Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers began in obscurity. But their irrepressible power could not be denied. They were survivors of aeons. They would even out-live the magazine that spawned them.
In late 1940s and early 1950s, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction was under attack by new competitors. The first significant one was The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Anthony Boucher. The focus of this magazine was literary quality, something Campbell thought of as of secondary importance. The second, in 1950, was Horace L. Gold’s Galaxy, a less literary opponent, but one devoted to the soft sciences, psychology and sociology. Where Campbell offered nuts and bolts, Galaxy gave the reader sardonic chuckles as it was revealed, “It’s a cook book!”
If (later Worlds of If) began as a magazine for another publisher, but ended up being poor sister to Galaxy. Gold paid more for Galaxy stories and the leftovers went to If. Fredrick Pohl would eventually inherit both magazines in the 1960s and add another, Worlds of Tomorrow. With If, Pohl used the magazine as an incubator for new writers, promising a first story every issue. The slant was slightly younger but also more fun with writers like Keith Laumer, C. C. MacApp, Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven. Among these writers was Fred Saberhagen.
Fred Thomas Saberhagen was thirty-three when he started selling to If. A veteran of the Korean War, he worked as an electrician for Motorola before working on writing encyclopedias and finally becoming a full time writer. His first sale was actually to Galaxy but his first important series was the Berserkers, and they were (mostly) in If. Fred would go on to write some incredible bestsellers including the Vlad series and the Swords series. But he never forgot his Berserkers.
Before all the huge novels, including one of my personal favorites, Empire of the East, Fred wrote about the killer machines that haunted the spaceways. Berserkers are robotic killers, self-replicating war weapons invented for a conflict lost aeons ago. The machines, huge stations (that may have inspired the Death Star in Star Wars) are designed to do only one thing: kill. They can destroy an entire planet. The robot servants they send out (that many feel were the inspiration for Star Trek‘s Borg) are bent on only one thing, to destroy all life.
Fred set all this up in the first story, “Fortress Ship” (aka”Without a Thought”)(If, January 1963). In this story a pilot (Fred had flown planes in Korea) must devise a way to keep control of his ship when the Berserker affected his brain with its powerful brain attacks. The story is essentially a puzzle story and a very minor piece in the Berserker saga. It is the kind of story that would have appeared in Astounding (now Analog) a decade before.
Things really get going in “Goodlife”(Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963). Here Saberhagen isn’t worried so much about a gimmick as the humanity of his characters. Goodlife is a man who has been kept alive by the Berserker since he was a small child. The machine has twisted his mind to hate humans. But his humanity is drawn to the two new captives, a man and a woman. There is still a bit of puzzle since Hemphill has to figure out how to blow up the Berserker but the power of this story is emotion not logic.
“The Lifehater” (aka “The Peacemaker”)(If, August 1964)
“Stone-Place”(If, March 1965)
“What T and I Did”(If, April 1965)
“The Sign of the Wolf” (If, May 1965)
“Patron of the Arts”(If, August 1965)
“The Masque of Red Shift”(If, November 1965)
“Mr. Jester”(If, January 1966)
“In the Temple of Mars”(If, April 1966)
“The Face of the Deep”(If, September 1966)
“The Stone Man”(Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1967)
“Berserker’s Prey” (aka “Pressure”)(If, June 1967)
“The Winged Helmet”(If, August 1967) saw introduction of time travel into the Berserker saga. this allowed fred to really utilize the Scandinavian origins of the word “Berserker”. As he would again in Berserker Planet, Fred’s love of heroic fantasy comes through. Who better to illustrate a Sword & Sorcery type story than Wally Wood?
“Brother Berserker”(If, November 1967)
“Starsong”(If, January 1968)
“Wings Out of Shadow” (Worlds of If, March-April 1974)
1967 saw the first of the Berserker collections, logically called Berserker. It collected most of these If stories. It would be followed by Brother Assassin (1969) and then the first Berserker novel, Berserker Planet. And what better place to publish it than Worlds of If (May-June /July-August 1974). In all the years that Fred sold Berserker stories to Pohl, he never got a cover until Planet, then he got two.
The last issue of Worlds of If was November 1974. The magazine may have died with a whimper but the Berserkers were going strong. The next stories would appear in Analog, Galaxy F&SF, Algol, and Omni. Many novels would follow. The Berserker series that started in that poor sister If, would reach fourteen volumes by 2005.
Just a nod here to Jack Gaughan who illustrated the majority of the series. His style of art and page design are now identified with the last period of If‘s (and Galaxy‘s) run. He would go on to do work for Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books.
A shout-out to Mike Ashley and his book Transformations (2005).
