Out here in one of the American satellite cultures, the events that took place in the United States in the half-century between the 1930’s and the 1970’s are at least as much our history as those that actually took place in our own country.  Some Norwegians feel ambivalent about this, but it would be hard to deny it.

William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream covers this period in American history.  Published in 1975, it’s a subjective history, full of opinions – and the occasional historical myth.  The book not only observes this period, but is a product of it.  It’s a point of view.  I find that kind of historical writing really refreshing.  Later historians get more of the facts right, but there’s no substitute for the voices of the people who lived through it all.  Manchester falls somewhere between these roles.  This is not his personal story, but it is his personal history.

This is a massive book, 1400 pages, which is why I read it as a high-speed audiobook.  “Slow readers” do so at their peril.  (I guess there’s also a case to be made here for ebooks.)

But I’m not sure what could have been left out.  Manchester zooms in and out, from broad strokes to detailed accounts of interesting events.  He covers all the important events you can remember, putting them in perspective, which is what this sort of history is for.

And let me also remind you again of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which covers some of the same period.

Like with many books, there’s a great essay hiding within the 200 pages of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.  You can read it here, or watch it as a presentation.  It’s about how television was the gin of the post-war decades, a way to make life with an abundance of spare time more endurable, but now the internet allows us to spend that time in ways that are much more useful and/or fun.

Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr are sort of mini-nemesises.  They throw little darts at each other in their books. I love that, because I’m a fan of both.  This new conversation on what the internet is doing to us is the most interesting one going on at the moment.  Shirky says the internet is liberating our spare time.  Carr responds that we’re actually watching more TV than ever.  Well, but Shirky is really talking about a potential, which is amazing even if still unrealized.  And so on.

So much for the essay, which is more or less the first chapter of the book.  The rest is .. the usual feel-good stuff about what nice thing some people did with social media once, and look at this Open Source thing, is that amazing or what?  It’s not wrong, it’s just old, and hastily thrown together.  Shirky is showing signs of being stuck in the 00’s.  I say we should take the decade’s good ideas with us, and move on.

But read the essay, definitely.  Go read it right now, there’s nothing more to see here.

It pains me to report that eventually my mother’s dabblings led her into a little bout with black magic. I wish I could deny this and prevent many of her descendants from being burned at the stake, but unfortunately she not only wrote and signed a small treatise on the subject under the influence of a sinister buffoon called Aleister Crowley, but she is also mentioned either under her true name or under an alias in all books about this rancid character.

At just about the time I was becoming acclimated to the Ecoles des Roches in Normandy, quite unaware, as usual, of what Mother was up to, Mother was in London acclimating herself to Aleister Crowley.

The practitioner and staunch defender of every form of vice historically known to man, generally accepted as one of the most depraved, vicious, and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or a lunatic asylum, universally despised and enthusiastically expelled from every country he ever tried to live in, Mr. Crowley nevertheless was considered by my mother to be not only the epitome of charm and good manners, but also the possessor of one of the very few genius-bathed brains she had been privileged to observe at work during her entire lifetime.  Ask me not why!  Much as I revered her, my mother was still a woman, one of that wondrous gender whose thought processes are not for male understanding.

- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges

We lined up outside the infirmary and, as we got near the door, we were told to pull our left arms out of our shirts. Inside the infirmary I saw a very surprising sight: a young cow, hitched to a desk, wearing a leather bandage over its eyes. When I got close enough for my turn, to my horror I saw the doctor reach into the cow’s hide with his forceps, cut off one of the pustules the cow seemed to be covered with, and dip his scalpel into the severed pustule. Then he rapidly jabbed the scalpel three times into my upper arm. This procedure didn’t seem to hurt the cow at all and it didn’t hurt me either.

But when I described all this years later in Hollywood to my doctor and yachting companion, Bert Woolfan, he told me I was full of flit, that I must be dreaming, that no tehcnique such as I described had been used since the beginning of the nineteenth century, that I had obviously confused a steel engraving of an early Edward Jenner experiment with a recollection of my own, that since 1850 it had been done with vaccines, that there hadn’t been a live cow in a hospital since Grant took Richmond, etc. But the good doctor was wrong.  Exactly what I described happened to me when I was in the thirteenth class of the Lycée Janson de Sailly on the avenue Henri Martin (now Georges Mandel) in Paris in about 1907.

- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges

In the salon of the apartment there was an earphone hanging beside the fireplace. I had listened to this idly once or twice, but it was completely dead and I had not the faintest idea what it was for. Then one night after dinner, Dr. Max Mertz, the kapellmeister of Isadora’s school, who was visiting us, unhooked the earphone and listened to it. His face took on a beatific expression. I asked him what he was listening to and he immediately waved me down, telling me in my own home, with perfect German manners, to shut up. He now resumed his listening and his expression varied between deep puzzlement and that of someone listening to celestial music. The earphone was connected directly with a microphone in the proscenium of the Paris opera house and was a service supplied for a very reasonable fee by the telephone company. It was called the Opéraphone, and I mention it only to show that there were some fairly bright people in the world around 1900, and that the whole idea of wired shows for which one pays is not a new idea.

- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges

Michael Moorcock can’t take the entire credit for inventing steampunk with his 1971 novel The Warlord of the Air.  (There’s also Walt Disney, for one.)  But he can take some of it.  Here’s the airships and the steam tech – and also something that (for better or worse) didn’t make it into the rest of the genre: Anti-imperialist satire.

Moorcock is a writer with a mission, and that’s one of the things I like about him.  When you take the ideas out of SF, you remove some of what made it so interesting in the first place.  It doesn’t have to be political ideas, but that’s what you often get from Moorcock, and what makes him one of my personal favorites.  He probably wouldn’t enjoy sharing that spot with Robert Heinlein, (whose novels he once compared to Mein Kampf), but hey.

The Warlord of the Air is one of his very political novels.  Moorcock’s neo-Victorian technology isn’t something glorious, it’s a symptom of a rotten world, an alternate world where the European empires never fell, and have continued to carry the white man’s burden up to the present, ie. the 1970’s.

Moorcock spoofs the arrogance of the well-meaning imperialist, and he uses the story to argue that a peaceful 20th century wouldn’t necessarily have been better than the 20th century we actually had.  It would have just delayed the shakeup we needed.

Well – not sure about that.  But then, disagreeing is half the fun of alternate history scenarios.

A good reason for writing one’s autobiography is that it may prevent some jerk from writing one’s biography. And this is all to the good, if only because what one writes oneself about persons and facts one knew firsthand will contain only such voluntary departures from the truth as one considers necessary to prevent a few husbands from shooting their wives, for instance (or vice versa), as opposed to the mountains of false statements, misspelled names, wrong dates, and incorrect loci the well-meaning biographer usually comes up with after tracking one down through the morgues of defunct newspapers, the old letters of some of one’s friends, and the very unreliable memories of people who knew one slightly. This is the tremendous advantage of even the most analphabetic autobiography over even the most scholarly biography. Baron Münchhausen himself will be closer to the truth, describing what he himself has done, than the most conscientious outsider trying to relate the same thing a couple of centuries later. It is often stupefying to read a piece about somebody one knew intimately, in a time which appears still quite recent, and to discover its extraordinary inaccuracy. It makes one doubt all the history studied in school, rarely written down by those who made it.

- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges

Samuel Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer, was by all accounts an asshole.  Many of the people who show up in A. Scott Berg’s biography of him praise him professionally, but nobody has anything good to say about him as a human being.

Being an asshole came with the job description.  You didn’t reach and stay at the top in Hollywood by being nice.  There was a place for well-meaning, intelligent, talented people in the movie business, and that place was at the feet of someone like Goldwyn.

Like most of Hollywood’s founders, Goldwyn was an Eastern European Jew, and the lesson he took from his impoverished Warsaw childhood was that you have to grab hold of everything in your reach.  Life is a competition with all the other people: Never let go, never trust, never rest, and never show weakness.

Despite his name also ending up in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer company name, Goldwyn spent most of his career as an independent producer, in a time when the major studios controlled the entire distribution chain.  This didn’t make him easier to work with.

But somehow it worked out, and he and all the other assholes made some really good movies.  How such awful people ended up creating such fantastic movies is a mystery worth pondering, (especially if you’re one of those who think movies should be financed by the state, and then wonder why nobody wants to see them).

The aliens in Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters are often held to be stand-ins for communism, but I don’t find that explanation very interesting.  Of course there’s a parallel – the Titans are evil masterminds who control their victims’ thoughts and actions, and at some point in the story the narrator tells us that, hey, this is a bit like communism, isn’t it?

But to classify The Puppet Masters as an example of 50’s red scare is to miss the point.  Yes, it was published in 1951.  And yes, it reflects a general anti-communist atmosphere.  But what it really does is something more interesting: Inventing the zombie apocalypse.

Well, sort of.  Richard Matheson came closer with the 1954 novel I Am Legend, (except with vampires instead of zombies), but the essentials are there in The Puppet Masters: The loved ones turning into monsters, the exponential infection rates, the paranoia, the sense of futility.

Of course Heinlein puts a different spin on it.  The world isn’t doomed, we just need to use our heads.  He portrays the conflict as a struggle of wits, a chess game of sociology.  And he finds a perfectly rational excuse for having every single person in the world becoming a nudist.  Perfectly rational, I swear.

And in which proper zombie apocalypse stories has the best way to detect infected people been to flirt with them?  Too few, I say.  Too few.

Science fiction was more ambitious in the post-war decades.  Reading the short stories and novels from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, is like watching a whole culture flex its mind, exploring uncharted areas of itself, (disguised as outer space and remote worlds etc., but us all along, always us).  And that was happening in real life as well, but you see it clearest and earliest in all these authors who were twisting and turning all the dials of humanity to see what would happen if..

Cordwainer Smith fits into this somehow.  Not at the center, but in a corner by himself.  The stories collected in We the Underpeople are set in a future that struggles with two great problems: Discrimination and perfection.  The discrimination theme works somewhat, such as when the man-animal hybrids get their own Jesus / Joan of Arc, even if the parallel to the civil rights struggle is a bit obvious.

I’m more fascinated by the perfection theme.  Humanity has rid itself of all risk, creating an anemic culture where nobody is unhappy, but nobody is really happy either, nobody does anything fun or extraordinary.  The rulers try to fix this by reintroducing an acceptable level of artificial risk, but it’s all very clumsy, even tragicomic.

Cordwainer Smith’s language has a rough edge, which I like, and the stories do to, which I don’t, not always.  There’s a garage band feel to it: The energy is beautiful, even when the notes are off.  It’s a good, wild ride, for the most.