The Way the Future Blogs

Jack Williamson, center, outside Nycon 1, the first Worldcon.
The worshipful fanboy at the left is me.
 

I did by chance run into Jack Williamson, briefly, at the first-ever Worldcon in 1939, which was in the same summer as New York’s first World’s Fair — and which Donald Wollheim had proposed we New York fans should use as the opportunity to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in the hope that it would attract some foreign fans who would be coming to our city for the Fair anyway. Mark the fact that the original idea had come from a Futurian.

But in the remorseless fan warfare of the period the other guys had more votes than we did, so they took it away from us, and the reason that first actual contact was “briefly” is that seven of us, me included, were unfairly ejected from the actual meeting. “Unfairly” because we were thrown out for something we hadn’t done. Dave Kyle had done it, and he was allowed to stay. As it happened, I then spent the time of the con in the bar next door, where most of the writers wound up anyway, but Jack didn’t happen to be one of them.

However, we Futurians were nothing if not resourceful. On the spot, we created a meeting of our own for the next day and invited all those attending the actual con to come to ours as well. On such short notice the only hall we could secure for our meeting was in remote Brooklyn. A fair number of the fans present managed to get there, but only one of the actual writers.

That one writer, though, was the always adventurous Jack Williamson.

Since he was clearly the star of our meeting I wasn’t lucky enough to have much one-on-one time with him, but we all had a free and easy several hours of chatting, and I think most of those present were glad they had come — although if they had known in advance that the hall we had secured, the only one we could get on short notice, was primarily the headquarters of the local Communist Party, there might have been some qualms.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 3

My dear friend Jack Williamson, who died a few years ago, was ten or eleven years older than I, and I didn’t actually meet him — in the flesh, that is, though I certainly knew and revered him through his wonderful stories — until he was an elderly 30 and I was 19, and just beginning a life of my own. Jack, of course, had been living his own life for a decade or more, and an interesting life it was: coming to New Mexico in a covered wagon as a child., sailing down the Mississippi with another writer , finding the love of his life when they were kids — and then losing her — and finding her again when she became widowed. But as I wasn’t there for those busy times I can’t tell you about them.

Fortunately Jack himself could, and did in his marvelous autobiography, Wonder’s Child, which you should get your hands on and read. For me, the personal story of John Stuart Williamson begins with the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York City in 1939, which Jack attended, and I and six other Futurians were thrown out of. (That’s a long story that I’m getting a little tired of telling, but I’ll do it by and by for the blog — and anyway it’s in my own autobiog, The Way the Future Was. Which is out of print but will be available real soon now as an ebook from Baen. Don’t worry, I’ll mention it in the blog when it is available.)

Actually, although I had never knowingly been within a thousand miles of Jack in the flesh, he had in fact already caused one significant change in my life. At the age of ten or eleven I was already hooked on sf. In those years science fiction in America came only in the form of the canonical pulp-paper magazines Amazing, Wonder (under several variations of title) and Astounding. I was able to afford all three only because I was able to buy them for a nickel or a dime apiece in a second-hand magazine store. (Depression days, remember. There were second-hand everything stores everywhere.)

That was fine for me until 1931, when I had a stroke of good — or more accurately of bipolar, mixed good and bad — luck. The good part was that someone had parted with his copy of the current Amazing while it was still on the stands, and so I had read the first half of a two-part serial at the same time time as the rich people. That serial was Jack’s The Stone From the Green Star. The bad part was that God alone knew when the next issue of Amazing, with the conclusion of the story, would fall into my hands. It might be months, might even be a year or more.

Could I stand waiting that long to learn how it all came out?

I could not. I had a way of dealing with the problem, though. My lunch allowance was 25¢ a day, enough for a 20¢ Western sandwich at the cafeteria down the street and a 5¢ glass of milk to wash it down. All I had to do was skip lunch for one day of the next week and that brand-new Amazing was mine. I didn’t hesitate. I did it. I never regretted it, either.

It is true, of course, that in the judgment of most authorities The Stone from the Green Star is by a wide margin the least of Jack’s novels. But what did I know? I was eleven years old, and addicted.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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• Jack the Wonderful Williamson, Part 2, Part 3

Will Sykora, left, and Willy Ley at the Queens Science Fiction League, 1948.

Will Sykora, along with James Taurasi and Sam Moskowitz, were the leaders of the anti-Futurian wing of New York fandom. They had way more members than we, so on votes they had no trouble cutting us off from even things that originally had been our ideas, like the 1939 Worldcon No. 1.

Willy Ley in his natal Germany was a member of the circle of early German rocket enthusiasts, including Wernher von Braun, which were largely responsible for encouraging the research which produced the V1 and V2 flying bombs. By then, however, Ley, a confirmed anti-Nazi, had escaped to America where he became a writer on that and related subjects.

Sykora had no particular connection with Ley. They just both happened to sit at the same table, and there was somebody with a camera.

* * *

 
The funny story about The Early Pohl:

It was the idea of some of the Doubleday editors to publish a book of the first (and generally the worst) stories ever published by a number of sf writers, including Isaac Asimov and me. As it happened, two of Isaac’s earliest stories had been collaborations with me, and he wanted to include them in The Early Asimov. So to pay me for my contribution to the work, I received a 5-percent share of the income from Isaac’s book.

The funny, if embarrassing to me, part of it:

We kept on getting royalties on these books for some time, and in every royalty period the money from my 5-percent share of Isaac’s royalties was always more than my 100-percent share of my own.

* * *

By the way and P.S:

Did you notice how trivial were the dreadful effects of technology that I was trying to worry the reader with? From jet planes, I warned of sonic boom; from cars, the corroding of stonework.

How ignorant we were even when we thought we were cutting-edge smart!

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

(Actually, it’s meant to be sung as a round, but I’m not real sure it can be.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shaggy Dog Story

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

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

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

I don’t know if you’ve ever met Vince Monte, who holds the title of My No. 1 Fan. He’s a well informed person with a collection that, apart from foreign editions, is much better than my own, and when he asks a question, I do my best to answer it.

This time the question had to do with pen names, of which I admittedly have, over the years, used a number. Vince sent me a list of 14 names that I have at some time or other used, and what is noteworthy about the list is that it does not include Frederik Pohl, a name I have used quite often. So let me try to answer Vince’s question, as follows:

• Ernst Mason
  This is the name I used for my nonfiction biography of the Roman emperor Tiberius. I wanted a name that was not identified with me or with science fiction, though when I then wrote about Tiberius for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the editor encouraged me to go back to my own name. Ernst Mason was created by taking the family name of my maternal grandfather, William Mason, and adding it to the given name of my paternal one, Ernst Pohl.

• S.D. Gottesman
  Name used on some early collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth. He picked it, I think taken from the name of one of his high-school teachers.

• Dirk Wylie
  Not my name, the name taken by my high-school pal Joseph Harold Dockweiler when he got tired of the name his parents had picked for him. The precipitating incident was the plan of Dirk, Dick Wilson and Don Wollheim to rent an apartment together, and Dick and Donald demanded that Dirk had a name starting with a D.

• Charles Satterfield
  Horace Gold laid this one on me. He wanted me to use a new pseudonym for one of my stories in Galaxy, I said I was tired of inventing pseudonyms, he said, “Then I will.” He had a prizefight going on the TV, Ezzard Charles against Bob Satterfield, and he said, “There’s your name.” What we didn’t know was that there was a real man named Charles Satterfield, but he apparently never saw the story, or didn’t care.

• Jordan Park
  Jordan Park was a pen name of Cyril’s. I just wrote part of one Jordan Park story.

• Paul Dennis Lavond
  Used for a few three-way collaborations; P for Pohl, D for Dirk, L for Lowndes.

• Elton Andrews
  Sometimes Elton V. Andrews, once or twice just the initials, eva. My first professional sale, a poem to Amazing Stories, was signed with this. I have no idea why I picked it.

• James MacCreigh
  My most frequently used pen name, not just for sf but for other pulps and for my first attempts at non-pulp sales.

• Edson McCann
  Joint penname with Lester del Rey. After we had written the book we used that name on, Lester realized that the name could be written as EM.CC and read, if we chose, as E = mc².

• Donald Stacy
  I think, repeat THINK, that this was the name (or pseudonym) of someone who had written a novel about TV called The God of Channel One, which Ian Ballantine had bought but was dissatisfied with and asked me to do a rewrite on.

• Paul Flehr, Warren F. Howard, Scott Mariner
  They sound sort of familiar. I think I did use them, but I don’t remember where or why.

There may have been others.

When I was quite new to all this, I confess I had a romantic view of pseudonyms. By “romantic,” I mean as in a boy-meets-girl scene like this one:

I imagined myself sitting at a soda fountain — I didn’t say cocktail bar, I said soda fountain, which gives an idea of how old I was — and there was an extremely good-looking girl sitting a stool or two away, reading a story of mine, and my plan was to wait until she had finished it and then let her knows that the pen name on the story was me.

Never happened, though. Probably just as well. My wife probably wouldn’t like it.

 
    Our most famous collaboration.

When I seriously began trying to be a writer — by which I mean when I began to write stories with beginnings, middles and ends — I began feeling the need to have other people around who were doing the same thing.

I wasn’t the only one. It was quite common for three or four, sometimes more, beginning writers to get together for a few hours after dinner — perhaps in someone’s apartment or, more likely, an office, because the chances of finding enough typewriters to go around would be better there — and everybody start typing at once. Then when we had something complete, we would show the story to the other guys, or maybe read it aloud to everyone at once, for criticism.

I don’t know that the presence of others made my own writing any better, but it did encourage me to do more of it. This is a good thing in itself. The very best way to improve as a writer is to keep right on writing until it gets good.

I hooked up briefly with two of these mutual-assistance groups. In neither case did we talk to each other about what we were going to write until we had written it. That was just as well, in a way, because what I wrote was almost always science fiction and in that the others had no interest at all. (A feeling I reciprocated about their light boy-girl comedies or sports.) I yearned not just to practice the mechanical skills but to hear trade talk about science fiction.

Then — blessed day! — along came the Futurians.
.
 

The Futurians were one of the New York area’s science-fiction fan clubs, but they were a little different from the others. We didn’t just want to read sf and talk about it. We wanted to make it — to write it, or to become editors of it or in some other way to become professionally involved in producing it, and to make that sort of thing our lifelong careers. So naturally, inevitably, we started our own writing group.

Actually, it might actually be more accurate to say we became one, because even the non-obsessed fraction of our members were mildly interested in the writing. All we needed was a place to set our portable typewriters — and then, when three of our members decided to club together on a joint apartment at 2574 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn that would also be the club headquarters, that problem was solved. We called it the Ivory Tower (it was on the fourth walk-up floor), and there we wrote. Three or four of us at a time, sometimes more.

The diligent ones, first to last, were Cyril Kornbluth, Dick Wilson, Donald Wollheim, Robert A.W. Lowndes, Dirk Wylie, James Blish, Damon Knight and, of course, me. Member Isaac Asimov rarely joined us in these sessions. He was as eager as anybody else, but he had to work regular shifts at his mom and pop’s candy store and so had to do most of his practice writing alone. (Well, except for a couple of minor collaborations with me, which are in his book The Early Asimov.) And, as you see, quite a few of us made the professional cut — some, like Isaac, almost excessively.

In fact we had a kind of success that writers’ workshops seldom achieve. Why? There may have been several reasons, but perhaps one of them was that there was a particular exercise we did that most workshops don’t do. We didn’t give each other just criticism and moral support. We began doing something else. We began to collaborate.
 

There are many ways of collaborating,. I think the traditional way goes with two writers getting into a room with a pot of coffee and a typewriter. One of them sits down at the typewriter and types their names and addresses and a title for the story and then looks expectantly at the other. Who says, “Okay, let’s start with he meets the girl. She gets out of a taxi, but when she closes the door and it starts away her dress is caught and the skirt is pulled off.” While the other one is typing away. And they keep on doing that, maybe changing places from time to time, until the story’s done.

What all the ways have in common is that two (or occasionally more) people are involved, and the hope is that if one gets stuck the other will come up with a way to get out of it. Or, when it’s working well, one has an idea for a bit of business and the other takes it and runs with it.

I’ll give you an example from life. When Cyril and I were writing The Space Merchants long, long, long ago we had some scenes in a food factory that we called Chlorella Costa Rica, where people were farming algae to turn into food for poor people. I said, “Why don’t we give them some actual meat? They can have an Alexis Carrel chicken heart that just keeps growing and growing and they chop steaks off it as it rotates.”

And Cyril said, “Fine,” and began to type and made the whole Chicken Little bit out of it. If you’ve read the book you know how fine that was; if you haven’t take my word for it. It was fine.

You have just seen one of the reasons why I loved collaborating with Cyril, but what I’m saying is that collaborating can help, even if you don’t have two writers who work together as productively as Cyril and I often did. It is often helpful to a newbie to collaborate, even with another newbie, just for the sake of the life support and discipline they can give each other.

Enough for now. Next time I’ll tell you how collaborating can help you even when you don’t have anyone to collaborate with.

 
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