Profiled by Galen Strickland

Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) - born in New York City, his higher education included Harvard University (1924-26) and later the New England Conservatory of Music. He left before receiving any degrees however, and became a farmer in Maine from 1939 to 1942, when he entered the Army to serve in the Medical Corps. He began his writing career with a mystery in 1930, and did not publish his first SF story until June of 1951, in Galaxy Science Fiction. That story, "Angel's Egg" is considered by some to be one of the finest novelets in genre history.

Edgar Pangborn was the recipient of the
2003 Rediscovery Award
presented by the Cordwainer Smith Foundation

His first SF novel came two years later.
West of the Sun (recently reissued in hardcover by Old Earth Books) concerns six human astronauts, stranded on the distant planet Lucifer, who must survive in conjunction with that planet's two sentient native species. When a rescue ship finally arrives they decide they would rather remain to further develop the society they have established. This is far from his best work, and yet it closes on such a poignant and hopeful note that the reader is left with many profound thoughts on which to ponder. The closing pages contain one of my favorite passages from any book I have ever read.

The person speaking is the colony's leader, Dr. Christopher Wright, and he is explaining what he feels are the important factors that have contributed to, and will continue to insure, his group's successful survival.

"As soon as [our children's] minds are old enough to
think with some independence and explore, we insist
that they start the lifetime struggle with man's primary
dilemma. That he is an individual, his selfhood precious
and inviolate, yet he must live in harmony with other
individuals whose right to life and welfare is as certain
as his own....We think, here, that the most rewarding
answer is in the old virtues of self-knowledge, charity,
honesty, forbearance, patience....We make them
understand that lip-service will not do; if one is to make
himself honest he must eat honesty with breakfast, sweat
with it in the sun, laugh and play and suffer with it
and lie down with it at night until it's near as the oxygen
in his blood. Yes, we aim high. Cruelly high, would you say?
We don't think so. Perfection is a cold spot on top of a mountain,
and nobody ever climbed there. We have trouble and fun and
arguments; sometimes the garden weeds grow until tomorrow
or the day after, but we sleep well."

Pangborn won the International Fantasy Award for his second novel, A Mirror for Observers (1954), which postulates that Mars has been guiding humanity on its road to civilization for thousands of years. Two different Martian observers - one good, one evil - contend for control over a human boy genius, a potential leader in man's next evolutionary step. I consider this to be Pangborn's best book, and I would have provided a cover image for it, except that my copy is a hardcover that is missing the dust jacket. Hopefully, Old Earth Books will reprint it soon too, and I will have an image of that cover to place here.

Two non-SF novels, Wilderness of Spring (1958) and The Trial of Callista Blake (1961) would come before EP's return to the genre, and the remainder of his work published in book form would be devoted almost exclusively to what is referred to as the Davy cycle. The novel by that name was the first of the series published, in 1964, even though it recounts incidents at the far end of the sequence, some 250 years after a nuclear holocaust has plunged the U. S. into a balkanized and somewhat medieval-like existence. Most of the remainder of this series was presented in collections of linked short stories, even though some were marketed as if they were novels.

As we have seen in other "future histories" - such as with Heinlein and Cordwainer Smith - the publication schedule does not necessarily equate to the chronological sequence of the stories themselves. Using internal clues, the Davy chronicle can be roughly ordered in this way: The Company of Glory (1975 collection); Still I Persist in Wondering (1978 collection); The Judgment of Eve (1966 novel); and Davy (1964 novel - although portions had been previously published as short stories).

Other stories outside of this sequence were collected in the volume Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972), as far as I know the only one of his SF titles that I do not have.

Editor and critic Damon Knight once said this of EP's work:

"...very much like the thing Stapledon was always
talking about and never quite managing to convey:
the regretful, ironic, sorrowful, deeply joyous -
and purblind - love of the world and all in it."

Spider Robinson, in his introduction to Still I Persist in Wondering, echoed much the same sentiment:

"His two essential themes were love and human stupidity
(perhaps human insensitivity is more correct)...He said
again and again in his books that love is not a condition
or an event or even a state of mind - that love is a country,
which we are sometimes privileged to visit - and again and
again he wrote of the exploration of that fantastic region..."

Related Links:
Review of Davy at lostbooks.org
Pangborn's Bibliography at fantasticfiction.com

Would you like to contribute an article on your favorite SF author or book? Just email me at ecgordon@templetongate.net.

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