Robert P. Mills
I have rarely been jealous of another editor — too much ego in the cosmos for that, probably — but there was a time at the Worldcon in Seattle in 1961 when I was thoroughly jealous of Robert P. Mills. He was in order for yet another Hugo — in all, he garnered three of them — and he had been telling me for two or three days how little he cared about his magazine and how little attention he paid to it.
He didn’t even read the stories that were submitted to it. True, he had some very good people reading for him, Cyril Kornbluth having been one of them, but he couldn’t remember a time when he had read every story.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but it seems the less I do on the magazine, the better the readers like it.”
It was impossible to dislike Bob; he was amiable and amusing and his wife made the best paella I’ve ever had. But I did wish for a time there that I knew his secret.
Todd Maosn says:
Mr. Pohl, you ascribe the same sentence to JWC, Jr. in the original edition of THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS. Not that I wouldn’t be convinced that both men might’ve felt the same way about their magazines.
April 29, 2009, 6:06 pmJohn DeChancie says:
Bob Mills was my first agent. I was a young and excitable writer; sometimes I’d blurt for five minutes straight on the phone to Bob, at the end of which Bob would ask patiently, “Can I talk now?” He handled my first short story sale and my first novel. I’ll always remember his kindnesses to a callow kid who was a bundle of nervous energy, tramping around NYC loudly telling anybody who wanted to know and everybody else that I was now officially a genuine, no-fooling writer. I visited Bob once in his apartment–never made it to his office. He was always solicitous and soft-spoken, brimming with anecdotes about famous writers and famous people whom I admired. It was a brief association: in a few months he sold his business, moved to California, retired–and suddenly died, of a heart attack, I heard. But I’ll always fondly remember Bob Mills.
May 11, 2009, 10:27 amBud Webster says:
Fred, do you know if Mills did the actual editing on his 1963 Dial anthology, _The Worlds of Science Fiction_, or of it was “ghosted” by someone else? I assume from what you say that Other Hands did the F&SF collections under his name, but I’m really curious about the Dial title.
May 29, 2009, 8:10 pm