Jake Arnott: The House of Rumour

Yet when I think of southern California back in the early spring of that year, I see it as a kind of paradise. The land around the coast was so empty then. We would drive out to the point at Palo Verdes, park above the cliffs and climb down to deserted beaches. An uninhabited planet we could colonise with our dreams. I remember the thump and hiss of the breaking surf, the sun going down over the Pacific, as we gathered driftwood to build huge bonfires that would snap and crackle and spit great sparks up into the night.

I tend to idealise this part of my life and think of it as a time when I was still innocent. But innocent is such a big solemn word. Dumb would be more to the point. I knew nothing about the world. In fact for most of the time I was looking away from it, gazing out into the universe with a naive sense of wonder. I was a shy and awkward young man who still lived with his mother, struggling to become some sort of writer. A self-confessed fantasist. Oh, I was a fool all right. And my memories of that time become fractured, unstable. Yes, it was a time of uncertainty. Nuclear fission had just been discovered. But there was also a cataclysmic split in the unsteady matter of my self. It was, after all, the year I first had my heart broken.

I’d had a bad case of mumps as a child and all through my teenage years I’d had trouble with my sense of balance. At first I was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear. It seemed that there was a dysfunction in the vestibular system, the bony maze of passages that regulate and guide our sense of motion. But when no physical evidence of this could be detected, it was suggested that my problem might be psychological. In extreme stress I could experience panic attacks and heart palpitations. These could be symptoms of labyrinthitis, or perhaps the manifestation of an emotional trauma that was the true cause of my sense of imbalance. So I had been seeing an analyst called Dr Furedi who had a practice in Beverly Hills.

It was a golden age of sorts. It’s now generally thought of as the start of the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. And I had just sold my first full-length story, a twenty-eight-thousand-word novelette. Lords of the Black Sun was set in 2150 with the Third Reich of the future, having conquered earth, embarking on an interstellar blitzkrieg . Fabulous Tales ran it as a three-issue serial and it was featured on the cover for the first part with a four-colour illustration of a fearsome-looking spaceship with swastika markings. Fabulous paid a cent a word, which was the going rate back then. I was nineteen years old and $280 seemed a king’s ransom.

I’d had some early success with a short piece called ‘The Tower’ that had run in Amazing Stories , but for a long time I had felt blocked. It was my analyst’s suggestion that I write something based on my long-absent father and I think that gave me some sort of breakthrough. So Graaf Thule, the intergalactic Nazi warlord, was born.

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society met at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. The place served free limeade, which suited a good deal of our membership who had scarcely a nickel or dime to spend. And yet I felt a bit gauche when I first attended the Thursday-night meetings, more nervous fan than serious writer. The decor of Clifton’s was absurdly kitsch. A waterfall cascaded through an artificial glade with plastic foliage and plaster rocks. A forest mural covered one wall. A gallery above held a tiny chapel with piped organ music and a neon cross. I always felt unduly sickened by this bizarre interior, which seemed to exacerbate my labyrinthitis. Dr Furedi explained this feeling as an ‘externalisation of inner anxiety’ and suggested that I obviously feared not being good enough to be part of this group. But once I had really achieved something, I felt a bit more confident.

The only person I really wanted to impress, though, was Mary-Lou Gunderson. She had sold as few stories as I had but she had a fierce presence. She seemed as self-possessed and outspoken as any who attended the weekly meetings of LASFS. Tall, blonde and athletic, she always made me feel ludicrously tongue-tied whenever she was near. I liked her stuff too. Thrilling Wonder ran her story ‘Atom Priestess’ in the summer of 1940. Set in a future that had descended into barbarism, it was about a religious sect that unknowingly worships long-lost theories of particle physics. And she had just started to write the series ‘Zodiac Empire’ for Superlative Stories . Mary-Lou was proud but she never bragged about her work; in fact she was meticulously self-deprecating. I think it allowed her to feel a little aloof about the strange trade that we had found ourselves in. She wanted to go beyond the ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. And secretly I did too.

‘Well, if it isn’t Larry Zagorski,’ she called across the table at Clifton’s. ‘The man who put the goddamn Nazis in space. What did you want to go and do that for?’

‘Er, um, well, Mary-Lou,’ I stuttered. ‘ Lords of the Black Sun is, you know, speculative.’

‘Well, of course it’s speculative ,’ she boomed. ‘But what, you want them to win?’

‘Of course not, no. It’s like, you know, a warning.’

‘A warning?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with a sudden certainty. ‘A warning from the future.’

‘Hmm,’ she pondered. ‘A warning from the future. I like that.’

Many years later a ‘serious’ science-fiction critic cited Lords of the Black Sun as an influence on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle , Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream and countless other novels that dwelt on what might have happened if the Axis powers had gained world domination. But I certainly wasn’t the first to come up with what has now become almost a sub-genre of literature. I got the idea from a strange English novel titled Swastika Night by Murray Constantine, though I did have something like an original twist to the idea and I wanted to share that with Mary-Lou.

‘I got this idea from Jack Parsons. You remember, that rocket scientist at Caltech who sometimes comes to the meetings?’

‘I’ll say,’ she drawled. ‘He’s cute.’

I gave an embarrassed cough.

‘That’s as may be,’ I went on. ‘What I remember was that he said German rocketry is already far in advance of anyone else’s. And that got me thinking. What if the Nazis conquer space?’

‘Yeah, terrifying thought,’ she muttered. ‘They say he’s into black magic, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Jack Parsons.’

Parsons was something of a legend even then: tall, dark, strikingly handsome, a brilliant scientist who dabbled in the occult, like some fully formed figure from fantasy fiction. I was hardly surprised that he intrigued Mary-Lou, but I had no idea then that her flippant comments were my own warning from the future.

And looking back now I can see something else I didn’t know at the time: Parsons was an acolyte of a notorious English occultist who became linked with the Hess case.

I felt just about bold enough to offer Mary-Lou a lift home to her boarding house in West Hollywood. She invited me up to her room for a nightcap where she produced the remains of a bottle of kosher slivovitz. As we sipped plum brandy she asked me about quantum mechanics.

‘Cause and effect start to get weird on an atomic level,’ I tried to explain, wrestling with ideas I didn’t really understand. ‘You know, with Newtonian physics it’s like pool. The cue ball hits a colour, that hits the eight-ball and so on. In quantum theory one particle can influence another without the need for intermediate agents joining the two objects in space.’