The Way the Future Blogs

  Roberto de Mattei

Italian scientists probably weren’t surprised when they saw in the bookstores a new work entitled Evolutionism: the Decline of a Hypothesis. Italy does have a fairly substantial Creationist movement, and the statements the book made were pretty close to Creationist doctrine: Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct until 40,000 years ago, what scientists take to be fossil strata are only high-water marks from Noah’s Deluge, etc.

But if they recognized the name given as the book’s author the case became stranger. His name was Roberto de Mattei, also known as the person occupying the second highest office, after only the president, of Italy’s National Research Council, the principal source of funding for scientific research anywhere in the country. Not only that but it began to look as though the Council had even helped to underwrite the cost of publishing the book.

Well, the Italian public is pretty used to scandals, although they usually involve sex or money. Maybe it’s time for a little variety.

My dear friend Jack Williamson, who died a few years ago, was ten or eleven years older than I, and I didn’t actually meet him — in the flesh, that is, though I certainly knew and revered him through his wonderful stories — until he was an elderly 30 and I was 19, and just beginning a life of my own. Jack, of course, had been living his own life for a decade or more, and an interesting life it was: coming to New Mexico in a covered wagon as a child., sailing down the Mississippi with another writer , finding the love of his life when they were kids — and then losing her — and finding her again when she became widowed. But as I wasn’t there for those busy times I can’t tell you about them.

Fortunately Jack himself could, and did in his marvelous autobiography, Wonder’s Child, which you should get your hands on and read. For me, the personal story of John Stuart Williamson begins with the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York City in 1939, which Jack attended, and I and six other Futurians were thrown out of. (That’s a long story that I’m getting a little tired of telling, but I’ll do it by and by for the blog — and anyway it’s in my own autobiog, The Way the Future Was. Which is out of print but will be available real soon now as an ebook from Baen. Don’t worry, I’ll mention it in the blog when it is available.)

Actually, although I had never knowingly been within a thousand miles of Jack in the flesh, he had in fact already caused one significant change in my life. At the age of ten or eleven I was already hooked on sf. In those years science fiction in America came only in the form of the canonical pulp-paper magazines Amazing, Wonder (under several variations of title) and Astounding. I was able to afford all three only because I was able to buy them for a nickel or a dime apiece in a second-hand magazine store. (Depression days, remember. There were second-hand everything stores everywhere.)

That was fine for me until 1931, when I had a stroke of good — or more accurately of bipolar, mixed good and bad — luck. The good part was that someone had parted with his copy of the current Amazing while it was still on the stands, and so I had read the first half of a two-part serial at the same time time as the rich people. That serial was Jack’s The Stone From the Green Star. The bad part was that God alone knew when the next issue of Amazing, with the conclusion of the story, would fall into my hands. It might be months, might even be a year or more.

Could I stand waiting that long to learn how it all came out?

I could not. I had a way of dealing with the problem, though. My lunch allowance was 25¢ a day, enough for a 20¢ Western sandwich at the cafeteria down the street and a 5¢ glass of milk to wash it down. All I had to do was skip lunch for one day of the next week and that brand-new Amazing was mine. I didn’t hesitate. I did it. I never regretted it, either.

It is true, of course, that in the judgment of most authorities The Stone from the Green Star is by a wide margin the least of Jack’s novels. But what did I know? I was eleven years old, and addicted.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Jack the Wonderful Williamson, Part 2, Part 3

    Algis and Edna Budrys, 1985
    (Photo by William Shunn).

It was a nice spring day in 1950-something and I was up in my third-floor office in the house in Red Bank, New Jersey, trying to telephone my other office in New York.

I wasn’t having much luck. Every time I picked up the phone my then wife, Carol, was already on it. Finally, I gave up, turned off the typewriter and went downstairs to see if the mail had come yet. It had. I was opening it over a cup of coffee when Carol showed up, off the phone at last. “Long call,” I said. “Who were you talking to?”

“Eddie Duna,” she said. “Oh, and I invited her out for the weekend, all right?”

“Oh,” I said. “Listen, I forgot to tell you. I already invited A J. I don’t think they’ve met.”

She gave me a look, but what she said was, “Fine. We’ve got room.” We did, too — a house that was ancient, decrepit, requiring constant infusions of money to keep it standing, but with twelve or so rooms. (I work at home and I don’t like to be crowded. My current home is about the same size, though less decrepit and needing somewhat fewer infusions.)

“Maybe they’ll like each other,” she added. “Maybe they’ll get married. A J could do a lot worse. Edna’s smart and great looking, and she’s got a good job.”

“Well, so could she,” I said, sticking up for my client. “A J is turning into a hell of a writer. What’s for lunch?”

And, you know, they did like each other and, a few months later, they did get married.

Well, that’s not so strange, is it? Happens all the time. A couple introduces friends to each other and sometimes the friends get married.

Well, sure, but what’s unusual about this particular event, at least among my crowd, is that these two stayed married, through four sons and more than fifty years, until 2008, when a long illness finally carried A J off. Hey, I’m some matchmaker! When I make a match it stays made.

 
Algirdas Jonas Budrys was born in 1931 in Lithuania, but he didn’t stay there long. His father was an official in Lithuania’s diplomatic corps and while A J was still small the family was posted to Konigsberg in the German province of East Prussia. A J, who had just about got a good handle on the Lithuanian language, began to learn German. His adult memories of East Prussia — which, like the rest of Germany, had been Nazified with the accession of Adolf Hitler a few years earlier — were troublesome.

He particularly recalled Hitler himself parading right past the Budrys apartment when he was five, he told Mark Williams in an interview shortly before he died. “After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up.” The crowds made “indescribable” sounds. Men lost control of their bowels and had to race for the bushes or writhed and rolled on the ground.

Not long after that, the Budrys family was redeployed to New York. That was a much better posting, especially for a young boy who was beginning to read American children’s stories, but then everything changed.

The Soviet Union occupied all three of the Baltic countries; the Lithuanian diplomatic service ceased to exist, and so did the salary that had kept them afloat in this new country. A J’s father had to find a new way to support his little family. For a while it was farming, but then the Nazis evicted the Soviets and occupied Lithuania, and the other countries themselves, and the American government tardily decided to underwrite people like the Budryses. It looked as though they would be here for a while, so A J began the study of his third language. At which, most critics would agree, he became quite good.

In fact, while attending college, A J began writing stories of his own in English, and even managed to sell a few. Then one day he turned up at my Fifth Avenue literary-agency office to ask if I would take on his representation.

I did. Unfortunately for A J, though — and not all that nicely for me — he came along at a time when I was getting seriously over-extended and in increasingly deep money trouble. In what may have been A J’s last public talk, at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007, the hundredth anniversary of Robert Heinlein’s birth, A J reminisced about those days. “Fred made some great sales for me,” he said. “He even sold John Campbell a story that Campbell had already rejected when I sent it to him myself. But then when Fred sent me his check for the story, it bounced.”

(I regret to say that that’s a true story, though not one I enjoy. Maybe one day I’ll write about my literary-agent days for this blog, but not right now. They were only fifty or sixty years ago and still too painful.)

I couldn’t go on like that. I took the hard decision and packed the agency in, turned all the writers loose and began working to earn the money to pay back the $30,000 I had lost. Mostly I was doing it by writing but, when Horace Gold’s health made him unable to go on editing Galaxy and If, and Bob Guinn offered me the job, I took it. And, of course, A J was one of my principal contributors.

By then A J and Edna were not only married but in the next year or so expecting their first child. They had moved out of the city and into a small apartment in Red Bank, less than half a mile from my own house. That was convenient for A J. When he finished a story for me he could whip the last page out of the typewriter, walk out his door and in ten or fifteen minutes walk it over to my house for, when necessary, an immediate read followed by my trip to the Galaxy office in New York the next morning to bring back Bob Guinn’s check for the story.

“When necessary,” as it happened, was basically always, because when they moved out of New York, they had moved away from Edna’s job. The Budryses were now living on A J’s writing earnings.

Writing money is not like salary money. Salary money comes in a check every Friday, and you can budget according to what you’ll be able to pay. Writing money comes in indigestible lumps — perhaps not much in January, even less in February, a couple hundred, maybe, in March, and then in April a whopping big check, which makes your average income per month look pretty good. But, of course, the grocer, the landlord and everybody else are on their own timetable which has nothing to do with your monthly averages, and so there are problems.

Still, A J was both prolific and good. After a while, the Budryses had risen to the status of renting a house (in Oceanport, closer to the shore) and buying a car. A J, a true son of the automobile age, was now in his element. He developed a new writing behavior that was all his own. Each night, after dinner, he would kiss Edna and the babies (by then there were two of them) good night and jump into his car, carrying a recorder and a good supply of tape.

Then he would drive around for most of the night, more or less at random, steering with one hand and holding the tape recorder with the other to dictate stories into. When he had filled enough tape to satisfy himself he would drive home, park the car, hand the tape over to Edna to be typed out and hit the sack for a good day’s sleep.

Sometimes he hadn’t quite finished the stories when he turned them in, especially when it came to putting a title on them, so we would wrangle over that before I would concede the story was accepted. Generally, that didn’t take long but there was one story — allusive, subjective, poetic — that gave us particular trouble. After we both had come up empty I asked, “All right, A J, just tell me what the story’s about.”

He said, unhappily, “I can’t. I just know it’s what I wanted to write.”

I was leafing through the manuscript. “All right,” I said at last, “Here in the first couple of pages there are some phrases that I like, One is ‘wall of crystal’ and the other is ‘eye of night.’ How about calling it ‘Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night’?”

He gave me a pop-eyed look. “What does it mean?”

I said, “I don’t know, but I promise you that if we do, no one will ever ask you that question.” And no one ever did.

I have been asked which of A J’s stories were written in this hard-driving way, and I don’t know the answer. He had begun writing novels by then and my guess is that that was the system for two of them, probably Who? and Rogue Moon, but it’s only a guess. I don’t think it was many, perhaps not any, of the pieces I published, with the possible exception of the one of his novels that I ran as a three-part serial, The Iron Thorn.

Which nearly resulted in a homicide.

You know what the first law of editing is? It is this: “Never, ever, announce a story by a particular writer until the completed manuscript is safely in your hands.”

I didn’t just violate that law. I did worse. I wanted to start a new serial in the next issue of If, which was just about to go to the printer, and I didn’t have one. What I did have was Part One of A J’s The Iron Thorn. That was just the kind of story I wanted for that spot, but every warning bell in my mind was clanging away. . . .

I ignored them. I crossed my fingers, sent Part One off to the printers and hoped for the best.

I don’t want to tell you how many deadlines we came a hairsbreadth from missing over the next two issues, but A J, though often coming through at the last moment, and I mean by that the very, very last moment, did unfailingly come through, so I didn’t have to kill him.

But I never did that again.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• A J, Part 2
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard

From the blog team:

Good news, Pohl fans! Goodreads is giving away some copies of Gateways, the just-released anthology of original new stories influenced by Frederik Pohl written by some of the top sf writers in the field and edited by Fred’s wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull. The deadline for entering the contest is July 31, so sign up soon!

 
Meanwhile, Betty wrote about the book for the Tor/Forge newsletter:

To celebrate my husband’s 90th orbit of the sun, I’m proud to have persuaded eighteen of the top writers in science fiction to contribute a story, and then to write an afterword, for this special anthology. Moreover, there are nine other appreciations of Fred, and these non-fiction pieces are exciting for me and for any serious fan who wants to know more about how we got where we are today in this literary movement Trufans call SF. For example, the memoirs by Bob Silverberg, Jim Gunn, Gardner Dozois, and Harry Harrison — themselves highly influential people who helped make the genre more respectable around the world — tell as much about the field and the way it was cultivated as they do about Fred and the way he encouraged each of them personally.

Elizabeth Anne Hull. Photo by Barb Knoff.

The main event here, of course, is the science fiction. Joe Haldeman, Mike Resnick, Frank Robinson, Harry Harrison, and Jody Lynn Nye each wrote a superb new tale. Many of the stories are inspired, either directly or indirectly, by Fred’s own fiction, most commonly by Fred’s favorite tale — the one he claims he is willing to have engraved on his monument when he dies — “Day Million.” I was delighted to realize that Gene Wolfe wrote that kind of singularity story, set in a world in an unspecified time — presumably our future — when humans had changed so much that their very nature has to be explained, or in Gene’s case, demonstrated by his first-person narrator.

The title of Cory Doctorow’s novella leaves no doubt that he was influenced by The Space Merchants, but what he has done with the concept is entirely fresh and original, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that fifty years from now “Chicken Little” will have become a classic in its own right.

In Jim Gunn’s remarkable four first-person narratives of intelligent alien races, he lets the aliens reveal themselves by what they say and how they say it, and by what they each choose to tell us about themselves. I believe Jim was influenced not only by Fred’s many novels and stories in which he created original alien species but also by the many summers he and Fred spent critiquing young writers in the workshops at the University of Kansas.

Then there are some stories that are … well, Fred Pohl-ish stories, like Vernor Vinge’s piece. I was tickled to see Vernor write a story that I think Fred would be proud to have written himself.

Sometimes Fred’s influence was as an editor, when he put a writer’s work before the public. I believe Sheri Tepper’s satiric gifts were encouraged by Fred, and Ben Bova shows in his story that he understands that the sense of humor is just as important as the “sensawunda.”

This project has been a labor of love, not just for me, but also, judging from the fact that all the super-busy contributors found time to send their new works — Neil Gaiman’s coming all the way from China! — for everyone involved.

Oh, and one other thing I must mention: Fred has been nominated for a Hugo for Best Fan Writer — for thewaythefutureblogs.com. Be sure to check it out. The Master is still happily writing every day, and is currently putting some finishing touches on his newest novel, All the Lives He Led, scheduled for next spring from Tor.

This also seems a good time to remind you that the deadline for voting on the Hugo Awards is July 31 as well!

Will Sykora, left, and Willy Ley at the Queens Science Fiction League, 1948.

Will Sykora, along with James Taurasi and Sam Moskowitz, were the leaders of the anti-Futurian wing of New York fandom. They had way more members than we, so on votes they had no trouble cutting us off from even things that originally had been our ideas, like the 1939 Worldcon No. 1.

Willy Ley in his natal Germany was a member of the circle of early German rocket enthusiasts, including Wernher von Braun, which were largely responsible for encouraging the research which produced the V1 and V2 flying bombs. By then, however, Ley, a confirmed anti-Nazi, had escaped to America where he became a writer on that and related subjects.

Sykora had no particular connection with Ley. They just both happened to sit at the same table, and there was somebody with a camera.

* * *

 
The funny story about The Early Pohl:

It was the idea of some of the Doubleday editors to publish a book of the first (and generally the worst) stories ever published by a number of sf writers, including Isaac Asimov and me. As it happened, two of Isaac’s earliest stories had been collaborations with me, and he wanted to include them in The Early Asimov. So to pay me for my contribution to the work, I received a 5-percent share of the income from Isaac’s book.

The funny, if embarrassing to me, part of it:

We kept on getting royalties on these books for some time, and in every royalty period the money from my 5-percent share of Isaac’s royalties was always more than my 100-percent share of my own.

* * *

By the way and P.S:

Did you notice how trivial were the dreadful effects of technology that I was trying to worry the reader with? From jet planes, I warned of sonic boom; from cars, the corroding of stonework.

How ignorant we were even when we thought we were cutting-edge smart!

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire
• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF

Will Sykora, left, and Willy Ley at a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League in 1948.

 
Introduction

This arrived without warning from my old friend Andrew Porter, once the editor and publisher of Algol/Science Fiction Chronicle, the only real competition Locus ever had. Andy didn’t say why he sent it, but I guess he just thought I would like to see it again — it’s a part of a chapter taken from a book of mine called The Early Pohl that I haven’t looked at in years. Well, I did get a kick out of some of it (although other parts did just repeat things I’ve written here and elsewhere). Considering how many said that you had enjoyed the chapter I inadvertently reprinted from The Way the Future Was, some of you might like this, too, so I’m going to take a chance and reprint this as well. (Having cut out much, though probably not all, of the stuff that already was in the earlier piece.)

The title of the piece is Andy’s. (It refers to the fact that if you wanted to start an sf club in New York in the ’30s, it helped to have a basement that you could hold the club’s meetings in.) It was also Andy’s decision to include a picture of Will Sykora and Willy Ley at the beginning, although only Sykora has anything at all to do with the piece, and then not much. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. As afterwords I’ll attach a little bit about who they are, and I’ll also tell you a funny, if a bit embarrassing to me, story about The Early Pohl, the book this piece came from.

 
BASEMENT AND EMPIRE
From the book The Early Pohl, copyright ©1976 by Frederik Pohl. (Abridged.)

In the winter of 1933, when I was just turned thirteen, I discovered three new truths.

The first truth was that the world was in a hell of a mess. The second was that I really was not going to spend my life being a chemical engineer, no matter what I had told my guidance counselor at Brooklyn Technical High School. And the third was that in my conversion to science fiction as a way of life I Was Not Alone.

All of these new discoveries were important to me, and in a way they were all related. I had just started the second semester of my freshman year at Brooklyn Tech. It was a cold, grimy winter in the deepest depths of the Great Depression. There was not much joy to be found. Men were selling apples in the streets. The unemployed stood in bread lines and prayed for snow — that meant there would be work shoveling it off the sidewalks. Roosevelt had just been elected President but hadn’t yet taken office — Inauguration Day, still geared to the stagecoach schedules of 1789, had not yet been moved up from March 4. Banks were going broke.

There was not much money around, but on the other hand you didn’t need a lot. Subway fare was a nickel. So was a hot dog at Nedick’s, which was enough for a schoolboy’s lunch. You could go to the movies for a dime or, sometimes, for a can of soup to be donated to the hungry.

Brooklyn Tech was an honor school, which is possibly why I decided to go to it in the first place. Like many of my colleagues, I regret to say that as a kid I was always something of an intellectual snob. (I do not wish to discuss what I am now.) Tech had been born in an ancient factory building, next to the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge in the grimiest part of Brooklyn’s industrial riverside district. It had outgrown that and was now spread around a clutch of decrepit ex-grammar schools in the same area. We commuted from building to building, class to class.

I found myself walking from my Mechanical Drawing class in P.S. No. 5 to my Forge and Foundry class in the main building in the company of a tall, skinny kid named Joseph Harold Dockweiler. Along about the third time we crossed Flatbush Avenue together I discovered that we had something of great urgency in common. He, too, was a Science-Fiction Fan, Third Degree. That is, he didn’t merely read the stuff, or even stop at collecting back issues and searching the secondhand bookstores for overlooked works. He, like me, had the firm intention of writing it someday.

Six or seven years later Joseph Harold Dockweiler renamed himself Dirk Wylie. Later still, he and I went partners in a literary agency and later, but tragically not very much later, he died, at the appalling age of twenty-eight, of the aftereffects of his service in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Dirk was the first person I had found like myself. Having learned that we were not unique, we contemplated the possibility of finding still others who would be able and anxious to compare the merits of Amazing vs. Wonder Stories and discuss the galaxy-ranging glamour of E.E. Smith’s Skylark stories. In a word, we went looking for science-fiction fandom.

The bad part of that was that fandom did not yet quite exist.

The good part was that it was just about to be born, when Wonder Stories started a circulation-boosting correspondence club called the Science Fiction League. We joined instanter, and began attending club meetings as soon as a local chapter was formed, where we met others like ourselves.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF
• Basement and Empire, Afterwords
• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Emperor penguins in Antarctica.

If you’ve seen me lately, you might have noticed a good-looking blonde hanging around. That’s my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who may soon be famous as the editor of what I think may be close to the best science-fiction anthology ever published, but is already locally well known as a woman who has gone swimming in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. It happened on two trips, several years apart, but I’ll tell you what I learned about the two remotest sections of our world now.
 

Betty Anne and me.

The Antarctic is said to be very cold, but when we were next to the Palmer Station on the Antarctic peninsula the air temperature was 37 degrees F. When we left Chicago, the temperature at O’Hare had been –4.

Antarctic ice comes in several pretty colors, It is blue or green if it has been at the bottom of some heavy layers of other ice and the air has been squeezed out of it, rarely reddish or yellowish if it has picked up a load of algae or something and — everybody’s favorite — the rest of the time most of it is the whitest white you ever saw.

The principal visible inhabitants of Antarctica are penguins. There are more than a dozen brands of penguins, but which brand any given penguin belongs to is of real concern only to another penguin. I can tell the difference, but only if they’re fairly close and I have the guidebook in my hand.

A pretty sight is to see several Buick- to bungalow-sized ice floes sailing by, each one with a penguin catching a free ride by sitting on its top.

Penguins live on land but have to return to the ocean if they want to catch anything to eat. This makes quite a problem for them because on the other side of one of those holes in the ice that they use to let them get into the water may well be one or more hungry seals, who are swimming around down there, waiting in the hope of catching a penguin for the same purpose. That is why you see the number of penguins parked next to a hole growing until, at last, one of them dives in and the rest follow pretty much all at once. If there is a single famished seal waiting there he’ll catch one of the penguins, all right, but the rest are home free.

Penguins don’t exactly swim. They sort of fly through the water and are very good at it.

Ice floes come in all shapes and sizes, some like castles with towers and minarets, some like craggy mountain ranges, some like huge, flat, square-cut pizza boxes, some like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Most of a berg or floe is under water with a lot of mass and jagged edges. Consequently every once in a great while one of them holes a ship, and then there’s big trouble. One small cruise ship did go down a few years ago, with I believe two people trapped inside.
 

While on the other end of the planet —

 
The Arctic Ocean contains no continent (though it is bounded by several) and very few islands (although one or two new ones are being discovered as the ice melts away).

When we sailed north toward the Pole, we hit lucky on the weather. It was fair and not very windy, thus giving us only gentle waves. As we approached the Arctic ice cap there was at first only a vague blur on the horizon. Then abruptly it transmuted itself to what looked a wide bay that we were entering. The closer we got, the more it began to look like — wow! — a tropical island that we were approaching, with a narrow beach of white sand, lacking only some palm trees and a central mountain to resemble Bora Bora or Moorea.

Actually, that whole scene was composed of nothing but size-sorted bits of floating ice. We were almost on top of it before I could see that the “beach” part was made up of a gazillion tiny ice bits, more or less marble-sized, next to a band composed of larger strawberry-to-baseball sized pieces, then one band after another, each band’s pieces getting bigger and bigger as you headed Poleward. Each separate piece of ice was jigging independently up and down in the gentle waves but they all kept to their spots within the group. (I developed a theory that there was a feeble northward current around there, perhaps a straggling fragment of the dissipating Gulf Stream, pushing on the surface waters to line the ice fragments up so neatly, but never found an oceanographer to tell me how all wet I probably was.)

Then the captain took us right into the ice, all the thousands of tons of our cruise ship, until we were more than a quarter mile from open water and getting a bit close to some biggish ice floes. The captain stopped the ship so we could all take pictures. (And, gee, I wish I had.) And then he carefully backed us out of the ice, staying within the liquid-water lane we had opened on the way in.

 
There aren’t any penguins in the Arctic. What they do have there is the local knock-off of the same general design, the auk, only they don’t have many of them anymore because 19th-century sailors found them quite tasty. We didn’t see any, anyway. Other Arctic creatures we didn’t see include polar bears, Arctic foxes and various aquatic and semi-aquatic forms.

We did see some whales.

 
Oh, and listen, those waters in the Arctic and Antarctic that I said Betty Anne had gone swimming in. Did I mention that they were the swimming pools located on the upper decks of our cruise liners?

Frank Herbert

I met Frank Herbert and his wife Beverly at the home of Poul and Karen Anderson in the early 1960s, where we had all been invited for dinner. It was a great evening. There weren’t many people more fun to share a meal with than those four, especially when Karen was creating one of her original recipes (this time with Japanese black beans and I have no idea what else).

We became friendly quickly. I should mention that the Andersons’ home was in those unexpectedly precipitous hills across the Bay from San Francisco, because when it became going-home time the Herberts and I were driven back to the city by another diner, a local resident who knew every hill and curve and preferred to take them all at high speed while turned halfway around in the driver’s seat in order to have a friendly conversation with us. When we got out, the Herberts and I agreed that we had just been through a life-changing experience, and we would be lifelong buddies from then on.

Still, we managed to get together only rarely because of problems of geography, except for the occasional fortuitous occasion — for example, the day in the early ’80s, when I was in Seattle on a book tour. As I was crossing a street on my way to a TV interview, a car pulled up in front of me and a woman stuck her head out the window. “Hello, sailor,” she called. “Looking for a good time?” It was Bev, with Frank grinning over her shoulder from the steering-wheel side.

It wasn’t the best of opportunities for a lengthy chat, but I was glad to see them both looking well; Bev had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and, I knew, was facing surgery. Before the other drivers began honking, the Herberts mentioned that they were building a house in Hana on Maui, and I promised that the next time we were in Hawai’i we’d look them up.

 
Meanwhile Frank, working as a newspaperman, had started to research an article about the sand dunes of Oregon, and that changed his life. The dunes fascinated him. He never finished the article, but he began writing science-fiction stories for John Campbell’s Astounding, starting with a three-part serial about a dune planet and its inhabitants.

Herbert himself thought it might make a pretty good hardcover book but was disappointed by the responses when he tried offering it to publishers. No book publisher was interested in acquiring the hardcover rights to this rapidly expanding mass of manuscript, however, until an editor at the quite small publishing house of Chilton Books managed to stitch the several existing stories into a single huge novel. He called it Dune, and when he published the result, it became a runaway bestseller, said to be the most profitable sf book ever written.

Frank had written with real people and places in mind, though he gave them invented names for his stories, just as Cordwainer Smith had for his own stories of the imperfectly concealed Middle East. Arrakis was Frank Herbert code for Iraq, The Baron was Dick Cheney, Selusa Secundis was Afghanistan and so on. (I’m sorry to say that I don’t know all the identities for either author.)

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man, Part 2