The Way the Future Blogs

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.)

 
Related post:

• Isaac

L. Ron Hubbard, left, and John W. Campbell

As the 1940s mutated into the ’50s things changed.

All through World War II, and for some time after, Astounding had been king of the hill — eagerly read not just in America but also in England, where a young Arthur Clarke was getting around to mailing in his first story, “Rescue Party,” and in Germany, where in wartime days, Wernher von Braun had been able to get his treasured subscription copies only by means of a false name and a neutral mail drop in Sweden.

Around 1950, though, competitors began to appear — first The Magazine of Fantasy, a more literary take on the field, then Galaxy, a more relevant one, along with lesser titles from others. One might have thought that competition could awaken John’s competitive spirit. It didn’t seem to. He had gone through a period of looking for new editorial challenges before America got into the war, with such ventures as the fantasy magazine Unknown, then an attempt to remake Street & Smith’s hoary old aviation magazine, Air Trails, into a science-news magazine called Air Trails and Science Frontiers, neither of which survived very long.

Then for a time, he seemed adequately fulfilled by concentrating on his services to the war effort. (When the Stars and Stripes ran a piece on new rocket weapons one of the authorities they quoted was described as “John W. Campbell, Jr., physicist and war work consultant.” I sent the clip to John for his amusement, but he may not have been amused. He didn’t reply.)

But when the war was over and he was merely the editor of one really great science-fiction magazine again, he seemed to enter a new phase. That was as a believer in some weird and improbable kinds of — I don’t know what else to call it — magic.

 
A disclaimer. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one to whom John talked non-stop about all the wonderful and clever things that had been accomplished by “us” — which I took to mean the presiding triumvirate who ran Dianetics/Scientology. That, as John described it to me, consisted of three more or less equal-ranked persons: L. Ron Hubbard, the almost forgotten skin doctor Joseph Winter, and John himself.

I believe that each of the three was considered by the other two to deserve the ranking because of services rendered; in Ron’s case inventing the subject matter; in John’s the fact that it could hardly ever have got off the ground without the mighty boost John gave it with his magazine.

And Joe Winter?. I don’t know the answer to that for sure. I didn’t know Winter well, only met him a few times, never talked with him or about him with either of the other two at any length. But he did have a legitimate M.D. and did wage a rather persistent, if quixotic (and markedly unsuccessful), campaign with the medical establishment to grant Dianetics and/or Scientology some respectful kind of recognition. So I think, with no more evidence than I’ve shown you, that what Winter represented to the other two was a touch of legitimacy.

And, yes, I wish I did know some other people who had heard as much of John’s proud progress reports whom I could ask what they thought of it all. But I don’t.

I’m pretty sure that John’s audience for that sort of conversation would have included just about everybody he saw. But I don’t know who all the others were, and rather few of them can be still alive.

 
Related posts:

• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Riding High

John W. Campbell in 1957
(via efanzines.com)
 

The home base of Street & Smith at the time that John Campbell came aboard to edit Astounding was a remarkably rickety old building at the corner of 17th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York. Well, that’s not strictly true. It wasn’t one old building. It was several of them, stitched together by knocking through walls and rerouting hallways to connect them.

This imposed a class system for getting into the offices. When John arrived for work each morning, he had to enter through the doorway on West 17th Street, because that was where the time clock was. (Yes, John Campbell had to punch in and out on a time clock, at least in the early days.)

Whereas when someone more important, like me, wanted to visit John in his office, we entered through the main door at 79 Seventh Avenue, like gentry. After telling the receptionist what we wanted, and providing we passed inspection, she summoned a guide to convoy us, through passages lined with thousand-pound rolls of pulp paper for the presses on the ground floor, to the ancientest and most decrepit elevator in the city of New York. Its controls were not push buttons, as we degenerate moderns suppose that every proper elevator’s are. They were not even the up or down handles that our parents remember from their youth. A rope dangled from rooftop to bottom of the elevator shaft, and if you wanted to make the Street & Smith elevator go down you caught the rope and pulled it downward, for up you pulled it upward, and the elevator stopped when you gave a little reverse tug on the rope.

That wasn’t the end of your journey. When you got to the right floor, you still had a country mile to hike before you got to John’s modest office. We were no longer in the original Seventh Avenue building — though we might as well have been when the presses began to roll and all the linked buildings began to shake. Then, at long last, we’re there … and John Campbell puts down the DeVilbiss with which he’s been spraying his throat.

“Good morning, Pohl,” he says — we knew each other for ten years before he ever addressed me as Fred — “Do you know why television can never replace radio in the American home?” And I knew that all was well with the world and John Campbell had begun work on his next month’s editorial.
 

That was one of the things I learned from John Campbell. He began each new month with some such polemical statement, trying it on everyone who came into the office. We were all encouraged to disagree with it, which meant that by the end of the month John had heard just about every disagreement that could be registered against his thesis, and had had time to think of rebuttals … so that he was ready to write his next editorial. (In which he proved that TV could never replace radio in the home because TV required attentive watching. Therefore housewives couldn’t turn it on just for company as they could radio.)

In John’s office, he sat at a rolltop desk. Why such an old-fashioned piece of furniture? I once asked him. “Because,” he said, poking a Camel into his long cigarette holder and lighting up, “these buildings are firetraps and smoking in them is against the law. So when the fire inspectors come by the switchboard girl gives everybody a special ring. We put our cigarettes out in the ashtrays and put them inside the desk with the top rolled down, and open the windows. Then we just wait for the inspectors to go away again.”

John was not alone in the room. He shared it with Catherine Tarrant, listed on the masthead as “Ass. Editor” until I pointed out to John that that might lead to unintended readings. Kay Tarrant had come with the job. Her official description was secretary-assistant, but as John preferred to do most of his own typing she spent most of her time copy-editing the manuscripts he bought (and those bought by his successor, Ben Bova, as well) to prepare them for the printer.

That was not necessarily an arduous job. John did not normally go in for the kind of lavishly creative editing that characterized, say, Horace Gold’s tenure at Galaxy (and infuriated so many of his contributors), and when John took a notion to rewrite sections of a particular story to make it more like John’s image of what it should have been, he did it himself.

But Kay Tarrant, too, had impulses that went beyond the simple correction of faulty grammar, spelling or punctuation. She hated — hated! — smut. And she devoted her life to erasing every trace of it from the magazine.

This, of course, had an effect on the corps of science-fiction writers, a sadly rowdy lot. The more troublesome ones initiated a contest to see who could get something bawdy past Kay Tarrant. Many of them tried. All saw their best inspirations slain on the copy desk until George O. Smith stepped up to the plate. He won when he got past Miss Tarrant’s eagle eye his definition of a tomcat as “a ball-bearing mousetrap.”
 

I can’t avoid a personal reminiscence here. When John left us and Ben Bova took over as editor of Astounding, the first story Ben bought was my “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.” As those who remember the story can attest, it is simply riddled with naughty words and impure thoughts — not because I can’t express myself without them but because there was no way to tell this particular story in their absence. (It’s a pretty good story, too. I think it’s my best novelette.) When he gave the ms. to Kay Tarrant for copyediting, he warned her that it would have to be edited with a very light hand.

All the same, he told me later, she got no more than about three lines into the first page before clearing her throat and saying, “Oh, Ben? Do you really want me to leave in this — ” “I do,” he said. “Leave it.” And three minutes later, when she cried, “Ben! Really!” it was, “Leave it again.”

Mine was the first example of what is loosely called adult prose that Ben bought but by no means the last, and ultimately Kay learned to live with the new rules and soldiered on.

 
More follows whenever I find time to write it.

 
Related posts:

• The Quadrumvirate
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Part 2

(*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

(*Before Campbell)

Astounding No. 1, January 1930

Astounding/Analog had two (or three) editors before John W. Campbell, Jr., came along with his magnolious “Golden Age” of people like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and all. However, none of those original editors were the ones that made the magazine great. That task was left for John Campbell, on his way to becoming what some authorities (ahem!) would call the greatest editor science fiction has ever had. (I’ll say more about that later.)

The original Astounding Stories of Super Science was the creation of a rather small New York pulp magazine publishing company called Clayton, which, sometime in the vertiginous year of 1929, elected to get bigger by adding some new titles. It was a reasonably intelligent decision, considering that they didn’t know what was going to happen to Wall Street that October, but it had one built-in flaw. It was only for eleven new titles. It should have been for twelve.

This requirement was an artifact of the way pulp magazines were printed. The text interiors were printed on the big black-and-white rotary presses on the cheapest available woodpulp paper. The covers, however, were printed in full color on glossy paper, and the most economical way to do that was to print them twelve at a time. If they were to proceed with only eleven titles it would mean leaving the twelfth space on the special paper empty and throwing away the part of that expensive paper not used.

Since printing a cover was a significant fraction of the cost of printing a pulp magazine it would be a pity to waste the cost of one. It made more sense simply to add a twelfth magazine. The question was, what kind of pulp should it be?

I don’t know who suggested that it be science fiction. Most authorities think it was Harry Bates, but I have a hunch that it might have been a man named Douglas Merriweather Dold. He is sometimes referred to in the old records as the editor of the new magazine but in fact was probably only an assistant, and was also the brother of the science-fiction cover artist (William) Elliott Dold. And I think that what Doug said was something like, “Tell you what we could do. We could put out a book” — all pulp editors of a certain vintage called their magazines books, perhaps because they wished they were— “of this scientifiction stuff that old Hugo Gernsback is doing. We could call it something like Astounding Stories of Super Science.”

And so they did, and so the new magazine came out into one of the worst years for publishing (or for almost anything else in the annals of American business.) in history It was the beginning of what they called the Great Depression.

 
In spite of the calamitous economic conditions, the new magazine survived. The actual editor was that same previously mentioned Harry Bates, who studied the stories in Gernsback’s magazines and the often better ones that from time to time appeared in all-fiction magazines like Argosy, and from them all derived an editorial policy that might have gone something like: “Action-adventure stories that simply could not happen here and now.”

That seemed to be a policy congenial for the writers. Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Lilith Lorraine and Captain S.P. Meek helped to fill the issues, and were generally happy to see some of their work in the new Astounding. One reason for that was the fact that all twelve of the new magazines had been planned in the prosperous and optimistic boom times of 1929 before the October crash. So as a matter of policy, the new magazines paid the writers not only well but, even more important, paid them promptly on acceptance.

Given a better economical climate, the Clayton Astounding might have endured a good deal longer, for it had some pretty good stories and even one or two that have to be called classics, like Farewell to the Master” (aka “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” by Harry Bates himself). Indeed, it was not, or at least it was not directly, the Great Depression that did it in, It was only that Clayton, foreseeing that some crippling charges would be coming due from their printer, sought to forestall them by the bizarre expedient of buying up the printing company first. It was a bold move. It didn’t work. It had required signing some notes, and when the notes came due, Clayton didn’t have the resources to meet them. Then they were out of business.

So for a bit, Astounding Stories — the trailing words “of Super Science” had been dropped after the first year — lay dormant. When Harry Bates discovered that there were enough stories in the inventory and enough printing materials, already bought and paid for, for one more issue, he promptly brought it out, dated March, 1933. Then nothing, until the larger — and solvent! — company of Street & Smith decided to buy it, and Astounding was reborn.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related post:
Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith

Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey (Photo by David Dyer-Bennet)

Quite a few years ago —well, about seventy of them, to be exact —I was the teen-age editor of two professional science-fiction magazines for the giant pulp firm of Popular Publications. I didn’t pay much for the stories that went into my magazines but I did pay something, and so most of the science-fiction writers of that era dropped by from time to time to see if I would care to relieve them of some of their stack of Astounding rejects.

People like hoary old Ray Cummings and bright-minted new stars like L. Sprague de Camp came by my little office at the end of 42d Street, just where it stops dead at the East River, and one day our switchboard girl, Ethel Klock, informed me that I had a new visitor named Lester del Rey.

Though I’d never met the man I knew the name; I had seen it, enviously, any number of times on the Astounding contents page. “Shoot him right in!” I commanded, hoping that he would come bearing manuscripts, and a couple of minutes later there he was, short, angel-faced, no more than a couple of years older than myself — and, yes, with two short-story manuscripts in his hands!

There is an established procedure for such events. It doesn’t allow the editor to snatch the typescripts from the author’s hands, or the author to throw them in from the doorway without a word. There has to be a little chatting back and forth first, so I had to wait until Lester was back in the elevator to start reading. The stories were short. I finished them both in a quarter of an hour.

Then I rejected them both.

What was wrong with them? I don’t remember. What were they about? I don’t remember that, either. And not only did I bounce them, so did every other editor Lester showed them to. Years later I asked him what had become of them. He said he had no idea, didn’t remember anything about them, and hoped I would never ask him such an embarrassing question again.

So that was my unpromising start to knowing Lester del Rey. Fortunately, later on things got better.

 
Later on things did, but it took a few years. John Campbell got over his nasty habit of rejecting any of Lester’s stories, so Lester had nothing to sell me; and then the Air Force invited me to join them for World War II so I had no magazine to buy them for, anyway. Then, postwar, Lester and I ran into each other now and then at various gatherings, and then in 1947 we ran into a big one. That was the ’47 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

We were both there. When it was over we were having a cup of coffee together somewhere when we got to thinking. We had had such a great time mingling again with our nearest and dearest (as well as some of our farthest and dislikedest) from the world of science fiction that we decided we really ought to organize some sort of local sf group so we could do more of it. So Lester commandeered a couple of his friends and brought them to my Greenwich Village apartment, where I had collected a few of mine, and we sat down and created the Hydra Club. (Why Hydra? Because there were nine of us there, and the mythological Hydra had had nine heads.)

This was a definite public service, because for years thereafter the Hydra Club had become the place where sf writers from out of town visited when they came to New York in order to find people they could talk to. (Out of town sometimes meant very out of town — in the case of Arthur Clarke or W. Olaf Stapledon, the United Kingdom; in the case of A. Bertram Chandler, from about as far away as you could get without leaving our planet entirely, namely Australia.)

Nor was Hydra merely a place where you could exchange trade gossip with colleagues. Lester and I both found wives there, and we two couples made a habit of going to cons together. What made that easy was that after a while Lester and Evelyn del Rey came out to visit with Carol and me and our growing number of children in our big old house in Red Bank, New Jersey. The del Reys’ intention was to spend a weekend. They wound up staying seventeen years — well, seventeen years in the neighborhood, anyway, since after a while they bought a house of their own down the street. It might have been longer, but one day, driving to a small vacation in Florida, their car got entangled in the wake of an eighteen-wheeler and was sent spinning off the road. Evelyn was thrown clear, but then the car rolled over on her and she was killed.

After that Lester could not stay in their house. He sold it for a pitiful amount —furniture, books, wine cellar and all — to the first person who thought to make him an offer, and moved back to the city.

 
For all those years we had been keeping busy, Lester writing, me doing some of that but also fooling around with editing and other diversions. After putting together a string of anthologies for Ian Ballantine, I wound up as editor of a couple of science-fiction magazines, Galaxy and If. It was not a well-paying job but I loved it. It gave some welcome perks, including a full-time assistant.

When I needed to hire a new one I interviewed a recent Barnard graduate named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who seemed to be bright and energetic enough for the job, but presented two worrisome problems. One was that her specialty was the works of James Joyce and she knew nothing at all about science fiction. That, I figured, could be handled; I would not ask her to make any buy-or-bounce decisions, and everything else I could easily teach her.

The other struck me as tougher. Judy-Lynn was an achondroplastic dwarf, not much over three feet tall, and I didn’t know how she would manage to reach the top drawers of the filing cabinets. But I took a chance, and actually she worked out rather well, turning out to be capable of managing anything at all. After I left the magazines, Judy-Lynn went to work for Ballantine Books, winding up running the enterprise, which is why its current avatar, Del Rey Books, was named after her.

Lester entered the picture when my publisher, Bob Guinn, urged me to add a fantasy magazine to my group. I had nothing against fantasy, but I didn’t have a great deal of interest in it, and anyway I didn’t want to add to my work load. So I persuaded Lester, now a widower for some years, to come aboard as its editor. He did well, and the three of us got along well, too, in fact better than I realized until I got a phone call from Lester to say that he and Judy-Lynn were getting married, and would I care to be his best man?

I would. They did it. And after a while, he joined Judy-Lynn at Ballantine, and — no surprise to anyone who knew them — with Lester handling the fantasy side of the operation while Judy-Lynn continued with the sf, they were fabulously successful, leading the field in the number of their books that wound up on the New York Times bestseller list.

What made Judy-Lynn successful? The answer to that is simply that she worked with (and/or married) three of the best editors around, studied what they did attentively and learned from all of them. (I know that makes me sound immodest, but I learned from the best there was, namely J. W. Campbell.)

Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off — once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry — but it was arduous. Some authors dumped the man who had made them bestsellers in favor of some other editor who might give them a less stressful life.

So the del Reys were riding high, but it came to an end. One of the penalties of being an achondroplastic dwarf is the likelihood of a short life span. After some very good years, Judy-Lynn had a massive stroke and then died of it, and a few years later Lester followed her.

Other husband-wife editorial teams in science fiction and fantasy — Ian and Betty Ballantine, Donald and Elsie Wollheim — have done wonderfully well, but in making that Times list, no one has done better than the del Reys, and I don’t really think anyone ever will.

When G.G. Clark started the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, I do not think he knew what he was getting into.

Clark was a grown-up adult human being, in his late twenties or thereabouts. He had a job, and he had a Collection that made even Dirk Wylie’s look sick. (Mine was sick to begin with. I had a fair number of books and magazines, but no place to put them, except for what space I could make by pushing the dishes and cans of soup off some kitchen shelves. That strikes me as odd. There were not many books in my house when I was a kid, except my own. My father read nothing but Westerns, which he kept on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. My mother did not seem to read much at all, which is strange: she was a pretty literate person, could recite poetry at great length, had been valedictorian of her graduating class, even once held a minor editorial job with St. Nicholas Magazine for a brief time. A happy one for me; she used to bring home the review copies of children’s books. But I was fifteen before I lived in a house with a real bookcase.)

Clark not only had every issue of every science-fiction magazine ever published, but they had that fresh- from-the-mint look of having been bought new from the corner candy store, rather than being picked up second-hand. He even had a few variorum editions, such as a copy of Amazing Stories on which the red plate of the three-color cover had failed to print, so that it was all ghostly blues and greens. He also had more sf books than I had ever seen in one place before, and he even had science-fiction fan magazines, of which I had never previously even heard.

I think Clark must have been less than delighted with us scruffy adolescents who turned up in response to his postcard. Not one of us was within ten years of his age. At least one — Arthur Selikowitz, a tall, skinny polymath who entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute not long after at the age of thirteen — could not then have been quite eleven.

At our first meeting, the first thing we did was to elect Clark chairman. There was no alternative. Not only did he rank us all (Member 1), but it was his hall. We met some of the time in his cellar library (allowed to touch The Collection only one at a time, and with Clark hovering vigilantly by), sometimes in a rented classroom of a nearby public school. The term “nearby,” of course, refers to its proximity to Clark. All the rest of us had to travel miles.

It is hard for me to remember what we did at these meetings, and I think the probable reason for that is that we did very little. There was a certain amount of reading the minutes and passing amendments to the bylaws, and not much else. After a while we decided to publish a mimeographed fan magazine of our own. I became its editor (largely, I think, because I owned my own typewriter), and it may have been the first place in which words of mine were actually published.

I haven’t seen a copy of The Brooklyn Reporter in many years and doubt that there was much in it worth reading, but it was marvelously exciting to me then. My words were going out to readers all over the country! (Not very many readers, no. But quite geographically dispersed.) People I never saw were writing letters to comment on what I had done.

It was through The Brooklyn Reporter that I first met Robert Lowndes — only as a pen pal at first, because he lived in faraway Connecticut, and neither of us could see any way of bridging that near-hundred-mile distance. But we became good friends by correspondence, quickly found interests in common (we both were addicted to popular songs), and shared others: he initiated me into Baudelaire, Mallarmé and J.K. Huvsmans, and I introduced him to James Branch Cabell.

You see, what we science-fiction fans mostly wanted to do with each other’s company was to talk — about science fiction, and about the world. Robert’s Rules of Order didn’t seem to provide for much of that, so we formed the habit of The Meeting After the Meeting. After enduring an hour or so of parliamentary rules, we troops would bid farewell to our leader and walk in a body to the nearest station of the El.

On the way, we would stop off at a soda fountain. This had three very good features: it gave us an informal atmosphere for talk, it supplied us with ice-cream sodas, and it got rid of G.G. Clark, so that we kids could be ourselves. The only bad part of it was that we had to adjourn the regular meetings pretty early, since none of us were old enough to stay out very late. But, considering what was happening at the regular meetings, that was no sacrifice.

I really don’t know why the meetings had to be so dull. I wonder why it never occurred to any of us to invite some real-live science-fiction writer to come and bask in our worship. That would have been a thrill past orgasm for every one of us, maybe even for Clark. It wouldn’t have mattered who the author was, and I’m sure some would have come. For one thing, if anyone had ever suggested it to Hugo Gernsback, he would surely have flogged any number of them into our arms to boost sales.

I know why it didn’t occur to me. I was simply too naive. I wasn’t aware that writers lived in places where they could be met. I don’t know where I thought they did live. I may have thought they were mostly dead — that seemed to be the case with Mark Twain and Voltaire and a lot of my other favorites. If they were alive, I suppose I assumed they occupied some tree-lined, gardened, pillared suburb of something like heaven.

But still, why didn’t the idea occur to someone more sophisticated than I?

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 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Hugo Gernsback

My ever-baffling computer pulled this out of some long-ago storage area, which was odd because it is obviously from a time long before I owned a computer. I have no idea who I wrote it for or where it was published, but when I read it over I thought it might be interesting enough to put in a 2009 blog. Tell me if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, assuming I can find any.

Amazing No. 1

In the Beginning there was Hugo Gernsback, and he begat Amazing Stories.

In the fullness of time, about three years’ worth of it, a Depression smote the land, and Amazing was riven from him in a stock shuffle; whereupon he begat Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, looked upon them and found them incomplete, and joined them one unto the other to be one flesh, named Wonder Stories. And Hugo looked upon the sales figures of Wonder Stories and pondered mightily that they were so starved-ass rotten. Whereupon a Voice spake unto him, saying, “Hugo, nail those suckers down,” so that he begat the Science Fiction League, and thus was Fandom born.

If there had not been a Science Fiction League, it would have been necessary to invent one. The time was ripe. In the early ’30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a proud and lonely thing. There weren’t many of us, and we hadn’t found each other to talk to. A few activists had done their best to get something going, digging addresses out of the letter columns of the science-fiction magazines and starting tiny correspondence clubs, but the largest of them had maybe a dozen members, and for the rest of us we had the permanent consciousness of being alone in a hostile world. The hordes of the unblessed weren’t merely disinterested in science fiction, they ridiculed it.

From Gernsback’s point of view, what he had to sell was a commodity that a few people wanted very much indeed but most people wouldn’t accept if it were given away free. He couldn’t do a lot about recruiting new readers, but he was aware that there were a great many in-and-outers, people who would buy an issue of Wonder Stories now and then, and thus were obviously prime prospects, but had not formed the every-month addiction that he sought. Well, sir. The arithmetic of that situation was pretty easy to figure. If the seventy percent of his readers who averaged three issues a year could be persuaded to buy every issue, he would triple his sales. These were the visions of sugarplums that danced in Hugo Gernsback’s mind.

He had a special need to think of something, because by the early ’30s even the magazine industry was grinding down under the Depression. Even the science-fiction magazines. Three of them existed, but they were reducing their size, cutting their prices, dropping back from monthly to every-other-month publication; in 1933 Astounding went out of business entirely, and then for a brief little while there were only two. (A few months later Street & Smith bought the magazine from the wreckage of the Clayton group of pulps and started it up again.) What Hugo hoped for from the Science Fiction League was a plain buck-hustle, a way of keeping readers loyal.

What we fans hoped for from it was Paradise. As soon as the notice appeared, I rushed to join, but my membership number was 490, even so. I didn’t mind. I was thrilled to think that there were 489 others like me, when I had in my whole life seen only one or two. The announcement promised that chapters would be chartered in all major cities; club news would be published in every issue of the magazine, members would be encouraged to become each other’s pen pals — what fun!

Hugo promised that some of the members would be foreign — imagine discussing Spacehounds of IPC or The Man Who Awoke with someone who lived in England or Australia! Imagine joining a chapter, sitting in a room filled with people who knew what you meant when you used terms like “time machines” or “ray guns,” and didn’t laugh! Imagine just knowing people who did not think science fiction was junk.

But, you know, in all honesty, a lot of it was.

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