Dream Makers I & II
The Only Qualification for Being a Science Fiction Writer Is Being Insane
A few years ago I went to Pittsburgh and at a used bookstore I bought a copy of Charles Platt’s Dream Makers which had at one point been deaccessioned from the Fort Worth public library. A few months ago I went to Pittsburgh and at a different used bookstore I bought a copy of Charles Platt’s Dream Makers II, which had a price sticker on the cover that certainly dates to the 1980s.
What is Dream Makers? Dream Makers is two volumes of what can only be called “profiles” of the most prominent-ish science fiction writers circa 1980. Each chapter is a dizzying account of Charles Platt’s confrontation with an author, including the setting, the mood, and some variable quantity of direct quotes the author spoke at him during their encounter. I hear both volumes have been republished in an updated form, but I’m smoking the original paperbacks as if we still lived in the dismal days of 1981.
Platt’s encounters with the SFF writers of the early Reagan years are somewhat gonzo. Often, the style makes both Platt and his subjects come off as super-aggro self-important pricks, which I believe is probably accurate. The only authors who seem like they’d be pleasant chats in real life are Samuel Delany, Joe Haldeman, Algis Budrys, Joan Vinge, Jean Marie Stine, and MAYBE Theodore Sturgeon (Sturgeon is on thin ice as he expresses how oppressive it is that he’s expected to wear pants when meeting strangers). Not one other author can resist talking shit about another author, usually the next person profiled in the book. If the author isn’t talking shit about someone else in the book, they are behaving badly in some other fashion.
Platt’s own agenda in the interviews becomes more and more visible, especially as we transition into Dream Makers II. He begins to demand answers from every interviewee on repeat themes like “Do you agree that fantasy is a horseshit genre?” and “How can you remain complicit in a publishing industry which suppresses unknown and early-career authors?”
Yet Platt is eminently sympathetic and relatable because every single interviewee has him beat for being batshit crazy. Multiple authors subject him to weird lunches, though interestingly William S. Burroughs doesn’t. Keith Laumer screams at Platt and waves a saber about menacingly. Not one author lives in a normal place: The authors doing well financially live in creepy swingers’ pads (Harlan…), while the broke authors cower in verminous squats and survive off squeeze-bottle mustard.
Your honor, I love them. I love Platt and every single freak he puts on display. Some folks use the term gender euphoria to describe when they really recognize or are recognized as their preferred gender. I have gender euphoria for science fiction writers. They are just like me for real: incapable of being normal, polite, or not announcing their weird beliefs to everyone, regardless of who surrounds them. They have no sense of when they’ve lost the room, and no ability to explain or justify themselves. They are ensorcelled by the strange patterns and meanings only they can see.
If these writers are abrasive, if they are incoherent, if they are disagreeable, if they are rankly offensive, if they are insanely divorced, they are utterly human.
In crafting Dream Makers I & II, Charles Platt did an incredible service to the field of speculative fiction. He put his health and safety on the line so we could know the personalities of these authors, their peacocking absurdity, alongside their work. Knowing Larry Niven was in 1981 the kind of guy who insisted on referring to himself in the third person makes a rich multi-faceted kind of sense only intensified by the concurrent revelation that he is a oil money trust fund baby who’s never had a real job. Knowing that Philip Jose Farmer’s vibes were so off that he scared Charles Platt right out of Middle America entirely is a sort of perfected knowledge that gives me an intense and enrapturing sense of peace.
The vast majority of Platt’s subjects have departed for the next emanation, and so have, presumably, the majority of their peers. Thus records like Dream Makers hold in their pages a last connection to these writers as fallible, morally-deformed human beings, not mere corpuses of creativity. Printed upon the spines stocking my bookshelf, these folks are like titans and archons of the field, as far away from my dull reality as the content of their stories. But in Platt’s renderings they are each my crooked neighbor and I must love them with my crooked heart.
Thank heavens for science fiction! Thanks heavens for Charles Platt! Pick up the Dream Makers books if you can find them. You can’t have my copies, though.
