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When I talk with philosophers, linguists, and psychologists, I am often struck by the way in which not only the arguments but whole phrases of their recent writings appear in their conversation. They are, or become, what they write.
This can be disappointing unless I remind myself that people who don't write usually have much less to say, and they generally don't change their patter much from year to year. The barroom remarks prefaced by "My philosophy of life is . . ." often go decades unrevised. Boring. I was first struck by the influence that Fritz's writing had on himself in the summer of 1968. 1 had just finished reading Fritz's A Specter Is Haunting Texas, then serialized in Galaxy Magazine.
The specter in question is a tall and very thin native of the satellite communities who must wear a support exoskeleton to visit Texas, which some two hundred years hence had annexed much of North America. Scully, an actor by profession, becomes a useful symbolic figure in the Hispanic, "bent-back" revolution against the ruling class of Texans who use hormones to reach Scully's eight-foot height without mechanical support.
Science fiction is replete with stories in which the protagonist and a small band of conspirators try to free "the people" from an evil dictatorship. Such stories reveal and reinforce a belief that is common among science fiction readers: that the character of society is determined by a technocratic elite. "Revolution" in this view occurs when a good elite, with fresh intelligence and technology, takes over the dumb masses and casts out the bad elite.
Scully, to the contrary, is just a co-opted speechmaker, a spectral mascot. Scully, artist-actor like Fritz, does not change the world - he reflects it, darkly. (The Communist Manifesto begins "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism ..." I asked Fritz whether anyone in science fiction had noticed the source of this title. He said no.)
I hadn't seen Fritz in a couple of years. He had driven in from Los Angeles to do a science fiction writing workshop at Clarion College in Pennsylvania. When I saw Fritz that summer he was sporting all of 140 pounds on his six-foot-five frame - a mighty gaunt reduction from his...