The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

“While I was writing ‘Descending,’ my icebox was in appropriately the same shape as my hero’s and I was living on my Macy’s credit card,” writes Tom Disch. “After ‘Descending,’ things picked up. ... I got hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach and found, rather to my dismay, that I enjoyed advertising and a living wage.”

DDB, you know, is the agency that does those readable Avis and VW ads. Makes it easier to understand why a writer like Tom Disch should have enjoyed it. That way, maybe you can think of it as “the ad game.”

There was something of a “game” feeling about that endless escalator, too—as if you only had to know the rules to be able to get off. I remembered that feeling too vividly when I came across (ex-Harvard’s) Timothy Leary’s article, “How To Change Behavior,” in LSD, The Consciousness Expanding Drug, (Putnam, 1964).

“Baseball and basketball have clearly definable roles, rules, rituals, goals, languages, and values. Psychology, religion, politics, are games, too, learned cultural sequences with clearly defined roles, rules, goals, jargons, values. . . .

“All behavior involves learned games. But only that rare Westerner we call ‘mystic’ or who has had a visionary experience of some sort sees clearly the game structure of behavior. Most of the rest of us spend our time struggling with roles and rules and goals and concepts of games which are implicit, and confusedly not seen as games, trying to apply the roles and rules and rituals of one game to other games. . . .

“Culturally, stability is maintained by keeping the members of any cultural group from seeing that the roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values are game structures.”

Are diplomats mystics? Or are they culturally unstable? I do not believe it is possible to carry on the absurdities of international intercourse without a clear knowledge of the game (the Great Game, as it has been called), not just its rules and goals and penalties—but the essential gaminess of it.

Romain Gary is a Frenchman of Russian origin, a distinguished novelist, a well-decorated soldier, and a career diplomat. He writes fluently in four languages and (I am certain) is a skilled gamesman in at least that many. He has, at least, a terribly clear view of the Syndicate Game and the Art Game, in this story from his recent collection Hissing Tales (Harper & Row).