophet of our times, Russell Baker, began his November 18th (post-blackout) column with: The end came on Sept. 17, 1973 . . . and wound up . . . Which, as everybody knows, is why nobody lives in cities any more.

In the middle, the mayor of New York says, with justifiable indignation: “In the old days, when the machine was running this city right, it never snowed in September.” And the wise press advisor replies: “True. But the machine is like everything else in New York these days. It doesn’t work.”

I happened to be in Washington when twelve inches of snow Immobilized the capital for two days last winter. What’s that—you can’t blame a blizzard on breakdowns? What about sustained water shortage in an industrial and commercial complex like the American North Atlantic cities? Drought is a natural phenomenon, but this was more than drought: a failure in planning, organized waste and misuse. As well call the disappearance of the bison “natural selection”—which, of course, it was.

The thing is, it seems to be exactly those measures established to promote efficiency and industry which are most prone to breakdown.

Unless you are absolutely convinced it’s a Communist plot, you have your choice: Jackson and Baker and everything falling apart) or Benét and the revolt of the machine (Remember “Nightmare ^#3).

And of course I haven’t even mentioned the human breakdown factor, best measurable, probably, in Miltown units sold.