An Old Letter from Lindskoog to Konkin

12/31/90

Sam Konkin
260 South Lake Avenue #173
Pasadena, CA 90010

Dear Sam,

Many years ago I took brief notes from you in my copy of The Dark Tower. You used the terms ficto-science, paraverse, and U Chronic. You said the latter means cross-time, where everything happens differently elsewhere. De Kamp wrote of this in the 1940s, and Philip K. Dick used it in The Man in the High Castle. Being awed by science fiction but unfamiliar with it, I wonder if you meant that L. Sprague De Kamp (is that right?) was about the first to write U Chronic fiction, and what the early titles are.

I listened to the tape of Brad Linaweaver’s November talk (and heard him greet you as you entered late). I have been trying in vain for well over a year to get a copy of Timeless at Heart, but no one could find it for me in England, and it is now out of print. I was quite excited to hear that Brad has a copy, which he mentioned because of the essay “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.” Because you are (as I recall) a Libertarian, I wonder if — like Brad — you have a copy of Timeless at Heart. If so, I would be very grateful if you would kindly photocopy the table of contents, preface, and “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” and let me reimburse you for your trouble. I just called the Wade Center in Wheaton, and it seems they never heard of it.

I’ll enclose a SASE to make it handy for you to reply.

Kathryn Lindskoog

Sam Konkin never used the SASE and never replied. (I obtained Timeless at Heart elsewhere.) But in a sense Konkin has replied indirectly three and a half years later.

At 11 AM on Saturday, 6 August 1994, Sam Konkin volunteered to speak first on the “C.S. Lewis Hoax” panel at Mythcon XXV at American University in Washington, D.C. He introduced himself as one of the (five) Council members of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society and a “hard science fiction fan.” He stated that circa 1985 he gave a presentation about science fiction that I evidently misconstrued. Thus, he chuckled, he had triggered my erroneous charge that The Dark Tower is not by C. S. Lewis.

In fact, Konkin’s lecture was in 1977 or 1978, as I recall, and it had nothing at all to do with my discovery that The Dark Tower is not by C. S. Lewis. (I was tipped off by a letter from Carla Faust Jones in 1986.) As Lewis once pointed out ruefully, that’s the trouble with facts; they spoil some of our favorite theories. (It is a great pleasure when research confirms our favorite ideas, as it did in the case of my theory that George MacDonald contributed significantly to Huckleberry Finn; see page 7.)

For a photo of Sam Konkin taken with Jared Lobdell at a New York C. S. Lewis Society meeting, see Legacy 52.