The Way the Future Blogs

Part 2 of my memories of Gene Roddenberry

  Gene Roddenberry

When the studio announced that Star Trek had been canceled after its second year, I took the news philosophically. I had more or less stopped watching it, and Gene Roddenberry had already taken me to previews of a couple of other science-fiction shows he was developing. (None of them actually did much.)

Gene, however, was not so easily defeated A few weeks after the announcement I got a letter from him asking if I would be willing to sign a letter asking the network to reverse itself and give Star Trek at least one more season to show its legs. Gene was not very specific about just what sort of letter it would be. I supposed it would be some sort of group letter signed by a bunch of old sf codgers. I had no objection to that, or indeed to any imaginable kind of letter he might have in mind. I could not think of any serious trouble such a thing might cause me, and I was quite willing to do Gene a favor.

I then forgot about it for a few weeks, until one day I got a letter from an eleven-year-old in some place like Albuquerque, New Mexico, and addressed to “Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy, If and Analog.” Its burden was a heartfelt plea for me to change my mind about canceling Star Trek and put it back on the air for at least one more year.

That was a rather puzzling letter. How did he get my home address? What made him believe I had anything to do with canceling the program? Most of all, what made anyone think that I was the editor of Analog, a post that had belonged to John Campbell since the Early Silurian?

It was not a great concern, though, and it had receded to the shadowy recesses of my consciousness when. A couple of days later I got a similar letter from a nine-year-old in a place like Freehold. New Jersey … and then more, many more, from youngsters all over the country, and all displaying the same errors concerning my control over Star Trek’s fortunes and what magazines I happened to edit..

So I got in touch with Gene to ask, just as a matter of interest, what he knew about those letters.

I already had figured out the basic structure of what was going on. TV shows get a heavy dose of fan mail — in the case of Star Trek largely from young boys — and somebody connected with the show had saved all those return addresses on the envelopes and converted them into a mailing list. (I knew all about such lists. Dirk Wylie and I had got his literary agency started by mailing an invitation to a list of the same kind, although much smaller, this one taken from the return addresses on manuscripts submitted to Popular Publications’ pulp magazines.)

In his reply Gene admitted that they had written a letter to all those thousands of fans, suggesting they write letters to get the program extended — but phrased a little confusingly, which is no doubt how come so many of them thought I was the executioner. He hoped I wasn’t mad because, in the heat of the action, they had sent out the letter — bearing my signature — without showing it to me. I wasn’t mad, and wrote back to tell him so.
 

Bjo Trimble, in costume, with William Shatner
on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, ca. 1979.

I wasn’t the only string to Gene’s bow. As I learned later, Harlan Ellison was trying to whip up pressure from the TV professionals, and Bjo Trimble and her husband were attempting to do the same among fan groups.

How well they did, I don’t know, but how well that letter under my name did was very. I have a statement from a person actually on the scene at the network that the executives were astonished and in no small degree worried at the volume and vigor of (correctly addressed) mail it produced.

And, in fact, the network did suddenly announce that they’d thought it over and, after all, they would let Star Trek stay on the air for one more season.

Related post:
Gene Roddenberry

“A kind of Wagon Train in space. . . .”

The Man Who Launched the Enterprise

      Majel Barrett and Gene Roddenberry.

I was pretty satisfied with Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland in 1966. When it was over, I had had a chance to hang with many old friends, I had had a few talks with writers I wanted to juice up for the magazines I was editing, Galaxy and If, and I had picked up another Hugo Award — this one a “Best Magazine” award for If. I was aware that there was a lot of stuff going on that I had missed — like the showing of the pilot episode of something called Star Trek — but I had received an information package about it from its producer, somebody named Gene Roddenberry, and he had described it as “a kind of Wagon Train in space.” That didn’t awaken in my soul any desire to see it.

True, Roddenberry himself sounded sort of interesting: A B-17 pilot with 89 missions in the South Pacific in World War II, later a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, who began writing TV scripts in his spare time. But by then I had had a fair number of dealings with TV people on my own, and they hadn’t impressed me with the breed. I wasn’t enough interested to offer to buy him a drink.

Then, in 1969, I won another Hugo for If and Star Trek won a Hugo of its own, and I got an idea. The most conspicuous thing about television was that their numbers were at least an order of magnitude larger than ours at the magazines. So why shouldn’t I try to get in on some of those large numbers, perhaps by obtaining the rights to publish an occasional story based on a Star Trek episode in one of my magazines? Would any of those numbers rub off on us?

I didn’t know that they would. On the other hand, I didn’t know that they wouldn’t. So I wrote Gene a letter, outlining what I had in mind and suggesting that he and I get together to talk it over. He responded at once with, “Sure, let’s.” And a week or two later, when I had been planning to be in L.A. for the purpose of urging some writers on anyway, I drove my rented convertible up to the gate at the Desilu lot, where Star Trek was filmed, and told the armed guard that I was here to see Mr. Roddenberry.

* * *

Gene turned out to be friendly, smart and obliging. He thought my plan could do nothing but good for both parties, and he thought it should be put into practice right away.

The only thing wrong with that plan, he told me, was that he didn’t have the authority to okay it. That belonged to the higher-ups in the company’s Byzantine Hollywood corporate structure. Star Trek didn’t own itself. It was owned by Paramount Pictures, which would have to approve the plan. Unfortunately, though, even Paramount’s approval didn’t mean I could start commissioning stories, because they, too, were owned, this time by the sprawling Gulf & Western, sometimes called Engulf & Destroy.

“So how long until we get a decision from Gulf and Western?” I asked, as politely as possible.

“Oh, you never know that,” Gene said. “Sometimes not too long. But anyway, as long as you’re here, I’ve got a photographer standing by. Mind if he takes a few pictures?”

I didn’t, and for a prop Gene picked his Hugo from the Worldcon off the shelf and we passed it back and forth for a dozen or so photographs — me awarding it to him for some, and then Gene awarding it to me (but with the lettering on the base carefully concealed) on the rest. And then I went on with the rest of my West Coast obligations.

Gene had invited me to try writing a script for the series. I did try, but without much luck. Perhaps the problem was that I didn’t really like the idea of another barrier between me and the audience — that is, a director and a bunch of actors — or perhaps I just wasn’t into network television, having already had my share of disillusioning experiences with it. Anyway, for some reason I just was no good at it. Still, that — and the hope that Engulf and Destroy might ultimately come up with the okay for us to do some of the stories — meant that I was in the habit of visiting Gene every time I hit L.A., which was always a pleasure. . . .

Well, almost always. There was the time when he invited me up to his home for lunch, high over Hollywood, where he lived with his wife, better known as Majel Barrett when she had appeared as Nurse Chapel in the series. It was a handsome house, with a grand view of the city spread out below. The furnishing was handsome, too, including the deep-pile, snow-white carpeting in the room we were in. Majel asked me whether I preferred white wine or red. I took the red. Then I almost immediately knocked the glass over, spilling the whole glass of that deep red wine onto the still deep-pile, but no longer snow-white, carpeting.

Majel was a sweet-tempered woman. The proof of that is that she didn’t snatch up one of the cheese knives and cut my throat on the spot.

I used to see Majel every once in a while at dinners of the local space society, where she was an honored guest. She spoke to me without rancor, which is proof, again, that she had totally forgiven me. (It is impossible that she simply forgot what I did to her beautiful white carpet.)

* * *

Star Trek had a good first year and a somewhat less good second year. For the third year it got canceled.

This sort of event is by no means unusual in the bloodthirsty world of network TV, but Gene wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. So he and some confederates concocted a plan to keep the show on the air for a while.

One of the confederates turned out to be me. To find out more about it, however, you’ll have to wait for the conclusion of this essay. That will be coming up in this blog before long, but not until I get around to writing it.

To be continued. . . .

Jack Williamson
 

The first “Worldcon” wasn’t quite as globally representative as one might have wished; I don’t know that any of the attendees came from any country but the U.S.A and, maybe, Canada. But it was the last chance we had for a real international gathering, because that year of 1939 was the beginning of that event that interfered with everyone’s plans for that sort of frippery, namely World War II.

America didn’t get involved in actual combat until Japan took its ill-advised crack at Pearl Harbor, late in 1941, but that was the end of even the so-called Worldcons. Most fans were male and mostly in their late teens or early 20s, and thus the natural prey of the draft. So, whether called up or volunteering, most of us were soon wearing uniforms.

By 1943, both Jack and I were in the Air Force and both had wound up as weathermen. I was just beginning. After doing basic training in Miami Beach, I was ordered to Chanute Field, Illinois, to learn how to read a theodolite, plot a synoptic map, operate a teletype and release a hydrogen-filled pilot balloon to investigate the velocity and direction of the winds aloft, after which I would be sent to join some weather station in the capacity of its lowest professional level, as a weather observer, Army Specialist Number 784.

Meanwhile, Jack, ahead of me as ever, had already done that a couple of years earlier. He had then served as a working observer at an actual weather station in the field, until he applied for promotion as a weather forecaster, ASN 787. This required going back to Chanute Field for additional training, and, by the grace of that useful Someone, his orders put him there over the same weeks as mine.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the significance of this chance meeting. It wasn’t a case of two dear buddies getting together for a long-desired reunion. We barely knew each other. What’s more, we didn’t have much free time on either of our schedules, and what one of us did have didn’t always mesh with the free time on the other’s. But I think we both enjoyed the chance to talk science fiction again, even if briefly.

Then our courses ended. Jack went off to an American air base on the way to his permanent assignment, which was to be forecaster for a landing strip on one of the myriad tiny islands that usefully dot the Pacific Ocean for the benefit of bomber crews that can’t quite make it home after a mission, while I went off to spend a year at the weather station on the base at Enid, Oklahoma, before my orders for Italy came through.

Then the war ended. (How quickly I write that down … and how slowly that event arrived in the real world.) All of us now being civilians once more, I wrote a letter to Jack that started one of the longest-lasting and most rewarding relationships of my professional life.

None of that might have happened, though, if it hadn’t been sparked by what was happening in the life of the person who was then my oldest friend, Dirk Wylie. But for that we need a digression, which will happen in Part Next (of I don’t know how many) in the Jack Williamson story, coming up shortly after I get it written.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 2

Jack Williamson, center, outside Nycon 1, the first Worldcon.
The worshipful fanboy at the left is me.
 

I did by chance run into Jack Williamson, briefly, at the first-ever Worldcon in 1939, which was in the same summer as New York’s first World’s Fair — and which Donald Wollheim had proposed we New York fans should use as the opportunity to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in the hope that it would attract some foreign fans who would be coming to our city for the Fair anyway. Mark the fact that the original idea had come from a Futurian.

But in the remorseless fan warfare of the period the other guys had more votes than we did, so they took it away from us, and the reason that first actual contact was “briefly” is that seven of us, me included, were unfairly ejected from the actual meeting. “Unfairly” because we were thrown out for something we hadn’t done. Dave Kyle had done it, and he was allowed to stay. As it happened, I then spent the time of the con in the bar next door, where most of the writers wound up anyway, but Jack didn’t happen to be one of them.

However, we Futurians were nothing if not resourceful. On the spot, we created a meeting of our own for the next day and invited all those attending the actual con to come to ours as well. On such short notice the only hall we could secure for our meeting was in remote Brooklyn. A fair number of the fans present managed to get there, but only one of the actual writers.

That one writer, though, was the always adventurous Jack Williamson.

Since he was clearly the star of our meeting I wasn’t lucky enough to have much one-on-one time with him, but we all had a free and easy several hours of chatting, and I think most of those present were glad they had come — although if they had known in advance that the hall we had secured, the only one we could get on short notice, was primarily the headquarters of the local Communist Party, there might have been some qualms.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 3

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

It’s called The Messenger; it stars Woody Harrelson and it’s the story of a lifer Army captain and a used-up, shot-over staff sergeant who get assigned to the stressful job of bringing to GI families the news that their son, father or husband has just been killed in Afghanistan.

I never heard of anyone in the cast but Harrelson and expected little from the film. But it really got to me. I think it would to you, too.

Algis Budrys
(Photo by William Shunn).
 

By the mid-1960s, Algis Budrys had become a darling of the critics. In the field of science fiction, two of the most respected at that time were Kingsley Amis and James Blish. Kingsley said that the way A J was going, he might become the most honored sf writer since H. G. Wells. Jim was less restrained. He thought that A J was becoming the finest writer in a second language since Joseph Conrad. One of A J’s stories had already been made into a film, though not a particularly good one, and his future was bright.

It was at that point that A J basically stopped writing science fiction and went off to Chicago to get into the public-relations business.

Why?

Well, I don’t know why. When A J took off for Chicago and a brief career as Mr. Pickle in a relish promoter’s PR campaign, it was a surprise to me. Perhaps it was because of the merciless difference between salary income and writer income that I alluded to earlier. By then the Budrys family census stood at six, with four healthy infant sons that needed to be fed every day — and would inevitably need more and more as the years advanced. But I lost touch with him for a year or two.

When I reconnected with him he had escaped from advertising and gone to work as the book editor for Playboy.

That made a certain amount of sense to me, particularly as he was showing signs of getting back to doing writing for me again. I was still editing for Bob Guinn, who had gradually enriched my expense account enough to permit annual trips to spur authors along . When in Chicago, I always spent some time with the Budryses. Their lives appeared to have slowed down and smoothed out.

But in that, too, I was quite wrong.

One day, back at home in New Jersey, I got a phone call from A J. He had news. The Church of Scientology had decided to honor their founder and principal sage, the science-fiction (and everything else, but best known for his science fiction) author L. Ron Hubbard, by establishing a new contest for talented entry-level sf writers that would pave the way for some of them to make the transition to professional success. Since none of the Scientology people knew much about publishing, they needed to find someone who did to save them from making too many blunders, and they had found A J.

“What I’m trying to do for them now,” he said, “is to try to find them major writers who —”

“No,” I said.

“— would be willing to be judges — what did you say?”

“I said, ‘no,’” I told him.

“But you didn’t let me tell you the good parts,” he said,

“That’s right,” I said. “I said, ‘no.’ ”

See how I handled it? A quick, firm decision, and then on to the next thing. No looking back, either.

Except that a few months later, when A J called again to tell me that Theodore Sturgeon, who A J had taken on as my replacement, was gravely ill, and A J was in a really tough spot, and if I could just help him out until he could find someone else. . . .

So I did it. I helped him out, and kept on doing it for the next thirty years.

 
In my defense, I will say that Writers of the Future, now broadened to include artists of the future, is indeed a good thing for beginning writers and artists, who can use all the help they can get. But there it is.

A J didn’t confine his efforts to Writers of the Future for the rest of his life. There was a prolonged, and expensive, period when he tried his luck as publisher of his own magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, but what happened at the end was simply that his health gave out. For the last several years of his life he was housebound in his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he complained that illness had so sapped his strength that he didn’t have energy for anything. Once he said, “There’s a novel I started in January and I’m not even a quarter through it.”

This was sometime in late spring. I said cheerfully, “So keep on plugging away. Sooner or later you’ll get it written.”

“Written?” he said, “I’m not talking about writing a novel. I’m talking about reading one.”

What was wrong with A J’s health was not a single, simple thing. I believe it was diabetes that kept him housebound for so long, but think it was metastasizing cancer that took him away in June of 2008.

He is missed.

 
Related posts:

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

    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