The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,2

trauma that was the true cause of my sense of imbalance. So I had been seeing an analyst called Dr Furedi who had a practice in Beverly Hills.

It was a golden age of sorts. It’s now generally thought of as the start of the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. And I had just sold my first full-length story, a twenty-eight-thousand-word novelette. Lords of the Black Sun was set in 2150 with the Third Reich of the future, having conquered earth, embarking on an interstellar blitzkrieg. Fabulous Tales ran it as a three-issue serial and it was featured on the cover for the first part with a four-colour illustration of a fearsome-looking spaceship with swastika markings. Fabulous paid a cent a word, which was the going rate back then. I was nineteen years old and $280 seemed a king’s ransom.

I’d had some early success with a short piece called ‘The Tower’ that had run in Amazing Stories, but for a long time I had felt blocked. It was my analyst’s suggestion that I write something based on my long-absent father and I think that gave me some sort of breakthrough. So Graaf Thule, the intergalactic Nazi warlord, was born.

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society met at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. The place served free limeade, which suited a good deal of our membership who had scarcely a nickel or dime to spend. And yet I felt a bit gauche when I first attended the Thursday-night meetings, more nervous fan than serious writer. The decor of Clifton’s was absurdly kitsch. A waterfall cascaded through an artificial glade with plastic foliage and plaster rocks. A forest mural covered one wall. A gallery above held a tiny chapel with piped organ music and a neon cross. I always felt unduly sickened by this bizarre interior, which seemed to exacerbate my labyrinthitis. Dr Furedi explained this feeling as an ‘externalisation of inner anxiety’ and suggested that I obviously feared not being good enough to be part of this group. But once I had really achieved something, I felt a bit more confident.

The only person I really wanted to impress, though, was Mary-Lou Gunderson. She had sold as few stories as I had but she had a fierce presence. She seemed as self-possessed and outspoken as any who attended the weekly meetings of LASFS. Tall, blonde and athletic, she always made me feel ludicrously tongue-tied whenever she was near. I liked her stuff too. Thrilling Wonder ran her story ‘Atom Priestess’ in the summer of 1940. Set in a future that had descended into barbarism, it was about a religious sect that unknowingly worships long-lost theories of particle physics. And she had just started to write the series ‘Zodiac Empire’ for Superlative Stories. Mary-Lou was proud but she never bragged about her work; in fact she was meticulously self-deprecating. I think it allowed her to feel a little aloof about the strange trade that we had found ourselves in. She wanted to go beyond the ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. And secretly I did too.

‘Well, if it isn’t Larry Zagorski,’ she called across the table at Clifton’s. ‘The man who put the goddamn Nazis in space. What did you want to go and do that for?’

‘Er, um, well, Mary-Lou,’ I stuttered. ‘Lords of the Black Sun is, you know, speculative.’

‘Well, of course it’s speculative,’ she boomed. ‘But what, you want them to win?’

‘Of course not, no. It’s like, you know, a warning.’

‘A warning?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with a sudden certainty. ‘A warning from the future.’

‘Hmm,’ she pondered. ‘A warning from the future. I like that.’

Many years later a ‘serious’ science-fiction critic cited Lords of the Black Sun as an influence on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream and countless other novels that dwelt on what might have happened if the Axis powers had gained world domination. But I certainly wasn’t the first to come up with what has now become almost a sub-genre of literature. I got the idea from a strange English novel titled Swastika Night by Murray Constantine, though I did have something like an original twist to the idea and I wanted to share that with Mary-Lou.

‘I got this idea from Jack Parsons. You remember, that rocket scientist at Caltech who sometimes comes to the meetings?’

‘I’ll say,’ she drawled. ‘He’s cute.’

I gave an embarrassed cough.

‘That’s as may be,’ I went on. ‘What I remember was that he said German rocketry is already far in advance