The Way the Future Blogs

I don’t know what kind of a writer I would have been if I hadn’t met Dirk Wylie and, through him and with him, the whole world of science-fiction fandom. Much the same, I imagine. I almost certainly would have been some kind of a writer — I’m hardly fit for anything else. And I had been trying to write sf at least a year before I met Dirk, in idle moments in classes in the eighth grade. But it would have taken a lot longer.

I owe a lot to fandom. From Don Wollheim, John Michel, Doc Lowndes — and later from Cyril Kornbluth, Dick Wilson, Isaac Asimov and others — I learned something about what they were learning about writing; we all showed each other our stories, when we weren’t actually collaborating on them. In the fan mags, I acquired the skills necessary to prepare something for public viewing — and the courage to permit it.

What I am not as sure of is whether all the things we learned then were worth learning.

Science fiction was purely a pulp category in those days. Sometimes the emphasis was on gadgetry, sometimes on blood-and-thunder adventure; when it was best, the high spots were vistas of new worlds and new kinds of life. In no case was it on belles-lettres, nor was it a place to look for fresh insights into the human condition. What we learned from each other and from the world around us was the hardware of writing. Narrative hooks. Time-pressure to make a story move. Character tags — not characterization, but oddities, quirks, bits of business to make a person in a story not alive but identifiable. So I learned how to invent ray-guns and how to make a story march, but it was not for a long, long time that I began to try to learn how to use a story to say something that needed saying.

In fact, when I look back at the science-fiction magazines of the twenties and the early thirties, the ones that hooked me on sf, I sometimes wonder just what it was we all found in them to shape our lives around.

I think there were two things. One is that science fiction was a way out of a bad place; the other, that it was a window on a better one.

The world really was in bad trouble. Money trouble. The Great Depression was not just a few million people out of work or a thousand banks gone shaky. It was fear. And it was worldwide. Somehow or other the economic life of the human race had got itself off the tracks. No one was quite sure it would get straight again. No one could be sure that his own life was not going to be disastrously changed, and science fiction offered an escape from all that.

The other thing about the world was that technology had just begun to make itself a part of everyone’s life. Every day there were new miracles. Immense new buildings. Giant airships. Huge ocean liners. Man flew across the Atlantic and circled the South Pole. Cars went faster, tunnels went deeper, the Empire State Building stretched a fifth of a mile into the sky, radio brought you the voice of a singer a continent away.

It was clear that behind all this growth and acceleration something was happening, and that it would not stop happening with huge Zeppelins and giant buildings but would go on and on. What science fiction was about was the going on. The next step, and the step after that. Not just radio, but television. Not just the conquest of the air, but the conquest of space.

Of course, not even science fiction was telling us much about the price tag on progress. It told us about the future of the automobile; it didn’t tell us that sulphur-dioxide pollution would crumble the stone in the buildings that lined the streets. It told us about high-speed aircraft, but not about sonic boom; about atomic energy, but not about fallout; about organ transplants and life prolongation, but not about the dreary agony of overpopulation.

Nobody else was telling us about these things, either. A decade or two later science fiction picked up on the gloom behind the glamour very quickly, and maybe too completely. But in those early days we were as innocent as physicists, popes and presidents. We saw only the promise, not the threat.

And truthfully we weren’t looking for threats. We were looking for beauty and challenge. When we couldn’t find them on Earth, we looked outside for prettier, more satisfying places. Mars. Venus. The made-up planets of invented stars somewhere off in the middle of the galaxy, or in galaxies farther away still.

I think we all believed as an article of faith that there were other intelligent races in the universe than our own, plenty of them. (I still believe it! What puzzles me is why we haven’t seen any of them as visitors. I wish I could swallow the flying-saucer stories — I can’t; the evidence just isn’t good. But the absence of hard facts hasn’t shaken my faith that Osnomians and Fenachrone are out there somewhere.) If polled, I am sure we would have agreed that wherever there’s a planet, there’s life — or used to be, or will be.

Now, alas, we know that the odds are not as good as we had hoped, especially for our own solar system. The local real estate is pretty low quality. Mercury is too hot and has too little air; Venus is too hot and has too much, and poisonous at that. Mars is still a possibility, but not by any means a good one — and what else is there? But in the mid-thirties we didn’t know as much as we do now. The big telescopes hadn’t yet been completed, and of course no spaceship had yet brought a TV camera to Mars or the Moon.

But we believed.

 
Stay tuned. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire
• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Afterwords
• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Wind farm.

• About a quarter of a million American water mains burst every year.
• Henry David Thoreau once started a campfire to cook some fish he had just caught and inadvertently burned down 300 acres of Connecticut forest.
• Wind energy employs more people than coal mining.

Donald Wollheim wasn’t satisfied with having his first story published in Wonder Stories. He wanted to be paid, too.

Hugo Gernsback wasn’t paying his writers. Johnny Michel had finally collected his five dollars, but not without endless annoyance, and Donald Wollheim had not been paid in full even then. They had come to the Brooklyn Science Fiction League to tell us their stories, and to seek vengeance.

All this inside information was revelatory to me. It was more exciting than anything that had happened to me before, at least since I discovered science fiction, maybe since I discovered sex. I don’t know what airy-fairy assumptions I had made about the mechanisms by which real authors supported themselves through their work. I suppose, if I thought at all, I guessed that once your work appeared in print, the government, or somebody, handed you a blank checkbook, which you filled out as you needed, or chose to want, their money.

Now that I have had some years of dealing with publishers on my own, and some of them even more reluctant than Hugo to cough up the scratch, I can see the picture in full holographic 3-D. Gernsback was not alone. Other publishers have been known to stiff their authors.

It is a matter of how much money is coming in, call it X, and how much is going out:Y. When X ≥ Y, all is serene. But when X < Y, then you have the problem of eleven holes in the dike and only ten fingers to plug them with. When you can’t pay all the bills, which bills do you pay? You placate the people who can hurt you the most. You pay your own salary, or at least enough to keep you going. You pay the printers, because if you don’t they won’t print your next issue, and then you’re out of business. You pay your paper supplier, because if you don’t he won’t give the printer any paper to print your next issue on. Out of what’s left you pay at least enough of your taxes, rent, and utilities to keep things from being turned off. And then you start to think about the writers.

All this is, of course, immoral. Without the writers none of the other things matter in the least. But it is the way it is, and one reason for it is that writers do not write only for money. They write to be published. All writers like to be paid for what they write, but few would stop writing just because the money was sparse or hard to collect. And those few are easily and instantly replaced out of the immense pool of millions, literally millions, of would-be writers who would sell their sisters to Buenos Aires for the chance to have one story published anywhere, paid for or not.

Of course, the stories written by the pros are probably likely to sell more copies for you than the cleaned-up salvage from the slush pile. But maybe you can’t afford to be choosy. If given the choice between publishing a magazine with so-so stories (but stories you can get) and a magazine made up of blank pages because the really good writers won’t give you any more credit, which would you do? You would probably hold your nose and publish. If you didn’t, your place, too, might well be taken by some would-be publisher ready to fill the vacuum.

Not all publishers think that way — in fact, let me put on the record right now that the business ethics in publishing seems to me a lot more praiseworthy than in most industries — but some do, even in the best of times. And in the Depression that was the Law of Nature, red in tooth and fang.

Clayton Magazines’ Astounding had paid its writers punctually and well. Clayton’s Astounding also had gone bust in 1933. Amazing and Wonder were a whole lot less benevolent, but they were still alive.

It’s interesting to try to calculate just how much money Gernsback traded the goodwill of his writers for. It probably was not very much — in the thousands, but probably not in the tens of thousands. But then there wasn’t all that much money around in the science-fiction field at that time. In the mid-’30s there were only three science-fiction magazines, often bimonthly.

I estimate that the total amount paid to writers by all three of them in an average year was not much over fifteen thousand dollars. All owing for pseudonyms, there may have been as many as fifty individuals selling stories to one or another of them in that period, and what they had to divide among themselves in return for feeding all us famished fans the fiction we lived on was something like six dollars per week per writer.

I could have made that calculation at the time, if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care.

Listening to the wisdom that flowed from Johnny Michel and Don Wollheim was like standing on the mountain, staff in hand, while the Voice spoke from the burning bush. I could not believe I was so lucky, and I wanted to be part of it.

I came back from the meetings and reported all this Gospel to Dirk Wylie, who cursed his parents for settling in Queens Village, so far from Bay Ridge and the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, and worked out stratagems for making the next meetings with me. We came. We sat at the feet of the masters, in one soda fountain or another, while the ice cream melted in our sodas and our malteds went flat, and we resolved to be just like them.

And when it turned out that Johnny and Donald were inviting us to join a crusade to set these iniquities aright, we took it as not debatable that we should sign up at once. What Donald proposed was that all we SFL members should secede, start our own clubs, assert our independence of The Evil One, and let the world know him for what he was.

It sounded great. We thrilled to the idea of causing so much commotion and trouble for Gernsback that he would perforce reform. Or kill himself. Or be driven from the society of human beings — choice of any or all of the above — and so we entered into the great world of science-fiction feuds.

 
Related posts:

• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!

By Elizabeth Anne Hull

Elizabeth Anne Hull

While I’m struggling to lose the twenty pounds I gained from several weeks of prednisone, I do appreciate the irony that, for most of the last century, our problems with food in the West — particularly North America and Europe — usually stem from the availability of too much tempting, cheap food, while the rest of the world has historically always struggled with the threat of famine. A plea for CARE came to my mailbox last week, and ordinarily I would have immediately sent them a contribution, but I delayed because I was too busy to write the check. (I did however, drop off a grocery bagful of nonperishable surplus from our pantry to the food pantry at the Palatine Township office.)

I also didn’t have the time to open my latest National Geographic till this morning. Aside from Playboy, NG is probably the magazine most subscribed to for its pictures and not its articles. The June issue shows pages and pages of pictures of the current problems in the world and the looming Malthusian crisis that will affect America. I recommend everyone should not only see these pictures — which give a glimmering of the extent of the current problem and leave to one’s imagination what the future will hold — but also read the article.

Meanwhile, I’m getting together another bag of groceries — Spam, tuna, dry cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, Triscuit, canned corn, peas, and green beans — to take to the food pantry for the hungry close to home, for those who have suddenly lost jobs, young healthy men as well as those who traditionally depend on the kindness of strangers: women with children and the elderly. I’ll probably never see their faces, or if I do, I won’t know that they received our bounty. But I’ll feel better about myself and my weight problems.

Palatine Township Food Pantry

Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2008

Like a lot of other people, I voted for you, although you weren’t my first choice. Actually you were my third. But as the campaign progressed I began to see how revolutionarily hopeful your candidacy was, and how wrong I had been ever to prefer anyone else.

The first thing was your brilliant style of fund-raising. American candidates normally put the arm on the biggest and richest bankrolls they can for the fattest checks, with the result that every candidate achieving election does so owing a large debt to individual persons and institutions, including such powerful entities as the National Rifle Association and (forgive me, dear wife the college professor) the teachers’ unions. All of which take care to see those debts get handsomely repaid in the currency of government favors.

But, President Obama, you didn’t do that. You raised your campaign funds primarily from individuals and in relatively small amounts. So you owe a debt too, but in so universal and diffused form that it can best be described as a debt to the American people in general.

Which is actually what every elected official is sworn to honor anyway, by the terms of his inaugural oath. So at one blow you have weakened one of the two great wickednesses in American politics, the favoritism given the rich and powerful.

Of course that is only one of the sins that besmirch our democracy. What about that other one, the power of the single-issue voter? Why, you’ve done something about that, too.

You said you wanted to be the president of all Americans, not just the ones who voted for you. That’s a pretty sentiment. It has been adopted — at least rhetorically — by just about every elected official in America since the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam, and if there is one of them that ever has put that principle into practice once elected, his name escapes me.

But look what you did, President Obama. The pastor of your church made some repellently unpatriotic remarks about the American treatment of African Americans. Others you have chosen to honor were gays or gay-bashers, liberals or conservatives, and a storm of disapproval rose against each one of them.

I am not privy to your thoughts, President Obama, but I think I see what you are doing. You are putting into practice that famous, and famously neglected, Golden Rule, “You and I disagree on some issues, but let’s work together on the others anyway, so we can jointly keep making the world a better place.” So there you have struck heavy — I hope mortal — blows against two of the most crippling evils in American polity. Don’t stop.

 

Even after I had come to the conclusion that you would make the best president of all the people in the field, I had some lingering doubts. You were, after all, visibly a person of color. Was it possible that the American voter could elect an African American to the highest office in the nation?

About that I kept my fingers crossed. Indeed, I think you might well have been defeated at the polls, except for two wholly unexpected factors. One was the surprisingly feckless campaign waged by John McCain (along with the appallingly snide one of his vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin). The other was the catastrophic self-immolation of the world’s financial structures. It is these things that put you so triumphantly over the top, and if I were a religious man, I would thank God for these healing scourges.

So carry on, President Barack Hussein Obama. There is a huge job ahead of you. I don’t know how you are going to heal the festering sores of recession and corruption that are all around us — but I know you will try your very good best. And whatever tiny bit I can do to help, I pledge to undertake.