Who Goes There?

In the latter half of the ’60s there were basically two factions among genre SF writers: the New Wavers and the old school. Lines were drawn along literary but also political lines, although it was by no means a clean split, since while the New Wave was considered generally left-wing there were a few notable right-wing New Wavers, including Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty. But the old school was for the most part steadfastly right-wing, including among those who were actually not old enough to have been part of the “old” school. One of the best and brightest of these new recruits to the anti-New Wave side was Larry Niven, who is still very much alive and who had made his debut in 1964, being one of Frederik Pohl’s biggest discoveries. At a time when hard SF ran the risk of becoming irrelevant (Analog was easily the most anti-New Wave magazine, and while its sales numbers were good it was also the least relevant of the big SF magazines in the late ’60s.), Niven emerged and made it seem cool again. Early Niven was snappy, wondrous, had a knack for concocting strange alien beings and cultures, and was not afraid to mix and match different genres. “The Organleggers” is an SF-mystery hybrid, and the first entry in a series starring the ARM detective Gil Hamilton. Niven, who would’ve been barely out of his twenties at the time, gave himself the challenge of writing a compelling SF mystery that would work as both science fiction and a mystery.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It would be titled “Death by Ecstasy” thereafter. For reprints we have World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim), Supermen (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), and several Niven collections, the most pertinent of these being The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.

Enhancing Image

Gil Hamilton has been called in to investigate an unusual death—not as a detective, but as the deceased’s next of kin. He finds Owen Jennison in his apartment, sitting in his armchair, grinning, and very much dead. Starved to death. Jennison must have been in his apartment by himself for weeks, starving to death and smiling the whole time. Hamilton and Jennison are old friends; they used to be asteroid miners together, which, says Hamilton, would make two men about as close to each other as one can get while still being platonic. In a rather proto-cyberpunk move for the time, Jennison has an implant in his skull, that would explain the uncanny grin: at least in the last weeks of his life he’d become a “current” addict, which is to say the pleasure centers of his brain would’ve been stimulated until he couldn’t think straight, indeed couldn’t really do anything else. Some people get addicted to drugs or drinking (or, shit, you could get addicted to just about anything under the right circumstances), but in the year 2123 there are also those get a “droud,” a cylinder implanted in their skull that gets them addicted to current. The rule of thumb is that current addicts have only themselves to blame since they can’t get a droud installed without being aware of the inevitability of addiction. They become like zombies, that is to say barely functional human beings. But they asked for it. Addiction is what you’re signing up for. At the same time none of this sits right with Hamilton. Why would Jennison choose to end his own life in such a way? It’s strange, and very drawn out, although in fairness it would not have been painful from Jennison’s point of view.

So something fishy is going on, and there we have our mystery. Either Jennison killed himself (Hamilton sees this as unlikely), or someone had gotten him addicted to current and hooked him up such that he could not escape. Unsurprisingly somebody wanted Jennison dead. There are a few factors that make this case a science-fictional one, that both make Hamilton’s job easier and hinder him. Had this been a normal mystery set on the Earth of today it would’ve been half the length, but Niven spends a good deal of time establishing both Hamilton’s backstory and the world in which he works, because this is not the Earth of today. It’s here that I should bring up the issue of organlegging, since it forms the crux of the mystery. For reasons I don’t really understand Niven seemed to have a hyperfixation on organ transplants at this time, since as how he had just written another story about this topic, “The Jigsaw Man,” for Dangerous Visions. The first successful heart transplant happened in December 1967, several months after Dangerous Visions was published, and Niven probably wrote “The Organleggers” around the same time. He seemed to be concerned with the practical issue of where to get these organs, of how much demand there might be and who would be able to meet such a demand. In the world of “The Organleggers” demand has risen to what I have to admit sounds like a ludicrous degree, with people requesting organ transplants even when they don’t need them—often just wanting younger organs for themselves, presumably so they can live longer. The government’s response to this is to make the death penalty a sentence for rather minor offenses, so that you have more criminals whose organs can be harvested. Yet this is still not enough, as there’s also a fruitful black market for illicit organ-harvesting.

There’s quite a bit to unpack with the political implications of the world Niven has set up, not least because Niven himself is a conservative. I suspect he gave up on the Gil Hamilton series by the early ’80s because it must’ve become clear to him that the future he depicted, in which human life is valued based on the condition of one’s organs and that people would be scrambling to get organ transplants, did not and would not come to pass. I mean, that’s good news for real-world people, but I can see how that would knock the wind out of one’s sails as an SF writer. (Of course that doesn’t stop right-wing nutjobs from coming up with conspiracy theories about how Planned Parenthood harvests the body parts of aborted fetuses for some black market, or what have you.) So conditions are a bit dystopian. So what? Our conditions are about as dystopian. The right to own property and capital are held to a higher priority than, say, having breathable air. This is all complicated by Niven probably supporting some form of the death penalty, which is strange to me because, given Niven’s right-libertarian sentiments, the government being able to murder basically whoever it wants strikes me as very not libertarian. But, it’s not all bad. Psi powers have become somewhat commonplace, to the point where Hamlton and Julie, his connection to ARM HQ, have them, Hamilton having a limited but very useful telekensis while Julie is a wide-ranging telepath. Niven is funny about ESP; he seems to think it’s the cat’s meow. One of the small ironies of old-timey SF is that Niven never appeared in Campbell’s Analog, despite at least theoretically the two being perfect for each other. Apparently the reason Niven did not appear in Analog until after Campbell’s death is that the two just didn’t get along on a personal level, which is funny to me. So, ARM is an acronym, and it’s kind of a forced joke on Niven’s part because it also refers to Hamilton’s invisible third arm, which is telekinetic.

Niven gave himself the challenge of writing a murder mystery that could not be done in a realistic setting, and I do think he more or less succeeded, albeit with the caveat that at least with “The Organleggers,” the mystery itself is the least interesting part of the equation. This is a problem SF mysteries have had at least since the time of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, where similarly the set-up and resolution of the mystery are the weakest links of that novel. Writing a good SF story and writing a good mystery are two different skills, and while there have been authors who were able to do both, they usually did so by writing the two genres totally separately. You may have noticed that up to this point I’ve mostly neglected to get into the actual plot of “The Organleggers,” and that’s partly because there isn’t as much of a plot in the strict sense as you would expect out of a novella, but also I have to confess I’ve been horribly depressed these past few days. I had a respiratory infection for about a week, which would’ve lasted longer had I not been proactive in seeing a doctor and getting prescriptions for it; but then, once I started to emerge from my sickness-and-meds-induced haze, I found that I’ve become even more susceptible to “the humors” than usual, which is saying a lot. I really had to coax myself into writing this review, which I wasn’t even sure I could hand in by the deadline (today) at first. The words simply would not come to me for a while. Even the experience of reading Niven’s story now feels to me like a haze, although that really couldn’t be pinned on the story, since I’ve been reading a lot recently and yet I’ve been getting little to no pleasure out of anything. Barely anything feels good to me at the moment. A dark cloud has been hanging over me.

So I’m sorry that this is not quite the review you were hoping for. In all fairness, even without the depression, I still would’ve focused more on the world-building than the plot, since I believe that’s what Niven gave priority, and anyway he does a pretty good job of it. I can poke fun at his politics, and if I really wanted to I could poke holes in the gender implications of this story (I mentioned Julie earlier, but she’s off-screen the whole time and otherwise it’s a bit of a sausage fest), or how it doesn’t hold up when taken as predictive; but science fiction doesn’t exist to be predictive. What matters most is that Niven, especially early in his career, had a formidable imagination, such that he could make things that are totally implausible when one steps back and thinks about them (his Known Space stories have quite a few goofy ideas, but they’re still “hard SF”) seem likely, or even inevitable. It’s a talent most SF writers don’t have. It helps also that Hamilton, while being a somewhat morally grey agent for the UN (ARM is a UN organization, not part of the US), fits the bill of the smooth-talking noir detective. Had Raymond Chandler lived long enough and tried his luck at writing SF he could’ve conceivably come up with the Gil Hamilton series. It’s a shame Niven has spent much of his career up to this point complaining about liberals and environmentalists.

There Be Spoilers Here

See the above.

A Step Farther Out

I could have gone into this with skewed expectations, for one because I had already read a later entry in the series, “ARM,” which I do think is stronger, namely for its heavier reliance on worldbuilding and its less obvious conclusion. There’s also the aforementioned problem of my depression, which has decided to creep more thoroughly into my life in the past couple days, for seemingly no other reason than to make up for the fact that I’m no longer feeling the worst of my respiratory infection. Physical sickness replaced by mental sickness; in most cases the former is preferable. At the same time it’s a shame Niven only wrote four Gil Hamilton stories; but then he also stopped the series around the same time people agree he jumped the shark (circa 1980), so maybe it was for the best. I’m sorry, I wish I had more to say on the story itself.

See you next time.