The Way the Future Blogs

That last summer we spent in the big old house over the Ashokan Reservoir was when Judy wrote most of her novel. She was there, with our daughters, all summer long. She had invited some of her old friends to spend much of the summer with her — I believe Katherine MacLean was one of them but don’t remember who else — and Judy had easily volunteered them to help her keep an eye on the kids so Judy herself could work on her book. Then, on weekends when I was there, I took over for a lot of the (actually pretty easy) childcare. That was the way it was in the first part of the summer.

Then, as Judy was having difficulties with the book, she began taking a room at the foot of the hill as soon as I got there on a weekend to take over prime charge of our daughters and writing away over the Friday night and the Saturday night, until relieving me on Sunday. I had no objection to any of that. As her agent, I had got Judy a pretty good contract with Doubleday, then still an all-purpose publisher with a decent record of best-sellers. Her editor was Walter Bradbury, the managing editor of the line, a business contact who had become a friend, and Brad was good with reassuring and encouraging Judy as she needed it. All was well.

Well, almost all was well, though with the occasional cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. When finally Judy gave me the completed manuscript, Brad did that careful line-by-line reading and then conference with the writer that I have described elsewhere. I think that must have been a tough meeting, because Judy tried her best to keep her style intact. But they got through it all right, or almost. There was a problem. Judy used one word in a scene that Brad really hated. I think the word may have been “burbled,” as in, “‘that’s great,’ he burbled.”

Brad was an almost-always reasonable man, but on this question, I don’t really know why, he was almost as intractable as Judy was. When he came to me with the problem, since I was Judy’s agent, I could not believe the two of them were locking heads over something that trivial. So I made a rather sneaky and very, very bad suggestion. I said, “If I were you, I would give up on the argument, but then I would just make sure the word wasn’t in the final setting proofs. Then when the actual printed book was in her hands and she noticed the change, I would abase myself in apologies.”

This Brad actually did. He was too upright a man to be really sneaky, though, so he let Judy know. It wasn’t the end of the world, though it did lead to a lot of yelling. But we got past it.

In fact, for several years there, we got past just about everything. I was losing big chunks of money every month on the literary agency, but it hadn’t yet reached the catastrophe point, and I was enjoying the work. And Judy had her novel.

The title on the book was Shadow on the Hearth. It wasn’t exactly the kind of book people thought of when they said “science fiction,” though it was set in the (near) future. In it, Judy’s postulate was that nuclear war actually happened. New York City was atom-bombed, and Judy’s story was that of a family trapped there.

She did a good job of it, too. The reviews were mostly friendly, and very soon there was even talk about a movie. Not Hollywood millions, that is. The kind of movie they were talking about would be a made-for-TV job, but what was wrong with that? There would be a useful chunk of money, no matter what, and then if it actually did get made her audience would simply explode, no more tens of thousands, to suddenly tens of millions.

It all happened, too. The movie did get made, quite well. It was a success. It didn’t happen rapidly, because such things don’t. But it was a great success for Judy, and she blossomed.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Dear People:

As you know, I have a problem, and its name is Mark Rich. For some reason, and I have no clue as to what that reason is, it is quite obvious that he hates me.

Now, I don’t particularly care whether someone named Mark Rich hates me, since as far as I know, I’ve never met the man. The difficulty, however, is that he has written a book about it, and it comes at a bad time. I’m not young, and I’m not in particularly good health, and there are a number of things that are important to me that I want to get done. Dealing with the attacks of this man was not one of them

But I really can’t let him go on unchecked. It isn’t just that he hates me. He makes up whole scenarios that never happened to hate me for, like the one I wrote about last week in this blog. And honestly, Mr. Rich, that’s pathological.

 
So I am going to have to do some setting of the record straight.

This presents a big problem for me, one I thought I had faced and settled 25 years ago.

You see, when I first began writing the autobiographical sort of material that ultimately turned into the book The Way the Future Was, I had to decide just how much truth I wanted to tell. What I decided was that I would try to be as candid as possible about everything I had done, even the things I wished I hadn’t. The trouble with that was that I was not the only person involved in those matters. If I chose to Tell All about everything I did, it unfortunately would sometimes involve simultaneously Telling All about others, which I had no right or desire to do.

Understand that I am not saying that that sf community in New York in the 1950s and ’60s was riddled with vice and degeneracy. It wasn’t. Well, not a lot, anyway. But these were young people who did a fair amount of drinking and sometimes a modest amount of drugs. That is to say, in those respects they were quite like young adult bridge clubs, church groups and party-givers all over America. Only in their cases some of them got kind of famous.

There was, for all these reasons, a lot of stuff I didn’t write about concerning some of the other people involved because I didn’t want to embarrass them. In particular, that applied to my one-time wife, Judy Merril. We had just begun being good friends again as I was writing that book, and that was a good feeling. It gave us a chance to enjoy our increasing numbers of grandchildren together, and it let us remember, as Judy said to me once, “Why I liked you in the first place.”

Rich however seems to think that I persecuted Judy, and I will take that up.

He also all but states that I embezzled some of Cyril’s share of the earnings from The Space Merchants. I’ll deal with that one, too, and with several others of his very bad guesses. But I want to do something else first.

Rich apparently believes that, apart from dishonesty, my career in science fiction has been marked by general incompetence in just about everything I tried, as agent, as editor, as collaborator and as author. If I left anything out, he thinks I was lousy at that, too.

In the scheme of things entire, I would like not to care what somebody I never heard of thinks of me. This time, though, I don’ have that privilege, because Rich went and wrote this damn book. Lots of people do care about Cyril Kornbluth and are likely to want to read about him. (Even more, I think, may be likely to hear of our present differences and want to see what he said for themselves.) Some of them may know very little about me, or about what the rest of the world thinks of me, and how that contrasts with Rich’s opinions and flights of fantasy.

That would be a pity, so let’s look at the record.

Start with this: I have seven Hugo Awards.

That’s not a remarkable number, but I won three of them for writing (four if you count the new one I unexpectedly got this year) and three as editor, and I would like to point out that in all the years Hugo Awards have been given out, nobody else in the world has ever won the Hugo in both those major categories. (The editing awards were for If, and the fiction awards included those for my novel Gateway and a short story, “Fermi and Frost.”)

One Hugo Award I shared with Cyril, posthumously, for a short story, “The Meeting,” and that’s of interest here. When Cyril died, his widow, Mary, gave me some scraps and fragments of stories that he had left behind, apparently because he got that far and bogged down and couldn’t figure where to go with them. I agreed to try to make complete stories out of them, sell them for publication and split whatever they earned fifty-fifty.

One of those fragments was a scene set in a parents’ association for a school for handicapped children. Like almost everything else Cyril was writing in those days, it was beautifully done, but there was no story. I gave it a story. I believe Rich thinks I screwed that up, too, but I don’t have the patience to go back and reread his dizzy-minded remarks.

So I will just say that what actually happened is that it won a Hugo — the only Hugo, I am sorry to say, that Cyril’s writing ever earned.

 
The Naming of Names

If what you’re writing is science fiction and the character you need a name for has three heads and seventeen eyes and lives on the ninth planet of Aldebaran, what writing secrets I am about to pass on to you won’t help you much. (Except that I will urge you to make it pronounceable. I still remember Doc Smith’s character Worsel the Velantian from my teen-age days, while cleverer names. but names composed entirely of consonants or musical notes that I encountered within the last few months are gone.)

But if it’s a human being you need to christen, I do have a few suggestions to offer. Suggestion Number One is: Know where your name comes from. Don’t just take some name that’s been inhabiting your subconscious for the past year or so. I speak on this subject with authority because I did that one wrong, many years ago;

The story I wanted to write involved a takeoff on Maxwell’s demon, a nonexistent little creature that illustrated some problems in quantum mechanics. For a title for my story, I wanted a human name that was racially inoffensive, easily pronounceable and, if possible, amusing. The subconscious quickly produced “Wapshot,” and my story was quickly published as “Wapshot’s Demon.”

It was only after the story was well and truly out before the world that I began to wonder whether John Cheever, author of The Wapshot Chronicle, the successful novel based on his New Yorker stories, was going to be unhappy with me. He never said anything about it, but for some time I expected a wrathful letter.

So there, for your edification, is an example of what you shouldn’t do. Don’t take some other writer’s presumably invented name to use in your story.

Now, how do you avoid it? Easy. Collect the obituary pages from your local newspaper. Dead people have no civil rights, not even in England where the laws are all in favor of the person libeled. Foreign-language papers are particularly useful for ethnic names, whether obtained in the U.S. or wherever your wanderings take you. (And, just to make sure, I generally pick a first name from one dearly beloved and a family name from another.)

However, use reasonable care. If the person who just won a judgment for $100,000 against you because he tripped on your sidewalk is named Jim Jumpup and in the same day’s paper you find obits for James Black and William Jumpup, and you choose to invent a loathsome drug peddler in your next story named, wait for it, Jim Jumpup, the judge is unlikely to believe that you did not intend it personally.

 
Related posts:
Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

What the Other Guy Does

I said earlier that there are many, many ways of collaborating, and there are.

There’s taking what somebody else knows all about but has no writing skills; you get him to talk about whatever it is or give you a rough draft of what he has to say and you make it good. (I did something like that for Ian Ballantine with a couple of early novels that had originally been written by someone else, Turn the Tigers Loose and The God of Channel One.)

There’s the kind where one partner is thought to have the better ideas so he writes a sort of outline of the story and the other fellow fleshes it out. (Which I did for a number of not very good stories with Cyril Kornbluth and for two, not that much better, with Isaac Asimov — those two are still available for anyone who really, really wants to read them in Isaac’s book The Early Asimov.)

Actually, I rather like taking someone else’s draft and making it publishable. The nine or so books that I wrote with Jack Williamson were done more or less that way. The first of them, Undersea Fleet, he gave to me as a jumble of notes and scenes. He had worked over the material a dozen different ways without ever having it jell into a novel, so he turned it over to me to get a fresh view on it.

The other eight books we did were mostly written on purpose as collaborations, bearing in mind that Jack lived in New Mexico and I in either New Jersey or Illinois. Although we traveled together now and then, we rarely sat down to write together. What we did was to exchange letters over a period of, usually, some months, talking about something we’d like to see in the book — perhaps a new scientific theory (we got a lot of mileage out of the steady-state hypothesis until it was proved wrong). And when we’d thought up all the complications and implications we could Jack, bless his soul, would sit down and write a complete first draft and mail it to me. Then I would do a lot of work on it and we’d give it to the publisher.
 

The absolute best collaboration technique I’ve come across was the one I used when writing with Cyril Kornbluth, and we discovered it by accident. The way it worked, Cyril would come out to our house on the river in Red Bank, New Jersey, where we kept a room for him on the third floor with his own bath, bed and typewriter. Then he and I would have dinner, and he would have a drink or two while I had coffee, and we’d chat about what we’d like to see in the new book — characters, situations, settings, whatever interested one of us. When we thought we had enough to start writing we’d flip a coin. The loser would go upstairs to his typewriter and write the first four pages. Then he’d come down and say, “You’re on!” And the other guy would go up and write the next four, and so on, turn and about, until we got to the page that said “The End.”

At this point we had a whole book, though not a truly finished product. Somebody, usually me, had to go over that manuscript and fix errors, incongruities and infelicities, maybe add some explanations and transitions and stuff and do a little polish, and then we’d give it to the publisher.

There was only one thing wrong with this system. It worked fine with Cyril, and not at all with any other writer in the world. I know this because I tried with several, including several really good ones, and that sort of telepathy that kept the two of us on message without ever explicating exactly what the message was never materialized.

Except with one writer whom I had never thought of.

Continue reading ‘Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 3’ »

I spend a lot of time reading what you guys have to say about items in the blog, and I have to say I’m impressed with what a smart and rewarding bunch you all are. (Of course I would probably say something of that sort whether it was true or not, but in this case it happens to be true.) So when one of you says that there is something you would like me to write about, and I can see how to do it, I try to comply. One of you, for instance, has recently asked me to try to describe what thought processes led me to the writing of my novel Gateway. That’s a welcome question not only because I’m particularly fond of that book but also because I can answer it.

The process that led to Gateway began with a remark by some scientist — I’ve forgotten which one — in an attempt to explain why, if there are other technically advanced civilizations in the universe, as many of us would like to believe, none of them have dropped in to visit us. That could simply be, he said, because they got an earlier start than we did. That is, life appeared on their planet thousands, or even millions, of years before it did on Earth, and therefore their dominant race of beings reached their spaceflight era long before we did. (After which, who knows? Perhaps they killed themselves off, of doing which there is all too good a chance that we might yet. Or they simply lost interest. Or — as I say — who knows?)

In that case, they might have visited Earth dozens of times, but finding no one here with interests closer to their own than the australopithecines — or, for that matter, than the trilobites or even the slime molds — they got discouraged and went away. And the only way we would have of learning that they had existed would be if they had left something of theirs behind for our archeologists to find.

That seemed like a territory suitable for the construction of a good science-fiction story to me, so I began trying to do it.

A lot of writers have minds more orderly than my own. These tidier souls tend to write out a synopsis of what the book is going to be, all the way to the conclusion, before they write a single line of the actual text. This approach to the how-to of writing is simply alien to my nature. Instead, when I get a sort of general idea I simply start to write, making it up as I go along. Writing, then, is pretty much a process of discovery for me. As I write I see more and more of the implications of that original idea, and I shape my story line accordingly.

Usually, it’s a fairly efficient process. I seldom have to go back and x out passages because they lead nowhere. But in the case of what ultimately became Gateway I made several false starts. I finally wrote a novella called “The Merchants of Venus.” That one made the assumptions that aliens, long ago, had indeed visited our solar system; but that they had paid little attention to Earth, for reasons we have no way of knowing, but perhaps because they altruistically didn’t want to interfere with the development of the primitive human terrestrials; and that they had accordingly then focused most of their attention on the planet Venus. And, since Venus’s surface conditions are lethally hot and nasty, they had dug huge tunnels, kept at a livable temperatures and filled with breathable air, in which they had established colonies of their scientists to study the planet — much as we humans have done in Antarctica.

Then, much later, the aliens have gone away and the human race has developed to the point of having space travel that is efficient enough to allow (rich) tourists to visit the planet, where they buy souvenirs excavated from the old alien tunnels. The tunnels were cleaned out by the aliens when they left, but they weren’t careful enough to get every last item. (Some of the “trash” they left behind is technologically advanced and very valuable to its discoverers.)

I was reasonably satisfied with the novella. But I couldn’t get those aliens out of my mind.

So a year or so later I went back to the drawing board and began writing the story of Robinette Broadhead, who visits the asteroid where the aliens have parked their surplus spaceships, and uses them to explore far-off star systems.

However, I had been thinking for some time that it would be nice for a novel’s readers if the author could give them some way of seeing everything that’s interesting in the background of the story. Not just what the author believes is relevant. And so I began writing the “sidebars” that festoon the book.

Meanwhile I was doing a lot of traveling around that time, writing on the book in airplanes and hotel rooms. (Some of the sidebars have a slight Canadian flavor. That’s because the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had invited me to come up to Toronto to do commentary on the upcoming rendezvous in orbit of a U.S. Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and I lived there for a week or so.)

Then, when it was basically all written, I assembled all the parts and read it over.

I was reasonably content with most of it, but the short last chapter didn’t move me. So I rewrote it. Then I rewrote it again.

Then I rewrote it again and kept on doing it until I could go no farther — each time giving better and better lines to my favorite character, the computer psychoanalyst, Sigfrid von Shrink.

And that’s the way, under the title Gateway , it got published.

“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. . . .

 
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Raising Star Trek from the Dead