James Paleologue Vandaleur — spoiled, weak, and feckless — has one source of income, renting out the services of his multiple-aptitude android. The trouble being, his pride-and-joy loses its mind whenever the ambient temperature goes above 92.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Vandaleur’s been spending a lot of time with his intermittently murderous companion, and like any odd couple, they’ve begun to project their personalities onto each other. This isn’t telepathy. This isn’t what the science fiction academics call a “novum”. This is what happens in every marriage, and (incidentally) why James Fox’s Tony comes such a cropper in Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant.

So much for the material. What are you going to do with it?

THE RULES OF PULP FICTION

(an incomplete list)

RULE 1: state the rules of your stylistic game straight away, and with as much insolence and brevity as you can muster. Bester’s first line?

“He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth.”

RULE 2: you’re building a helter-skelter, not a viewing platform. *Keep it moving*.

“‘Then it got to arson. Then serious destruction. Then assault . . . that engineer on Rigel. Each time worse. Each time we had to get out faster. Now it’s murder. Christ! What’s the matter with you? What’s happened?’”

Make motion your god, and your aesthetics will veer off in odd directions. Lines like “She was short, stocky, amoral and a nymphomaniac” will sound to outsiders like you’re reaching for effect. You will know how painfully necessary this register is for you.

RULE 3: distil everything. There’s no time for realism. Reach for the compression bag of simile, so that a search party, say, becomes

“one mile of angry determination stretching from east to west across a compass of heat.”

RULE 4: round here you don’t show: you *tell*:

“‘If I could only get rid of you. If I didn’t have to live off you. God! If only I’d inherited some guts instead of you.’”

RULE 5: remember that you are a professional poisoner. Everything you do, however hedged, reduces to desire and death. So why hedge? Know what you are.

“‘It kidnapped a child. Took her out into the rice fields and murdered her.’

  ‘Raped her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’”

RULE 6: Overdrive rules 1-5 and after a lifetime’s obscurity, you will become Alain Robbe-Grillet. You will become David Lynch. You will become Barry Gifford. Which is to say: you will become one of the most accomplished experimentalists ever to make print.

At which point, you can climb on top of that dung-heap of yours and exclaim:

“Oh, it’s no feat to beat the heat.
All reet! All reet!
So jeet your seat
Be fleet be fleet
Cool and discreet
Honey . . .”

and no-one — no-one — will dare to say where you went wrong.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1954, and collected in Starburst, The New American Library, New York, 1958