The Way the Future Blogs

 
As mentioned earlier, when the Futurians held a party they were limited in program. There was music sometimes, borrowed from somebody’s record collection, but no dancing, because few of us males knew how. There was much drinking (but only of non-alcoholic beverages; the hard stuff came later) and quite a lot of eating, the materials for which were provided by the surplus from Roz Cohen’s mother’s business.

But what we mostly did was play games. And, although we did sometimes play board games like “Monopoly,” then just becoming a smash hit, we had other preferences. Since a majority of us were ambitious to spend our lives working with words — as writers, editors, crossword-puzzle creators, whatever — our favorite games were word games, mostly offshoots of that good old game of “Ghost.”

You know what that is, although you might have played it under a different name. Players form a circle. First player says a letter. Next player also says a letter, and you keep on doing that until the letters have formed a word. At that point the player the word ended on is out of the game and the one after him starts a letter of a new word.

There are very few rules, in fact really only one. After you have said a letter any other player can challenge you to name a word that begins with the string of letters so far in play. If you can’t produce such a word, you’re out of the game. If you can, he is.

It is tempting to form an additional rule defining what is an acceptable word, but I think it’s more fun to battle it out when a challenge has occurred.
That’s the classical “Ghost.”

 
Of course we quickly tired of playing what everyone else was playing, and began inventing improvements. The first of these was “Le Spectre,” which is the same as “Ghost,” except that it is played in French, This made the game particularly challenging, since at the time none of us spoke French.

The success of that game inspired us to try translating the game into German, Italian, Swedish and other tongues. Those however were not successful, due largely to the fact that we couldn’t even get started, as none of us knew what the word for ghosts was in any other language.

Clearly we had to try a different tack.

Our next success, then, was “Stsohg,” which is to say “Ghosts” played backward. “Stsohg” turned out to be complex enough to challenge us all. However, the Futurian motto was “Onward and Onward (Until You Fall Off the Edge),” so we persevered. I think it was Don Wollheim who came up with the ultimate word game. We called it “Djugashvili.”
 

It has been my custom to explain the rules of the games, but with Djugashvili that’s not possible. Some observers have concluded that this because the game itself lacked playing rules. But this is untrue.

Each player has a complete set of rules and playing instructions that cover almost every problem that can be encountered in play. However, the feature that sets Djugashvili apart from all others is that each player is required to generate his own set of rules, and forbidden to reveal them to anyone else.

Jack Gillespie

Jack Gillespie was the shortest of the Futurians and the most likely to be up for any fun idea anyone had.

Jack’s parents were divorced. He lived with his mother, a devotee of, among other composers, Richard Wagner. His father ran a trucking service with an unwonted record of having merchandise fall off the backs of the trucks, so Jack always had plenty of cigarettes and Milky Ways.

Jack and I, having nothing much to do and plenty of time to do it in, would sometimes begin to write three-act plays, and sometimes kill a weekend by hitchhiking to, say, Washington, where my Uncle Les was a motorcycle cop and sometimes was reasonably glad to see us.

During the war, Jack went his own idiosyncratic way: no uniformed service; instead, he joined the Merchant Marine. He survived the U-boat menace, and after the war married a startlingly beautiful blonde girl named Lois Miles, a former schoolmate of my wife Carol, and then moved to Pennsylvania because that’s where the jobs he wanted were.

We exchanged letters in regard to a number of little-known American poets for a while. But then we pretty much lost touch.

Walter Kubilius

Walter Kubilius was a long-term member of the Futurians. He was also a pretty prolific (and published, that is) writer, but most of us hardly knew it, because he rarely took part in our discussions on the subject, and I’m pretty sure never got involved in our orgies of collaboration. He did quite a lot of collaborating with, for instance, Fletcher Pratt, but I, for one, wasn’t even aware of it until after Fletcher’s untimely death.

The most notable physical fact about Walter was his height, six feet eight or so. He didn’t talk much, just sat in the ranks, but you wouldn’t miss the fact that he was there because, even seated, he was taller than anyone sitting next to him.

I believe Walter joined the YCL when everyone did, and left, too, when everyone did that as well, but I can’t swear to dates, because Walter didn’t join the Flatbush 3 branch of which I was president but some other somewhere else. But I’m sure his motives were the same in both acts — a sense of duty, followed a few years later by heartbreaking disappointment. I’m not sure I ever saw him again after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but believe he went on with his job — he was editing a trade paper — and his writing.

He did, I remember, at last find a good-looking girl almost as tall as he was. They got married and lived, I’m confident, as happily as could be until Walter died in 1999 or so, and she followed some years later.

Jack Robins

Jack Robins (or sometimes Jack Rubinson) was a well-liked Futurian from the very beginning. He took little part in the Futurian writing attempts and was never known to write a science-fiction story.

Indeed, most of us considered him as “the smiling guy in the background.”

But then, one day, he brought in the manuscript of an actual, playable play he had written all on his own — it was called “The Ivory Power,” long lost, and it was a sort of idealization about what we might have been doing. It was actually moving.

And when he retired it was with a Ph.D. in chemistry. Only two Futurians attained the Ph.D. The other was Isaac Asimov.

 
Read more about Jack in The e-Fan (pdf).

 
Related post:
A Little More About Jack Robins

The Battle of the Bulge left Dirk Wylie unable to hold a regular job, so we made him — and ultimately, me — into a literary agent.

After World War II had grabbed most of us Futurians by the scruff of the necks and flung us to various odd destinations in all sorts of unexpected parts of this planet of ours, it did, somehow get itself ended and there we were, civilians again, and back in New York. I had had a relatively undemanding war, ending up with doing public relations at the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in Caserta, Italy (with my spare time spent in a resort hotel on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius). Dirk Wylie, however, hadn’t had anywhere nearly as nice a war as I did.

Dirk’s war hit bottom in the early winter of 1944–45. That was when Hitler’s Wehrmacht made one last attempt to take back control of the western front in the Battle of the Bulge. It was a vicious and protracted fight, and Dirk, then an MP sergeant, was in the middle of it. This cost him. At one point, he jumped hastily out of a truck and landed in a very wrong way, doing something seriously bad to his spine.

That was the end of the war for Dirk, and the beginning of years of hospital stays and unremitting pain.

By the late 1940s, he was discharged from the New York-area Veterans Administration hospitals — not because he was cured but because there was nothing more they could do for him. Now Dirk was a civilian again, with one unanswerable question: What was he to do with the rest of his life? A normal nine-to-five job of any kind was pure fantasy. The only good part of the situation was that he didn’t need to make much money. The Veterans Administration had recognized their obligation to him and awarded him a substantial pension. But a living wage wasn’t the whole of Dirk’s needs. He was just barely out of his twenties, and didn’t like the prospect of doing nothing for the rest of his life.

I spent a lot of time with Dirk and his wife, Roz, discussing that question, and we came up with an idea that seemed worth pursuing. He could become a literary agent.

 
There are all kinds of literary agents. Some of them can do very good things for their clients, making sales for them that the writers would not have made by themselves and sometimes acting as story coaches to help their clients write more salable material. Others (as my mother used to say when totally exasperated) are not worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

So what made the difference between the saviors and the total wastes? One, a good agent needed to know the market. Two, s/he needed to know good work from bad. Three, s/he needed to be able to let clients know how to tell the difference between good and bad, too, and how to encourage them to get better.

Of course, Dirk didn’t have personal knowledge of all these things, although, as a Futurian, he had been exposed to a fair amount of shop talk over the years and had made a few sales himself. But what he did have was me.

Continue reading ‘How I Lost My Oldest Friend
(and Gained a Literary Agency)’ »

Mary Byers longed to leave Ohio farm life to become a New York Futurian.

Mary Byers was a science-fiction fan who lived on a farm in Ohio with her uncle and a few other family members. Through fan talk, she heard of the New York Futurians and yearned to live that kind of life.

When the chance came, she jumped on a bus (or a train) and headed for New York City. Her uncle, though, followed after, and when he caught up with her, he brought her back. She got away a couple more times with the same result. But then Cyril Kornbluth made a more complicated escape plan, with more help, and Mary got away.

After a while, Cyril and Mary married. They lived for a time in New England, where Cyril took, and passed, a wartime government course in machine shop, after which he was considered a skilled machinist. World War II came along. Cyril got caught up in it with the consequences that ultimately killed him, and all the time he was soldiering in the ETO, Mary was alone, going through her own kind of hell in Chicago. And somewhere in this period Mary became a stone alcoholic.

An alcoholic is not just a drunk. An alcoholic is a person who, having taken the first drink, cannot stop drinking until she, or he, has become sodden.

(Read up on it or Google it. I don’t know many details, and some of what I do know I wish I didn’t.) Cyril’s attempts at dealing with it were sometimes brutal. Once, when he and I were driving somewhere, I think to the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, Cyril took a deep breath and said, “I wish I was not so cruel.” The bad times for Mary, I know, without knowing many more facts than the ones I have told you, were very, very bad.

But not all the times were bad. When Mary was clinging to AA and resolutely not taking that first drink, I think they were quite good.

This is in itself a puzzle to me. When things were good with Mary, she seemed to be the perfect wife, he appeared to be the standard-issue Brady Bunch husband and, all in all, Cyril behaved in astonishingly unlike Cyril ways. They were — for other people — quite normal ways, but for Cyril totally unexpected ones.

He began to be a father — two boy babies, John and David — he was writing well on his own constantly improving stories and he and I put out a ton of collaboration work as novels for Ian Ballantine. Things were suddenly very conventionally good for the little Kornbluth family.

That was when my money problems began to sting.

Mary proved she was a perfectly normal sf wife by nagging Cyril to dump me as his agent.

 
When I lost Cyril as a client, I had lost everything. I began to make plans to close the agency down.

During this period, Cyril and I had lost contact. It wasn’t just the money. It was the fact that there were the two clients I had led the farthest and expected the most from, Cyril and Isaac Asimov, both gone.

I didn’t see him again until, completely by chance. I ran into him at, I think, Horace Gold’s apartment. I prize that chance meeting because we were easy with each other again — “What are you writing?” “Hey, that was a pretty good novelette in Galaxy last month.” Shop talk of two old friends.

The reason I prize it most was because I never saw Cyril alive again. One morning not long after that, the phone rang. Carol answered it. It was Mary, quite hysterical.

Cyril had had to go into New York for a business meeting that morning, but it had snowed during the night, so he had to shovel the driveway before he could get the car out. When he got to the Long Island Rail Road station, the train was already there and beginning to load passengers. He parked the car as fast as he could, ran for the train and dropped dead of a heart attack on the platform.

Part 2 coming up shortly.

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 2, Part 3
• Cyril