The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,124

that the NASFWA should issue a statement, declaring that ‘Atomic War is inevitable, humanity will quickly pass through this necessary stage into a new society – socialism.’ He swiftly disbanded the association and responded with the story ‘Sycorax Island’, which appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1963.

Set in a parallel world where the Missile Crisis has escalated into all-out nuclear war, a disparate bunch of survivors find themselves stranded on an idyllic island in the Caribbean. American embassy staff and their families, a detachment of Cuban women’s militia and a group of Russian technical advisors overcome their initial hostilities and attempt to build a new world together. They find traces of a long-dead culture on the island: the circular ruins of some kind of temple that becomes the focus of the emerging community. At the end, just after one of the militia women has given birth to a mutant baby of uncertain paternity, a unit of US Marines arrives and promptly kills all the Cubans and Soviets. ‘Hey!’ their captain calls out to reassure his now hysterical fellow Americans. ‘It’s all right! You’re safe! Didn’t you hear the news? We won! Yeah, we really clobbered the bastards!’

In September 1964, Larry attended the Twenty-Second World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland and met Philip K. Dick for the first time. They indulged in a long and drug-addled conversation concerning Dick’s most recent book Man in a High Castle, a counter-factual novel where the Nazis and the Japanese have won the Second World War. Zagorski had assumed that this had been influenced (as his own first novel had been) by Swastika Night. Dick assured him that he had in fact been guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching.

It seems clear that this is what inspired Larry to start work on what was to become The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski (1966), a cycle of twenty-two interconnecting stories structured around the trump cards in the Tarot deck. Zagorski spent longer on this novel than any other and he was never happy with it.

It started with such promise, I mean it just seemed to write itself until I got up to the sixteenth card, and then – wham! It was the Tower! I was back at my first story, back trying to find my lost father. I felt that I was being led into a hall of mirrors, stuck in some awful time warp. I’d been doing primal therapy, rebirthing, stuff like that, and, of course, ingesting huge quantities of LSD. I used Crowley’s Thoth pack, which is pretty psychedelic anyway – and there it was: the ego, the phallus, that vision of authority I could never overcome, plus I’d just learnt that I was infertile so I felt emasculated and cut off from fatherhood at both ends of the continuum. I found myself wandering up and down Venice Broadwalk, muttering, ‘The tower must fall, the tower must fall.’ I had an overpowering sense of doom – after all, the Tower represents ruin and catastrophe. I got through it but after that it was a hard book to finish.9

Now the Tower had perhaps become a symbol of an existential despair in the midst of apparent success. As Blaise Pascal had written: ‘We burn with a desire to find a secure abode, an ultimate firm base on which to build a tower which might rise to infinity; but our very foundation crumbles completely, and the earth opens before us unto the very abyss.’

The critical reception of The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski was mixed. Village Voice declared it a ‘meta-fictional masterpiece’; The New York Times called it ‘a confused and self-indulgent mess’. It was joint winner of the Hugo Award for best novel awarded at the SF Worldcon in Cleveland, Ohio in 1966.

Much of Zagorski’s work was now being hailed as part of the ‘New Wave’ of SF writing. Larry certainly liked to be seen as radical and he pushed the idea of an ‘alchemical reaction between pop culture and the avant-garde’. His stories found their way into Michael Moorcock’s militantly nouvelle vague journal New Worlds and he was asked to contribute to Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). But already one can detect an uneasiness concerning the permissive age in Zagorski’s writing. His Dangerous Visions story, ‘The Crazy Years, Mass Psychosis in the Sixth Decade’ (named after Robert Heinlein’s uncanny prediction for the 1960s in his 1941 ‘Time-Line of Future History’), depicts an increasingly barbaric youth cult called the Subheads, whose