The Way the Future Blogs

Alfred Bester

When the Air Force decided they wouldn’t need my services in order to accomplish the defeat of Japan — the reason for that being that Japan, discouraged by the simultaneous American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Stalin’s last-minute invasion of their northern front, had finally given its struggle in World War II and surrendered — they sent me home to New York City. There I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and, for reasons connected with a book I was trying to write, went looking for a job in the advertising business.

I answered three help-wanted ads in the Sunday Times employment section. One of them, a small Madison Avenue advertising agency, Thwing & Altman, took me on as a copywriter.

It didn’t pay as well as I had thought a Mad Ave. advertising job would, but otherwise it was a likable enough job. Its good features included location. Within the perimeter of a circle with a ten-block radius there were literally hundreds of quite good restaurants where I could get a lunch of almost any school and ethnicity. I quickly learned that, even with all that variety available, there were a handful that I kept returning to, and one of those was in the lobby of the Columbia radio (not yet TV) network’s then New York headquarters, the present skyscraper not yet having been built. The restaurant was frequently used by people from the network, and one of the reasons I liked it was that every once in a while I would run into Alfie Bester, also looking to grab a lunch there, and we would have a nice meal together, spiced with shop talk.

 
The thing to remember about the career of Alfred J. Bester is that he was first and foremost a money writer. He had the talent to do that well. He could write almost anything — science-fiction stories, comics, radio-serial scripts, you name it, and he could do them all at the top of his form — and what particular kind of thing he did write, depending on how the vagaries of the market fluctuated at any given moment, was whichever one of them was paying the most dollars per hour of punching typewriter keys.

Alfie had begun writing science fiction, back in the ’30s, because he had a number of friends — including Horace L. Gold and Mort Weisinger — who worked as editors at Standard Magazines, publishers of, among many other pulps, the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. They coached him in the writing of sf, and bought his practice stories. (Well, they didn’t buy all of them. A very few they rejected, and of those I bought one or two when, as a teenage editor, I was editing Astonishing and Super Science Stories).

Then Alfie discovered that comics were paying better than sf just then, so he tried his luck at comics, discovered that they were as easy to write as sf — for him — and switched his personal production line to comics.

Then he got a tip from his wife, Rolly, that changed everything.

Continue reading ‘Alfie’ »

Hal Clement, right, hands me the Skylark Award at Boskone 2 in 1966. The con chairman, Dave Vanderwerf, looks on.

Hal Clement was a nearly ideal client Almost everything he wrote was a sure sale.

The only real problem was that Hal (whose real name was Harry C. Stubbs) found it almost impossible to say no to a publishing-minded friend. He had written a really good novel called Mission of Gravity, but unfortunately, before I came on the scene, Harry had given it to the semi-pro sf book publishing company Shasta Publishers as part of a complex package deal intended to include a paperback and assorted other editions. Unfortunately, as happened with a number of the semi-pros, problems intervened, and the whole project came to shuddering stop.

Meanwhile Hal’s fine novel, perhaps the best he ever wrote, was lingering in hyperspace, waiting for some means to be devised so that readers could at last enjoy it.

Cleaning up log-jams of this sort is one of the most important duties of a literary agent. I went to work on the problem and before long had a release from Harry’s commitments to Shasta and the several other publishers involved in the deal, thus freeing me to send it where I had always known it belonged for its first appearance — that is as a serial in Astounding, John Campbell’s magazine.

Who promptly rejected it.

What Campbell said in his letter of rejection was something like, “wonderful story, Fred, but as you see it simply doesn’t divide well into three installments.”

That brings us directly to the second most important part of an agent’s duties, which is namely to prevent editors from making total fools of themselves. So I didn’t argue with John. I didn’t say anything at all to him. I just put the manuscript in the bottom drawer of my desk for a few weeks. Then I took it out and looked at it.

It was some 300 pages long. I turned to page 100 and hunted around until I found something that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and I marked that “Part 2.” I did the same on page 200, marking that one “Part 3,” and then I gave the ms. to my secretary, instructing her to retype three or four pages before and after those pages, and when she had done that I sent it back to John with a little note.

I didn’t lie to him in the note. I hardly ever lied to an editor, except when absolutely necessary. I just said, “How do you like it now?” And he sent back a check, and it was just about the best-liked serial he ever printed.

 
When I stopped being an agent, Harry and I remained good friends. Actually, we ran into each other just about as often as before, because both Harry and I enjoyed most of the East Coast’s annual cons and were generally invited to them. The best feature of them, in my view, was Harry’s every-con lecture on what was new in astronomy.

Between Harry’s talks and Isaac Asimov’s once-a-month column in F&SF, I considered myself the most scientifically up-to-date layman in Red Bank, New Jersey. Would they both were with us still.

 
Related post:
Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs

After Cyril’s cremation, I hung around a day or two longer, because there were a couple more things I could do for the Kornbluths. Cyril had left a few unsalable and unfinished fragments, which Mary pulled out for me. I could see where he had given up on them, but I was a more resourceful plotter than Cyril had been. Besides, most of them had that wonderful total command of the medium that Cyril had begun to develop.

I told Mary that I could find ways of turning most of them into actual stories, and if she liked I would do so and sell them, and we would split the money. She said she liked, and so I took them home. (One of them, “The Meeting,” won a Hugo Award, the only Hugo Cyril ever got.)

But I had another, somewhat larger idea. “How,” I asked Mary, “would you like to start a new career as an anthologist?”

That one she liked a lot. It was something that she might perhaps be really good at, because she read a lot and seemed to have definite opinions — all you needed to become a successful anthologist, provided, that is, that you could find a publisher to buy your book.

But that was my job. I paid a call on that most decent of editors, Walter I Bradbury at Doubleday. “It should have a pretty good shot,” I told him. “All of the reviewers know her name, and every one of them liked her husband’s work. There should at least be some sympathy sale, and — ” But I stopped talking there, because Brad had actually been saying “yes” and “all right” as soon as he heard the name.

The book, Science Fiction Showcase, happened as planned. Mary made her choices, I helped her clear the rights. It came out in 1959. It sold some copies. And it disappeared into old-anthology heaven, because what it didn’t have enough personality to make readers want more. I should have worked on that with Mary. I didn’t, though.

There was one unexpected complication. I had been planning to ask the contributors to donate their stories for free, so she would get to keep more of the advance. Mary wouldn’t allow that, though: “No charity. I Will pay what every other anthologist pays.” And so it was.

She sent out checks to all the contributors or their agents. Since a big chunk of the stories she liked came from my agency, she sent the biggest check to me. I hope I had the decency to waive commissions when I gave the writers their share.

 
Most of the more dangerous brushfires that surrounded the Kornbluths now safely extinguished, I went back to my own home and my own work and the long haul.

(And, yes, the long haul is what comes next, after I write it.)

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 2
• Cyril

The Battle of the Bulge left Dirk Wylie unable to hold a regular job, so we made him — and ultimately, me — into a literary agent.

After World War II had grabbed most of us Futurians by the scruff of the necks and flung us to various odd destinations in all sorts of unexpected parts of this planet of ours, it did, somehow get itself ended and there we were, civilians again, and back in New York. I had had a relatively undemanding war, ending up with doing public relations at the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in Caserta, Italy (with my spare time spent in a resort hotel on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius). Dirk Wylie, however, hadn’t had anywhere nearly as nice a war as I did.

Dirk’s war hit bottom in the early winter of 1944–45. That was when Hitler’s Wehrmacht made one last attempt to take back control of the western front in the Battle of the Bulge. It was a vicious and protracted fight, and Dirk, then an MP sergeant, was in the middle of it. This cost him. At one point, he jumped hastily out of a truck and landed in a very wrong way, doing something seriously bad to his spine.

That was the end of the war for Dirk, and the beginning of years of hospital stays and unremitting pain.

By the late 1940s, he was discharged from the New York-area Veterans Administration hospitals — not because he was cured but because there was nothing more they could do for him. Now Dirk was a civilian again, with one unanswerable question: What was he to do with the rest of his life? A normal nine-to-five job of any kind was pure fantasy. The only good part of the situation was that he didn’t need to make much money. The Veterans Administration had recognized their obligation to him and awarded him a substantial pension. But a living wage wasn’t the whole of Dirk’s needs. He was just barely out of his twenties, and didn’t like the prospect of doing nothing for the rest of his life.

I spent a lot of time with Dirk and his wife, Roz, discussing that question, and we came up with an idea that seemed worth pursuing. He could become a literary agent.

 
There are all kinds of literary agents. Some of them can do very good things for their clients, making sales for them that the writers would not have made by themselves and sometimes acting as story coaches to help their clients write more salable material. Others (as my mother used to say when totally exasperated) are not worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

So what made the difference between the saviors and the total wastes? One, a good agent needed to know the market. Two, s/he needed to know good work from bad. Three, s/he needed to be able to let clients know how to tell the difference between good and bad, too, and how to encourage them to get better.

Of course, Dirk didn’t have personal knowledge of all these things, although, as a Futurian, he had been exposed to a fair amount of shop talk over the years and had made a few sales himself. But what he did have was me.

Continue reading ‘How I Lost My Oldest Friend
(and Gained a Literary Agency)’ »

I have one more little story that I want to tell you about our Custody Wars, and then we can leave that unpleasant subject forever. It concerns the way in which Judy was able to make people who should have been neutral declare loyalty to her.

I was working in my Fifth Avenue literary agency one day when the door opened and a man named Sam walked in. (His name wasn’t actually Sam, but I see no reason to tell you what his real name was, although there are quite a few people around who would have no trouble guessing it.) Sam said the reason he had come was that he had been working for the Scott Meredith agency, Scott had fired him and he needed a job. Would I like to hire him?

Such a thought had never occurred to me but, you know, it wasn’t a totally bad idea. To some extent the earnings of the agency depended on how much time I devoted to making sales. I didn’t trust anybody but myself with the major sales, but there were all those routine ones that required no more than putting a manuscript in an envelope with a friendly covering letter, and getting it onto the desk of somebody who might buy it.

I wasn’t deep in financial miseries yet, although I was beginning to get close, so I said, “All right, you’re hired for a trial month. Here’s a building pass and an office key, and come in tomorrow and start familiarizing yourself with the work.” Big executive, right? Shrewd judge of men. Quick to seize a random opportunity.

So the next day came along, and Sam began to familiarize himself with the locator cards, and which Western could go to, say, Mike Tilden’s Western pulps but by no means to those of the Thrilling group, and all that stuff. And then, just a few days later, one of my favorite writers came in, looking seriously annoyed. “Hey, Fred,” he said, “Horace bought that novelette of mine two weeks ago. Why haven’t you sent me a check?”

That was an unexpected embarrassing moment — truly unexpected and seriously embarrassingly embarrassing — and then there was another like it, and then I figured out what was going on. Sam, who is dead now, was using his office key to come back at night, after everyone else had gone home, and make a careful study of my deposit slips and check stubs. And then he passed it all to Judy. Who passed it on to my clients. With the result that now everybody knew as much as I did about my most private juggling of the funds that were keeping me going.

Was I pretty close to theft there? I was. The only thing that was different was that every last human being who had money coming was getting it in full, just a few days or weeks late. But no, I had no right to do it.

Just an overpowering need.

 
Of course I fired Sam five minutes after I found out what damage he had done, but of course the damage was already very serious. What Judy knew, if she chose to spread it, was enough to threaten the relation of trust I had with some of my favorite clients.

She did choose to do that, and it did have that effect, for a few clients. But it didn’t put me out of business.

And what about old Sam, here? How would you describe him? Stinking, treacherous, backbiting piece of human excrement? Something like that, maybe, or at least those were the kind of words that crossed my own mind.

But do you really think that that’s the way Sam thought of himself? No. I don’t think that for one second.

Remember what I said about Judy’s phenomenal ability to attract loyalty from others. I think he considered himself an indispensably good friend to someone who urgently needed his help in her righteous struggle with me. And that is why, for the purpose of these writings, his name will remain as just Sam.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 9

Fantasy Book No. 6, 1950.

Sometime in the early 1950s, I was putting together Beyond the End of Time, an anthology for one of Doubleday’s subsidiary imprints. That was something I liked doing, so I did it fairly often.

It was an easy thousand dollars or so, because I had already read about a zillion stories that I liked well enough to be willing to package for some new readers and because all those old issues of Astounding, Amazing and Wonder had not yet been mined by so many other anthologists that every good story had already been reprinted by six or seven anthologists in six or seven books. I needed to include a bunch of those old superstars, because my editors felt that the names were what sold the books, but I also liked to include a couple of pieces that would be new to almost everyone. And I had one candidate in mind from the very beginning.

It was a story that had appeared in a semi-pro sf magazine from California called, if I remember aright, Fantasy Book. Its title was “Scanners Live in Vain.” It was about a bizarre kind of spaceflight, set in a bizarre future world, and it was signed as by someone named Cordwainer Smith. So I included it in my lineup, and then had the problem of finding out who could sign a permission for the use of the story and accept the payment for it. “Cordwainer Smith” smelled very much like a pseudonym to me. But for whom?

At first I thought it likely that it belonged to one of the existing pros because it just seemed to be too professional in quality to have been written by an amateur. However, stylistically it was very unusual, and not a bit like the style of any writer I could think of, So, as deadline time grew close and I had no signed permission I fell back on Plan B.

Plan B was Forrest J Ackerman. Forry knew just about everybody who was or ever had been connected with science fiction and had set up a literary agency of his own that capitalized on that fact. So I got my permission, the author got his money when Forry had tracked him down, and one day when I happened to be in the office, a man named Paul M.A. Linebarger showed up to thank me for publishing his story and to ask if I would be interested in some others he had written.

His timing was perfect. I had become editor of Galaxy when Horace Gold’s health made it impossible for him to go on with the job, and I was looking for strong new writers. Paul was just what the doctor ordered. Not only was he a welcome new voice in that every-issue cantata I tried to conduct, he had one trait I appreciated in particular. He liked to write. He did it in volume. And the stories were all good. Some I liked better than others, but I don’t think I ever turned down a single word he wrote. . . .

Well, except for titles. When Paul was on target, his titles were unlike anyone else’s, and better, but sometimes the muse seemed to have deserted him. I changed fairly many — not by any means a majority, but a significant fraction.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember most of them. If I could go through a complete file of the magazines, I could probably pick them out, but I don’t have one. The only instance I can remember for sure was “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell.” I don’t remember what Paul had called the story, but I thought it dreary … while what I do remember is that on the very next page of the ms., in another context, he had written the phrase “The Ballad of Lost C.Mell,” just begging to be made the title.

(If anyone is desperate to know which is which they probably could satisfy themselves by visiting Syracuse University’s library. After I left, I believe Bob Guinn, Galaxy’s publisher, donated all of the magazine’s papers to the university for a tax break, and the stories should all be there. If you come across a manuscript in which the original, typed title has been crossed out and a new one penciled in, that’s one.)

Writing science fiction was of course not Paul’s sole enterprise. He spent a lot of time on his main job, which was something weighty for the American State Department. I don’t know exactly what. He didn’t volunteer much, and I didn’t press him because I had learned, in the years when I was wandering the Earth to lecture on American science fiction as a sort of ice-breaker for the working diplomats, that there were things they didn’t want to talk about. You’d be chatting amiably with somebody in Washington — or in some embassy or consulate in Moscow or Leningrad or Stockholm or or Singapore or Auckland and at some point they would kick the conversation into a ninety-degree turn and, if you asked why, they’d just say, “Well, we’re not supposed to talk about that.”

Paul did say that the principal reason they considered him indispensable in Foggy Bottom was that they needed him to lecture to some groups of foreign diplomats. These were the people with not quite adequate command of English, and what they liked about Paul was that he could speak u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-y S-L-O-W-l-y, so the foreigners had time to translate his remarks in their minds. But what those lectures were about he never said.

And then he would go home and write stories for me for relaxation.

If you would like to know everything that Paul was writing in those days, just look at my magazines. Up to a point, at least, it’s all there., just about every story Paul wrote in the mid-’60s, because he sent them all to me, and I couldn’t make myself reject any of them. . . .

Well, that’s true with one exception. At that time, Paul’s agent was Harry Altshuler, and one day Harry got in the mail an envelope from Paul that contained not one but two new stories. The bad part of that was that for reasons I can only guess — psychosis? Alcoholic delirium? — Harry had long ago imposed on himself a truly loopy rule prohibiting ever sending to an editor more than one story by a single author at a time. So he sent one story to me — which, whatever it was, I bought and published — and the other, a piece called “On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard,” which, obediently to his maniacal Rule No. 1, he shipped off to Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Which, of course, not being incompetent, they bought and also published.

When I found out about it, I had words with Harry. This led him to suspend that rule for the duration of his life. But it was too late to prevent the loss of a story I really wanted. The damage was done.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Cordwainer Smith, Part 2