The Way the Future Blogs

Isaac Asimov, 1965.

All this time Isaac was continuing to write for John Campbell — Foundation stories, robot stories, all kinds of stories. Perhaps his biggest hit for John, though, wasn’t exactly a story. It was what came to be called “a non-fact article,” this one a dead-pan scientific report on a compound called “thiotimoline,” which had the curious property of beginning to dissolve before it was added to a solvent.

For a time I was back in the literary-agency business, handling Isaac among most of the other top sf writers in the world. The publishing of science fiction in book form in the U.S. had just begun, and I wanted Isaac to get in on it. The trouble was that Doubleday, the most interesting of the hardcover houses, had decided that they wanted new works, not reprinted serials taken from the pulps. (It was a dumb decision, and later, when they realized what they were missing out on and reversed it they made a fortune out of those old Foundation and robot books.)

But at the time that was policy and I couldn’t argue them out of it. But I happened to know that Startling Stories had asked Isaac to write a short novel for them and then, when he did, rejected it. When I told him what I had in mind, he dragged it out of the dead file and handed it to me. “Fred,” he said, “this is my only copy. Be very careful of it, because if it gets lost, you are no longer my agent.”

That pulled my cork. I think it was the only time in my life that I was really mad at Isaac. I all but threw the manuscript back at him. “Isaac,” I said — well, I think yelled, “we’re talking about grown-up publishing here. You’re the author. You give me a manuscript, I try to get it turned into a book, but I’m not the one who provides the manuscript.” (There may have been a few expletives thrown in here and there.)

Anyway Isaac backed down, we were friends again, and Doubleday was glad to have the book. Isaac had called it “Grow Old Along With Me.” Walter Bradbury, the editor who wrote the contract, called it The Stars, Like Dust, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s still in print today.

If the established New York publishing houses were too proud to pick up reprints from the pulps, the fan-owned semi-pros who had started the whole thing weren’t. What I couldn’t sell to Doubleday or Simon & Schuster I mostly sold to them. Isaac’s robot stories, for instance, went to Martin Greenberg’s Gnome Press. When I handed the manuscript over to Marty, he said, “I don’t have to read this, I’ve already read them all. I’ll write a contract. But I need a title and there isn’t one on the script.”

He was right. No new title occurred to me, but I’d admired the title on an Eando Binder robot story — “I, Robot,” borrowed from the great Robert Graves novel, I, Claudius — and it wouldn’t matter what we put in the contract, because the title could always be changed and titles aren’t copyrightable anyway. So said the contract, and the Binder title just never got changed.

Funny story: Isaac had told me that “his” Three Laws of Robotics were actually given to him by John Campbell — Isaac had just tinkered with the wording. But when the movie people actually made a film called I, Robot, the story that was filmed had nothing to do with Isaac’s actual stories but was something written and published by another writer, and all they used of Isaac’s work was the title and the Three Laws. Neither of which had been his.

 
In 1948, Isaac got his Ph.D. It is the custom before that degree is granted for the candidate to appear before a sort of jury of people who already have the degree, who question him or her at depth about various details of the particular field of study involved. When Isaac went before the group for his orals, he expected they would make him sweat and they did.. Then, when he was just about ready to flee from the room, the most senior of his questioners said, “Now there is one subject we haven’t touched on, but it may be the most important of all. Mr. Asimov, what are the properties of the compound thiotimoline?”

And Isaac knew he had it made. As he had. Not only the degree, but also a job, teaching biochemistry at Boston University (not to be confused with the famous Catholic school, Boston College) and no one could take it away from him because he had been granted tenure. With his wife Gertrude — Gittel for short — and their two babies, he could now look forward to a comfortable and stress-free life in New England.

He was, however, not quite prepared for superstardom.

 
Final installments coming up when I write them.

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, from left, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.

The Asimov store and apartment were just off one corner of the immense Prospect Park, on Windsor Place. I lived, with my mother, on the opposite corner, on St. John’s Place near where Eastern Parkway runs into Grand Army Plaza. It was a neat neighborhood to live in, with not only the Park but the fine Brooklyn Museum just across the street. I spent a lot of time roaming the park, which is a beauty, sometimes with Cyril Kornbluth or some other Futurian, more often alone.

Sometimes I would find myself at Isaac’s end of the park, and if the hour was respectable (as sometimes it wasn’t, since several of us Futurians had devil-may-care attitudes about sleep, and in those years Prospect Park was never closed), we might walk the extra block or two to drop in on Isaac. (Two notes here in the interests of full disclosure. I did also have some thoughts of the free malted that Mrs. Asimov was likely to offer me. And I did sometimes suspect that Cyril’s interest involved Marcia, Isaac’s sister. But maybe I was wrong about that. I don’t think anything came of it.)

As his brother, Stanley, began to mature into the role of full participant of candy-store chores, Isaac’s responsibilities began to ease a little. That was a good thing, since he had a busy life. In addition to his interest in science fiction, he had taken on another challenge. His father had given him a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was a gift that might have perplexed some teenagers, but not Isaac. He knew what books were for, so he picked up Volume 1, turned to the beginning of the A’s and began to read. He told me it was his intention to read all the way to the end of the Z’s, but whether he made it all the way, I don’t know.

    Isaac Asimov, 1940.

Isaac and I were pretty much of the same age. (We couldn’t be sure just how close, because neither of his parents was sure when his birthday was — sometime in the fall to mid-winter of 1919–1920, while mine was November 26th.) When we were both seventeen, we both made a major change in our educational status. Isaac graduated from high school and began college (and kept on with schooling until he reached the Ph.D. — one of the only two Futurians to get that far, the other being Jack Robins). While I quit school entirely and never went back.

Around about then, both Isaac and I formed the habit of visiting science-fiction editors in their offices. Isaac concentrated on a single one, John Campbell, who had recently replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding.

What Isaac did was write an actual story, leave it with Campbell and come back a month later to get the rejected manuscript (which he then mailed off to Amazing Stories, who bought it right away), along with a thirty-minute lecture on what Isaac did wrong and what he should have done right. So Isaac wrote a second story, trying to do it as Campbell had described. That got the same treatment; bounce with lecture from Campbell, acceptance by Amazing. And the third story was the charm. It was accepted by Campbell, as were scores of others over the next decades.

While I had followed a different course entirely, visiting nearly all the sf magazine editors there were — now a couple of dozen, as science fiction was having an unexpected boom. Nominally I was an agent offering them stories by my clients. I don’t think I made any actual sales, but when I confided to one of the new editors, a kind man named Robert Erisman, that I, too, would like to be an editor, he pointed me in the direction of Harry Steeger’s pulp chain Popular Publications, currently in the process of adding a number of new titles to their list.

I went there and offered my services to Steeger. Wonderfully, he took me on, allowing me to create two new science-fiction magazines, and suddenly Isaac had a new fallback market for the stories John Campbell didn’t want, and I had a prolific contributor.

 
That was quite a happy time for both of us, but what then came along was World War II.

That affected more people than just the two of us. Campbell suddenly discovered that editing the best science-fiction magazine in the world was no longer enough to satisfy him. Through friends, he found out that the Navy was willing to set up a small research facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to take on problems that the established teams weren’t handling, and set himself to help the war effort by recruiting people to staff it. Robert A. Heinlein was an easy choice: former Annapolis man himself, invalided out as a j.g. and desperate to get back into uniform. L. Sprague de Camp because he, too, couldn’t pass the physical for actual combat. Isaac was a natural. And there was also a good-looking female lieutenant better known by the name she acquired a few years later, Ginny Heinlein.

I’m not sure the team ever made much progress in their researches, but they did give it the old Navy try. Especially Isaac, who was yearning to find some kind of high-tech career to follow, since he had learned he was never going to be a doctor. No medical school would accept him, because there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement to limit the number of Jewish doctors threatening to convert the whole practice of medicine into a Jewish specialty. So quotas had been established, and they were all filled.

 
(Many more parts to come.)

 
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• Isaac

H. Beam Piper, 1957.

For a while, H. Beam Piper was one of the clients of my literary agency in the late 1950s. He had first attracted attention with his story “He Walked Around the Horses,” about a man who, having done that, apparently disappeared into another reality. But perhaps he is best known for his successful “Little Fuzzy” stories

Piper was a railroad man from birth. He lived in the Western Pennsylvania rail centers of those great continent-spanning lines that appeared after the Civil War. That war was important to Beam. He had strong feelings about such concepts as heroism and personal honor, and he took sides. The side he favored was the slaveholding but militarily exciting Confederacy. Mostly self-educated, Beam was thrilled by the exploits of. those dashing Rebel commanders, in particular by John Mosby, the Southron cavalry officer who made parts of Virginia uninhabitable by Federal troops or sympathizers.

When Beam mentioned to me that he had, on his own time and just for the fun of it, written a lengthy work about his hero, I reminded him of my Basic Maxim No. 1: “Writers write mostly for the fun of it. Agents exist to see they get money for having fun.” So he turned the finished piece over to me, and I promptly sold “Rebel Raider” for a decent amount of money.

With things like that and the better prices I was able to negotiate for his science fiction, Beam was enjoying a modest prosperity. He formed the habit of coming to New York once or twice a month. His first stop was usually at my literary agency office on Fifth Avenue just across from Madison Square, where we would usually pick up a few other writers to go out for dinner.

Beam had had little experience with exotic eats — high cuisine was not apparently popular in Altoona at that time — and so loved to experiment with menu items. Not always happily. When he ordered a dish that was meant to contain uncooked Italian ham, he sent it back to be properly fried. He wasn’t deeply into nutrition, either. When a waiter would bring him an entree with crisp green and red vegetables artistically surrounding it on the platter, Beam might spread his hands over his eyes and cry, “Vittamins! Vittamins! Take the foul things away!”

That happy state continued for some time, and then I closed the literary agency down and plunged into the line of work God (or Someone) had obviously intended for me all along, the telling of stories. I saw less of a lot of writers who had been clients, especially out-of-towners like Beam.

Stories floated in from Western Pennsylvania, first astonishingly that he had quit his job. That was a little worrying, in the case of a lifelong old railroad man like Beam, but it indicated good news. I had fixed him up with a new agent, my old friend (and one time boss at Popular Publications) Rogers Terrill. I was glad to see that things were working out for both of them. . . .

And then another story came in. Beam had gotten married!

That was a major shocker. In all the time I had known him, Beam had never shown the slightest flicker of sexual interest in any female. (Or, I hasten to say, in any male, either.) And the wedding seemed to have taken place — wait for it — in Paris. In Paris! In the city of lights, the home to romantics and lovers and all the other things that Beam had spent his life proving he was not.

It was impossible. But there it was.

That was all we knew. It seemed that none of us in our once-in-a-while-dining-together circle had maintained close contact with Beam, so we knew very few details.

Then we heard nothing much at all for quite a while. Then what we did hear was about as bad as it could be.

 
I heard the first part of the bad news right away. A neighbor called to tell me that Rogers Terrill had just died, she thought of a heart attack. That made sense. Rog’s Jersey shore house had about as much lawn to mow as mine did, which was the better fraction of an acre. Taking account how his face blanched and his limbs began to quiver when he cut it, Rog’s wife had long beseeched him to hire one of the neighborhood teenagers to handle that chore, but Rog was stubborn.

We arranged the sending of condolence cards and went on with our lives, and then, not very long later, we heard the rest of it. Beam was dead, too. He had shot himself.

Bit by bit, the rest of the bad news piled on. There had been a divorce, Beam had settled everything he owned in joint accounts with his wife, but now the lawyers were barring access to the funds by either party. Rog had failed to provide for a plan to carry on payments to his authors as checks came in in the event of his death, so money was silting up in trust funds that could not be tapped by humans until these other packs of lawyers came to an agreement, and Beam ran out of money.

There was no reason for that to happen. I wasn’t then particularly well off but I would, any one of us would, have been happy to go to any necessary trouble in order to front him enough for his three hots a day as needed to keep him alive.

But that couldn’t be. Remember Beam’s concepts of personal honor. He was incapable of asking for that kind of help. He was incapable of letting anyone know how desperately he needed it. He did still have two resources. One was a windowsill where pigeons came down to coo and flutter. The other was a 22-caliber handgun with a few rounds left in it.

(This is the story as I first heard it from one of Beam’s relatives. I have since heard slightly different versions from others, but I’ll stick with what I heard first.)

Every evening, then, Beam would open the window. When a fat pigeon landed there, he would shoot it in the head, clean it, pluck it and broil it in his little gas flame, and that would be his dinner. And when he had come down to a single remaining round, he put it in his own brain.

Now that I’m getting marginally better at one-hand typing, I can respond a little better to some of your remarks. In particular there were a ton (relatively speaking) of responses to my piece on the Science Fiction League, and two that I just can’t not reply to.

One is from a woman from Singapore whom I met there in 1985 and who is not named Han May. That, however, is the pen name she attached to her novel, Star Sapphire, which just happens to be the only science-fiction novel ever written by a Singaporean. Grand to hear from you, May. (And the rest of you please note that this blog may not be the most popular ever, but it sure does get to some far-off places.)

The other is from Jeff Berkwits (note also that I’m getting braver about using names), who wants to know something about the other science fiction league, the one that hardly anybody else has heard of.

This was a phenomenon of the early 1950s and it consisted of two young men who had a plan to bring science fiction to television in a big way. The design was to get as many of the field’s top writers into a syndicate (yes, I think they called it the Science Fiction League, disregarding Hugo Gernsback’s prior Wonder Stories club), which would then function sort of the way ASCAP and BMI (if those are unfamiliar to you, Google them) do for writers and composers of popular songs. And to get it off the ground, they had written to all the top sf writers in the New York area inviting them to come to an organization meeting in Fletcher Pratt’s apartment on West 58th Street.

Around 20 writers responded with interest. Around nine of them showed up at Fletcher’s at the appointed hour. The other 11 or so (all this is from memory and the numbers are probably not exact. But close) didn’t come in person. They sent me. At the time I was riding high with my literary agency and doing pretty well with it. I represented a clear majority of the best writers in the field; and all the writers who were my clients asked me what to do, and I said I would handle it.

Unfortunately, there was not a great deal to handle. The two organizers were personable and articulate, but they had very little tangible to offer. Their idea did have some possibilities, and we spent some hours discussing them. But at the end, they had neither on-signing money to offer — and that was essential, since signing would have caused problems for some who already had interest from actual producers — nor the names of any producers who were interested in acquiring rights to any of the assembled writers’ properties. I told them that, as far as I was concerned, if they could get any producer to express interest in working with their syndicate I would be willing to reopen the discussion for my writers, but that never happened,

 
Related post:
Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League

(*Before Campbell)

Astounding Stories, December 1933

The title of Astounding Stories was kept in its new, Street & Smith incarnation, the inaugural issue came out, and the new editor was named F. Orlin Tremaine.

Tremaine was not, of course, well-versed in science fiction. He was a Street & Smith veteran whom the management thought could do a creditable job of running a magazine in almost any field, even one unfamiliar to him. Tremaine thought so too, or at least thought that he could learn everything he needed to know about what sf readers wanted in a magazine from what the readers themselves had to say.

The primary source Tremaine had available for his instruction was fandom itself, now bigger and more active than ever before. All over the country, fans were organizing themselves into clubs, and almost every club began publishing its own fan mag (the coinage “fanzine” had not yet been invented). And what was in the fan mags? Almost always, there were critical discussions of almost every sf story published in any magazine. Tremaine studied these and kept in touch with some of their editors, thus greatly flattering those fan editors as he learned.

And Tremaine had one other resource for learning what fans wanted. That was — well — me.

You see, I had formed the habit of dropping by the offices of all the pro mags now and then to drop off manuscripts submitted for them. A few of them were written by me, others by fan friends and would-be writers, for whom I functioned as a literary agent, but that title didn’t begin to mean anything until some of us began to sell, quite a lot later on. At first Tremaine would send a (very) junior assistant out to the reception room to take the current collection from my hands, or, a little later, to return them as rejects, But then, once or twice, Tremaine himself began to come out and to chat with me for a few moments. And then — wonderful day! — he actually took me to lunch. I was then about sixteen. It was the most grown-up thing that had ever happened to me, and, oh!, how jealous all my fannish friends were when I told them about it

 
I don’t know if Tremaine had other secret agents at work in fandom to supply him with intelligence. I do know that he made good use of what he learned. He tumbled quickly to the fact that fans liked to believe that sf was in some way important and that you didn’t have to specify where in any story the importance lay. He used that wisdom to create a whole line of what he called “thought-variant” stories. He never said what thoughts they were meant to vary, nor was I ever able to deduce what unifying principle of thought-varying they were good for. No matter. The title sounded good and portentous, which I’m sure was what Tremaine was aiming at.

Tremaine’s Astounding was actually a better magazine than any of its competitors, at least (arguably) until Wonder mutated into Thrilling Wonder. What it didn’t do was produce a new group of major writers: L. Sprague de Camp and who else? In fact, the only other science-fiction writer I think of as a Tremaine discovery was called Warner Van Lorne, a name generally supposed to be a pseudonym hiding the identity of the real author, who perhaps was F. Orlin Tremaine himself. (Tremaine denied it.)

But then Tremaine returned to supervisory duties. Street & Smith cast about for a replacement to edit Astounding. They settled on an MIT dropout in his twenties. He had no editorial experience, but had written a few quite good stories of his own. His name was John W. Campbell, Jr., and he turned out to be the greatest editor sf has ever had.

 
Related post:
Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines

Some of the Futurians at my apartment in 1938. From left, front row: Joseph Harold Dockweiler aka Dirk Wylie, John B. Michel, Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollheim; center row: Chester Cohen, Walter Kubilius, me, Richard Wilson; top row: Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie, Jack Robins.

The “Quadrumvirate,” for most of its existence, ran the Futurians. We accreted to the club and to each other by adhesion to other clubs; the first was G.G. Clark’s Brooklyn Science Fiction League, which Donald Wollheim and Johnny Michel had left a shambles after they had kidnapped most of its members, one of them being me; then we began sending radar signals to individuals to seemed to be our kind of people, by which we mostly meant the kind of fan who desperately wanted to become a pro.

We found one of these in Connecticut in a person who was then a member of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, because the CCC not only gave him three hots and a cot for planting trees and doing other things for the environment, it also sent some money back to his family who could use it (remember, this was the time of the Great Depression). That was Robert A.W. Lowndes. Before long, he was able to change jobs, becoming a hospital orderly (thus his nickname of “Doc”) and then he made it to New York and the Futurians.

Continue reading ‘The Quadrumvirate’ »

Robert P. Mills

I have rarely been jealous of another editor — too much ego in the cosmos for that, probably — but there was a time at the Worldcon in Seattle in 1961 when I was thoroughly jealous of Robert P. Mills. He was in order for yet another Hugo — in all, he garnered three of them — and he had been telling me for two or three days how little he cared about his magazine and how little attention he paid to it.

He didn’t even read the stories that were submitted to it. True, he had some very good people reading for him, Cyril Kornbluth having been one of them, but he couldn’t remember a time when he had read every story.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but it seems the less I do on the magazine, the better the readers like it.”

It was impossible to dislike Bob; he was amiable and amusing and his wife made the best paella I’ve ever had. But I did wish for a time there that I knew his secret.

Swanson and the Brits

There is a story about H.N. Swanson making a phone call to a producer that goes like this:

H.N. Swanson

Swanie: “Sam?”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie?”

Swanie: “I’m taking over representation of your writer, Blodgett. You’ve been paying him $150 a week.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

Swanie: “You’ll have to raise him to $500. I don’t represent any $150 a week writers.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

True story? I don’t know. It could be. Swanie certainly had all the musculature to enforce his will on the biz. I don’t know how long Swanie had held the rights to some of the greatest properties of all time. I don’t know who his very earliest clients were — H.G. Wells, probably, Joseph Conrad, some Kipling, why not? — though I do refuse to believe in Beowulf. And what I especially don’t know and never did was what advantage Swanie saw for his own high-voltage agency coming to be known as the West Coast branch of mine. Of course the association wasn’t likely to make a lot of work for Swanie. At that point in the development of my agency the number of film sales had reached a grand total of zero.

But now everything was different. What I said to Swanie’s associate was, “I want Swanie to handle it.”

“All right,” she said, a little doubtfully, I thought. “I guess he’ll do that.”

And she told me that British Redifusion, the name of the people making the offer, was a London outfit that took TV channels from one place and transferred them to another. This, under the English licensing laws, gave them enough money in the bank to contemplate new careers as movie producers. So, contemplating the prospect of what an unplanned thousand dollars or two might mean to my own solvency, I went about my business.

That week my business included four or five stops on an abbreviated lecture tour to the Midwest and the Coast. I don’t remember what my first stop was — perhaps some management conference in Chicago — but when I got to my hotel, there was a message waiting:

Mr. Pohl —

Now that we have made contact we would prefer that future discussions take place between the two of us, rather than through a third party. As an evidence of good faith we are prepared to increase our offer to $10,000. Please let us have your acceptance by return.

When I called Swanie’s office the next morning, he wasn’t surprised that they would have preferred to dicker without him. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Anyway, they’re up to $12,500.”

And when I checked into my Denver hotel, they were at $22,500, and at $27,500 in Seattle, and by the time I was home the price was up over $30,000, and British Redifusion was trying to beat some sense into me — “Swanie is going to ruin the whole thing for you, you know. We can just walk away.” — and failing to beat sense into me.

Even Arnold Perl was showing some concern: “You did say that the Kornbluth family had some money concerns. It could be quite a while before our negotiations began to reach this kind of number.”

And when I called Swanie the next day, he said, “They’re at $50,000. What do you want me to do?”

I said — or screamed — “I want you to deal with it! Take it, leave it, whatever. I want you to make the decision.”

“Well,” he said, “I am encountering some resistance. I could go for $100,000, but I think it’s better to take the $50,000.”

How much is the $50,000 of the 1950s?

It’s enough that my share paid for a convertible, our first color TV, a dining-room chandelier that my then-wife Carol had her heart set on, and a few other odds and ends. I should say that $50,000 then was worth at least a quarter of a million now, but for the Kornbluths, the story was somewhat different. That great loving Mom that is the state of New York makes sure that the needy among us is cared for by rigorous laws, especially if they are lawyers. Since Cyril had not planned on dying but had let himself go intestate, the New York government appointed a lawyer to protect his interests — by which I mean the lawyer’s interests. So the Kornbluth half was not quite as big as my half. . . .

And if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure how I would do it.

 
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Me and the Biz
Me and the Biz, Part II