Dear Gordon:
Thanks for the assignment. Even now, perhaps more than ever, I appreciate your thinking of me for this anthology. Maybe I do have a chance after all.
Although it is a grim assignment. How could it not be? “Imagine the worst that could happen. Extrapolate a future in which this worst has happened. Write what you fear most in that happenstance.” That would have been challenging at any time but never more so than now.
Consider: science fiction has always lived on the dystopian blood that surged through its varicose veins and it has never been difficult for most of us to emerge with ever more exotic and terrible futures to trade like baseball cards…but my own interest in disaster has begun to fade as Phil Larkin’s “that one large thing which has always been waiting for you” looms ever larger. “You can’t beat chronology” as the horseplayer said, looking over the chart of a maiden race for three-year-olds and (way) up, won by the three-year-old’s nose. It would have been nicer to have reflected on the better circumstance that Trump promised us. But that was not to be; from nearly the start it was clear that the situation was impossible, his prospects for election ridiculous.
So rather now it is what the present Administration is doing, will be doing which in our scrambling prowl for the worst we must confront. The reflexive, almost parodic conversion of “liberalism” into practical fascism has of course continued riotously. it is impossible to conceive of free and open debate on the campuses or off, in the public media or the tunnels of the Internet. It is ever clearer, as free speech or sexual constraint deteriorate into ugly exercises that the worst is already around us. “Feminism” seems to have defaulted into spiritual battery; “safe spaces” as mandated on or off the campuses have become versions of Orwell’s (and O’Brien’s Room 101) in which the most feared, the most awful to conceive are given to confront us.
Our only practical recourse, then, is to use default ourselves. We must conceive—and somehow make real within ourselves—the nation that the our leader would have given us, a nation for which the nonsense I have described above would have been a dim memory or a horrific fantasy, we must keep possibility and hope alive by acting as if the alternative, the real life of the nation had been ours and we would have been able to put paid to what the excellent Michael Savage described as “the mental disorder of liberalism.” In that alternate history, in that counterfactual world, the full forces of the State would have been turned against the avalanche of verminous nihilism, even that shadow of a “multi-party” deceit would have been purged and we would be living in a cultural situation at least striving toward equality and justice. We would have had a Head of State who understood that the only real service is self-service and that lesson, given so fiercely to the addle-headed polity of the problematic might have saved us.
But it is too late. Surely the lessons of the decades have taught us this—life has taught us this—life has taught us plenty and all we can do is accommodate ourselves to the uneven and tragic flow of history. The only good news can be given at the end: We have persisted into a world in which an original anthology of such speculation has been commissioned. We can perhaps take comfort from that if not the color of the situation itself.
(Fortunately I can remind both of us that the above is fiction. We have the comfort of noting that this uncomfortably speculative anthology is for its conscripted but eager contributors just an exercise, a kind of spiritual exercise, an exploration of a haunted and nonexistent alternate reality. We do not live in the world in which they—and therefore we—lost. We live in the world in which they—we—won. Let the practices continue. Let the resettlement camps continue to open across the nation [and when fully occupied] their gates). Let the fire begin. No longer their world but yours, no longer distant fire but the smoke drifting through and over the landscape of the camps. We have been trudging inexorably this way for all those years since 11/22/63 and now we are about to vault over the darkness.
I hope that I have performed satisfactorily. As you know, in the past, so long before this unpleasantness, I had some minor recognition as a writer of speculative fiction.
A copy of this by statute to the Dept. of Control and Coordination.
As ever,
Barry N. Malzberg (Jew 5,271,009 of Sector 14)