The Way the Future Blogs

 
This first paragraph is only for people who have seen the L. Ron Hubbard movie Battlefield Earth. If you haven’t ever seen it, count your blessings and do your best to keep it that way for the rest of your life, because it is truly awful.

But if you ever have, we want to ask you two questions:

1. How many movies have you seen in your life? (Your best guess is good enough.)

2. Numbering them No.1 for the best to the last of the total numbers you’ve ever seen for the worst, what number would you give Battlefield Earth?

We”ll tell you why we’re bothering you about this after the jump, but please make up your mind about the answers first.

Continue reading ‘Battlefield Earth’ »

It’s called The Messenger; it stars Woody Harrelson and it’s the story of a lifer Army captain and a used-up, shot-over staff sergeant who get assigned to the stressful job of bringing to GI families the news that their son, father or husband has just been killed in Afghanistan.

I never heard of anyone in the cast but Harrelson and expected little from the film. But it really got to me. I think it would to you, too.

 
All the time some of us put in to learn Klingon no longer avails, because the new lingua faana is the one devised by linguistics professor Paul Frommer for James Cameron’s Avatar. With an existing vocabulary of hundreds of words and using sounds that are familiar in terrestrial languages — but not all of them in English — it sounds musical and plausibly foreign.

Language lessons at your next con?

    Frank Herbert, 1978.
 

As promised, we made Hawai’i our destination on our usual get-somewhere-out-of-the-cold trip one winter. Frank and Beverly Herbert had built themselves a house in the district of Hana, on the island of Maui, an area renowned for its beauty even in the state where there is very little that isn’t. Betty Anne and I had talked about taking a look at Hana before, but never as a serious plan, because Hana wasn’t easy to get to. You had to drive for a long time on a bad road through tropical near jungle to get there and that didn’t sound like much fun. But now a brand-new puddle-jumper airline that linked Hana to the capital of the island had just become available. It required no use of that unlovable road, and anyway, that’s where the Herberts were.

So we booked the flight and a hotel. Hana was indeed a particularly interesting area to see, home to a few movie stars and once a beloved retreat for, among others, Charles Lindbergh. When Lindy’s flying days were over, he spent the end of his life in Hana, and his family elected to bury him here. The area also has a waterfall nearly a hundred feet high and all sorts of beautiful growing things. Betty Anne saw most of them with Bev as a guide, while I mostly stayed near the hotel pool or my typewriter.

Of course, we were staying in the hotel, and not with the Herberts. We had known in advance that that wasn’t possible. Their multi-roomed house, though it had six baths, had only one bedroom, and that was their own. (They didn’t like the idea of houseguests.) At dinner, Frank conceded that they were beginning to believe that it might be nice to be able to put friends up now and then, after all, as long as they weren’t in the same house as the Herberts themselves. They were thinking that maybe, someday, they would put up a little guest house down the hill for that purpose

I don’t think that ever happened. Beverly’s health worsened and not long afterward she died. She and Frank had been married for nearly forty years.

 
In 1985, Betty Anne and I decided to take in the Worldcon in Australia, a continent I had never set foot on. We enjoyed it a lot, especially the sightseeing, although just as we were getting ready to leave our home, one of Ted Turner’s producers invited me to write a script for a new Turner project. It was an attractive prospect, but it meant I would have to write a treatment for the script while we traveled, and courier it back to America from somewhere along the way. But that seemed doable, and by the time we got to the con, we had had several really long flights. That sort of thing is good for my writing. I did some of my best work on airplanes, with my weird but lightweight and almost soundless Brother typewriter on my tray table.

At the con, we were happy to find that Frank had turned up there before us, in fact now equipped with a good-looking, brand-new wife to show off. Her name was Theresa, and they too had been exploring Australia as a sort of honeymoon. Frank was full of stories about the shooting of Dune, mostly in Mexico, and the two of them seemed about as happy as newlyweds are generally supposed to be. Well, with one exception. Somewhere along the trip, Frank said, he had picked up a touch of food poisoning, and he was going to have to watch his diet for a while.

That was a self-diagnosis and, sadly, it was wrong.

The next time I saw Frank was about a year later. I was at O’Hare Airport, waiting to board my flight to Seattle, where I was to take part in a brainstorming session about future small arms for the U.S. military when I heard my name called. It was Frank. He looked leaner and a bit tireder than when I’d last seen him, but his voice was strong.

That pain in the gut in Australia, he told me, hadn’t been food poisoning. It had been pancreatic cancer.

I knew what that meant. Nearly always, it meant dying quite soon. I must have looked as though that was what I was thinking, because Frank was shaking his head.

“I know that’s got a bad prognosis,” he said, “but the University of Wisconsin medical school has some new ideas about treatment, and that’s where I’ve been.”

The new ideas, he said, were pretty strenuous. Each period of therapy had to be followed by a stretch of recovery time at home. He had completed two therapy sessions and was on his way home to rest up for the third.

“Sounds like hard work,” I offered.

“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m going to beat this thing!”

I don’t know what else we talked about. Not much, I imagine, because they started boarding the flight. Our seats were not near each other. I thought of asking to change mine so I could have his company for a few more hours, but Frank already had one of his sons and one or two other men traveling with him … and, too, I didn’t want to risk tiring him out. When we reached Seattle, I looked around for him to say goodbye, but he was gone.

A few weeks later, I learned that he had died in Madison after undergoing cancer surgery.

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man

    Murray Leinster
 

Will F. Jenkins, who sometimes chose to sign his stories with the pseudonym Murray Leinster and sometimes didn’t, was one of the most influential science-fiction writers ever, and I want to write something about him. What’s wrong with that simple ambition is that I didn’t know him very well. In fact, I don’t think —

1. that he and I were ever in the same room, or,

2. that I ever bought a story from him during the decades in which I was successively working as an editor for Popular Publications, PopularScience/Outdoor Life, Galaxy, Ace and Bantam, and was regularly buying work from just about every other significant sf writer alive.

But I do have some special knowledge of Jenkins/Leinster from other sources. One of them is the same for me as it is for any other fan. I’ve read a lot of his stories, and what stories they are! There’s “Sidewise in Time,” from the June, 1934, Astounding, which was the very first parallel-time story, and so provided interesting new story explorations to be made in all of the hundreds and thousands of paratime stories that followed. There was “A Logic Named Joe,” which got just about everything right about the most important invention of the 20th century except one thing, the name of the logics. (When they came true, we called them computers.) And there was “First Contact,” the first science-fiction story to think through the problems you encounter when your exploration ship comes across a ship of intelligent aliens exploring the same planet.

The thing about Will Jenkins’s stories is that there are so many of them, over 1,500 short pieces, both articles and short stories, that we forget just how good they are. He even started near the top, making his first sale, a short story called “The Foreigner,” to the classiest magazine of the time, the legendary The Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. He kept on appearing in it, too, so frequently — indeed sometimes with more than one story in and issue — that he had to create the pen name “Murray Leinster” to attach to the surplus. Science fiction wasn’t common in America yet, but Will began writing it early with stories for Argosy like “The Runaway Skyscraper,” which canny old Hugo Gernsback reprinted in Amazing as soon as he started it.

 
As I’ve said, I never met Will Jenkins and, to tell the truth, I’m not at all sure that we would ever have become close friends if I had. After all, his choice for the greatest man who ever lived was the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, while my own would have been President Abraham Lincoln. We might have had to fight The War Between the States over again a few times first.

All the same there’s a lot to admire in Will Jenkins, as I’ve discovered in reading the unpublished biography of the man that two of his daughters, Jo-an J. Evans and Wenllian J. Stallings, have just finished writing. That is my source for a good deal of what I know about him.

What I know is that, in addition to being a talented and seminal writer, he was a good father, a kind human being and a talented inventor. Perhaps his most successful invention was a system of forward-projecting surround scenes when shooting a movie, which sounds to me a lot like what Stanley Kubrick was experimenting with when he shot the opening ape-men scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’ll tell you one thing. If I were still drudging away as a book editor, I would quickly write a contract for this book, perhaps plumping it out by adding “Sidewise in Time” and “A Logic Named Joe” to show what I was talking about. Then I would get it out in the stores so everybody could read the facts about this commendable man, including his reasons for giving his four daughters such, ah, distinctive names.

Swanson and the Brits

There is a story about H.N. Swanson making a phone call to a producer that goes like this:

H.N. Swanson

Swanie: “Sam?”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie?”

Swanie: “I’m taking over representation of your writer, Blodgett. You’ve been paying him $150 a week.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

Swanie: “You’ll have to raise him to $500. I don’t represent any $150 a week writers.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

True story? I don’t know. It could be. Swanie certainly had all the musculature to enforce his will on the biz. I don’t know how long Swanie had held the rights to some of the greatest properties of all time. I don’t know who his very earliest clients were — H.G. Wells, probably, Joseph Conrad, some Kipling, why not? — though I do refuse to believe in Beowulf. And what I especially don’t know and never did was what advantage Swanie saw for his own high-voltage agency coming to be known as the West Coast branch of mine. Of course the association wasn’t likely to make a lot of work for Swanie. At that point in the development of my agency the number of film sales had reached a grand total of zero.

But now everything was different. What I said to Swanie’s associate was, “I want Swanie to handle it.”

“All right,” she said, a little doubtfully, I thought. “I guess he’ll do that.”

And she told me that British Redifusion, the name of the people making the offer, was a London outfit that took TV channels from one place and transferred them to another. This, under the English licensing laws, gave them enough money in the bank to contemplate new careers as movie producers. So, contemplating the prospect of what an unplanned thousand dollars or two might mean to my own solvency, I went about my business.

That week my business included four or five stops on an abbreviated lecture tour to the Midwest and the Coast. I don’t remember what my first stop was — perhaps some management conference in Chicago — but when I got to my hotel, there was a message waiting:

Mr. Pohl —

Now that we have made contact we would prefer that future discussions take place between the two of us, rather than through a third party. As an evidence of good faith we are prepared to increase our offer to $10,000. Please let us have your acceptance by return.

When I called Swanie’s office the next morning, he wasn’t surprised that they would have preferred to dicker without him. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Anyway, they’re up to $12,500.”

And when I checked into my Denver hotel, they were at $22,500, and at $27,500 in Seattle, and by the time I was home the price was up over $30,000, and British Redifusion was trying to beat some sense into me — “Swanie is going to ruin the whole thing for you, you know. We can just walk away.” — and failing to beat sense into me.

Even Arnold Perl was showing some concern: “You did say that the Kornbluth family had some money concerns. It could be quite a while before our negotiations began to reach this kind of number.”

And when I called Swanie the next day, he said, “They’re at $50,000. What do you want me to do?”

I said — or screamed — “I want you to deal with it! Take it, leave it, whatever. I want you to make the decision.”

“Well,” he said, “I am encountering some resistance. I could go for $100,000, but I think it’s better to take the $50,000.”

How much is the $50,000 of the 1950s?

It’s enough that my share paid for a convertible, our first color TV, a dining-room chandelier that my then-wife Carol had her heart set on, and a few other odds and ends. I should say that $50,000 then was worth at least a quarter of a million now, but for the Kornbluths, the story was somewhat different. That great loving Mom that is the state of New York makes sure that the needy among us is cared for by rigorous laws, especially if they are lawyers. Since Cyril had not planned on dying but had let himself go intestate, the New York government appointed a lawyer to protect his interests — by which I mean the lawyer’s interests. So the Kornbluth half was not quite as big as my half. . . .

And if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure how I would do it.

 
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Me and the Biz, Part II

The One That Went Right, Almost

The Space Merchants was actually the first science fiction novel that Cyril Kornbluth and I wrote, and it pleased us both greatly by becoming a quick success. We scored good sales and got a ton of reviews, mostly good.

And in the fullness of time, I got a phone call from a man named Arnold Perl. He said he had just read the book. He thought it might have some possibilities that might not have occurred to me, and would like to discuss them. And why didn’t I drop by his house in Alphabet City — a pleasant residential section of the lower East Side at the time, not yet carved into drug kingdoms — and have a chat?

If you are a more sophisticated person than I was in the 1950s, you know who Arnold Perl was. I didn’t. He had to tell me. He was the fellow who had taken a book of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, Tevye’s Daughters, made it into a Jewish theater play … and then encouraged the process, together with Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, who fiddled with the milkman’s story and added some great songs — and everything else it needed to become Fiddler on the Roof, pretty much the biggest and best musical event to hit old Broadway.

And what he was wondering, Arnold said, as he poured me another cup of tea, was whether something like that could be done with The Space Merchants.

 

Now, I can’t honestly say that I knew just what was being offered to me, but what I did know was just a tiny bit worrisome. I didn’t want to disappoint this nice man, and I was well aware that I knew nothing about playwriting. Ah, not to worry, Arnold said. He wasn’t looking for a finished script. What he was hoping for was glimpses — a short story, even a single page from a story, a confrontation, a discovery. An idea.

Or a song.

Or a dance number — I was after all, I was a big ballet fan, wasn’t I?

Nothing that had to attain the professional standards of theater, though.

So I did it. I said I’d give it a try, and as I wandered down from his place in the East Village, the ideas were beginning to condense themselves out of what had been that amorphous cloud that these things come from. So I waited for the ideas to hit.

No “If I were a Rich Man” came to me out of my gymnastics, not even a long and empty length of railroad track. But I was, I thought, beginning to catch the rhythm of the process. One notion — a song and dance about a major surgical procedure — stuck in my mind for a while. What did that have to do with the future of the advertising business? Nothing.

What did Arnold say when I showed it to him? He said, “I’m glad to see you’re loosening up.”

Was any of this stuff real story material? I don’t know, but sometimes I would get a feeling that there were useful images coming along, any minute now. My big sorrow was that I had to do it all by myself, because Cyril had died some months earlier. If he had been around, the whole process would have been at least twice as easy and at least twice as good. But he wasn’t.

And then one morning the phone rang at a shockingly early hour, and it was the office of my film agent, H.N. Swanson, on the line. I don’t mean it was Swanie himself. It was one of his large number of assistants and associates and assorted other human beings who inhabited the two-story walkup that was his office.

“Fred?” said the voice on the phone. “Swanie says some English people called Redifusion Television are offering $750 for the film rights to The Space Merchants and what do you want him to do about it?”

To be continued. . . .

 
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Me and the Biz, Part II (continued)

There were four other books that I rescued from the Ryndam’s library. My interest in two of them was generated by the Ryndam’s unexpectedly lavish store of American classic films. I had had no warning such a treat was in store.

But while I changed for dinner one evening, the stateroom TV stopped me cold. A young man was standing his ground against a powerful older one. I didn’t know either man by name, but I was pretty sure that the young one was a struggling composer desirous of being taken on by the Maestro di tutti di maestri di balletto. And in just a moment — wait for it — yes, there was Moira Shearer to apply to that same company as a dancer, looking as dewy and darling as any human female had ever been.

There was no doubt. We were right at the beginning of that greatest of ballet films ever made, The Red Shoes. Of course I was a little late for dinner that night, as I was on more than one other night that month because the classics didn’t stop coming. Patton. The Wizard of Oz. The African Queen. Fantasia. Cleopatra.

And then the one that turned me to the Ryndam’s bookshelves, On Golden Pond, starring Jane Fonda, playing the estranged daughter of Henry as well on the screen as she did in real life, with Katharine Hepburn playing the totally loved mom — but that was only casting. The first time I had seen the movie, I had been interested in some newspaper chat about Hepburn being critical of Jane for politics, Fonda disapproving of Kate for switching her own career to black so she could devote every minute of her time to loving and caring for Spencer Tracy, the man who meant her life to her, but couldn’t divorce his Catholic wife to give her a ring.

These are two of the greatest film actresses of any century. One would like to know what drives them. This one would anyway, so I checked out Kate by William J. Mann and My Life So Far by the Fonda woman herself and began to read. The first couple of chapters of My Life went well enough, not least because they covered the Barbarella period of Jane’s career, and it is quite rewarding to even an aging man to help Roger Vadim calculate how many centimeters of fabric can be removed from his wife’s costume to produce the maximum of pink-skinned gorgeousness.

Kate, on the other hand, offers no such rolls in the hay. Kate is dying. The roles, the lovers, the headlines, are all over now. All the roaring fireplaces in her house are shut down because there is oxygen in the house. The end is approaching.

Well, you say, why not? Could not a great book be written about the death of a loved person? Of course it could. Just not by Mann. Too bad. This could have been a good book, but perhaps better with a different author.

There remain two books, both pretty much picked up by chance, and both highly recommended by me. I had had no idea such a volume as Elizabeth’s London existed, therefore couldn’t go looking for it as I might otherwise have done before watching Shakespeare in Love. It tells you all there is to know about how Elizabethan London filled its shops, emptied its latrines, and dealt with its criminals.

I should on the other hand have expected the existence of a book like Paris 1919 if I had thought to look for it, because surely someone would have tried to express all those complex interactions of victors and vanquished that did so much to assure that there would be a second World War worse than the first.

It is easy to point out areas where the victorious Allies made mistakes, harder to know how they might have avoided them. Take Woodrow Wilson’s bargaining position. When the American navy first landed in France after the Armistice, he was The Man, and his word was law. A little later — when American Republicans were tired of being ignored; when secret deals that removed chunks of populations from one state to another could no longer be kept secret; when wartime promises had to be repudiated (catastrophic! Or kept, even worse), that worldwide writ was running thin. Unfortunately, Wilson didn’t seem to know.

Even worse was one other thing he didn’t seem to know. Georges Clemenceau and Lloyd George did: In November, the German high command had pled for a truce not because they were bored with fighting but because they were being crushed by huge, fresh Allied forces. Total defeat was about to happen at any day. With the Armistice, though, everything changed. The Germans had time to lick their wounds, while the victorious Allies began sending their troops home.

Before long, the numbers favored the Germans. If fighting had resumed and those German troops had returned to the assault on Paris, there would have been very little to keep them out.

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