Afterword to Simulacron-3

Daniel F. Galouye was a remarkable writer, a man both behind and ahead of his time. He could write pulp adventures with the best of them, though the time for pulp adventures had pretty much come to an end. (Okay, a temporary end; they’re still with us, they’re just using modern technology.)

But he was also a visionary, dealing—as you can see in this book—with something that, while popular today, almost all other writers would ignore during his lifetime (which ended all too soon in 1976, at the age of 56.)

Dan was born in New Orleans, graduated from Louisiana State University, and then worked as a journalist until he enlisted in the Navy during World War II as an instructor and test pilot. He crashed, was not often in good health thereafter, and retired early, at 47.

His injuries/disabilities didn’t stop him from writing some of the best science fiction around. He wrote for almost all the major digests of the day—Galaxy, Amazing, F&SF, If, Fantastic—and began developing a reputation as a dependable, professional author. But nothing he had done up to 1961 prepared the public for his debut novel, Dark Universe.

Dark Universe was a classic the day it was published, and remains one to this day. The only reason that it hasn’t been turned into a blockbuster movie is because if the adaptation bore any resemblance to the novel, you’d be watching a totally black screen for the first forty minutes.

The book was written during the depths of the Cold War, when every week brought a new threat of nuclear conflict, and the affluent all created bomb shelters to hide in when the nukes began dropping. Dan took a good hard look at the notion that the deeper underground you went, the safer you would be. He postulated an incident that seemed dead certain to lead to a nuclear Armageddon, and had entire segments of the population go deep under the surface in an almost endless series of natural and artificial caves and shelters.

And at the last minute sanity prevailed, there was no war, and everyone returned to the surface of the planet. Except for one group that never got word of it, and spent the next few generations far beneath the surface of the planet, living in total darkness.

How would such a society evolve? How would they find their way around their dark universe? How would their social mores change? And most fascinating of all, when someone finally stumbles across them, how would they react to a noiseless sound that hurts the eyes—light?

How good a book was it? Well, it was a Hugo nominee, which is something that almost no first novels achieve. But it was more than that. Here’s a story I have only told to a few people, but it is absolutely true.

I met Dan at the 1968 Worldcon in Berkeley, California. We’d corresponded some, but the only time we ever met in person was at the convention hotel, the Claremont, which has become known in fannish legend as the Transylvania Hilton. We had a meal together, and during the course of it, while discussing Dark Universe, he mentioned that he had actually voted for Robert A. Heinlein’s worldwide bestseller, Stranger in a Strange Land. What I later found out was that Stranger had beat Dark Universe by two votes, and if Dan had voted for his own novel—which would be one vote less for Heinlein and one more for himself—his debut novel would have tied for the Hugo with one of the most popular novels of the decade.

He followed Dark Universe with Lords of the Psychon in 1963. It had only one thing in common with Dark Universe (and with a lot of other science fiction of the time): the threat of nuclear devastation. Only this time the bombs did drop, and the remnants of the United States armed forces have to deal with some sphere-shaped aliens who move in, operating not unlike galactic scavengers. A fine and wildly creative science fiction adventure, dealing with optics, energy fields, the annual “Horror Day,” and all-but-incomprehensible aliens—but as good as it was, it was something that could have been done by Henry Kuttner or Philip Jose Farmer or many of the field’s better writers.

Then, as people were wondering if he was a journeyman writer who had one great science fiction novel within him, or a brilliant writer who just wanted to have some fun writing an up-to-date science fiction adventure with his second book, he answered all the questions with the novel you hold in your hands: Simulacron—3 (which appeared in England as Counterfeit World). It’s been around for almost half a century, and it’s been made into a television play and a movie, so people who know the book tend to take it for granted, That’s a mistake, for Simulacron-3 was dealing with the stuff of “cyberpunk” two decades before William Gibson’s brilliant Neuromancer officially began the cyberpunk movement.

Most of the novel takes place inside a computer. Possibly all of it does. Because Galouye poses a large problem and implies an even larger one: if you somehow, through luck or brilliance, figure out that you are a computer simulation, an artificial being composed of 0’s and 1’s, created to respond to various stimuli like a human being for purposes of study, and you find that out, and you even find a way to get from that world to this one…how do you know this one isn’t a computer simulation as well?

There’s more to it than that, of course, but that use of the computer, before anyone knew anything about computers except that a computer that filled three rooms and was called Univac could occasionally make correct election predictions based on sparse returns, was many years ahead of its time.

Though Dan has left us, the novel refuses to die. It was turned into a German teleplay titled Welt am Draht in 1973, and then became a movie, The Thirteenth Floor, in 1999. A lot of readers and critics have suggested that The Matrix and its sequels owe a lot to Simulacron-3 as well.

Dan continued to work, though his health was failing. He produced A Scourge of Screamers (British title: Lost Perception) in 1968, and a final novel, The Infinite Man, what we call a “fix-up”—a novel pieced together from previously published stories—in 1973. Along the way, he had two collections of stories: The Last Leap in 1964, and Project Barrier in 1968.

He’s been gone for more than a third of a century, and he produced only five novels and a handful of stories, but because two of those novels are classics there has always been a perceptive publisher—Bantam Books, Gollancz, Gregg Press, and now Arc Manor—happy to bring them to a new generation of readers.

There is an award named the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, given out annually at Readercon. There are four judges, and they vote to give it to a deceased writer whose work should be “rediscovered” by today’s science fiction readers. In 2007, the four judges—each of us performing the task for the first time—were Gordon van Gelder (editor/publisher of F&SF), Martin H. Greenberg (anthologist with more than 2,000 titles to his credit), Barry N. Malzberg (Campbell Memorial winner, and multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee), and myself.

Daniel F. Galouye was our unanimous choice.