The Way the Future Blogs

Photo by Josef Stuefer (Flickr)

See, I’ve got this novel that I owe my publisher and it’s way, WAY overdue. Its composition was repeatedly interrupted, first by Arthur Clarke inviting me to write The Last Theorem with him and then by some of those pesky almost-90-now health problems. I’m back on it now and the end is (almost) in sight, and I’ve even been able to write some new stuff for this blog. Including a couple of what, I hope, will be regular features.

One will be next. It comes about because I once thought that, having worn all the hats at one time or another, I might like to write a how-to-be-a-writer book. I never did it, partly because I think there are too many of them around already, but I have over the years sometimes thought of things I would like to say in it. So next will be the first installment of Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom.

Blogging in our cabin aboard MS Ryndam.
Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

So here I am, back home at last after visiting Kauai, Bora Bora, Tahiti and four or five others of the most beautiful tropical paradises God ever made — and now doggedly tunneling my way through mountains of letters, emails, contracts, phone messages and — what is most relevant here — comments from all you wonderful people who were kind enough to tune in on the beginnings of The Way the Future Blogs and drop us a line about it.

In regard to which there is something I must say. I care about you all — beloved grandkids, cherished old friends and just high-quality human beings in general — and wish it were possible for me to respond personally to each of you. Unfortunately, due to the useless condition of the witch’s claw that was once my sturdy right hand, it just isn’t. But please keep reading and letting us know what you think! (Did I mention that you did so in such unexpected volume that you burned up all our bandwidth and head blogmeister Dick had to run out and buy more?)

And what’s ahead? Oh, all kinds of stuff. In the universe of personal reminiscences of some of science-fiction’s giants, there are pieces on three of the field’s greatest married editor-publisher couples, Ian and Betty Ballantine first, because it is already on the computer, then Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey and Donald and Elsie Wollheim. Plus sketches on Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth and some added material on Sir Arthur C. Clarke … and, of course, whatever other fancies happen to occur to me as I sit before the keyboard. See you then!

MS Ryndam Upper Promenade
 

Every other cruise ship I’ve ever been on, several other Holland-America vessels among them, has had a place which they admitted was a ship’s library, where they kept books made available to relieve passenger boredom when shore visits, lectures and native dance performances by members of the ship’s crew failed. MS Ryndam indeed has just such a place, with even more books than usual, but it isn’t called a library anymore. Now it’s an “Explorer’s Lounge,” I suppose to avoid those boring booky connotations, and to make it trendier still, it even has its own built-in copy of a Starbucks. (O tempora! O mores, for that matter.)

So being bound to the Ryndam’s literary resources for a month has somewhat the feel of spending a month in the country home of a well-to-do friend whose library is significant, but whose interests don’t resemble mine. There isn’t a speck of science fiction on the shelves, for example. No Heinlein, no Clarke, not even a Bradbury, and definitely no me. (This I think pretty chintzy of Holland-America, since such large chunks of one or another of mine were written on Holland-America ships.)

Still, I did find a fair number of volumes I was glad to read. As people do sometimes ask for lists of what books I’ve been reading for pleasure, I will append the record of what I’ve just finished. (You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I won’t mind.)

First, a couple that I started but didn’t finish: Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps was about how the central importance of their revolution in thought wasn’t relativity but the attempt to pin down the concept of simultaneity. (I thought it a interesting idea, but Galison bogged down in an interminable discussion of the struggle to establish time zones around the world, which I had recently read all about from another source, and I gave up.)

Then there was Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? Dowd is one of the acutest, sharp-toothedest political writers around, and when I found this in the same “Science” stacks as the Galison, I had to pick it up. Barring a few pages about future chromosomal possibilities, though, it wasn’t about science but about the current situation in feminism. On this subject I am well informed by my wife, so I put the Dowd back and picked up the fat book on politics, courageously simply entitled Politics, by another of my all-time favorite writers on the subject, Hendrik Herzberg.

This reprints some of his columns of the last four or five decades. It is all good stuff, but all the recent material I had already read in The New Yorker, where it first appeared, and the older pieces are, well, older. Reading about Bernardine Dohrn and Yoko Ono was more interesting in the ’70s than it is toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Finally, Augustine. I picked it up because I had a mild interest in the man whose Confessions have stayed in print for more than a millennium and a half, was interested enough in the lively opening pages to think I might want to read it all the way through and then discovered that those were the only lively pages in the book. Not being greatly interested in the vicious infighting among the various Christian sects (and having anyway got the general idea long before from L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall), I gave it up and started reading something else.

This one not only was good, it made me laugh out loud, startling the dickens out of my somnolent fellow-explorers in the Lounge. The book was called Mary, Mary, and it was written by at least two of the most interesting writers around: Ed McBain, which is a pseudonym of Evan Hunter, which in turn is a pseudonym of Sal Lombino, whom I had known slightly back around 1950, when he was a sort of office manager for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

The story goes that Lombino answered the phone one day when a publisher was calling.

Publisher: “Listen, we have a great novel title and we need somebody to write the novel for it. The title is The Blackboard Jungle and it should be about troubles in our high schools. Got anybody who could do that?”

Lombino: “Sure we do. How about, let me see, oh, yeah. How about, uh, Evan, ah, Hunter?”

Well, something like that, anyway. I don’t guarantee I’ve got all the details straight.

Anyway Lombino did a great job with The Blackboard Jungle and, a little later, an even greater one under the McBain name with his splendid “87th Precinct” stories. Mary, Mary is about crimes in Florida rather than in the somewhat disguised New York City 87th Precinct, but even second-string McBain is worth a read. And this is the part that made me laugh out loud:

(P. 133.) “I’ve always felt,” the narrator of the book says, “that people should be called what they wish to be called, don’t you? If Salvatore wants to be called Evan, I owe him the dignity and respect of free choice, which isn’t always so easy to come by in the land of the free and home of the brave.”

Well, I haven’t got around to talking about some books I’m glad to have read, but I’m using up blog space faster than I like. So I’m going to quit this now. Maybe I’ll get back to the others another time.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather off-handedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

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