A Matter of Doroteya
by Bill Tyrell
My name is not Doroteya Durev, and I am a science fiction writer in trouble.
Last month I was flicking through the online archives of the magazine Astounding, brought back to life by the grandson of one of the subsidiaries of the Street and Smith publishing group for the benefit of those with speculative interest. It was fascinating to see how confident the genre once was—buoyed by post-war optimism and topics such as the space race, extrasensory perception and the banality of 1950s Americana, the prose and editorials formed part of an informal, almost carefree conversation between the writers and their fans, with no sense of the worldly anxieties and political correctness that comprise much of the genre’s modern output.
I guess it’s true when they say life was much simpler then. The editors, publishers and advertisers knew exactly who their readership was: white and mostly American males in their early teens. Whilst many of them had televisions, I’m guessing the grainy output was not enough to satisfy their young, overactive imaginations. Many of them will not have travelled farther than the safety of their project or suburb, so the promise of a “thrilling space adventure” combined with an editorial insight into the realms of subjective color in Polaroid photography must have seemed mighty exotic!
Let’s take a minute to consider the adverts. The back page was often taken with “amazing optical buys, and other scientific bargains” that can’t be found in today’s edition of Analog. One could buy a horseshoe shape, war surplus giant magnet for $8.50 post-paid. A box of enameled plastic sticks and easy-on rubber joints under the moniker of “D-Stix” sold for $3.00 post-paid, guaranteed to help you “visualize your ideas and crystallize your plans.” A two-stage rocket toy used water and air as fuel, and demonstrated the principles of jet action…knowledge was the most valued commodity on sale here, and little chunks of new science could be bought for under $10.00 guaranteed––all post-paid.
I spent hours digesting this classic content, but it was the August 1959 edition that set this sorry tale off.
John W. Campbell Jr.’s first pick was simple enough: a military “first-contact” novella named The Aliens by Murray Leinster. (Tag line: “When two expanding empires meet…war is inevitable…or is it…?”) Next came a short story called Trapped by Franklin C. Vanderbilt. From an academic perspective I found this story extremely interesting. The plot concerned a struggling writer who found himself literally trapped in a story, his life and soul sucked between the pages; the reader was led to believe that this was possibly a dream, or a strange drug trip––or perhaps the story was reality, and the protagonist was “trapped” in a never-ending loop of fictional uncertainty…that is where he was left at the climax.
While this might seem a “meat and potatoes” topic for modern science fiction, it struck me that this story would have been very unusual for the 1950s. The style and content were similar to Philip K. Dick, but during this time, Dick’s prose wasn’t as paranoid and wonderful as his later trademark. For much of the 1950s, the master had shunned the genre and was churning out suburban dramas that never even reached publication until recently. Perhaps Mr. Vanderbilt was an influence on the writing of Mr. Dick, or perhaps this was a pen name of the master, already experimenting and pushing the genre in different directions under a guise that allowed him a little more freedom.
The next story made me jump from my chair. Called “A Matter of Communication” by Jack Garrett, the piece imagined a world in the early 21st century that was remarkably similar to ours. The plot rotated around the Space Race to Mars, predicting that wealthy entrepreneurs will lead funding for exploration, and that central governments would lose interest when there was no political motivation to drive the effort. Above all else, the minor details surprised me the most. Social networking, mobile telephones with swipe screens, and climate change all weaved through the story, and like every well-crafted piece of science fiction, these devices didn’t necessarily affect the plotline; they were just little background nuggets for the reader to digest whilst the dialogue snapped along.
“Hah!” growled the first black President, his fists pounding the mahogany desk. “Let’s get down to brass tacks. If our shuttle is second on the ground, then we’ll have a bigger problem than Korea to contend with. It’ll be curtains Benson, curtains for the U.S.A.!”
The President’s aide spoke quickly and capably. “Then let’s make sure we’re the first.” She slapped the back of her neck, nullifying a crawling and creeping sensation that felt like an alien plasmid crawling up her spine.
I Googled Jack Garrett and was overwhelmed with references to a 14-year-old virtuoso guitar player who lived in Geneva.
Eventually I found the real man, lurking in another archive of science fiction sources. He only wrote this one particular story, before vanishing into the archives of pulp forever. Yet only a few mouse clicks later I had his address; he was still alive, living alone in a suburb of Connecticut. He had no relation to the aforementioned guitar player.
Really, the detail of this modern world in “A Matter of Communication” was extraordinary. Mr. Garrett had the insight to see beyond the American-Soviet tensions and imagined a new order, one in which efforts to eradicate poverty led to a more developed world. Mr. Garrett was pessimistic of humanity, and rude about the selfish and materialistic nature of post-war generations. Some of his views were quite conservative, but not dated or offensive.
The similarities with this story and the modern age were too insanely accurate to be coincidence. And it was brilliant. There have always been these one-shot authors who present immaculate pieces of work and then vanish into the speculative ether––but none so connected with truth. More importantly, my discovery would make a good non-fiction article for Locus magazine.
I vowed to find him––but first I had a keynote speech to make.
At the start of this tale I stated Doroteya Durev was not my name. I am not a Russian female; I am a white British male, working by day as a lab tech, writing science fiction by night. Under the name “Bill Tyrell,” I have had success in the semi-professional speculative scene, with numerous short stories, novelettes and novellas out there in the respected publications; however, my greatest success was a non-fiction autobiography based on my three months spent as a bass guitarist in alternative rock group The Fall, based in Manchester, England.
Yet there was one market that eluded me.
The semi-professional magazine Alternate Visions always rejected my work. It may seem silly to be irked by this, as there are thousands of other places to target an online speculative readership. This magazine’s tagline was “Representing the Under-Represented in an Alien World.” What this essentially meant is that they only published female authors. The published stories were no different and no better than my output, but there was an unspoken condition that only females could be published in Alternate Visions.
This really got my goat for two reasons: first I really liked the stories published there; and second I had several stories that would fit perfectly in their monthly selection. I submitted all my best work there, but always got the same response:
“Dear Writer,
This story does not meet our needs.
Sincerely, Alternate Visions”
My Twitter followers had to calm me down when the subject of the above arose.
“Let it go man!” one wrote. “Honestly, the more you go on about this, the more it makes you sound like an asshole.”
“So because I’m white and male, I’m instantly ostracized from their market. Does that seem fair to you?”
“It’s not a question of fairness––it’s a question of how much longer I can listen to you go on about this.”
“I’ll tell you what Mark E. Smith would say about sexism in literature.”
“Christ, stop going on about your time in The Fall! We get it!”
From these conversations was born the pen name of Doroteya Durev. I imagined this young female living in the deepest recesses of the Eastern Bloc, a lone voice of protest in the bowels of the former U.S.S.R. My fiction began to be shaped by this mythical female, imagination running wild with her carved tales of oppression and quiet literary protest. Her version of a totalitarian regime in Tau Ceti was an obvious allegory to her plight under the Russian government.
Those suckers at Alternate Visions lapped it up. Doroteya got first billing on the magazine and she was applauded for courage; an award was conceived and rapidly presented. I wrote and said that it would be too dangerous to accept the award in person, but thanked them for their generosity…
…It was when they offered to pay for my flight and asylum in the United States that matters got a little hot.
Alt-Vis-Con was a grand event in a large conference hall in Chicago. Over five hundred attended––I’d put the female contingent at over ninety-five percent. Even in my navy blazer and chinos I felt underdressed; every woman had made a real effort on appearance, the floor a blur of colorful dresses, tasteful makeup and interesting hair. The perfume smells were a welcome respite from the sweatier moments of many of the male-dominated, beer gut prominent British conventions. No offence to my colleagues but some of them could benefit from a date with soap and water.
My concierge was a petite red-haired girl called Tanya. She had a round face, eager smile and nice green eyes; and she talked a lot. She took me through a procession of handshakes with the senior editorial team, and quickly guided the conversation to matters more pertinent.
“So you’ve come at a good time of year for the best of the Chicago weather…say Mr. Tyrell, I was wondering when we could meet Miss Durev…she wrote in her emails that her representative would be present, but it’d be swell to meet her before her keynote address––”
“Did she not also say that she wished to keep her public appearance to an absolute minimum?”
“Yes, sir, but given the circumstance I’m sure her sponsors would want to––”
“I’m sure you appreciate the danger that Miss Durev has put herself in to come here,” I interrupted.
“You’re absolutely correct,” admitted Tanya, though the way the words came out indicated that she meant the exact opposite, and that she wanted to say a whole lot more. Her eyelids flickered momentarily, and then she was “back in the room.”
As the moment of Doroteya’s scheduled address approached (just after sci-fi legend Mike Resnick), the temperature in my head rose to a boiling point.
“Are you okay, Mr. Tyrell?” asked Tanya as we stood by the side of the stage, watching the audience, their bodies wriggling in anticipation for the sight of the Russian celebrity. “You look a little sweaty.”
“I’m fine,” I snapped.
“Where is Miss Durev?”
“Quiet,” I muttered. “I’m trying to listen to Resnick speak.”
It would be unwise to reveal the truth at this moment.
“I love Kirinyaga,” said Tanya, which completely threw me.
The sweat-drenched crib notes finally disintegrated in my hands.
And then it was time to go on.
As the roar of applause quickly dissolved to silence at my appearance, I grabbed the lectern with both hands and addressed my female audience, relishing the advice that to relieve the anxiety of public speaking one should imagine the audience in their underwear. My voice was strong and direct, the words dancing to the meaning that I had intended; my glottis projected to the back of the hall so that everybody could hear, something Resnick hadn’t mastered yet.
“Ladies and Gentlemen…well, haha, gentleman; it has been a tradition of the genre that writers experiment with pen names to challenge their audience. It was common that women wrote under masculine monikers. All three Brontë sisters began their careers as one of the Bell brothers. Thankfully, those days of literary sexism are over.”
A murmur of agreement came from the audience, but the presiding emotion was definitely one of anticipation.
I continued. “Perhaps we have reached an era where the male author is challenged to present his work using different approaches. Did you know that our predecessors often wrote under a feminine name? For instance, the famous and inimitable Murray Leinster wrote a series of romance novels under the name of Louisa Carter Lee.
The mood changed quickly as reality dawned upon Alt-Vis-Con. The editors’ jaws fell agape.
“So if I were to say that Doroteya Durev was just another example of the genius of the pen name, would this fact challenge your preconceptions?”
Almost immediately the booing erupted. My throat felt drier with every swallow. I tried to complete an anecdote about the wonders of the Astounding archive, but it was drowned by angry comments from the floor.
“This is a f**king outrage.”
“I’m first in line to kick this guy in the f**king nuts.”
“Another white American male telling us what to f**king think.”
“I’m British, actually. And please mind your langua––”
The microphone was cut off. Without the sound of my amplified voice I heard the sad sobs from my audience mixed with the terrifying bray of this female cabal. Quickly I departed before anyone decided to get physical.
As I left the building and my lungs filled with the warm city air, I couldn’t help thinking about the pulp writers of those early days of science fiction. I bet they didn’t run into these meta-sexual, identity swapping harassment scenarios. No, their breed didn’t have time to tiptoe around the subjects of race, gender and equality––too often these writers were driven by the overriding impulse to sell first, and entertain second. These heroes were the blue-collar workers of the industry, churning out pages and pages of script, every pay-for-word dime and nickel contributing to keeping a roof over their heads and feeding their children.
The writer wrote out of necessity, not to score politically correct points or highlight the malodors of their own gas.
Just how did they produce so much content, so fast? Their career retrospectives extend into hundreds of millions of words––how did their brains maintain that level of creativity without slipping over the edge into madness?
I didn’t expect the conventioneers to keep chasing me outside.
Quickly I learned to run away from the sound of the angry mob. The city workers of Chicago proved hard to negotiate, their bodies steely and unmoving, briefcases and iPads ricocheting off my body as I tried to move forward. Threats were shouted; my movements anticipated by these businessmen and women who moved in increasingly defensive bundles with every forward step. Moving to the main road proved no less treacherous, the cars and taxis too fast and unpredictable to maintain a safe getaway. The city-slick women behind me were immune to all this, and gaining fast. It seemed inevitable that I eventually found myself down an alley, my movement hindered by a wire-mesh wall lined with barbed wire, the stink of rotting food and dead animals putrefying in the hot city air.
“Crap,” I shouted. “I wanna go home.” A sleeping vagrant that I hadn’t spotted responded by turning his body the other way.
Around thirty of the conventioneers pulled my scampering body from the mesh, dragging me to the ground; they kicked, punched, spat and clawed at me for a long time. Leading them was Tanya, who goaded her colleagues to strike harder and cause more damage. “Pull his shoulders!” she kept repeating, organizing them into a functioning torture rack. “Take that side and we’ll pull the other direction!” Every feature on that pretty round face had turned to the look of hatred, her eyes burning with a vengeful anger. “Do it for Doroteya,” she chanted under her breath, satisfied my limbs were under tension. I wanted to clarify that the woman never existed, but I was in too much pain to talk, and I believe her reasons for saying it carried deeper meaning than I will ever understand.
They seemed satisfied once my left shoulder popped out of its socket.
***
The East train to Connecticut was far more pleasant, much more in line with the American experience I’d imagined. The cabin air was cool, and the staff courteous. The sun gently arched over the greens and yellows of the rural landscape. A brief stop in Cleveland broke the journey too, and I recommend an overnight trip there.
On the second stage of the journey I thought some more about Jack Garrett and his story, and wondered what his response would be when I alerted him to his celebrity. What age would he be now? Eighty-five? Older? Nerves took hold of me, bringing the ache back to my shoulder; what if he didn’t want to tell me his story, or worse, he was too mentally incapacitated to be of any use for the non-fiction article I had promised Locus?
The passenger opposite interrupted my thoughts. “What happened to your arm?” the man asked, referencing my shoulder sling by nodding toward it.
I shook my head and said, smiling, “Women.”
“Amen to that,” he said cheerily, squinting over the rim of his gold spectacles to assess me further. “Say, is that an English accent?”
“Yes, Manchester,” I said.
“Long way from home.”
I told him about Jack Garrett, and his amazing modern-age story all the way from a pulp magazine in the 1950s. The man nodded and seemed to understand my point, that Garrett’s references to swipe-screen phones and other modern nuances were far too accurate to be coincidence.
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“Yes, my son wrote a novel once,” he said once I’d finished. “He was twenty-eight when he started writing, and it was finished by the time he was thirty-five. He died of a brain aneurysm the next year. I should really get round to seeing if someone will publish it. I’m not sure I can bear the rejection though. The whole affair makes me very sad inside.”
This moment seemed to place a full stop on our conversation, and I turned my attention back to the window.
The train journey was over in a jiffy. After lunch, I took a bus to Mr. Garrett’s suburb: it was leafy, with quiet clean roads, every house and garden well-sized and maintained. Sounds of bicycle bells, happy children and happy pets drifted through the mid-afternoon air. As a Briton, the scene conformed to the movie ideal—I half expected Beethoven the St. Bernard dog to scamper out and slobber me blind!
Tentatively I used the brass knocker on Mr. Garrett’s old wooden door, cooled by the shade from his porch. There was a quick turning sound, the creak of somebody getting out of a chair and then the universal clatter of cleaning for unexpected visitors.
The door opened.
“Tanya,” I gasped. “How did you—”
“Oh don’t worry about that,” said the woman, beckoning me inside. I had half a mind to flee, but intrigue overcame the other emotions. The air of the house smelled of dust, old coffee and a whiff of old liquor—a classic writer’s infusion. Tanya entered a door on the far side of the entrance hall, and I followed.
I heard her excited voice say before I entered, “We don’t get many people visiting anymore. I wonder what your story is.”
I couldn’t see the furniture in this dusty room for the piles and piles of paper manuscripts. They lay atop chairs, lined the skirting boards, and acted as cup stands; one hefty copy propped a green-tinted desk lamp a couple of inches from the burgundy carpet. In the center was a long table; Tanya stretched over it, piling some more scripts on top of each other, and freeing a chair for me to sit on. On my way across the room I spied the title of one of the manuscripts: The Other Martian by F. Terrance Carter.
The petite girl motioned for me to sit, so I did, and quickly she was off again. Only as the door closed did it register that she was wearing a cloak.
It was a little too dark; I considered opening one of the blinds but the cords looked frayed and the shutters delicate. So instead I went to one of the piles of nearby manuscripts and leafed through them. All were on yellowed paper, typewritten neatly in the Courier font, with precious few corrections; most of it was perfectly typeset.
And the titles!
Death to the Moon by Morgan Chase
Green Peril by Alice Robertson
Ultimatum from Mars by F. Charles Kendrick
Deathly Planet by Leighton Craig
Cantor’s Secret Salvage by Monty Fredrickson
A Question of Salvage by Tate Kirk
Space Wreck by Margaret Donald
Jupiter’s Thunder by Peter V. Hawker
Power Planet by Lester Philips
City of Alternate Minds by Ford Collins
Red Discord by Gertrude Buck
The Exiled by Leighton Craig
Spaceship in a Flask by Gordon Tellerman
Weapons of War by Penn Tatum
Mysterious Raid by Jonathan T. Dwight
Annulled World by Ted Koppler
Master of Toys by Alice Robertson
Hand of the Martian Gods by M. Thomas Abraham
Tanya arrived with a stacked plate of pancakes and syrup. Neatly she placed a knife and fork on either side. “Please eat,” she said. “We serve guests well here.”
“It’s okay, I’m not hungry,” I said, but the smell was too good to be true. I took a nibble––the divine maple set my taste buds alight. “Tanya I’m so sorry about before,” I said, resisting the urge to eat further. “It was one of those situations that got out of hand way too fast. I didn’t realize everybody would be so upset.”
The girl grinned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t Tanya. Yes, her features were exactly the same; the red hair, green eyes, quick smile and slightly yappy voice; yet her movements were a little slower, and her words more considered. She was altogether more relaxed, with nothing of the simmering aggression that I associated with my convention associate. This one had a cloak too. “I’m a Psion,” she explained. “I have a physical form, but the psychic energy that surrounds me is very coercive; most people see what they want to see, unless their mind is extremely strong.” She added as an afterthought, “Which isn’t very often, in case that kind of thing offends you.”
“No offense taken,” I said, and with the understanding that I was out of danger from the conventioneers, I took my fork and knife and tucked into my pancakes. The syrup was adherent to the cutlery; the first mouthful tasted so good. “Sorry,” I mumbled between bites, but the ecstasy of the tastes was too good to offer much politeness.
“Speculation shapes the future,” said Tanya as I ate. “Its effect is never immediately apparent, but by targeting young American minds we’ve influenced successive generations to be sensitive and sympathetic to the Psionic mindset. Soon, the concepts of transmutation of matter and energy will no longer be controversy. The world is starting to slowly understand us, through fiction.”
“E.S.P.,” I offered between mouthfuls.
“Yes, very good!” clapped Tanya. “So one day, soon, the concept of psychokinesis turning matter into electricity won’t send the world in a spin. Imagine—energy, for everyone, through us, infinite.”
“A few decades ago you’d have been locked up,” I said, having to stop three-quarters through my pancakes, because my stomach hurt. “Nixon wouldn’t have stood for all this. He’d have taken your lot into the dungeons for experiments.”
“You’re absolutely correct,” said the Psion. “Another concept we promoted through pulp—the danger of paranoia of the unknown found in present and future governments.”
“So you wrote…hang on a minute,” I said. “I checked. Jack Garrett only wrote one story.”
“We couldn’t write all the stories under one name. We took hundreds of pen names. Maybe eighty percent of the market was ours.”
“Did the editors know?”
“Of course not! Apart from John W. Campbell, who was also a Psion.”
“So Heinlein was…you guys?”
“No, not Heinlein. He was his own visionary.”
“Asimov?”
“Asimov knew of us—we came to an arrangement.”
“An arrangement?”
“He kept quiet, and we didn’t kill him.”
“Right,” I said, eyeing my pancakes more suspiciously now. A deliberate clumping sound from above the ceiling signaled that we were not alone. I struggled to move from my chair, tired and full as I was. As the sound of several footsteps came slowly down the staircase, I felt my sense of freedom rapidly diminish—in its place a sickly, dyspeptic fear. “The story by Jack Garrett,” I said. “‘A Matter of Communication.’ It’s so real. That’s why I’m here. Your story led me to this place. Was it a trap?”
Tanya considered this, her thin red eyebrows creasing. “No trap. We’re too old for traps.” She seemed flummoxed. “Which one are you referring to?”
“I don’t remember the story, only that it featured smart phones and social networks.”
“Oh yes!” she exclaimed, her cloak swishing with the sudden body movement. “That was just a joke. A Psion knows the future; in fact, all the local solar system stories were based on versions of what is to come. But we threw that one in as our one original tale, without the help of a human brain.” She motioned to my plate. “Eat up, you haven’t finished.”
There were only a few crumbs left; I pushed the plate away. “What do you mean, brain?”
“Oh, you’ll see soon enough,” said the Psion. “Your plasma glucose level should be just about high enough for us to write one more story. It takes a bland mind to write the actual words; we just come up with the ideas and then you and the Hieronymus machines do the rest.”
“The machines?”
The next moments were a blur—fascinatingly so. Three more Psions entered the room, all pretty women, each with blocks of metallic equipment under their arms; they slotted the pieces into one another until adjacent to my chair formed an old-fashioned machine with letters and ticker tape. The danger didn’t strike me till late for a couple of reasons: first, the sugary pancakes were anesthetic, and second, the girls were so pretty, all long limbs, flowing hair and the large-lipped pouts that only those of intimidating beauty have truly mastered—and who’s afraid of a pretty girl?
I had to remind myself that these images weren’t their real form. Tanya had already told me so. I was seeing what I wanted to see. So I focused really hard on Tanya as she typed into the machine, as if she was a Magic Eye picture I wanted to decipher.
Nothing happened. Not even a blur. I cursed myself for my weakness.
I watched the most beautiful of the women, admiring her peachy bottom as she put a plug in a wall socket. I gasped as she stood up again. She was familiar. The soft features, the high cheekbones, the long, brittle-blonde hair and the look in her eyes of steely certainty in the face of political oppression; this was Miss Durev, alive. Now I was terrified. “Let me go home,” I said to her. “I’ll go back to my country, and I’ll put my pen away and never write again. That I promise you, please.”
Nyet, said Doroteya, placing a steel helmet on my head. Tanya and the others attached the electrodes and the ticker tape started flowing.
“Our last ever story,” said Tanya. “Thank you for coming today. We never thought we’d get the chance.”
“Actually it’s not so bad,” I said defiantly over the clatter of the machine. “If I’d known that loaning your brain was so painless, I’d be happy to do it more often.”
Tanya chuckled. “We haven’t started yet. Now be quiet and relax or it’ll hurt even more.”
I was aware of some nods of agreement, and Doroteya murmured Da before stepping aside, and then the room was aglow of electric blue light as they fried my head apart. What was worse than the pain was the smell of my burning hair.
***
That all happened three years ago. I have some residual neurological tics, but otherwise I’m well and still writing. There is still no word of a worldwide Psionic Movement. I believe their mission was a failure, and they simply didn’t have the guts to stand up and reveal themselves. This made sense; after decades of festering away writing and selling fiction, their revolutionary fire fizzled out, replaced by worlds of character, conflict and resolution.
Doroteya Durev still scares me, in my dreams at night. Her cool expression as she watched me fry was simply too freaky to explain in words. The idea of one of your fictional characters observing and admiring your downfall is too much to bear in one life.
And I’ll never forget Tanya’s words as the ticker tape flowed. “Hmm,” she said. “Starts off a little slow. Trying too hard to be weird. There’s a nice sense of reflection and celebration of the genre, but ultimately, in the larger sense of things—tiring and far too passive.” She cleared her voice in an unladylike fashion. “I guess we could always try this on Swamp Biscuits and Tea.”
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About the Author
Bill is a physician working in the north of Scotland, U.K. He has published this year in Liquid Imagination and Speculative Edge. He tweets @billytyrell.
“A Matter of Doroteya” © 2013 Bill Tyrell
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