The Future is Now by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HATE IS A SANDPAPER ICE

CUBE WITH POLKA DOTS

OF LOVE ON IT

Terry Dixon

Terrence Eugene Dixon is an explosive young college student, presently living in Berkeley, whose ultrarevolutionary proclivities are exhibited in his attitude toward New Wave science fiction. Mr. Dixon’s lengthy, caustic, colorful and scholarly observations on this, his first published story, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of your editor:

“It’s a put-on and put-down of certain undesirable elements in the New Wave, a small band of charlatans best synthesized in the form of a composite or hypothetical New Raver I’ll call Mr. Phew (an acronym for Paranoid Harangues Emulating Writing). Mr. Phew is a prolific purveyor of poshlost (that untranslatable Russian word defined by Nabokov as ‘not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever’ and further described by Alfred Appel, Jr., as ‘an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity’). Phew saturates the science-fiction scene by sheer quantity, self-promotion and puerile antics at conventions. A major element in his very offensive offensive is copycatting the style tricks of contemporary mainstream iconoclasts (running the gamut, and the gauntlet, from Barth to Barthelme). He chews them up and regurgitates them upon unsuspecting scienceficionados who, because they traditionally read very little outside ‘the field,’ greet his hand-me-down motley as new and daring gear. The hallmarks of Phew’s work are noise, petulance, thyrotoxic hysteria, current slang clichés, secondhand ‘revolutionary’ ideas (safely popular), typographical gewgaws stuck on like junk jewelry, a predilection for pseudo poetry, an addiction to what Joanna Russ calls the ‘falsely profound,’ a pathological obsession with violence and the sickest kind of sex. Saul Bellow unwittingly described Phew in his latest novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet: ‘All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling … Like the spider monkeys in the trees . . . defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below … Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder.’ ”

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