The Fabulist Play Cycle: A radio play collection

By Hugh A. D. Spencer

For the first time in print, Spencer's radio plays Amazing Struggles, Astonishing Failures, and Disappointing Success, together with the follow-up four-part audio drama CULT STORIES, tell the tales of disillusioned science fiction writers over the course of the mid-20th century.

AMAZING STRUGGLES!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brain Lag
• Release date: Jan 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781998795062

Hugh A. D. Spencer

Hugh A. D. Spencer's short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Descant, Interzone, On Spec and the Tesseracts series. Most of these stories are now avail­ able in Why I Hunt Flying Saucers and The Progressive Apparatus from Brain Lag Pub­ lishing. His novel Extreme Dentistry, also from Brain Lag, was released in 2014. Hugh developed a passion for aural performance by listening to the 1938 War of the Worlds "panic broadcast", the BBC Radio serial of The Day of the Triffids, as well as every Firesign Theatre LP he could get his hands on. He went on to adapt much of his own work into audio dramas which have been performed by Shoestring Radio Theatre for the Public Radio Satellite Network.Hugh was twice nominated for the Aurora Award in Canada for best short story (English) in 1992 and as media curator and writer for the National Library of Canada's exhibition on science fiction and fantasy (1996). His story "(Coping with) Norm Deviation" received an honourable mention in The Year's Best Science Fiction (2007). In May 2019, his play "The Triage Conference" was performed at the Scripted Toronto Theatre Festival. His second novel, The Hard Side of the Moon, was released in hardback in 2021 and in paperback in 2023. All of the plays in this volume were performed by Shoestring Radio Theatre from 2004 to 2016.Hugh's research into the origins of contemporary religious movements in science fiction fandom was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and is available online from McMaster University or through the reference collections of the Toronto Public Library. He is also the president of The Museum Planners Group, an international cultural consulting firm, and lives in walking distance of Lake Ontario in Toronto, Canada-which is very convenient for walking dogs and admiring ducks.

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Title

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, events, and organizations portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Brain Lag Publishing

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Copyright © 2024 Hugh A. D. Spencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [e-mail].

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Cover artwork by Catherine Fitzsimmons; interior illustrations © Emily O'Brien

Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft by Terry Draper and John Woloschuk

Copyright © 1976 by Magentalane Music Limited.

Administered by Southern Music Pub. Co. Canada Ltd for the World.

Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It music and lyrics by Irving Berlin

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The Fabulist play cycle : a radio play collection / Hugh A.D. Spencer.

Other titles: Radio plays. Selections

Names: Spencer, Hugh Alan Douglas, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230497284 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230497292 | ISBN 9781998795055

   (softcover) | ISBN 9781998795062 (EPUB)

Subjects: CSH: Radio plays, Canadian (English) | LCGFT: Radio plays.

Classification: LCC PS8637.P47 A6 2023 | DDC C812/.6—dc23

Content warnings: Car accident, death

To Monica Sullivan and Steve Rubenstein

Two of my favourite radio producers.

You Laugh but in a Very Uncomfortable Way

In his fiction, Hugh A. D. Spencer has frequently dealt with popular culture in its many expressions. His approach is often humorous, as he satirizes a range of popular culture tropes and phenomena, from urban legends to science fiction in various media. In his story collection Why I Hunt Flying Saucers and Other Fantasticals (2016), for instance, Spencer skewers accounts of alien abduction (the collection’s title story), millennial cults (When Bloomsbury Fails), fast food (The Z-Burger Simulations), and science fiction’s countless uncontrollable robots (The Robot Reality Check, a riff on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics). He loves to write about the SF pulp magazines and television shows that so many of us grew up on, like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek (Rod Serling even makes a cameo appearance in Astonishing Failures), and that made us fans and Fans of the genre. He has made frequent use of his training in anthropology and his wry wit to create marvellous, hilarious, and affectionate send-ups of beloved but philosophically and artistically flawed science fiction. He cannot help being attracted to the charming optimism behind many Golden Age and TV visions of the future, particularly the incurable belief among some that advanced technology can only bring about a Utopian society. After all, we have been so good at handling our own creations since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, what could possibly go wrong if we gain control over the very underpinnings of reality?

More recently, Spencer has turned to radio drama as a favourite medium, although his interest in radio expressions of the fantastic dates back many years. For example, when we were putting together the National Library of Canada’s exhibit on Canadian science fiction and fantasy, Out of This World, in 1995, he took on the task of exploring and identifying Canada’s rich legacy of fantastic creation in radio as well as in other media. His Media Resource List, although never published, is an important bibliographic resource for knowledge of what Canadian playwrights and other media artists were up to during most of the twentieth century. On the creative side, Spencer has written scripts for quite some time, and one of them, a radio play called, A 21st Century Scientific Romance, was published alongside the short stories in Why I Hunt Flying Saucers and Other Fantasticals.

The Fabulist Play Cycle is a suite of eight linked radio plays about the authors and the pulp magazines, paperbacks, TV shows, and movies constituting what has meant the world and the Otherworld to us since the 1920s. Four of them form parts of Amazing Struggles, Astonishing Failures & Disappointing Success and the other four are episodes of the connected Cult Stories. The entire sequence can be seen as what we might call a drame à clef: that is, the characters, the magazines and TV shows, and even the titles of the two parts are direct allusions to and fictional representations of actual figures and elements in the history of media science fiction. The title of the first set includes a reference to Amazing Stories, which, as many readers of SF know, Hugo Gernsback founded in 1926 as the first all-science fiction magazine. Arguably even more influential was Astounding Science Fiction, which began in 1930; when John W. Campbell, Jr. became the editor, he created a stable of authors comprising the leading authors of American and British science fiction, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Henry Kuttner, to name only a few. Stewart D. McReady in Spencer’s plays is a thinly disguised portrait of Campbell, and Sheldon Isaacs is not-so-loosely based on Asimov. The young writers in Amazing Struggles desperately want to join McReady’s stable of those writing for Tremendous Stories of Super Science. Implausible heroes and villains, and equally implausible forms of technology, will be these budding scribes’ tickets to pulp stardom. Later, Space Spanners appears both alongside and as a parodic version of Star Trek, complete with a lascivious and politically self-righteous Captain.

The key reality-based figure throughout the cycle, however, is Donald H. Evanston, who is a satirical depiction of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology—here represented by the Temple of Mentotechnics. Hubbard influenced Campbell just as Evanston does McReady, and both the Church and the Temple set up headquarters in California. Spencer even incorporates a truncated reference to John Travolta in Disappointing Success II. There are a number of other parallels, and it should be noted that Spencer knows whereof he speaks as he researched the Church/Temple as a graduate student, in much the same way that his avatars in the plays, Lambert and Daniels, have done.

On the other hand, it would be mistake to see Spencer’s satire as directed solely at the people and institutions of pop-culture science fiction. How SF has fit into the United States’s culture more generally, particularly in promoting and promulgating American ideology, is Spencer’s larger interest. At one point during a confrontation with an alien species in Disappointing Success, Captain Hughes asserts that their way of thinking is "completely… wrong!" and informs Elder #3:

You fail to recognize the sacred right of every individual to pursue their personal economic happiness in a democratic free-enterprise system based on self-respect and the values of fair play and open competition, where all men (and some women) are free to choose to live in a heterosexual monogamous man-wife relationship. (pauses briefly for breath)

Only when you surrender to the altar of individual choice, and convert to a monotheistic sect based on basic rights and truths… and only then… will your vile and degraded society crawl out of the sub-human barbaric totalitarian slime… and slowly progress towards the dignity and honour and goodness…

In the Space Spanners universe, aliens just need to have their eyes opened by an American starship commander to see the error of their ways. Less humorously, and more distressingly, in this capitalist cultural realm some of our idealistic young authors eventually sell out in order to achieve the professional success they have sought.

Spencer deals with other issues as well, such as McCarthyism, corruption in Hollywood, and academic politics. What we see in the world of science fiction in Spencer’s plays reflects the materialism, corporatism, and degeneration of human relations in society as a whole. Pulp fiction may often be silly, Spencer shows, but there is an innocence to its approach to the future that gets lost when ego and bigger economic and social forces come into play.

The Fabulist Play Cycle is thus funny and tragic at the same time. That is the hallmark of satire: it makes you laugh but in a very un­comfortable way. Spencer knows his material, and he simultaneously appeals to our nostalgia and our sense of the way the world really works.

Allan Weiss

August 2023

Play One:

Amazing Struggles

Characters – In Order of Appearance

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three