The Author With a Thousand Heads: Round-Robins

Doc Savage had an adventure called The Thousand Headed Man in 1934. The Thousand Headed Man guards a lost city in the jungle. This piece has nothing to do with Doc or his five amazing helpers. The title just worked. Because we are going to talk about when the author is really many authors.

Back in the 1980s, when I was involved with the APA Rowrbrazzle, there would occasionally be cartooning jams at conventions. All the artists would contribute a panel or two in a big, crazy, largely plotless jumble. They were fun to see. I had no idea that this was an old idea that fandom had used from the days of the Pulps. In fact, most of my favorite authors had been involved in such story writing mayhem, which were not called “jams”, lacking the musical coolness we would get later. They were called  “round-robin

stories”. The term “round robin” actually refers to a 17^th Century practice of alternating petition signers so that group leaders would be harder to identify. The name stuck for any activity done in this manner so when people started camping in the 19^th Century, a campfire game of telling a story by many people in turns got the name as well. Science Fiction picked up the idea from Liberty Magazine where nine authors wrote The Woman Accused (with chapters by Gertrude Atherton, Zane Grey and Irwin S. Cobb). It was made into a Cary Grant/Nancy Carroll film in 1933.

Around the same time Science Fiction clubs began and started publishing fanzines. One such organization included The Science Fiction Correspondence Club and the Scienceers (including future editors Ray Palmer, Forrest J. Ackerman, Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz) that produced Science Fiction Digest, later retitled Fantasy Magazine in 1934. Fantasy Magazine was under no pressure to produce marketable fiction and could have fun with the idea. Their first outing was the massive, “Cosmos”. Typical of all round robins the final product is uneven, rambling and not the greatest epic ever written. This, and the complexity of paying for such a piece, kept commercial magazines from adopting the idea on a large scale. The idea is fun and wasn’t meant to be “paid for”, as the club didn’t pay anyone for their contributions. A. Merritt’s literary heirs would excise his chapter and rename it “The Last Poet and the Robots” for The Fox-Woman and Other Stories (1949).

“Cosmos” (Fantasy Magazine, 1934) featured 19 chapters by A. Merritt, David H. Keller, P. Schuyler Miller, Otto Binder, J. Harvey Haggard, Raymond A. Palmer, Lloyd Arthur Eschbach, Earl Binder, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Arthur J. Burks, Ralph Milne Farley, Bob Olsen, Francis Flagg, John W. Campbell, Abner J. Gelula, Otis Adelbert Kline, E. Hoffman Price and Edmond Hamilton. The plot simplified has two scientists, Dos-Tev and Mea-Quin spanning the solar system warning the people of the nine planets about the usurper Ay-Artz and his plan to take over the entire system. Later Krzza of Lxyia, an agent of Ay-Artz, captures and hold the two men. They escape at the last, join the earth fleet for a huge space battle with the good guys winning. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are completely destroyed.

More famous is “Challenge from Beyond” which many know as a Fantasy-Horror jam but it actually was two round robins, one Fantasy and the other Science Fiction, run together in the same issue.

“Challenge From Beyond” – Horror (Fantasy Magazine, September 1935) with C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long. George Campbell is camping in the Northern woods when he finds a strange artifact. This devise propels him through cosmic space. His spirit is put into the body of an alien centipede. As this creature he conquers his people and becomes king. Meanwhile George’s earth body is drooling and eventually drowns.

“Challenge From Beyond” – Science Fiction (Fantasy Magazine, September 1935) with Stanley G. Weinbaum, Donald Wandrei, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Harl Vincent and Murray Leinster. Stanley Weinbaum started things off with scientists, Crabbe and Blake, arguing about physics and how to create a wormhole. They create three suits to protect them. No surprise the beautiful Leora grabs the third suit and joins them. They entire the wormhole and see new galaxies beyond. A many-jointed alien and a god-like voice challenges them, trying to close the vortex. They are doomed so Leora and Blake express their secret love for each other while Crabbe defeats the Intelligence.

“The Great Illusion” (Fantasy Magazine, September 1936) with Earl and Otto Binder, Raymond Z. Gallun, Jack Williamson, John Russell Fearn and Edmond Hamilton. Four men, Berringer, Korth, Bradley and Forijay (Forrest J. Ackerman parody, no doubt) study the Blue Beings for two years to realize they can create a spaceship that can travel beyond the Beyond. They learn all is an illusion. The stars are not real. But the gigantic monstrosity that guards the void is. The men voyage further into the cosmos then back to earth to met the Blue Beings, to learn the secret of the universe. The men commit suicide by cutting their spacesuits.

Round Robins did not end with the Pulps and their fanzines. In July 1960, editor Cele Goldsmith resurrected the idea for “The Covenant” (Fantastic, July 1960) with Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley, Murray Leinster and Robert Bloch. Goldsmith said: “We’re rather proud of the literary relay race that features this issue. A “round-robin” story–in which different authors write different parts of the same plot–is not an original idea. It has been done before; but not for a long, long time. And not, we think, with the wizardry of our five writers.” Goldsmith goes on to explain their process. First, she chose five top authors with different plotting and stylist methods. Then Leo Summers was commissioned to do a cover, one that has no seeming connection to any particular idea. This cover was shown to the writers, and they were off…

Humanity is on the brink when the Cloud people show up. Humankind is dying out but a lone hero tries to find answers. Ban goes to the prophetess. She tells him he must conquer time itself if humanity is to be saved. Ban, accompanied by the youngest of the prophetess’s hand maidens goes to the realm of the Cloud people, only to see his weaponry fall to dust. His body begins to age. Soon he is an old man.

In her introduction, Cele Goldsmith tells you what you can expect:

“The result is more than an exciting and original story. It is a revelation into the way the minds of the writers tick. Poul Anderson, creating his bravura characters and situations; Isaac Asimov, grounding the conflict in framework of theory-in-action; then Bob Sheckley ripping the fabric by going to the ends of galaxy for complications; pentultimately, Murray Leinster beginning the fusion of the story strands with ideational adeptness; and finally Bob Bloch taking the wildly disheveled story and tying it up in a brilliant job of plot-resolution, down to the patly ironic final sentence.”

The 1970s made a small cottage industry of finishing Robert E. Howard fragments and an initial chapter “Genseric’s Fifth-Born Son” to became a story jam with “Ghor, Kin-Slayer”. Begun by Fantasy Crossroads editor, Jonathan Bacon, the round-robin only completed 12 of the 17 proposed chapters. Bacon dropped out of publishing but Glenn Lord retained the manuscript. In August 1997, March Michaud and Necronomicon Press published all 17 chapters by Robert E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph Payne Brennan, Richard L. Tierney, Michael Moorcock, Charles R. Saunders, Andrew J. Offutt, Manly Wade Wellman, Darryl Schweitzer, A. E. van Vogt, Brian Lumley, Frank Belknap Long, Adrian Cole, Ramsey Campbell, H. Warner Munn, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Lupoff.

Robert E. Howard begins the story with his James Allison character relating one of the lives he lived in the past. In Vanaheim (one of the Northern parts of Hyboria) a boy with a twisted leg is left to die. He ends up living with a pack of wolves and growing up to be a big man. In battle he unknowingly kills his own father. He tracks down his kin and kills all of them too. Then a goddess sends him on a rescue mission to save Nemedia. From there is weebles and wobbles to a very unHowardian end.

Well, you’d think that was the end of round-robins but they do pop up every so often. Ellen Datlow and the Internet gave it a try in 1990 as Omni explored the idea online. “Making Good Time” (Omni Online 1997) by Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, and Rachel Pollack. and another “The Reef Builders” (Omni Online 1997) by Karen Joy Fowler, Terry Bisson, Rosaleen Love, and Maureen McHugh. Will these be the last? I rather doubt it. Every so often an editor picks up the challenge of the thousand-headed author and we see another rambling, bulbous, shoggoth-of-a-story. I look forward to the next one!