Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Life and Art of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, by Luis Ortiz, Foreword and Artwork Captions by Alex Eisenstein, Nonstop Press, 2007, $39.95.

WHEN come upon by current friends and fellow writers, the photograph on the jacket of my first book occasions great hilarity. It was the sixties, after all. And the photo was taken on the porch of the Anchorage, Damon Knight's and Kate Wilhelm's home, at the beginning of the last day of the week-long Milford Conference. I was very young, next door to starving, and very, very hungover.

Many young people at the time believed they were going about the work of changing society. A few of us, with somewhat more focus and a tad less ambition, but with equal assiduity, were going about the work of changing science fiction.

I bring this up here because the book at hand deals with a very specific time in our cultural history and with segments of our culture that until recently have been poorly documented, and because my recollection speaks to those obscure drives that can impel us, first, to create art at whatever personal cost and, second, to choose to work in marginal forms. I was a very serious young science fiction writer, and I wrote short stories. Believe me, I was well out of the thick of things.

But I also bring up the photo for another reason. Look closely at the credit on that first book of mine: Photo by Ed Emshwiller.

There was a time, boys and girls, back just after the war — no, not this war, and not that one either, the one back around the forties? — when being an artist or writer was the coolest thing possible. Wild, huh?

Not coincidentally, that was also the time that science fiction was truly coming into its own. Think man-made lake. Think lots of boaters. Speed, whoops of joy, a bit of apparent danger, a bit of romance.

Among the many other things Emshwiller Infinity x Two does (and we'll get to those in a moment), it gives fresh documentation to that era, the early boom years of science fiction, using as fulcrum the career of one of the field's finest artists.

A new popular art, be it jazz, action painting, hip-hop, or science fiction, passes through a number of stages. First there is rebellion, as the evolving form, clearly derivative, begins to conceive of itself as something new on the Earth. There is synthesis, the manifesto stage, during which it tries to define itself, generally in terms of exclusion. There is the stage at which the forms become set and begin to harden, to calcify. There is challenge, as those set forms are broken, fresh influences imported; then a time of factions. And finally there is mainstreaming, as the "new" form flows into the general culture.

The first great generation of science fiction, readers and writers alike, is almost gone, yet still, for some, existed within our lifetimes. Many of us have had the chance to meet Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Phil Farmer, Fred Pohl, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber. And many of us as readers vividly recall the raw power, the visceral impact, of the early days of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding, and original paperback novels.

Looking through the reproductions here, I am amazed at how closely Ed's work circled the days of my late youth and early adulthood — just as it did the early adulthood of the genre. The cover painting "Get a Horse," with its depiction of a crashed spaceship being towed by a mammoth stallion? I read that issue of If at band camp, summer after the ninth grade. F&SF with his cover for "The Silver Eggheads" or "Have Space Suit Will Travel" or "A Day at the Beach"? Other summers, other seasons, sitting under trees or in lawn chairs or on porches in various cities. Emsh's work was for many of us, as Alex Eisenstein writes in his introduction, "a kind of terrific SF wallpaper, a continuous surround of space adventure and the far future." As was the science fiction that Ed illustrated. And yes — as Ortiz and Eisenstein note — we took both for granted.

Emshwiller recalls those times, the wallpaper, the surround, that moment in our youth and cultural collective when everything ahead was bright and shining. In that respect, certainly, it serves nostalgia. It also evokes wonderfully the sf world of the fifties and sixties: Horace Gold sequestered in his apartment on East 14th Street, the succession of cheap magazine offices in midtown, Friday gatherings in which writers would pick the artwork around which they'd write their story. Ed Emshwiller was witness to much of that, and, with this book, we become the same.

Ortiz catches up marvelously the insularity of sf, its missionary zeal, its fulsome power — and the shabbiness and tawdriness that's always been a part. For as much as we love the mind-stretching nature of the genre, many of us embrace as readily its rude appeal: its garishness, its outlaw nature and adolescent rebelliousness. R. A. Lafferty is quoted here as saying "The covers were the best part of those old magazines, by a long ways." And Isaac Asimov: "The images are what attracted me in science fiction, more even than the surprises and the ideas and the crazy plots."

By 1952 Ed's images had become so prevalent that, of 29 sf magazine titles and a total of 153 issues published that year, Emsh art was in or on a third of them. A fine sampling of this work is offered herein, in beautifully done reproductions with intelligent, witty commentary by Alex Eisenstein. But the book's aim is far higher.

One may have good reason to approach such a book with misgivings, fearful of fannish hyperbole, pauperish content, lack of horizon and perspective. This, however, is a serious inquiry into one artist's life, a book whose excellent production values mirror its overall ambition. Nor does Ortiz ever lose perspective, constantly drawing back, be it from the sf subculture or from the artist's narrowly focused world, to the larger. Of the debate over the genre's origins he notes that "the reality is — outside of science fiction fandom — no one cares." Writing of the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention in 1953, he lists the six sf or fantasy movies playing within easy distance from the convention hotel.

Emshwiller then is, first, the biography of an artist who moved from success as a commercial illustrator into the rarefied air of avant-garde film. As such, it is also an inquiry into the nature of creativity — what causes it, what drives it, how it manifests — and a portrait of the nonconforming artist doggedly pursuing sparrows that perhaps he alone can see, relentlessly and even obsessively stealing time and energy from other parts of his life, subsidizing the work however he can.

This aspect gains density in that the book is also a portrait of Ed's marriage to Carol, and of her development from novice to writer's writer to general acclaim. The couple met at art school and were married in 1949; Ed's career as illustrator began taking form on the boat trip back from their honeymoon year abroad as Ed passed the voyage reading American magazines bought at a Paris newsstand: "Between waves (I'd never make a good sailor), I let the obvious idea grow. As soon as I hit shore I started knocking out samples."

That career ran just over fourteen years, leading to 700-plus covers and untold interior illustrations for such as F&SF, Infinity, Super-Science Fiction, Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, Ace Books, Fantastic Universe, Untamed, Gnome Press, and Lion Adventure Magazine. Painting so often to tight deadlines, Ed worked mostly in gouache, or opaque watercolors, because other mediums were too slow drying. Again for expedience, his interior illustrations were often done on scratchboard, a board covered with chalky substance that is inked then scratched with a sharp object to bring out white lines.

As one might imagine from the range of venues, there was considerable variety, from stylized neo-realist painting to surreal juxtapositions of color and form, but there were also many strains in common — his importing of modernist design, for instance, which is perhaps best seen in line drawings for pulps like Planet Stories and Startling Stories. His draftsmanship and figures are instantly recognizable. But given all else, it is Ed's wit that stands out. An Emsh cover hits you in the face. Then you begin to take notice of the details, the small jokes and twists and visual puns occurring off center, almost out of sight.…

By the mid-sixties Ed had mostly given up illustration for art cinema and, eventually, a professorship at CalArts. Several of his films, such as Relativity, Image, Flesh, and Voice, and Sunstone, are landmarks in the development of experimental film. He died in 1990, age sixty-five, of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bones. In an introduction included here, Carol writes of those final days.

She had been undergoing a development similar to Ed's in her own work. Trying her hand after years of hanging around with sf people who "talked about writing as if it was a chess game and a normal person could learn to do it," she began writing with genre markets in mind. "Something clicked. So this is what writing is all about. It's not at all that stuff in high school or freshman English." Following the tenor of the times, her stories ("Pelt," "The Piece Thing," "A Day at the Beach") tended toward dissent and coded protest.

Ed had remarked that from his earliest films he was interested "in making almost pure visual abstractions with practically no allegorical implications." He strove, he said, toward "the sense of the unfolding of a small universe." Likewise, Carol had begun looking beyond conventional fiction, slowly letting go of her hold on plot and embracing the avant-garde as a means of saying "something different than has ever been said before." Reading John Cage and Frank O'Hara, she had come to the realization that there were volumes and positive and negative spaces in language just as there were in paintings or sculpture or film, and that these could be manipulated, nudged into new, non-linear, non-narrative relationships that might at once reflect and reconfigure the world.

Quite aside from the main text, those of us who care deeply for science fiction will find much here to give pause and thought. Brian Aldiss's remark that, once impoverished by its isolation, science fiction now stands in danger of being impoverished by its popularity. Ortiz's observations concerning those writers who "looking for a new way of skinning the literary cat, found a new plaything in the blue-collar world of genre science fiction." Or his description of the avant-garde world, which winds up sounding an awful lot like the sf world:

"A groundswell of lessons learned from one another drove the avant-garde community along with a mixture of iconoclasm, homage, naivete, eclecticism, a demand for seriousness, and a certain amount of flippancy and prankishness."

Interviewers frequently ask why, after forty-some years of writing, I remain drawn to teaching it. The answer, I tell them, is contained in the question. All too easily and soon one becomes professionalized, focusing on the mechanics, the production, the practicalities. Teaching makes me remember why this is so important to me, why I have worked so hard and long at it, why I started doing it in the first place.

So does this book.