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Of course, they weren't supposed to be a series, either. But that was a happy accident. Once they actually became the protagonists (if not the heroes) of an ongoing series, the evolution of the relationship between Ernst Vossoff and Karl Nimmitz was a royal pain in the ass. It became one of the banes of my writing life, and, aside from the death of their traditional venue SCIENCE FICTION AGE, the main reason this series stands dead still where it is.
Stuff happened, is what I'm saying.
And not all stuff I expected to happen.
Look. Vossoff and Nimmitz are just two more specimens of a certain subspecies
of science fiction story I happened to feel a little nostalgia for one day:
the "two-guys-in-a-spaceship-get-into-trouble-AGAIN" story. I call
it that, emphasizing the word "again," because the subgenre depends
on repetition. Repetition is the whole point.
In this kind of series, two bickering guys in a spaceship repeatedly get into tremendous trouble and repeatedly have to reason their way out.
The fascination lies in the phenomenon that it keeps happening to them.
Ross Rocklynne wrote one such series in the 1930s, One guy was an interplanetary criminal, named Edward Deverel; the other was Lieutenant John Cobie, a cop dedicated to chasing him throughout the known universe in order to bring him in. The inevitable confrontation between this proto-Kimble and proto-Gerard was always complicated by the conditions of the alien environments where they met, which always trapped them in situations that forced them to team up. The most famous story in this series was "The Men and the Mirror," in which the pair topple into a gigantic concave mirror, sliding all the way down and then all the way up, dozens of times, losing sufficient momentum on each swing to know they'll soon be stranded, without hope of rescue, at the bottom. The solution has to do with recognizing their predicament as a form of pendulum. The physics don't quite work, but that doesn't matter. It's still a neat story, in part because it's only the most recent of several such confrontations the pair has had, and they operate with the unspoken assumption that the universe is going to continue fucking with them indefinitely.
Isaac Asimov produced his own pair of hapless guys in Powell and Donovan, spacefaring employees of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men who couldn't go anywhere without the inherent ambiguities in robot programming forcing a crisis. In one such tale, "Runaround," they're stuck on Mercury waiting for a robot to deliver an important MacGuffin before their life support fails, and find themselves first required to figure out why the robot is gallivanting around in circles singing in verse. They solve the problem, of course -- but in the very next story find the universe fucking with them again.
My all-time favorite practitioner of this particular kind of story is Robert Sheckley. A substantial number of his stories (not the majority, by any means. but a few) feature Two Guys In A Spaceship Getting Screwed With By the Universe, and not always the same two -- but he produced several about Richard Gregor and Frank Arnold of the AAA Planetary Decontamination Service, who like Deverel and Cobie, and Powell and Donovan, couldn't go anywhere without becoming entrapped in some absurd life-or-death situation that inevitably required an equally absurd last-minute solution. In one such tale, they stupidly equip their ship with a device that will provide them with anything they need -- but only (they learn while well into their journey) once per item. Slowly starving, because the device includes food in its list of items no longer in stock, they come up with an elegant solution...one that nevertheless leaves them with an even thornier condundrum at the story's close.
Some folks will say Kirk and Spock are two guys in a spaceship.
Well, yeah, they are...but though they behave like they're the only two guys
on that ship, they're actually two of more than four hundred. To be a true Two-Guys-In-A-Spaceship
story, the two guys must be a complete unit, like Laurel and Hardy, or Abbott
and Costello. Just a pair of wacky guys who have the misfortune to continually
find themselves in the wrong places at the wrong times.
The first Ernst Vossoff and Karl Nimmitz story, "Just a Couple of Sentients
Sitting Around Talking," was mistaken by many for a Douglas Adams hommage.
Well, I can't say he had nothing to do with the madness that followed (certainly,
anybody who noticed the dedication will have guessed that), but the first story,
at least, was a conscious attempt to Do Sheckley. It is nowhere near as good
as Sheckley, but by placing its characters in a Sheckleyesque situation and
giving them a Sheckleyesque last-minute comeuppance, it nevertheless established
what I was soon surprised to find out had become a popular and successful series
running for much of the lifespan of SCIENCE FICTION AGE. It helped that editor
Scott Edelman found the perfect perennial illustrator in Joel Naprstek, who
captured the idiot pair so perfectly that his vision for them began to illustrate
the content of the stories.
By
the time of the second story, "Just a Couple of Extinct Aliens Riding Around
In A Limo," a tale I still consider one of the series' two best, the basic
rules seemed to be set.
The titles would always begin with "Just a Couple Of..." and, though
ridiculously covoluted, accurately reflect the story.
The stories would always end with Ernst Vossoff (the brains of the pair) and Karl Nimmitz (the kidneys) damned to some fate worse than death. There would never seem to be any possible means of escape, but the next story would write off their previous predicament as lamely as possible and set them up for another fall.
This, I felt, could continue indefinitely; guys like these could always find themselves a new fate worse than death, just as I could indefinitely produce some bullshit way to press reset and let them screw themselves again.
The series became less than consistent on a few matters. For instance, Karl Nimmitz, who is only mildly dim at its onset, becomes ever stupider as the series progresses, achieving some approximation of his ultimate single-digit IQ by installment three. You can attribute this to authorial fine-tuning, or you can say that his various travails leave him with progressive brain damage. (I prefer the latter explanation; when he gets a little smarter again, as he seems to in the "Strikebreaker" story, you can say that his neurons have had an opportunity to knit.) And though Ernst Vossoff is a small-time criminal at the onset, becomes a wannabe supervillain by the latter installments. I think the same explanation applies. In any event, the less-than-profitable relationship between these poor-starcrossed fellas could have continued indefinitely without any noticable change, were it not for the one monkey wrench that I ever-so-foolishly decided to toss into the gears.
That's right, folks. I provided them with their own personal Yoko Ono, in the form of Dejah Shapiro, impossibly gorgeous ex-wife of Ernst Vossoff.
I honestly thought I was being clever by sparing Karl Nimmitz a horrible fate for once. It played with expectations. It changed the pattern. It gave the series a new supporting character. It...
...like Yoko. ruined everything.
Although I firmly expected to do terrible things to Nimmitz again, pairing him with Dejah gave him something to live for, and thus rendered me loathe to inflict disasters upon him.
It gave Vossoff, who continued to get royally screwed by the universe, an increasing reason to plot revenge.
It split the pair apart. Rendered them mortal enemies.
Made the biggest challenge of starting any new Vossoff and Nimmitz story, not rescuing Vossoff (alone) from whatever horrible fate had befallen him in the previous installment, but also arranging some manner of sticking these two erstwhile companions in the same room together without immediately placing them at odds.
When the stories are read one right after another, the evolution is clear. Before Dejah, Vossoff and Nimmitz are inseparable. After Dejah, Vossoff hates his ex-partner with a murderous passion. Before Dejah, Nimmitz expresses misgivings, but still follows his partner's lead in all things. After Dejah, Nimmitz grows enough of a backbone to oppose his partner when necessary. The hostilities between these two erstwhile pals grows so very extreme that in the last two installments, they don't even meet except briefly...a state of affairs that didn't promise to get better any time soon.
They developed.
It happens.
But I sure as hell never expected it.
Where would the series have gone from here, if the boys hadn't been rendered homeless by the death of SCIENCE FICTION AGE? The penultimate story, "Just a Couple of Subversive Alien Warmongers Floating All Alone In the Night", offers one clue. In that tale, having elbowed both of the men in her life out of the way, Dejah takes center stage for the first time. She turns out to be awfully good at it. I think she would have left Vossoff to this well-earned retirement as a Screaming Pylthothi Stink-Moss and taken over the series, with Nimmitz functioning as sidekick and comic relief. Don't be surprised if she appears again under these conditions. I certainly won't. Indeed, I even hope so. But I don't expect Vossoff and Nimmitz to pal around again. As a team, they're deader than Martin and Lewis.
*
Some other notes, for completists:
Ernst Vossoff and Karl Nimmitz make cameo appearances in stories other than the eight of their official canon.
They show up, for instance, in my X-Men/Spider-Man novel TIME'S ARROW:THE PRESENT, as lackies of the evil alternate-world Cyclops.
They also show up, if you look close, in my upcoming Spider-Man novel THE SECRET OF THE SINISTER SIX, as illusions cast by the evil Mysterio.
They can also be spotted, unnamed but definitely present, in my Hugo/Nebula nominee "The Funeral March of the Marionettes." Remember the pair of bickering space pilots responsible for smuggling my protagonist Isadora to the planet Vlhan? How the story characterizes them as "Just a Couple of Incompetents With No Talent for the Work?" Well, that's them.
They will also appear, briefly, in a story still in progress called "The Box." (Now THAT's a hell of a story, and if you don't see it within two years of this book's publication, get on my ass about finishing it, okay? Okay.)
As for the canonical eight:
"...Sitting Around Talking" is the shortest and most embryonic of the tales. The boys don't seem themselves in this early adventure, and the universe seems too ordered to serve as their proper habitat. What can I tell you. They were still growing.
"...In the Back of a Limo" is one of my favorites, even if Nimmitz shows an intelligence here that I soon began to pare away from him. It also introduces the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, which was to become one of their perennial annoyances.
"...Name that Tune" had the best Naprstek illustration of the entire series. Vossoff and Nimmitz staring in aghast amazement at the giant pink bunny. I want it.
The next tale introduced Dejah, but I like it anyway.
"...Behind the Toilet Paper" was the last of the short stories; immediately after this one, the tales grew longer. That's probably because it was taking longer to get the boys talking to each other again...
"...the Liver of Justice" was an attempt to introduce two brand new supporting characters; they didn't last long. The explanation of cellular biology turned out to be the highlight for most people, even those who didn't normally like the series. Some folks found Vossoff's fate, in the last paragraph, unbearably grim. Thank you.
"...Floating All Alone In the Night" takes place on a version of Babylon 5. Its in-jokes include Captain S'Clri (a reference to fan Joe Siclari), who at one point says something "sternly" (a reference to Joe's wife Edie Stern). An alien race known as the Bursteeni (reference: writer Michael Bursteen) also shows up. The subtlest joke, however, is the "slightly bruised box-lightener," which I expected everybody to get, even if nobody did. This is my favorite story in the entire series, and might bode well for Dejah appearing again, someday, somewhere, sometime.
"...the size of a planet" is a total, unredeemable mess; it makes less sense than any other story in the series, and is totally inexcusable. What the hell. That means you'll probably love it.
-- Adam-Troy Castro
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