Intro & Credits
The Berserker Story
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Intro & Credits
This short piece of reflective non-fiction by Fred Saberhagen
was published only once, as far as I can tell: in the Summer-Fall
1977 issue
of ALGOL Magazine. Luckily, I was able
to contact Andrew Porter, the editor and publisher of ALGOL,
who kindly gave me permission to reprint the article, provided
Fred also gave permission (which he did). So I'd like to thank
both of them very much for the opportunity to resurrect and share
with the world this fascinating capsule of insight on the Berserker
series.
Copyright (C) 1977 by ALGOL magazine; reprinted here by permission
of Andrew Porter, the publisher, and Fred Saberhagen, the author.
The Berserker Story
by
Fred Saberhagen
Time: early summer, 1962. Place: the sweltering (or freezing,
it must have been one or the other) Chicago apartment of
neowriter Saberhagen, who is laboring over what he considers
to be a
jim-dandy of a story idea, viz: the construction of a functional,
checker-playing computer without any hardware more advanced
than a game board (simplified from regular checkers), a
few small boxes, and a stock of beads of various colors.
Having
got well along with plotting and writing the story, which
he has chosen (without thinking about it) to make an adventure
set in interstellar space, Saberhagen
realizes that he has yet to name, describe, or even begin to think about the
deadly menace whose destruction by his clever hero is already scheduled for the
penultimate page.
"I know what," says Saberhagen to himself, off the
top of his then-ungrayed and crewcut head. And without giving
the matter any more conscious deliberation
than that he types a new opening paragraph:
The machine was a vast fortress,
containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that
lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance
of Earth from some war fought between interstellar empires, in some time
that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar... Men
called it a berserker.
The rest, as someone has said in another
context, is history. Or at least it has been going on ever since.
Some fifteen years and eighteen stories
(if my
count is correct) later, readers in Japan, England, Brazil, France, and who
knows where have had a chance to read about berserkers. Some of them (and
even some
editors) are still asking for more. There are now berserkers in computer
games, though I believe that in that alternate universe they are still vastly
outnumbered
by the Klingon forces. What was to have been an ephemeral menace has turned
into something approaching a lifelong career.
I still have Fred Pohl's acceptance
note for that first berserker story, which he bought and renamed
'Fortress Ship," a title I still have not learned
to love. The note reads, in part:
I like the berserker ship in 'To Move and
Win"1 very much; I'm not quite
as fond of the rest of the story. (The concept of the wild, huge ship
seems to promise much more color and drama than the checker
game provides.)
In
subsequent notes (and in conversation, when Fred and I finally
met at a convention) he urged me to write more berserkers, and
solemnly assured
me that
a series of
connected stories was the most certain road to fame.
And you know, he was
right. Or, anyway, the berserker series has, and has rubbed off
on me, a name-recognition potential far greater than anything
else that
I have ever written, though the series actually makes up less than half my
published
output of science fiction. That first berserker has brought in many times
the $50 earned by its first showing in Worlds of If, and new requests for
reprinting
are still at hand in 1977.
In mathematics there are series that converge and
others that diverge. So, I think, it is in story-telling. In
a convergent series of the literary type
(I
had one, I believe, in my trilogy The Broken Lands, The Black
Mountains,
and Changeling Earth) the writer sooner or later feels increasingly
constricted by what he has already put down about his characters and settings.
As in
real
life,
choices once made must be lived with. Not as in real life, the author retains
the prerogative of bailing out of his cornered position in that world, to
another world that he already knows; and sooner or later the prerogative
is exercised.
The divergent series of stories, on the other hand, is more
like the succession of football seasons, or Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
One chapter's victories or disasters mean nothing when the next chapter
starts.
Sherlock Holmes grew old, converged, and retired, though he
had the (in his case, delightful) habit of coming back for a
long succession
of last
bows. How can the berserkers grow old?
It's been
established that in their secret automated bases they can repair and
improve themselves, and add to their numbers by new construction.
Fred Pohl, in
his editorial capacity, was a little worried upon reading one of the
stories ("Stone Place," If,
March 1965) that I had decided to wipe out the berserkers and wind the
series up. No, by then I was already too smart for that. The metal killers
came back
from near-extinction as briskly as dandelions. Nor are they presently
an endangered species.
A few hours ago (as I write this) I mailed
off to my agent a new berserker short story, called "The
Smile.''2 I'm also working on Berkerker
Man, a novel which I
think may be the best of the family to date. With a whole galaxy
to range
over, containing scores (at least) of Earth-colonized planets, and an
occasional alien race if I need one, I don't feel the least bit
crowded. Particularly with
several thousand years established as a rough time-frame.
This is not
to say that suitable ideas for new stories are always at hand.
I believe it works something like the nation's proven reserves
of oil;
at times there may seem to be no more anywhere, but let a whiff of money
stir
the air,
the metaphorical rod smiteth the rock, and lo, the needed material gusheth
forth.
Or trickleth, anyway; enough to meet the absolute necessities of the
time.
Lack of ideas as a difficulty is peculiar to the series story,
of course. About the only difficulty I can think of that is,
other
than convergence,
is really
no more than an irritant.
It has to do with background material; the establishing
of the story's setting for the reader. For example, in how many
different ways (limiting
oneself
to the English language) is it possible to repeat, restate, or paraphrase
that
explanation that The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life,
et cetera? You can't leave the background out, or new readers
won't know what is going on, and some of them will care.
You can't
keep sticking
in the same sentences and paragraphs, or old readers (not to mention
editors) may have the sensation of dropping their money in a too-familiar
turnstile.
So the writer, the one being paid here to do some work, has to keep on
making the
same old beloved background look fresh each time it is revisited. Of
course when series stories are gathered into a book, even varied discriptions
of the same
thing quickly become too numerous, and background material so carefully
created for the individual stories must be taken out. No
more, as I said, than an irritant.
To return to origins. The idea of automated
war machines that no one can turn off was original with me, in the
sense that at the moment I
began
to use it
I was not aware that anyone else had done so. There seems to be no
doubt that I
was wrong. I stand ready to be corrected, not having the evidence before
me, but I believe Sturgeon's "There Is No Defense" is an
example of an earlier use, dating from 1948. Others have used the same
basic
idea since I began,
and others will use it in times to come.
The point I want to make, though,
is that this idea fit me, worked well for me, almost became identified
with me, precisely because it
came out
of the
bottom
of my subconscious and through the top of my head. Writers who have
had things suddenly go right, as if of themselves, will know what
I mean.
To repeat another bit of advice, this one, as I recall, from
Damon Knight: Find something that you do well, and stick with it,
or at
least come
back to it. For
myself, I seem to do best with the far, far out; with ungodly and
unlikely worlds and monsters; robot killers, the demons of Changeling
Earth,
sympathetic vampires.
(My own feeling is that The Dracula Tape may be my own best book.
Publishers' Weekly liked it. You've never seen it in a bookstore?
Neither have
I. Another story.)
1. How's that for a title?
2. Somewhere, someday, you may see it in print as "Fortress
Face."
Copyright (C) 1977 by ALGOL magazine; reprinted here by permission
of Andrew Porter, the publisher, and Fred Saberhagen, the author.
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