For about five years, between 1958 and 1962, such a center seemed to be growing again at Ziff-Davis, where Cele Lalli (then Goldsmith) was editing Fantastic and Amazing: David R. Bunch, Thomas Disch, Larry Eisenberg, Phyllis Gotlieb, Keith Laumer, Robert Rohrer, Roger Zelazny, all came out of these pages. (Now Amazing and Fantastic have been sold, and the new policy seems to be primarily reprint.)
The closest thing to it since then has been Fred Pohl’s new-writer-per-issue policy for If—where R. A. Lafferty, Larry Niven, and Norman Kagan first appeared. The policy continues to turn up good prospects: Jonathan Brand, Hayden Howard, Alexei Panshin, and Bruce McAllister might—any or all—develop interestingly. But the “combining force,” whatever it is, is not there—nor at F&SF, although it continues to attract, and select, superior new writers. (Since 1960, F&SF has come up with a number of exciting “Firsts,” among whom Vance Aandahl, Jane Beauclerk, Calvin Demmon, Sonya Dorman, Terry Carr, and Jody Scott come most readily to mind. Astounding/Analog turned up R. C. FitzPatrick, Richard Olin, Rick Raphael, and Norman Spinrad over the same period.)
Possibly the new SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) will be able to supply the spark—as for some years it was supplied by Theodore Cogswell’s extraordinary pro-fan letter-journal, PITFCS (Proceedings of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies). Or perhaps some bright publisher will give Cele Laili a new magazine.
In the meantime, two of the top graduates of Fantastic’s Class of ‘62 have just published their first novels: Zelazny’s This Immortal (Ace) and Disch’s The Genocides (Berkley). (Zelazny also took two of the first SFWA awards for 1965: for the novelette, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” in F&SF and the novella “He Who Shapes” in Amazing.)
Tom Disch’s second novel (tentatively. White Fang Goes Dingo) will have been published by Ace before this Annual is out; and his short stories will have appeared in everything from Galaxy and Alfred Hitchcock to Mademoiselle, while he himself roams Europe, following the music festivals and writing between programs.
THE ROACHES
THOMAS M. DISCH
Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn’t see one without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful. She would run, instead, for the spray-can of Black Flag and inundate the little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then. . . . No, it was best not to think about it.
Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment, but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia’s wage was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She could always telclass="underline" there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the roaches knew about.
At least, she thought, I keep my apartment clean. And truly the linoleum under the sink, the backside and underside of the stove, and the white contact paper lining her cupboards were immaculate. She could not understand how other people could let these matters get so entirely out-of-hand. They must be Puerto Ricans, she decided—and shivered again with horror, remembering that litter of empty husks, the filth and the disease.
Such extreme antipathy toward insects—toward one particular insect—may seem excessive, but Marcia Kenwell was not really exceptional in this. There are many women, bachelor women like Marcia chiefly, who share this feeling, though one may hope, for sweet charity’s sake, that they escape Marcia’s peculiar fate.
Marcia’s phobia was, as in most such cases, hereditary in origin. That is to say, she inherited it from her mother, who had a morbid fear of anything that crawled or skittered or lived in tiny holes. Mice, frogs, snakes, worms, bugs—all could send Mrs. Kenwell into hysterics, and it would indeed have been a wonder if little Marcia had not taken after her. It was rather strange, though, that her fear had become so particular, and stranger still that it should particularly be cockroaches that captured her fancy, for Marcia had never seen a single cockroach, didn’t know what they were. (The Kenwells were a Minnesota family, and Minnesota families simply don’t have cockroaches.) In fact, the subject did not arise until Marcia was nineteen and setting out (armed with nothing but a high-school diploma and pluck, for she was not, you see, a very attractive girl) to conquer New York.
On the day of her departure, her favorite and only surviving aunt came with her to the Greyhound terminal (her parents being deceased) and gave her this parting advice: “Watch out for the roaches, Marcia darling. New York City is full of cockroaches.” At that time (at almost any time really) Marcia hardly paid attention to her aunt, who had opposed the trip from the start and given a hundred or more reasons why Marcia had better not go, not till she was older at least.
Her aunt had been proven right on all counts: Marcia, after five years and fifteen employment-agency fees, could find nothing in New York but dull jobs at mediocre wages; she had no more friends than when she lived on West 16th; and, except for its view (the Chock-Full-O’-Nuts warehouse and a patch of sky), her present apartment on lower Thompson Street was not a great improvement on its predecessor.
The city was full of promises, but they had all been pledged to other people. The city Marcia knew was sinful, indifferent, dirty, and dangerous. Every day she read accounts of women attacked in subway stations, raped in the streets, knifed in their own beds. A hundred people looked on curiously all the while and offered no assistance. And on top of everything else there were the roaches!
There were roaches everywhere, but Marcia didn’t see them until she’d been in New York a month. They came to her—or she to them—at Silversmith’s on Nassau Street, a stationery shop where she had been working for three days. It was the first job she’d been able to find. Alone or helped by a pimply stockboy (in all fairness it must be noted that Marcia was not without an acne problem of her own), she wandered in rows of rasp-edged metal shelves in the musty basement, making an inventory of the sheaves and piles and boxes of bond paper, leatherette-bound diaries, pins and clips, and carbon paper. The basement was dirty and so dim that she needed a flashlight for the lowest shelves. In the obscurest corner, a faucet leaked perpetually into a gray sink; she had been resting near this sink, sipping a cup of tepid coffee (saturated, in the New York manner, with sugar and drowned in milk), thinking, probably, of how she could afford several things she simply couldn’t afford, when she noticed the dark spots moving on the side of the sink. At first she thought they might be no more than motes floating in the jelly of her eyes, or the giddy dots that one sees after over-exertion on a hot day. But they persisted too long to be illusory, and Marcia drew nearer, feeling compelled to bear witness. How do I know they are insects? she thought.