Introduction to
GETTING ALONG

For over thirty years James Blish has been the most consistent, loudest voice in the field for literacy, grace and technical expertise in writing speculative fiction. Both as himself and as "William Atheling, Jr." he has fought the good fight: as the former, by example, with stories of power and rigorously-manipulated imagination, with elegance in his writing, with a frequently cerebral appeal too often ignored in sf . . .and as the latter, with critical writings that have informed and sustained an entire generation of new writers, proffering literary standards by which to judge our best and our worst. Of all the writers one might call "giant," Jim Blish is certainly most deserving of the title.

Further, he is impeccably honest.

No one has greater cause to know this than your editor. I won't go into it—I have elsewhere, if I recall—but Jim's position seems always to have been one that is best encapsulated by a quotation from a silent Doug Fairbanks film, Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), in which Fairbanks, as Don Cesar de Vega, apologizes for having offended someone, and when his compatriots bring him to task for it, he tells them, "When you're in the right, fight; when you're in the wrong, acknowledge it." I've seen Jim Blish do that in print, and knowing how difficult it is to backtrack, I take it to be a singular mark of the man's honesty.

Further, he is incorruptible.

He values his integrity more highly than any man I've ever met. Hired to do a series of adaptations of Star Trek scripts for Bantam paperbacks, Jim found himself confronted, on one occasion, by a puzzle that might have stumped Solomon. The filmed version of one script was vastly different from the original version written by a certain sf writer. Jim had to please the Bantam people, the producers of the show, the honchos at Paramount Pictures, and he didn't want to insult the sf writer who'd done the script, which original he'd liked. You or I, we'd have just sidestepped the problem and adapted something else; but Jim carefully took the best of both versions and wrote a marvelously ameliorative paragraph explaining that this was a version cannibalizing both. And everyone was content.

Further, he is patient with those who need to learn.

Without flying into the towering rage taken as refuge by so many other observers of the sf scene—and I shamefacedly admit to being one of those lesser mortals—he has over and over again tried to point out to advocates of the Old Wave/New Wave controversy that every writer tagged, as being a member of the "New Wave," has vehemently denied it. Even Blish's calm and reasoned sanity, however, has done little to stifle the, er, piercing tirades of those who would not only deny writers hungry to test the parameters of the sf equation their new forms and daring experiments . . .but continue to joust with paper tigers by insisting that the more avant-garde wish to deny that right to their brothers and sisters tagged "Old Wave." It is, at core, a moron's jehad. As Blish has noted, patient with the dull and even the humorless who are doomed to see the world with tunnel vision, the universe of speculative fiction is wide enough, colorful enough, rich enough, to support all forms, all styles, all writers.

Which brings me to "Getting Along."

A very special piece of work, even in a book devoted to the extra-special.

It is a story, certainly, and brilliant parody, of course—of which, more in a moment—but it is something else. It operates on a level of social intercourse once peopled by the likes of Alexander Woollcott, Bernard Shaw, Periander, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Dorothy Parker, not to mention H. L. Mencken. It pokes gentle but (again) piercing fun at a philosophical position so humorless that its proponents conceive of the very act of laughter anathema. It is James Blish doing what he does better than anyone else in our midst—letting the hot air out of gasbags—and having just a grand time doing it.

And, if an editor may be pardoned the liberty, since it is painfully apparent to one who has encountered the unlettered youth of our nation in several hundred colleges these last five years and found the names Herman Melville and Gustave Flaubert unknown to an alarming number of those who consider themselves hip because they know the names of every instrumentalist in Blood, Sweat & Tears or Three Dog Night—the parodies may be a trifle obscure, so I would like to identify the authors being lampooned.

It should be understood that this suggests no contempt on the editor's part for the reader's intelligence, but merely one further attempt to make this volume as complete and uplifting an experience as, say, an Evening with Bobby Sherman.

However, to insure no one will take offense at the act of kindness, I suggest you read "Getting Along" first, try to identify for yourself the authors being parodied, and just skip everything that comes between the space below (including the upside-down part) and the next big space in the copy. Everything in-between those spaces identifies the authors parodied in the nine letters. After you've read the story you can come back and see how many you were able to recognize. It'll be more fun that way.

Okay, start skipping now.

The parodies run like so . . .

The combination in the fifth letter is due to the fact that the two men wrote almost identical stories—"Two Bottles of Relish" and "A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It"—although for the parody Blish drew pretty generally on all the stories in Collier's Fancies and Goodnights and, of course, Dunsany's famous Jorkens stories. Similarly, the Doyle section is a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and The Land of Mist. I'm not sure it's necessary, but there may be readers who have forgotten that John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill and that "Victor Appleton" is the name signed to the Tom Swift books. Anyhow, in letters 6, 8 and 9 it seems clear that the author had no specific works in mind.

And perhaps it might be suggested that Jim show letter number 5 to Lady Dunsany, who should find it amusing.

Now that you've skipped over the information pertaining to the parodies, and have reserved the joy of figuring them out for yourselves before coming back to test your erudition, it is time to catalogue the Blish books to date, and to offer Jim and his lovely wife, Judith Ann Lawrence, with whom he wrote this delight, a chance to state their vital specifics.

In science fiction, these are the Blish titles:

The Warriors of Day

The Duplicated Man (with Robert W. Lowndes)

Jack of Eagles

The Cities in Flight Series:

1. They Shall Have Stars

2. A Life for the Stars

3. Earthman, Come Home

4. The Triumph of Time

The Seedling Stars

The Frozen Year

Vor

Galactic Cluster

A Case of Conscience

And All the Stars a Stage

Titan's Daughter

The Night Shapes

So Close to Home

The Star Dwellers

Mission to the Heart Stars

Welcome to Mars!

Best SF Stories of James Blish

A Torrent of Faces (with Norman L. Knight)

Star Trek 1/2/3/4

Spock Must Die!

Anywhen

Fantasy titles are Black Easter and The Day after Judgment; an historical novel, Dr. Mirabilis; a teenage novel, The Vanished Jet; brilliant criticism in The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand; as editor, Thirteen O'Clock (early stories of C. M. Kornbluth), New Dreams This Morning, The Nebula Award Stories, Fifth Volume and Kalki, the James Branch Cabell Society Journal.

In preparation at this writing: Beep, King Log, Histories of Witchcraft and Demonology & Magic (two volumes), and The Sense of Music.

Of Judy A. L. Blish, much can be said. Not the least of which is that she sub-authored this story/parody/happening with her husband Jim. It can also be said of her that she is a talented artist and draftsman; that she designed the covetously handsome Nebula awards of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a three-dimensional rendering of any sf writer's dream of what a neat award should look like; that she writes well; that she is a woman of uncommon good sense and almost unbelievable empathy; that she will be pissed-off I haven't given her as much space as Jim. But she knows me. And like an angel, forgives me more than she should.

They both live in England, at the moment, and here is what they write of themselves, sort of in the spirit of just, er, getting along . . .

"JB born 1921 in Orange, N. J.; educated Rutgers (B. Sc. 1942) and Columbia; U. S. Army 1942–44; trade newspaper editor 1945–52, public relations counsel (both agency and corporate) 1952–69; now full time free lance author. M. 1945 Virginia Kidd, two children; rem. 1964 Judith Ann Lawrence. 27 books in print, one in press, three in process; represented in 64 anthologies not counting A,DV; translated into 18 languages. One of the three founders of the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference; vice president of SFWA, two years; winner of Hugo award for best novel of 1958, A Case of Conscience; guest of honor, Pittcon (1960) and Lunacon (1967) and principal speaker at Phillycon (1968). Have also written Westerns, detectives, sport stories, popular science articles, poetry, plays, literary criticism, music criticism, TV scripts and feature films."

"O god Jim says I have to do this too. Won't give birthdate to anybody. BFA Columbia 1957. Taught school, ran elevators, secretaried & all that. Now freelance illustrator—19 books, many magazine spots, mostly sf. Married to all the above. Like it. Isn't that enough? Refuse to satisfy any more prurient curiosity.

"This was not a cold story collected out of the air. It was collected out of a hot British summer night at about 4 a.m., and climbed out of a nice warm bed and wrote its idea down, on a still warm electric typer."