The Way the Future Blogs

Me and Milly

Psychologist Emile van der Zee, at the University of Lincoln in the U.K., is studying how dogs perceive differences between objects. When a human being hears the word “ball” he forms a visual image of something marked by its roundness — the most marked trait he observes by looking at it and handling it.

His dog, however, does not rely on those inputs. Its principal source of information is its mouth, and it isn’t clear what traits it considers most significant when dogs handle things with their mouths, which seems to suggest that size and texture are more important.

Researchers taught a collie dog named Gable made-up names for some objects, one of them being a horseshoe-shaped thing they named a “dax.” Asked to fetch a “dax,” Gable brought something larger or smaller, but not necessarily retaining the “shape” bias.

I have the dog. . . .

For the science-minded among us, there’s a home scientific experiment that you might like to try. For it, you will need the following research materials:

4–6 little opaque cups with lids
1 piece of tasty dog food
1 baby about 1 year old
1 pet dog
1 domesticated wolf
(optional) 1 each bonobo, chimpanzee, gorilla and other great ape

Procedure: In a room where none of the animals are present put the piece of tasty dog food in one of the cups, cover it and line them up on a table. Admit one of the animals. Point to the cup containing the dog food. Observe the response of the animal.

In general, if the animal used in this trial is either the pet dog or the baby of about 1 year or more in age it will then attempt to open the cup. If successful in that effort, it will then eat the piece of dog food. If it is any other kind of animal, it will probably pay little or no attention to your signal but will sniff each of the cups, perhaps attempt to lick your face or simply wander around the room.

You will probably suppose from this behavior that the dog and the baby have inferred that you are calling attention to the one cup that contains a reward — the piece of dog food — for the subject animal and thus attempt to find out what that reward is, whereas none of the other animals will appear to draw that conclusion. At least, that is the conclusion reached by the team of ethologists led by Jozsef Topal at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Interestingly, no other kind of living creature displays this ability to interpret a human signal except for the domestic dog and the human baby, which begins to be able to solve the problem of interpreting this nonverbal human signal around its first birthday. The wolf is the closest relative to the domestic dog, but even a wolf that has been raised since birth in the company of human beings, as well as any of the great apes, the closest species to human beings, fails miserably at this task.

It is suggested that this innate quality of dogs is what has made them particularly easy to domesticate.

   Judith Merril

For the first couple of years after World War II, I was living in Greenwich Village, as a civilian, along with my second wife, Dorothy Louise LesTina (about whom see The Way the Future Was.). We had a pretty busy life, the two of us, and although I had heard that there was a whole new science-fiction fandom in the city I was overfull of self-affairs (as the Bard put it) and myself did lose it.

Anyway, then Tina, visiting her parents in California filed for divorce. (There, too, check my writing about Tina for details.) In any case, I suddenly wasn’t married any more, and so I had time to get around to seeing if I and this new NYC fan community had any reason to get together.

It turned out that we did. I began making friends with young Robert Silverberg and young Charles Brown (yes, the Locus man, although all that was still very far away) and a bunch of other people who became close, long-time friends. And there was one really interesting thing, unprecedented in pre-war fannish history, and that was that quite a few of these new New York fans were female.

That was an unexpected but very, very welcome development. I soon became friendly with some of this new breed of femmefans, as they were (briefly) termed, and with one in particular. That one’s name was Judy Zissman. She was divorced and with an enchanting little girl whom she had named Merril. Judy wanted to be a writer and the two of us got along just fine.

Before I tell you some of the things that happened next, there is one thing you need to know about Judy right now, and that is the nature of her beliefs about sexual conduct. One of them was that females had as much right to sleep around as males do, and that that right was considerable..

That was one of the things I didn’t really want to discuss when I was writing The Way the Future Was. The good news is that now I don’t have to discuss it at all. In the last years of her life, Judy was writing her own memoir, and in it she was quite open about her views and her experiences.

Judy died before she could finish the memoir, but the two of us had begun having some of our children’s children growing up and taking over some things. One of them was our well-beloved granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary, who, having herself become a writer, finished the book for her. (It was published as Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. And listen, our kids and grandkids don’t fool around. It won a Hugo Award.)

So by all means, read all you like about Judy’s private business. Only read about it from her.

 
Before long, Judy and I had settled down to cohabitating in her gigantic New York apartment on East 4th Street.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The place certainly was gigantic, at least four big bedrooms, but it was also on the basement level of the apartment building To get to it, you took the elevator down one flight. It had been designed, and built, with the expectation that it would be occupied by the building’s janitor and his family. In America’s postwar boom, though, your average janitor didn’t care to be treated like an inferior. The present incumbent and family lived in modest prosperity, rent-free, in a perfectly rentable apartment above-ground. Judy had discovered the situation and grabbed the underground space for a pitiful rent, which I think may have been less than $25 a month.

For us it was perfect. Plenty of room for us each to have space to live and write, and space for little Merril and for the child’s pet dog, Taxi Driver, and even for Judy to rent out one of the extra rooms to the occasional single woman who needed a cheap place to stay. One was Gerry Schuster, rehearsal pianist for the New York Ballet. Another, at a different time, described herself as “the white New York girlfriend” of a famous musician — and proved it by getting us all comped seats to his Carnegie Hall appearance, and a visit to his dressing room after.

And, in particular, the one thing that the place was perfect for was parties. We had a lot of them.

We were quite prosperous at that time, you see. I was book editor and advertising copywriter for the rich Popular Science Publishing Company at a steadily increasing salary. While Judy had got herself an editorial job with Bantam Books, working for Ian Ballantine, who at that time ran it.. Between us we earned quite a lot, we didn’t really spend all that much, and God was good. Not only that. Bantam gave Judy the chance to edit her first very own science-fiction anthology (but entitled Shot in the Dark to disguise the fact that it was sf as much as possible).

And even that wasn’t the very best of it. There was the fact that Judy had, without warning and all by herself, had unexpectedly written a story of her own that just knocked the socks off everyone who read it.

Continue reading ‘Judith Merril, Part 1: ‘That Only a Mother’’ »

In the 1930s, few of us had any excess of spending money. What money we had was scarce and hard-won. Radio was our great professional source of comedy, with those two titans Jack Benny and Fred Allen dominating the airways. Mostly, though, we generated our own comedy and a favorite form of it was the shaggy dog story, as practiced in the haunts of New York City’s café society.

The professionals worked in nightclubs which were sometimes dingy rooms with a tiny stage, seats for perhaps 100 to 300 persons, and of course, a bar. The people performing there were professionals. We weren’t. We didn’t have furnishings, electronics, or stocked bars, we had very little but our physical selves. Fortunately, we needed nothing more.

We Futurians would collect on the front stoop at the apartment house at 2574 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. It housed the four rooms we called the Ivory Tower. After a period of talking, joking, gossiping, singing, making noise, we would start to move.

Cyril Kornbluth was likely to take part in one of these performances, Doc Lowndes almost as much so. Chet Cohen, Jack Gillespie and Damon Knight — or, as he preferentially wrote it in those days, damon knight — might be frequent performers, so might any Futurian or, for that matter, any other fan temporarily hanging out with us.

So when there were four or five of us gathered, we were likely to start the move, the narrator continuing to tell the story, and, when he came to the end, one of the others beginning a different one.

Nearly all the Futurian shaggy dog stories are lost to 21st-century performance. That’s not entirely a bad thing. The whole point of a shaggy dog story was that it needn’t have a point. When Futurians told their stories in the presence of ordinary fans, the expressions on the faces of the audience was often a sort of stupefied disbelief. A shaggy dog story was meant to be dragged out as long as possible.

I cannot write down for you the text of a classic Futurian shaggy dog story. It’s not just that my right hand would wither and fall away. You wouldn’t read it, either.

I will instead give you a short synopsis of the classic example of the Futurian shaggy dog story, which gave its name to the whole genre, and also “The Story of the Brass Cannon,” which is about the only story in the catalogue that has actually sometimes caused listeners to laugh right out loud.

The Shaggy Dog Story

A man who owns a shaggy dog has let it run away. He advertises in the all the local newspapers for the return of his dog. He says, “My dog has run away and I want him back. He is a shaggy dog and I will pay a reward for his return.

The next day he appears at the home of someone who says he has found the dog but when the dog appears at the door of the home, the man says, “Oh, not so damn shaggy.”

Continue reading ‘What Made the Futurians Laugh: The Shaggy Dog Story’ »

    Robert A. Heinlein
 

I mentioned that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers, Robert A. Heinlein, a while ago, and that got me to thinking about the man and what it was like to be his editor, at least for the magazine publication of a lot of his work. So I went poking around some musty old papers (and some of the even mustier crevices of my brain) and produced some memories to share with those of you who are interested.

As many of you (especially the ones who have read The Way the Future Was) already know, at the age of nineteen, principally because of dumb luck, I found myself the editor of two professional science-fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, and one of my contributors was that same Robert Heinlein.

I hasten to add that that statement conveys an implication which is unjustified. In such a relationship, it is supposed to be the editor who makes the buy-or-bounce decisions, and therefore it is the editor who dominates it.

In this case, that was incorrect. It happens there is a member of my immediate family who exemplifies the Pohl–Heinlein relationship of that period more accurately. Her name is Milly. She is a nine-year-old Jack Russell, and at every meal she sits at my feet, waiting for me to finish so she can lick the crumbs off my plate. This well describes how things were between Robert and me around 1940. Everything he wrote went at once to John Campbell. The few stories that John rejected went to me — to be run only under a pseudonym, to be sure, because that was how John had decreed it.

Still, it wasn’t too bad either for Milly or me. Milly makes a decent living out of my dinner plates (she also gets regular dog food, of course, but I know which she prefers), and I got some nice stories that John had been too opinionated to publish.

Of course, later on things improved for me. By the time I was editing Galaxy and If in the 1960s, John and Bob had suffered some sort of cooling off, and so I got the choice of everything Bob wrote. I didn’t buy it all, but I did buy quite a lot.

For years I was under the impression that the explanation for this was that Robert, for whatever reason, had told his agent not to offer anything to John. I’ve since been told that that’s wrong; the novels were indeed submitted first to Campbell and he rejected every one. If this is true, as I am forced to believe, then it just proves that even the best of editors has occasional fits of idiocy.

Anyway, I was, I admit, a little rueful about the Heinleins I was publishing because Robert had by then apparently begun to run out of steam. Novels like Podkayne of Mars were reasonably cute, but a long way below the products of his glory years. Then, without warning, along came The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, not only right up there with his best but maybe his very best novel ever. I began running it at once.

Naturally it won that year’s Hugo (so did the magazine I ran it in, largely because I had been lucky enough to get such good serials), and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

Me and Milly.

 
Today, Frederik Pohl completes his 90th trip around the Sun.

His wife and 18 of the best sf writers alive planned to celebrate by presenting him with a festschrift book containing stories and personal reminiscences on his birthday, but health problems interfered (not so much his as Betty Anne’s, the editor’s, who fell and cracked a caudal vertebra, requiring surgery, and then needed more surgery for an unrelated complaint, with longish recovery times for each), and pub date has been delayed till June 2010.

But Happy Birthday, anyway!