Some who play a part in changing the world are hardly
recognized. Jim Baen, who has died following a stroke at the age of
62, science-fiction editor and founder of the U.S. science-fiction
publisher Baen Books, was one such.
His role as a cultural warrior was a proud one. He contributed
very significantly, below the radar of sociological and cultural
commentators, to the strengthening of Western culture.
He also did something not many cultural warriors, and not many
publishers, can claim: he may have contributed directly and
significantly to the West winning the Cold War.
Not bad for an ex-hippie who left home at 17, lived on the
streets for several months and finally enlisted in the U.S. Army to
avoid starving.
SF author David Drake said that the two books Jim Baen most
remembered as formative influences were Fire-Hunter, by
Jim Kjelgaard, and Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C.
Clarke: “The theme of both short novels is that of a youth from a
decaying culture who escapes the trap of accepted wisdom and saves
his people despite themselves. This is a fair description of Jim
Baen’s life.”
After the Army (where he spent some time in Bavaria intercepting
Soviet radio signals) he became a hippie managing a coffee shop in
Greenwich Village.
He entered publishing as an assistant in the Complaints
Department of Ace books, the beginning of what was to be a lifetime
career in science-fiction publishing. Baen books was founded in
1983. Military SF author David Drake wrote:
“He never stopped developing new writers. The week before he
died, Jim bought a first novel from a writer whom Baen Books had
been grooming through short stories over the past year.”
BAEN BOOKS OFFERED AN ANTIDOTE to leftism generally in science
fiction. It helped rescue science-fiction publishing from the
leftist, nihilistic “New Wave” science fiction that had arisen in
the 1960s and was concerned, in parallel with postmodernism and
deconstructionism in other literature and art, with denigrating
Western traditions and values. The “New Wave” was never really
popular (New Worlds, the major New Wave magazine in Britain, was
bailed out by public money after the buyers and readers stayed away
in droves), but it might well have had the purely negative
achievement of driving traditional science-fiction writers out of
publishing. Baen Books gave — and still gives — a voice to
stories of traditional Western values like honor, patriotism,
chivalry, duty and military valor.
It was probably Jim Baen, more than any other, who rescued the
“military science-fiction novel,” carrying on into the future and
to other worlds the highly honorable tradition associated with the
likes of Hornblower and C. S. Forester, and offering a voice
against the anti-Western adversary culture so common in modern
literature. In its way, and without beating up any obvious
political message, Baen Books has played its part in the Culture
War, on the right side.
Baen Books also gave me my own break into professional
science-fiction writing. Multiple award-winner Larry Niven, working
with Baen, looked to expand his “Known Space” stories (“Ringworld,”
“The Ringworld Engineers,” etc.) with stories of the wars, referred
to off-stage in his books, between the peaceful humans of several
centuries hence, and the alien, tigerish Kzin. Larry Niven felt he
could not write about the wars close-up, and it was decided to open
the series to other writers.
Several SF Greats such as Steve Stirling, Dean Ing, Donald
Kingsbury and the late Poul Anderson contributed. I also, with some
temerity, and a complete unknown, sent Larry Niven a story (he
remained editor of the series).
My story was accepted and so far ten more stories totaling
400,000 words have followed. Baen Books’s dealings with me have
always been prompt, courteous and professional. Also compassionate.
I once asked Jim if I could have an advance on a story: he sent me
twice the amount I asked for.
The distinguished science-fiction and fantasy artist and
illustrator Stephen Hickman told me: “It was Jim Baen who lent me
$15,000 towards buying our new home when we moved out of the awful
Washington, D.C. Metro area, and further helped secure the home
loan by guaranteeing a certain amount of work to me in writing — I
ask you to try and imagine any other publisher in the lenticular
galaxy doing to same …
“And I remember being surprised and very touched at finding that
I was by no means alone in being so indebted to this man for his
support and friendship.”
Many authors have paid tribute to his generosity. Also among
Baen Books’s charities were large donations of books to U.S.
servicemen overseas and in the Navy.
But before that, Jim Baen, Larry Niven and others had been
responsible for something else.
In November, 1980, with President Reagan in the White House, a
group of science-fiction writers including Poul Anderson, Greg Bear
and Robert Heinlein (they coincide to some extent with the Man-Kzin
writers), astronauts including Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad and Philip
K. Chapman, space scientists and engineers, aerospace industry
executives, computer scientists, military officers and others, met,
initially at Larry Niven’s California house, hosted by his wife
Marilyn, to form the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space
Policy. Jim Baen was a major formative influence on the
council.
It was to be, in terms of its effect and outcomes, one of the
most extraordinary private initiatives of modern times. The caliber
of some of the members meant that, with the coming of the Reagan
Administration, it had direct input into government at the highest
level.
The Council held regular meetings and reported to the National
Security Advisor until 1988, after which there was electronic
conferencing. Jim Baen attended all meetings from the council’s
inception and was an important part of the council and its work and
direction.
A POSITION PAPER BY THE COUNCIL was instrumental in convincing
President Reagan that it was technically feasible to intercept
ballistic missiles in flight. With General Daniel O. Graham’s High
Frontier organization it prepared much of the Strategic Defense
Initiative materials that led to President Reagan’s speech
announcing the development of the SDI as policy in March, 1983.
Leftish science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, not invited to
the council meetings, later claimed the Citizens’ Advisory Council
on National Space Policy was a sort of Trojan Horse devised to get
the U.S. government to spend more money on space. Dr. Jerry
Pournelle, a major member of the council, replied roundly:
“Although the Council wrote parts of Reagan’s 1983 SDI speech,
and provided much of the background for the policy, we certainly
did not write the speech. Mr. Reagan was a better speechwriter than
any of those working for him. By far.
“Norman’s open and publicly expressed dislike of Reagan was
certainly reason enough not to invite him to a meeting of a group
that was first called into existence to write the Space and
high-tech Defense portions of the transition team papers…many of
those at the Council meeting had not voted for Reagan (some
Democrats, some Libertarians) but all of them had sufficient
respect for him to be able to work with the group…
“We were not trying to boost space, we were trying to win the
Cold War, and we were all agreed that the West ought to win the
Cold War. NASA exists now primarily to pay the NASA bureaucracy and
keep it busy ($100 billion for a couple of cans they call a space
station that won’t do what SKYLAB did a long time ago?). Giving
NASA more money would not have build a space program.
“But then we always thought winning the Seventy Years War was a
good idea …”
Many presidents would not have had the genius and imagination
Reagan showed in accepting so utterly crucial and radical a policy
from such outre sources, but as a result, and in the face
of all manner of criticism and attack from every left-wing
pressure-group including the World Council of Churches, the
Strategic Defense Initiative was born.
The Soviet Union tried to match SDI and couldn’t, either
technically or economically. Gorbachev recognized there was no way
out. That was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It would be
simplistic to claim too much. When the end actually came it had
many causes, and was due to many people. But the Citizens’ Advisory
Council on National Space Policy with its science-fiction writers
and publishers as well as others played its part and more. It was a
story worthy of a science-fiction plot itself, but real, and Jim
Baen was there on St. Crispin’s Day.
