The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber

Left: Copy I have; Right: Copy I wish I had

The simple fact was that no professional writer could visualize starting a story except in terms of pressing the Go button of a wordmill, and marvelous as Space Age man might be, he still hadn't sprouted buttons; he could only gnash his teeth in envy of the robots, who were in this feature much more advanced.

In January I read Fritz Leiber's "The Button Molder," a semi-autobiographical story of city life, and totally loved it.  Today we read another work that I thought just might have autobiographical elements, the 1962* novel The Silver Eggheads.  Last month I bought the 1969 Ballantine paperback, 01634, though I wish I had found the 1962* printing with the way out Richard Powers cover.  A shorter (I assume) form of "The Silver Eggheads" was the cover story of an issue of a 1959 issue of F&SF in which Anthony Boucher recommends Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit--Will Travel, Poul Anderson's War of the Wing-Men and collections of cartoons and also talks about people who study UFOs.

*Nota bene: According to isfdb, there is some dispute about whether the first edition of The Silver Eggheads came out in late '61 or early '62.

You have perhaps heard me many times express my skepticism of satires.  If you hate our bourgeois market society and want to found upon its ruins a radical egalitarian civilization with an economy planned by experts, or, if you conversely fear that having a bunch of elite strivers run our lives for us will mire us in poverty and slavery, I'd rather read your sober 1,000 word essay briefly explaining your position's moral and practical bases and providing the hard evidence that lead you to your conclusions than your grievance-fueled 50,000 word novel full of lame puns, broad caricatures and childish slapstick.  But here I am, overcoming my prejudices, about to tackle a 190-page book that August Derleth, writing in The Capital Times ("Wisconsin's Progressive Newspaper"), called "a riotous satire."  Why oh why?

First off, Fritz wrote one of the funniest stories I have ever read, "Lean Times in Lankhmar," which is not only hilarious but also a great fantasy story about life in world of multifarious gods and sword swinging barbarians.  Secondly, the come-on text on the back cover and first page of my copy of The Silver Eggheads suggests it is a satire of the publishing industry and the SF world in particular, so maybe it will be interesting from a historical standpoint, providing insight on the SF community of the '50s from the point of vantage of a Grandmaster.  So, I have hopes this won't be a suicide mission I will regret embarking upon; maybe I will even come out the other side of this caper with an enhanced respect for good old Fritz!

It is the future!  Man has colonized the solar system!  Life on Terra is easy, because robots and computers do everything.  Computers even write the novels!  

Our hero is Gaspard de la Nuit, journeyman writer living and working in New Angeles, California, on Readership Row, the center of the Solar System's publishing industry.  Fiction is produced by a computer called a wordmill; those who operate them may be called "writers," but they mostly just polish and lubricate these large computers.  Writers are members of a powerful union that closely regulates their careers and lives; Gaspard has to wear specific clothes and even smoke a specific pipe in order to maintain the appearance the public expects of a writer, and different levels of seniority within the writing profession have to affect a particular look, with apprentices required to dress like Greeks or Romans or in Elizabethan hose, you know, like Homer or Virgil or the Bard of Avon, while master writers are obliged to wear blue jeans and sweatshirts.  Gaspard is also under orders required to spend two hours a day having sex with his current squeeze, master writer Heloise Ibsen.  Heloise is a regular firebrand, and Leiber starts his novel off with a sort of parody of the terror campaign of the Luddites as Heloise leads of a mass attack on the wordmills by union activists, destroying them utterly with bombs and flamethrowers.  Gaspard is the rare writer who actually likes the wordmill which he tends, and he is proud of the erotic book which bears his name and he--impotently--opposes this violent labor action; his reactionary tendencies scuttle his relationship with the overbearing and sexually voracious Heloise.

Another bone of contention between Gaspard and Heloise has been Gaspard's fondness for robots.  In Leiber's satire, robots are truly alive, with personalities and emotions, and they make up a sort of marginalized servant class, Leiber offering them up, I assume, as an analog of blacks and perhaps Hispanics and Asians in real life 20th-century California.  Most humans fear and despise robots, even calling them "dirty tin n******s" (here's a trigger warning for you 21st-century kids--there are no asterisks in the original!) but Gaspard likes them, so that Heloise calls him "a dirty-robot lover." 

With the destruction of the wordmills, the Solar System faces a crisis.  The human race is addicted to the cheap and easy-to-read fiction produced by the mills, and now there is no way to manufacture it.  (The cheap books of the future disintegrate after one reading so rereads are impossible, and almost nobody in the future has the intellectual ability to read books penned in the era before the wordmill.)  The "writers" of the day are just semi-literate figureheads, and no new wordmills can be built, because the now-destroyed wordmills' circuitry was based on scans of actual human writers from a long dead generation.  If these wordmills were so rare and valuable, you may wonder why the government or the businesspeople who own the wordmills didn't protect them from Heloise and her fellow union thugs.  Well, the leftwing government is in the pocket of the unions, and the robot security hired by the publishers is also unionized, and these union creeps stick together!

Things get even more conspiratorial when Gaspard and his robot friend Zane Gort (a robot who writes adventure stories for the robot market--humans may have lost the ability to write creatively but robots have not!) learn that the executives at their publisher actually welcomed the destruction of the wordmills, they having an ingenious plan.  You see, one hundred years ago, at the dawn of the wordmill era, there was a genius scientist who figured out how to remove people's brains and preserve them, alive, in metal cases shaped much like large eggs.  Such bodiless people are more or less immortal.  Gaspard and Zane Gort's publishers have control of thirty such brains, all of them the brains of writers!  In theory, they have a monopoly on fiction writing!  But theory and practice are different things--the thirty brains refuse to write!

The refusal of the brains ends what we might think of as the first half of the book.  I had sort of expected that the second half of the book would focus on the brains and the efforts of the publishers to get them to produce popular fiction, but that plot thread is just one of many.  The Silver Eggheads has forty-four chapters, and many of them are devoted to the five or six different relationship dramas (e.g., Gaspard and Heloise; Heloise and another union leader; Heloise and one of the publishing execs; Gaspard and the Nurse who tends the thirty brains; Zane Gort and a government censor robot; and a sort of love triangle involving another publishing exec, a robot whore he hired, and Gaspard who finds the mechanical sex worker intriguing) and three or four espionage plots (union vs publishers; a rival robot writer vs Zane Gort; and some spies vs the publishers) Leiber has going.  All of these subplots are pretty silly, and some are presented as brief gags that are not very deeply explored.  The profusion of these subplots makes the novel feel unfocused and, paradoxically, both frenetic as we are constantly flitting hither and thither to meet new characters and slow, as many of the subplots don't seem to advance any element of the story we care about and thus feel like unnecessary detours.    

All these plot threads are resolved in a way that is not satisfying or even interesting.  All the main characters find sex partners with whom they can live happily ever after, but none of the characters was actually likable and none of them had compelling emotional lives so who cares?  Heloise is never punished for her terrorism that not only destroyed irreplaceable property by slew multiple people.  The thirty brains do start writing salable books, but Gaspard and Zane Gort's bosses don't gain a market advantage, as all the other publishers have brought to fruition equally unlikely schemes to produce new fiction, like finding a lost colony of humans on Venus who have maintained the culture of 150 years ago.

This thing is marketed as a satire, so does it make some point?  Leiber's points are inoffensive but banal.  1) Racism is bad--the robots have feelings just like natural people, some are good and some are bad just like flesh people, and Zane Gort is the actual hero of the story, inventing devices and saving people who got kidnapped.  2) Sex is good.  3) To be a good writer you have to have life experience--the brains don't start composing salable copy until after one of them has an adventure (being kidnapped.)

Satires are also supposed to be funny, but I didn't find anything in here particularly amusing.  Maybe when the book appeared the many sex jokes, which I found weak, were somehow shocking.  Heloise is not only sexually insatiable but into BDSM, Zane Gort spanks one of the union leaders, that female robot who works for the government as a censor is always worried people are sneaking a peek at her open sockets or her oil ports, etc.  Sex might be considered the main topic of The Silver Eggheads, as the covers above attest; robots' sexual relationships with each other are described in some detail, and there are brothels where robot ladies, specially constructed to appeal to fetishes and fantasies (including incest fantasies), service human men.  More trigger warnings: the novel's attitude about gender roles and biological differences between men and women, and its depiction of women's sexual strategies and proclivities, are not going to please feminists.    

One of the novel's odd wrinkles is the presence of dead children; one little boy gets blown up by a bomb detonated by Heloise, and a fiction-addicted 13-year-old commits suicide when he learns there may be no new adventure stories produced.      

Probably the most appealing and interesting element of the novel, at least for me and the kind of people I suspect read this blog o' mine, is its recursive commenting on the SF world.  There are plenty of affectionate references to famous SF writers, among them Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon and Lovecraft.  One of the sex robots is described as having hair like that of Shambleau, C. L. Moore's famous alien temptress.  Late in the novel there is a two-page spoof of space opera adventure stories and the sorts of SF stories that celebrate humanity's perseverance; I suppose Leiber is trying to paint such stories as silly and boring, but he has just inflicted upon us a seven-page history of robot sexuality that was mind-numbingly tedious, so the punch doesn't quite land--the space opera spoof actually comes off as a brief glimmer of excitement.  A more appropriate and provocative commentary on the SF world is the recurring idea, put in the mouths of the publishing execs, that editors are as responsible--or more responsible--as the credited writers for the shape of popular literature and individual works of fiction; I am taking this as a comment on the tremendous influence and controversial editing practices of major SF editors like John W. Campbell, Jr., Horace L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim and Farnsworth Wright.  

The Silver Eggheads is way too long and I found the second half a chore to read.  So, thumbs down.  Other opinions have differed, or so it seems.  A scene from Heloise's attack was included in Isaac Asimov and J. O. Jeppson's Laughing Space: An Anthology of Science Fiction Humor, and the novel has been translated into Italian, German and the language of love, francais.  

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The back cover of my copy of The Silver Eggheads advertises five SF books.  One of them is John Wyndham's Re-Birth, AKA The Chrysalids, giving me an opportunity to remind you that back in 2015 I read Re-Birth in my copy of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction and explained at length why I didn't care for it.