The Way the Future Blogs

The Brooklyn Science Fiction League met in the basement of its chairman, George Gordon Clark. He was an energetic fellow. When Wonder Stories announced the formation of the SFL Clark did not waste time, he sent in his coupon at once and consequently became Member No. 1. When the SFL announced it was willing to charter local chapters, he acted instantly again, and so the BSFL was Chapter No. 1, too.

We outgrew Clark’s basement pretty quickly; there was only room for about four of us, in with his collection of sf magazines. We moved to a classroom in a nearby public school. What I mostly remember about those meetings is surprise that I couldn’t fit into the grammar-school desks anymore — after all, it was only a couple of years since I had been occupying desks just like them every school day. I remember we talked a lot about how to interpret Robert’s Rules of Order and spent quite a lot of time reading minutes of the previous meeting. If anything else substantive took place, I have forgotten it entirely.

But, ah, the Meeting After the Meeting! That was the fun part. That was when we would adjourn to the nearest open soda fountain, order our sodas and sundaes and sit around until they threw us out, talking about science fiction.

It was always a soda fountain. Not always the same one; over the years we fans must have staked out and claimed dozens of them, all over the city. But we were addicted to ice cream concoctions, so much so that a few years later, in a different borough of the city, after the meetings of a different club, we finally designed our own sundae, which we called the Science Fiction Special, and persuaded the proprietor of the store to put it on his menu.

We were a young bunch, as you can see. Except for Clark, who must have been in his early twenties, the old man of the group was Donald Wollheim, pushing nineteen. John B. Michel came with Donald; and a little later, down from Connecticut, Robert W. Lowndes; the four of us made a quadrumvirate that held together for — oh, forever, it seems like — it must have been all of three or four years, during which time we started clubs and dispersed them, published fan magazines, fought all comers for supremacy in fandom and wound up battling among ourselves.

The fan feud is not quite coeval with fandom itself, but it comes close. None of the clubs seemed to live very long. The BSFL held out for a year, then we moved on to the East New York Science Fiction League, a rival chapter of the parent organization, which seceded and renamed itself the Independent League for Science Fiction. That kept us engaged for another year, then it was the turn of the International Scientific Association (also known as the International Cosmos-Science Club). The ISA was not particularly scientific, and it certainly wasn’t all that international; we met in the basement of Will Sykora’s house in Astoria, Queens. (The ENYSFL-ILSF had met in a basement, too, the one belonging to its chairman, Harold W. Kirshenblith. I do not know what science-fiction fandom would have done in, say, Florida, where the houses didn’t have basements.)

It didn’t much matter what the name of the club was, or where we met. We did about the same things. We held meetings once a month, mostly devoted to arguments over whether a motion to adjourn took precedence over a point of personal privilege. We got together between times to publish mimeographed magazines, where we practiced our fledgling talents — for writing, and also for invective.

The fan mags (now they are called “fanzines,” but the term hadn’t been coined then) were sometimes club efforts, sometimes individual. I managed to wind up as editor of the club mags a lot of the time, but that wasn’t enough; I published some of my own. The one I liked best was a minimal eight-page mimeographed job measuring 4 ¼ by 5 ½ inches — a standard 8 ½-by-11-inch mimeo sheet folded twice — called Mind of Man. Since it was my own, I could publish anything I liked in it. What I liked best to publish was my own poetry, which at that time was highly sense-free, influenced in equal parts by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and some of the crazier exhibits in transition.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF
• 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

Will Sykora, left, and Willy Ley at a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League in 1948.

 
Introduction

This arrived without warning from my old friend Andrew Porter, once the editor and publisher of Algol/Science Fiction Chronicle, the only real competition Locus ever had. Andy didn’t say why he sent it, but I guess he just thought I would like to see it again — it’s a part of a chapter taken from a book of mine called The Early Pohl that I haven’t looked at in years. Well, I did get a kick out of some of it (although other parts did just repeat things I’ve written here and elsewhere). Considering how many said that you had enjoyed the chapter I inadvertently reprinted from The Way the Future Was, some of you might like this, too, so I’m going to take a chance and reprint this as well. (Having cut out much, though probably not all, of the stuff that already was in the earlier piece.)

The title of the piece is Andy’s. (It refers to the fact that if you wanted to start an sf club in New York in the ’30s, it helped to have a basement that you could hold the club’s meetings in.) It was also Andy’s decision to include a picture of Will Sykora and Willy Ley at the beginning, although only Sykora has anything at all to do with the piece, and then not much. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. As afterwords I’ll attach a little bit about who they are, and I’ll also tell you a funny, if a bit embarrassing to me, story about The Early Pohl, the book this piece came from.

 
BASEMENT AND EMPIRE
From the book The Early Pohl, copyright ©1976 by Frederik Pohl. (Abridged.)

In the winter of 1933, when I was just turned thirteen, I discovered three new truths.

The first truth was that the world was in a hell of a mess. The second was that I really was not going to spend my life being a chemical engineer, no matter what I had told my guidance counselor at Brooklyn Technical High School. And the third was that in my conversion to science fiction as a way of life I Was Not Alone.

All of these new discoveries were important to me, and in a way they were all related. I had just started the second semester of my freshman year at Brooklyn Tech. It was a cold, grimy winter in the deepest depths of the Great Depression. There was not much joy to be found. Men were selling apples in the streets. The unemployed stood in bread lines and prayed for snow — that meant there would be work shoveling it off the sidewalks. Roosevelt had just been elected President but hadn’t yet taken office — Inauguration Day, still geared to the stagecoach schedules of 1789, had not yet been moved up from March 4. Banks were going broke.

There was not much money around, but on the other hand you didn’t need a lot. Subway fare was a nickel. So was a hot dog at Nedick’s, which was enough for a schoolboy’s lunch. You could go to the movies for a dime or, sometimes, for a can of soup to be donated to the hungry.

Brooklyn Tech was an honor school, which is possibly why I decided to go to it in the first place. Like many of my colleagues, I regret to say that as a kid I was always something of an intellectual snob. (I do not wish to discuss what I am now.) Tech had been born in an ancient factory building, next to the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge in the grimiest part of Brooklyn’s industrial riverside district. It had outgrown that and was now spread around a clutch of decrepit ex-grammar schools in the same area. We commuted from building to building, class to class.

I found myself walking from my Mechanical Drawing class in P.S. No. 5 to my Forge and Foundry class in the main building in the company of a tall, skinny kid named Joseph Harold Dockweiler. Along about the third time we crossed Flatbush Avenue together I discovered that we had something of great urgency in common. He, too, was a Science-Fiction Fan, Third Degree. That is, he didn’t merely read the stuff, or even stop at collecting back issues and searching the secondhand bookstores for overlooked works. He, like me, had the firm intention of writing it someday.

Six or seven years later Joseph Harold Dockweiler renamed himself Dirk Wylie. Later still, he and I went partners in a literary agency and later, but tragically not very much later, he died, at the appalling age of twenty-eight, of the aftereffects of his service in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Dirk was the first person I had found like myself. Having learned that we were not unique, we contemplated the possibility of finding still others who would be able and anxious to compare the merits of Amazing vs. Wonder Stories and discuss the galaxy-ranging glamour of E.E. Smith’s Skylark stories. In a word, we went looking for science-fiction fandom.

The bad part of that was that fandom did not yet quite exist.

The good part was that it was just about to be born, when Wonder Stories started a circulation-boosting correspondence club called the Science Fiction League. We joined instanter, and began attending club meetings as soon as a local chapter was formed, where we met others like ourselves.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF
• 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

Frank Herbert

I met Frank Herbert and his wife Beverly at the home of Poul and Karen Anderson in the early 1960s, where we had all been invited for dinner. It was a great evening. There weren’t many people more fun to share a meal with than those four, especially when Karen was creating one of her original recipes (this time with Japanese black beans and I have no idea what else).

We became friendly quickly. I should mention that the Andersons’ home was in those unexpectedly precipitous hills across the Bay from San Francisco, because when it became going-home time the Herberts and I were driven back to the city by another diner, a local resident who knew every hill and curve and preferred to take them all at high speed while turned halfway around in the driver’s seat in order to have a friendly conversation with us. When we got out, the Herberts and I agreed that we had just been through a life-changing experience, and we would be lifelong buddies from then on.

Still, we managed to get together only rarely because of problems of geography, except for the occasional fortuitous occasion — for example, the day in the early ’80s, when I was in Seattle on a book tour. As I was crossing a street on my way to a TV interview, a car pulled up in front of me and a woman stuck her head out the window. “Hello, sailor,” she called. “Looking for a good time?” It was Bev, with Frank grinning over her shoulder from the steering-wheel side.

It wasn’t the best of opportunities for a lengthy chat, but I was glad to see them both looking well; Bev had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and, I knew, was facing surgery. Before the other drivers began honking, the Herberts mentioned that they were building a house in Hana on Maui, and I promised that the next time we were in Hawai’i we’d look them up.

 
Meanwhile Frank, working as a newspaperman, had started to research an article about the sand dunes of Oregon, and that changed his life. The dunes fascinated him. He never finished the article, but he began writing science-fiction stories for John Campbell’s Astounding, starting with a three-part serial about a dune planet and its inhabitants.

Herbert himself thought it might make a pretty good hardcover book but was disappointed by the responses when he tried offering it to publishers. No book publisher was interested in acquiring the hardcover rights to this rapidly expanding mass of manuscript, however, until an editor at the quite small publishing house of Chilton Books managed to stitch the several existing stories into a single huge novel. He called it Dune, and when he published the result, it became a runaway bestseller, said to be the most profitable sf book ever written.

Frank had written with real people and places in mind, though he gave them invented names for his stories, just as Cordwainer Smith had for his own stories of the imperfectly concealed Middle East. Arrakis was Frank Herbert code for Iraq, The Baron was Dick Cheney, Selusa Secundis was Afghanistan and so on. (I’m sorry to say that I don’t know all the identities for either author.)

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man, Part 2

The quality of the meat you eat depends partly on whether the animals suffer heat stress on the way to the slaughterhouse. After an animal is slaughtered, its glycogen gets broken down and acidified to lactic acid, lowering its pH from 7 to 5.5 . The meat now “resembles soggy white blotting paper” and begins to smell of decay, says Neville Gregory of England’s Royal Veterinary College.

At what temperatures does this happen? Oh, at about the temperature of the ambient air after global warming.

* * *

Mojib Latif, a climate physicist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, warns that natural variability may outweigh global warming for some periods in coming decades. Skeptics of the warming scenario will use this to cast doubt on the whole argument — but, Latif says, the warming will return.

 
Related posts:

• Meat Grinding
• Fred’s Dumb Thing

 
I admit I do, and as a matter of fact have since I was twelve years old, although my reasons changed as the years piled up. Of course the first draw was the plentiful and profusely illustrated ads that made me first to grab that section on Sunday mornings: What twelve-year-old boy doesn’t enjoy photos of pretty young girls in their underwear? Then it was the twin pull of the Sunday crossword puzzle and the cooking page.. I never tasted a single one of those dishes except in imagination, but in that form every one was delicious. And, of course, for decades on end doing that huge Sunday crossword puzzle was a ritual for half the families in America.

But the Times still holds me. It’s one of my greatest extravagances, by which I don’t mean its dollars and cents cost but its exorbitant price in hours and minutes. By the time I get through the world news section and the national, and Books, Travel, The Week in Review and the Magazine, the day is pretty well shot, and I haven’t even opened Business, Sports or any of the eight or ten other sections that come tumbling out of their plastic sheath.

But I’m fond of the ones I do read. Unfailingly they provide me with little nuggets of knowledge I might not otherwise possess. In one issue of the Magazine, for instance, I learned that if I have a little naturally occurring lithium in my tap water the chance of my committing suicide is lessened — so reported the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao, after a study of communities in Japan’s Oita Prefecture. And if you pull out those old sixth-grade snapshots of yourself and study them, are you smiling? Psychologist Matthew Hertenstein reported that when he compared the top ten percent of childhood smilers with the bottom, the nonsmiling kids grew up to have five times as many divorces.

In that same issue of the Magazine, I learned that we now have a third option for what to do with our corpses when we’re through with them in addition to the old standbys.of burial or cremation. It’s called resomation, and it’s ecologically sound, neither increasing the carbon burden nor taking priceless land out of productive use. It was pioneered by the Mayo Clinic as a means of disposing of donated cadavers when no longer needed, and is now beginning to become available to commercial undertakers in a few states. In resomation, the corpse is heated in a potassium hydroxide solution for three hours, after which all that’s left is a soft, white cremation-like ash, plus shiny dental fillings and surgical implants, if any existed, and a brownish liquid which, being 100-percent sterile, can be poured away with waste waters.

398 John St., Burlington, ON, L7R 2K4, Canada, (905) 637-6137.

You know how it is when you’re in Toronto and you need to drive down to Niagara Falls, only it’s time for lunch and you’re getting really hungry, and you don’t know the name of any really outstandingly good restaurant on the way? Well, we can help you there.

The one you want to go to is the Red Canoe Bistro in Burlington, Ontario, voted the best new restaurant of the year and well deserving of the honor. Check out their website for directions and menus.

The proprietor and head chef is the talented Tobias Pohl-Weary, who has not only been winning awards for his cuisine but is also my grandson, of whom I am really proud.

    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′

Unwashed beans of kopi luwak, the world's costliest coffee.

Q: What is the main source of supply of the world’s most expensive coffee?

A: Cat poop.

Now I don’t want you to think that any old alley cat’s droppings taste wonderful if steeped in hot water and served in a china cup. I’m pretty sure they don’t, although, to be honest with you, I’ve never put it to the test and never intend to.

For one thing, for the deluxe coffee you need a particular kind of a cat. They’re called palm civet cats and they grow wild in certain parts of southeast Asia. Then it’s best if you start looking for them in the vicinity of large coffee plantations, because once you have your stock of civet cats, what you want to feed them on is ripe coffee berries from the trees.

That makes the civet cats happy because they love the taste of coffee berries, and it then makes you happy because after the berries have traveled through the animal’s digestive tract the pulpy part of the berry is digested away and what is left is the hard, indigestible coffee bean, which you can sell for as much as $227 a pound.

Something else happens to the bean on its way to the litter box. The bean is fermented in the bowels of the animal with its enzymes and stomach acids. What the coffee drinker gets after it is roasted and ground is a brew that is described as “smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.” And, oh, yes, worth a couple of hundred bucks a pound.

However, you must exercise care. Unscrupulous farmers have been caught gluing undigested coffee beans to just any old civet cat BMs, and the resulting cuppa is not said to be worth very much at all.

And — yes — here too, I think I’ll just have some tea.