lost feminist classic in 1985 when it was revealed that it had been written by Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night is probably the first and certainly the most frightening of the many novels based on the premise of a Nazi victory. Zagorski acknowledges that it inspired him to write his first successful full-length work, Lords of the Black Sun (serialised in Fabulous Tales in 1940, first reprinted as a novel in 1948). ‘It might seem a fairly crass attempt at this now familiar conceit,’ he wrote in the introduction to the 1978 reissue, ‘but bear in mind that at the time of writing this was neither an alternate history nor a counter-factual exercise; this was the possible future.’
It was probably the recognition he received for Lords of the Black Sun that gained him entry to Robert Heinlein’s celebrated SF salon in Los Angeles – the Mañana Literary Society. In Anthony Boucher’s roman-à-clef Rocket to the Morgue (1943), based on the Mañana group, Zagorski is clearly identifiable as Matt Duncan, the ‘up-and-coming young science-fictioneer’, alongside fictional versions of Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Williamson and the rocket scientist Jack Parsons. There was much interest in alternate realities among this circle, as well as in the exploration of propagations of influence and even complex quantum notions like backward causation. In Boucher’s novel, Austin Carter, Heinlein’s alter ego, writes a story that proposes a world where far-left democrat Upton Sinclair wins in California while Roosevelt loses in 1936, causing a schism in the nation, civil war and the eventual ‘establishment on the West Coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic’. It was to be called ‘EPIC’ (with a nod to the End Poverty in California campaign that Heinlein had been part of).
‘Heinlein was something of a radical back then,’ Zagorski was to recollect in the 1960s. ‘I don’t know what happened to him later.’ It was at Heinlein’s salon that he first met friend and erstwhile collaborator, the Cuban SF writer Nemo Carvajal. ‘Interesting times for American science fiction,’ notes Carvajal. ‘The future was bound up in ideology, so even the space-opera writers could scarcely avoid a political critique in their work.’6 Indeed, the genre itself was ideal for geopolitical speculation and there emerged a collective and progressive approach to a world-view made possible by projections in time and space.
Larry was in love with Mary-Lou Gunderson, a fellow writer (later director, producer and television executive), but it remained unrequited. The year 1941 saw the emergence of jonbar points, in Zagorski’s life as well as that of the planet. ‘He was a shy and sensitive kid,’ remarked Gunderson, ‘the last person you would imagine going to war.’7 Yet the day after Pearl Harbor, that great point of divergence in American history, he signed up with the USAAF for combat duty.
Zagorski served as a radio operator in a B-24, flying bombing missions over Germany and occupied Europe. It was a harrowing experience as the conditions under which the air war was fought were extremely harsh. The long-range sorties were exhausting, some lasting over eight hours and in sub-zero temperatures with the crews wearing electrically heated suits and oxygen masks. Larry was to describe the experience as a ‘lethal parody of all my childhood dreams of flight and space travel’. Any simple technical malfunction could prove fatal and frozen oxygen lines could cause death from hypoxia. Then there were the swarms of enemy fighters and the flak from 88mm anti-aircraft batteries or the 108mm radar-controlled guns. The chances of surviving the thirty-mission requirement were very slim indeed.
‘Along the azimuth arc, from zenith to horizon flew death, and down below we saw planetary destruction, cities turned to moonscape, and we smiled.’ So begins ‘Fee, Fi, Foo, Fum’, one of the few stories he wrote that directly recall his experience of the war. The crew of a B-24 witness strange craft in the stratosphere:
‘Foo! Foo!’ went the call on the intercom. That nonsense word from some alien dialect. But the radioman knew what it meant. He had tuned himself in to them, ignoring all the arguments about whether such things were hallucinations, Nazi prototypes, or from another world. He knew what foo meant: it meant the future. Something had broken through the space–time continuum; that’s what they were seeing. A vision of what was to come, of the even greater terrors that awaited them in the heavens.
Returning home, Larry took his share of a collective post-war trauma. For a year or so he lived with his mother, supporting them both