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Watermelon and Mustard by William H. Patterson, Jr.

“Watermelon and Mustard”


by William H. Patterson, Jr.


The atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 provoked a surge of interest in science fiction as a communications channel between the new sciences and the general public—but the big, established publishing houses were slow to take advantage of the demand: who knew how long this sudden fad would last?

Doubleday & Co., younger, nimbler and less burdened than its competitors with a reputation to protect, decided to get in on the bonanza. The editor for Doubleday’s new SF line approached Heinlein for a reprint collection and finally settled on two of Heinlein’s prewar novellas, “Waldo” (Astounding, 1942) and “The Devil Makes the Law” (Unknown, 1940).

This selection puzzled Heinlein, as the two stories had virtually nothing in common, not even genre. “Waldo” was science fiction, albeit of an offbeat sort: an eccentric mashup of Nikola Tesla’s broadcast power with some of the weirder implications of cutting-edge quantum mechanics (experimental results seemed to depend on what the experimenter expected to see). “The Devil Makes the Law” was an unambiguous fantasy, albeit a fantasy of a new type, about “white magic” treated as industrial technology woven into the routine background of business and “black magic” become a tool of the criminal underground.

When this story was written (January 1940) the genre that came to be called “Unknown-type fantasy” could hardly be said to exist. Unknown itself had only been in existence for about nine months. The only model for pulp magazine fantasy was “weird fiction” derived from Dunsany and Blackwood. The clarity and ingenuity of “The Devil Makes the Law,” hybridizing fantasy materials with science fiction’s methodology (H.G. Wells’s “domesticate the impossible hypothesis”), made it the type-specimen of a new (sub)genre of fantasy.

This story was also personally important to Heinlein: He had failed to sell any story other than his Future History stories until this story broke the string of rejections.

In 1950, Heinlein restored its title to his original—and smarter—title, “Magic, Incorporated”—but he considered these stories so mismatched, he told his agent, that, “[i]t seems to me that they go together about as well as mustard and watermelon.” It was a headache to come up with a title for the book. He ran through several lackluster possibilities and gave up: the book was published in 1950 with just the titles of the two stories joined together.

Waldo & Magic, Inc. was a commercial success and has been continuously in print for more than sixty years. Evidently, these two novellas did belong together in some fashion Heinlein did not understand in 1950—

—and of course they do, for what “Magic, Inc.” and “Waldo” have in common is that they are both explorations of cognitive boundaries, of the mental cages we erect for ourselves, whose limits we pace out and self-reinforce. This is just the place where the best speculative fiction sets up its tent and settles in for a while (until they have to pull up stakes and set up elsewhere as the new and the strange becomes the comfortable and the familiar).

“Waldo” was still very new and very strange: more than thirty years later, Nikola Tesla’s thinking, especially about broadcast power, was so far off on a tangent from contemporary engineering practice in the age of Edison and Westinghouse (or even the age of Vannevar Bush and Alan Turing and John von Neumann) that his demonstrations seemed supernatural—like magic, like natural laws turned on their head. He was photographed in his Colorado Springs laboratory, with electrical discharges arcing around him, positioning him (for public consumption) as something mystical, unearthly, godlike. The implied magic-magic of the story’s Pennsylvania hex doctor is puny by comparison.

But put them together . . .

Waldo (with a reverent nod to H.G. Wells’s Pyecraft story) filters Gramps Schneider’s “Other World” through the Participatory Anthropic Principle (and Heinlein’s own youthful background reading in n-dimensional physics and neo-Kantian philosophy), and the world—the cosmos—is changed forever.

This story was written in the opening days of World War II, while Heinlein was living on John Campbell’s couch. His wife was in the hospital. Defeat after defeat by the Japanese in the Pacific bore in on Americans.

This story reaffirms American exceptionalism in a very Heinleinian, radical individualist way: a single individual mind will reshape the entirety of existence.

“Magic, Inc.” was written two years earlier and under much happier circumstances—but it, too, is a story of radical individualism. The apparent protagonist of the story, Archie, stands for the small-businessman of America, whose small-time lobbying efforts lead him to a role in the cosmic project of Amanda Jedson invading the Hell Universe and challenging Satan himself for dominion. Again, a single individual mind remakes reality.

Heinlein’s radical individualism was fundamental to his character—and a key element to why Heinlein was a “phenom,” why the elements he wrought together were so unusual and unexpected for science fiction as it developed. While science fiction was in formation, this quality was very useful for the community. When SF came to its own maturity, starting in the 1950s, the field came to prize less Heinlein’s unceasing challenging of boundaries: science fiction had developed its own boundaries to protect.

But Heinlein continued to push the boundaries, and soon the general public he trained up valued him more than his colleagues in science fiction.

“Waldo” and “Magic, Inc.” are products of the first flush of Heinlein’s personal innovation, welcomed at the time as an escape from the pulp formulas of ’30s space opera. Both stories are just as fresh and invigorating now, as we find ourselves in the middle of another era hidebound with convention and spiraling in on itself.

Is there a Waldo in the house? Or an Amanda Jedson? Ask again a hundred years from now . . .

(and, no, it does not end. It never ends . . .)


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