Introduction to A Thousand Deaths

There is a wonderful exchange in one of my favorite films, They Might Be Giants, between George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and a Mr. Bagg, whom he has just met:

MR. BAGG: I thought you were dead.

“HOLMES”: The Falls at Reichenbach? I know. I came back in the sequel.

* * * *

We used to talk about character actors coming back in the sequels—they’d die in one B movie and there they’d be, back again, two months later—but the above scene was the first time anyone ever actually gave voice to the notion for public consumption.

And then came Sandor Courane.

Actually, the title of this book—A Thousand Deaths—is a wild exaggeration. I doubt that Courane has died much more than eight or nine times. Surely less than a dozen.

But they weren’t phony deaths. When I was a kid and we had the first television set on our block, back in the late 1940s, my friends and I used to gather around the tube after school and watch the endless Tom Mix serials. At the end of one episode we’d see him and Tony (his horse, for the uninitiated) fall over the side of a mountain and plunge to their deaths, or get run over by a train. Then we’d wait breathlessly for a few days until the next episode, which always started a minute before the last one ended, and we would see that our eyes had betrayed us, that we only thought we’d seen Tom and Tony fall to their doom, that Tom had somehow dived to safety in the last nanosecond.

There’s none of that sleight of hand for Sandor Courane, no sir. When he dies, he dies, and there’s no two ways about it. He stops functioning. He stops breathing. He enters what you might call a long-term open-ended state of non-life.

But he still comes back in the sequel.

Most people don’t have any trouble coping with reality. Every now and then you get someone like Philip K. Dick, who questions it just about every time out of the box. But no one ever played as many tongue-in-cheek games with it as George Alec Effinger, the sly wit who took such pleasure in constantly killing Courane and bringing him back.

Take, for example, The Wolves of Memory and “Fatal Disk Error.” In the former, TECT runs the universe and eventually kills Courane. But in the sequel, “Fatal Disk Error,” Courane kills TECT, and then we find out that it was really George Alec Effinger who created (and destroyed) them both. And since George was never content merely to put in one or two unique twists when he could come up with more, we also learn that the story was rejected by an editor who was a little too based in reality, so George resurrects TECT just to kill it again.

Or consider “In the Wings.” Doubtless at one time or another you’ve seen or read Ionesco’s classic play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. This one might just as easily be titled: “Effinger’s Stock Characters in Search of a Plot.” The entire story takes place in the wings (or perhaps the locker room) of Effinger’s mind, where Courane and other regular Effinger characters are waiting impatiently for George’s oversexed muse to get him to write Chapter 1 so they can go to work. And of course, Courane is killed again. At least once. (Not to worry. It is impossible to let the cat out of the bag when discussing an Effinger story. If you like the image of cats, it’s a hell of a lot more like herding them. Trust me on this.)

Okay (I hear you say), now I know what a Sandor Courane story is: things happen and he dies.

Okay, I answer. Go read “The Wicked Old Witch” and then tell me what a Sandor Courane story is about. This one may be one of the least likely love stories you’ll ever read. (Or it may not be a love story at all. George was like that.)

There’s one here that I commissioned some years ago, when Disney’s Aladdin movie was coming out and I edited an anthology of stories about genies and magic teapots and the like, and of course I invited George to write a story for it. What I got was “Mango Red Goes to War.” It’s a Courane story, of course, or it wouldn’t be here—but it’s a lot more than that. For one thing, it’s George explaining to me exactly how he’s constructing the story, not by phone or e-mail but as part of the story itself. And with all the three-wish stories that filled the book, George’s was the most original. (George was like that, too.)

Poor Courane has reality yanked from under him yet again in “From the Desk Of,” in which he’s a science fiction writer. (George loved to write about science fiction writers. Nothing ever went smoothly for them.) He’s a science fiction editor in “The Thing From the Slush,” a story I am convinced George wrote after reading one too many Adam-and-Eve endings in some magazine’s slush pile.

I won’t tell you a thing about “Posterity,” except that it ends with a question no one else had ever thought of asking, but a legitimate, even an important, question nonetheless, one that most writers I know would have a difficult time answering. (George could be so amusing that sometimes people didn’t recognize the fact that he asked important questions. Lots of ’em.)

In the course of his career, which ended all too soon with his death in 2002, George created three ongoing characters.

Marid Audran was the star of the Budayeen books and stories—When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and the like—and that is clearly the most important work he ever did.

Maureen Birnbaum was the ongoing star on a new genre of humor that George created, which I call Preppie Science Fiction. She was the funniest of all his creations.

His third character, of course, was Sandor Courane. Not as important as Marid, not as funny as Maureen Birnbaum. But I’ll tell you something: the Courane stories are far and away the most creative, the most off-the-wall stories that George or just about anyone else ever put to paper.

Enough introduction. Sit down and read them, and I’ll bet Courane’s life you agree with me. (After all, what have I—or he—got to lose?)