Read This Fortress World Online
Authors: James Gunn
This Fortress World
James Gunn
An [
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No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1955 by James Gunn
First e-reads publication 1999
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-0275-3
James Gunn has worked as an editor of paperback reprints, as managing editor of K.U. alumni publications, as director of K.U. public relations, as a professor of English, and now is professor emeritus of English and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He was awarded the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement and the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching, was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America for 1971-72 and president of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, was guest of honor at many regional SF conventions, including SFeracon in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and Polcon, the Polish National SF convention, in Katowice; was presented the Pilgrim Award of SFRA in 1976, a special award from the 1976 World SF Convention for Alternate Worlds, a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo) by the 1983 World SF Convention for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, and the Eaton Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement; was a K.U. Mellon Fellow in 1981 and 1984; and served from 1978-80 and 1985-present as chairman of the Campbell Award jury to select the best science-fiction novel of the year. He has lectured in Denmark, China, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union for the U.S. Information Agency.
Crisis!
Future Imperfect
Kampus
Station in Space
The Listeners
The Magicians
In 1951, with a dozen published stories, I decided that it was time to start a novel. I worked on it evenings and weekends while serving as an editor for Western Printing and Lithographing (which published Dell Books and Little Golden Books, among others). Then, at my first World Science Fiction Convention, in Chicago, I learned from my agent, Frederik Pohl, that I had sold four stories, and I returned to full-time writing in Chanute, Kansas, and then in Kansas City, Missouri, broken by a three-month stint as assistant director of civil defense for Kansas City. When my agent, Frederik Pohl, sent me a contract for
This Fortress World
from a publisher just getting into the SF business, Abelard, I gave up the security of a paycheck once again for the uncertain existence of a free-lance writer.
This Fortress World
was my first novel, published the same year, 1955, as
Star Bridge
, my space-epic collaboration with Jack Williamson. They make a good pair.
This Fortress World
might be called an anti-space-epic, or in the terminology of a later critical period, a
meta-
space-epic. At that time space epics were relatively bloodless; billions of rational beings, even entire worlds, could be destroyed without blood-shed. Streets were never grimy; personal needs or hygiene were never mentioned; passions were reserved for politics or science. What I decided to write was a naturalistic space-epic that showed far-future events the way they would seem to someone who actually lived in those distant but disturbing times. Hemingway once said that he was trying to show in his stories and novels "the way things were." I was trying to show "the way things may be." Isaac Asimov used as the model for his
Foundation
stories
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
; I used the Dark Ages.
When I turned in the manuscript, Abelard asked me to approve some editorial changes, and, being young and inexperienced, I refused and Harry Altshuler, my agent after Fred got out of the business, resold the novel to Marty Greenberg's Gnome Press. When it was published in a good hardcover edition (for $3--$2.50 in Marty's Pick-a-Book plan—today used copies sell for $50 or more) with one of my favorite dust jackets and reprinted as an Ace double-novel (back to back with Robert Silverberg's first novel
The Thirteenth Immortal
), the novel received little notice (Damon Knight dismissed it in a fan review, later collected in
In Search of Wonder
). The hardcover and paperback editions earned only its $500 advance; Marty was always behind in his payments to authors, and I learned my first lesson in freelance writing that I later codified for my writing students as Gunn's first law: Sell it twice! Since then the novel has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese, and reprinted in England and by Berkley Books. A few writers, such as David Drake, remember it as influential.
The introduction to my book
Breaking Point
, a collection of stories written about the same time as
This Fortress World
, said, "I look back upon them now as my attempts to bring to the task of telling a science-fiction story everything I knew about setting and symbol, theme and character." And: "Interested readers may note the evolution of a writer." I could say the same things about
This Fortress World
.
James Gunn
…Wherever you are, wherever these words have been carried by chance or stealth, you read this in the splintered wreckage of the Second Empire.
Go out tonight, look at the sky, and see the scattered stars, distinct, separate, alone, divided by infinite chasms of hate, distrust, and the realities of power. See them as they really are—great, gray fortresses guarded by the moats of space, their walls manned against the galaxy.
The Second Empire. Say it aloud. Let it inflame the imagination. Let its meaning sink into the soul.
An empire. Within it the numberless worlds of the inhabited galaxy united, working together, living together, trading together. The name alone tells us that much. But how did it work? How was it held together? How were disputes decided, wars avoided? We don't know. We will never know. Only the name comes down to us. We remember it, and we remember, dimly, a golden time, a time of freedom and peace and plenty, and we weep sometimes for what is gone and will not come again.
The Second Empire. It implies another, an earlier, but of that we have no memory at all.
The Second Empire. Will there ever be a third? We dream, we hope, but we know, deep down, that the golden days are gone, and we cannot call them back. The Second Empire is splintered, and the wreckage is drifting apart, so far that it can never be pulled together again.
We are no longer men. We are shadows dancing a shadow dance inside our shadow fortresses, and the golden days are gone…
—The Dynamics of Galactic Power
Chapter One
I was running through the infinite dark, alone and afraid. I was afraid because I was alone and alone because I was afraid, and I hurt somewhere, not knowing where, unable to find out because I was running, unable to stop because I was afraid
.
Behind me came the patter of feet, chasing me down an unseen corridor, and the feet were light and almost noiseless because they were disembodied, and the corridor was black and unknowable because it was lost in time and space, as I was, without a home.
Worst of all was the silence, the complete silence that enveloped me like the darkness and was worse than the darkness because my need to speak and hear was greater than my need to see, and if I could break the silence, the darkness would shatter and I would no longer have to run. And the feet came closer in spite of my speed and the panic that urged me on ever faster through the darkness and the silence, because the feet had no leaden body to hold them back.
Slowly consciousness of where I hurt came to me. It was my hand, my hand hurt because of the glowing coal I carried there. Fresh fear surged through me, and the fear was mixed with shame, and I let my hand open; I let the coal fall away. And the patter of feet behind faded and my fear left me, but in its place came an aching loneliness because even the corridor was gone now and I was truly alone, floating in blackness without an anchor to anything, and truly without a home.
My mind spiraled through the emptiness and the silence and the dark, searching for something else alive in the infinite, but there was nothing. Nowhere was there anything to speak to, and if there had been something, there was no way to speak.
And I woke up, my hand fumbling automatically at my waist pouch for reassurance, but the pebble was gone, and I knew why it was gone, and I remembered. I remembered how fear first entered my world…
The liturgy was echoing through my mind when I saw the girl step through the flickering golden translucence of the Barrier. She was terrified.
…
your God is here
…
Terror! I recognized it, and I did not know how I knew.
All my life had been spent within the monastery. The monastery walls are wide, and within them is the world's peace. The monastery walls are high, and the world's torment can never climb them. Behind them I was contented and at peace, and it was quiet joy that the clear pattern of my life would never lead me outside.
I did not remember ever being outside. I did not remember my father or mother or their names or how they had died, if they were dead, but it did not matter, because the Church was father and mother to me, and I needed nothing else.
The emotions I knew were few and simple: the Abbot's powerful piety; Brother John's intense, sometimes feverish, search for scientific truth; Father Konek's absorbed contemplation; Father Michaelis's occasional mystic rapture. But terror was an alien. Like the other soul-disturbing passions, it could not pass the Barrier, just as physical objects could not pass.
…
behind the veils of ignorance and doubt you must seek Me, for I am there, as here, if you will see
…
Here in the Cathedral it was a little different, but I had only been on duty here twice before. The people entered the place that had been set aside for them, their place of contact with the life of the Church, seeking what we had so much of—peace. They came through the Barrier troubled, and they left in peace, reconciled with the Universe. I had felt their troubles distantly, and I had pitied them, and I had been glad when their troubles were taken from them.
But now I knew that the passions I had received in the control room were poor second-hand things. The girl's terror was an aura that surrounded her. It touched me with cold fingers, springing to my eyes from the screen, to my fingers from the gauntlets—
My eyes flicked to the clock. Already the timing was seconds off. I pulled my right hand free, tripped a switch, adjusted a knob. The Dissipation would have to be abrupt. If the Abbot should learn…