It's been far too long since I've posted.  Partly, because I suffer from depression  (more on that later).  And my wife, having broken her elbow a year and a half ago, broke her ankle in May and had surgery.  She was confined to bed and a wheelchair, but know has on a heavy metal boot and can use a walker.  My big problem, however, has been struggling with writer's block.  Goodness knows I have plenty of unfinished projects to complete.  But getting down to it is more difficult.  So I'm forcing myself to write what I can.

Which leads me to this, basically a book review but of a book blending several of my interests, such as history, science fiction, pop culture, and more.  So I give you my review of:

Ray Palmer has always been an important figure in the creation of modern science fiction, but few historians of the field give him quite as much credit as he deserves and others have effectively written him out of that history or, at best, given him a cameo appearance at the edges of the story.

This is in part because Palmer was also the man whom many SF fans believed had killed science fiction, both through the "Shaver Mystery" stories and from Palmer's championing of flying saucer and occult phenomena.

Fred Nadis' biography is a welcome book as it restores Palmer to his rightful place in the creation story of modern SF but also as the man who invented flying saucers and developed many of the conspiracy theories so near and dear to the hearts of the Far Right, especially the "Tea Party" movement.

With access to otherwise obscure material and with the help of Palmer's children, Nadis ably recreates the world of the bright young man whose horrific collision with a wagon wheel would leave him crippled and hunchbacked.  Those injuries, however, led Palmer to become a voracious reader.  Eventually they also directed Palmer both to the world of science fiction fandom, where he found acceptance despite his disabilities and his short, slightly dwarfish physique, and then to the world of the paranormal.

Nardis also catalogs the series of painful episodes in Palmer's life that shaped him psychologically, including the death of his beloved old brother during the Battle of the Bulge.  Palmer later claimed have a vision of his brother's death, including an apparently accurate description of the fatal wounds.

What emerges is the portrait of a man who over time carried on the vision of Hugo Gernsback by editing Gernsback's pioneering  Amazing Stories after the major Chicago magazine publishers Ziff-Davis acquired the magazine but didn't know what to do with it.

Palmer brought the publication back to life with a mix of clever hucksterism, promotion, and hard work.  While John W. Campbell and Astounding are often presented as the source of modern science fiction as a serious literary form, it is all too often forgotten that Palmer published the first stories by a number of those "Golden Age" writers, most notably Isaac Asimov.  And Palmer too both pushed space opera into the wings and developed, with Campbell, a form of "science fantasy" that went beyond the gothic style of Weird Tales and produced magazines like Unknown Worlds and Amazing's companion magazine Fantastic.

On the other hand, Palmer also perpetrated the infamous Shaver Mystery when in the 1940s he published the rantings--though edited and rewritten by Palmer--of Richard Shaver, a former mental patient.  Shaver's tales of how two competing ancient races, working in caverns beneath the Earth's surface, both created misery and joy, good and evil.  Soon these tales of deros (detrimental robots) and teros (integrative robots) came to dominate the pages of Amazing.

It remains unclear--mainly thanks to Palmer himself--whether the Shaver stories were meant to appeal to readers who believed them to be "true," or if they were simply a sensationalistic publicity stunt by Palmer to increase Amazing's  news stand sales.  And it certainly did achieve the latter.

Naris spends a great deal of time telling the tale of Palmer and Shaver, who became close friends, yet this is in some ways one of the least interesting parts of Naris' book.    In many ways the Shaver mystery is well known to science fiction fans, although Naris manages successfully to portray the sad and tragic side of Shaver as well as the genuine friendship he shared with Palmer, who often went out of his way to help Shaver financially.

Yet at the same time Palmer was setting up his own publishing firm devoted to his non-fiction interest.  Soon Palmer's Fate, Search, and Mystic appeared to promote Palmer's interest in the paranormal and the occult, rather in the fashion of old dime museums and pseudoscientific investigation.  Later, Palmer established the science fiction magazine Other World, as well as Flying Saucers and Space World.  In addition, Palmer also hired a young man names James Oberg as his associate editor.  The far more skeptical Oberg went on to be perhaps the most important chronicler and historian of both the American and Soviet space programs.

In addition to flying saucers and the paranormal, Palmer turned his attention tot the political, especially conspiracy theories about One-World Government conspiracies and the like.  Nadirs points out that Palmer coined many terms like  "flying saucer”, “men in black", associated with Ufology, and carried them over into the right-wing conspiracy theories he promoted in his newsletter, the Forum.  In an odd way, Palmer invented, revived or was midwife most of the fringe beliefs in modern society.  So one of the fathers of modern science fiction was also the creator or inventor of UFO investigations,  religions and cults and may have set the ground work for political groups like the modern "Tea Party."

Yet Palmer was also sympathetic to the hippie movement, in part because of its willingness to explore many of the subjects that intrigued Palmer himself.  He also endorsed the sexual revolution and the anti-war movement.  As Nadis points out, Palmer might well have been the only support of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace who knew and loved all the lyrics to "The Age of Aquarius" from the musical "Hair."

By the end of his life Palmer was promoting—and debunking—many of his own ideas, lik the idea that flying saucers come from inside the Earth, which is actually donut shaped and open at a both poles.  As always, one can’t be certain of what Palmer actually believed or what he saw, in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, as pure bunkum that nonetheless wer extremely popular.  Many of these ideas and beliefs Palmer both promoted and championed, and also went to great lengths to debunk.

Ultimately, Nadis has succeeded in giving up a portrait of a very American character who encompassed many of the contradictions and paradoxes of post-WW II Cold War America and largely either created, or was a mid-wife to, and promoted many of outlier movements and fringe ideologies.  Hunchback, gnome-like Ray Palmer, in the final analysis, remains as much of a paradox now as when he was alive, but that may have more  to do with the worlds he help create rather than his own complex and frustrating persona.