The Way the Future Blogs

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

I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate.

Let’s talk for a bit about my career as an agent.

Mark Rich has a lot to say about my failings, especially my financial woes, which were considerable. A J Budrys told a funny story about them in one of the last speeches he gave, at the Heinlein Centennial, a year or two before he died. He had discovered what a great agent I was, he said, when I sold John Campbell a story of A J’s that Campbell had turned down cold before A J became my client. And then when he got my check, it bounced.

Funny story? Sadly, also a true one.

But the interesting thing there is that A J didn’t quit the agency. He remained my client until the waters finally closed over my head. And almost all of my other clients, Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement and John Wyndham and Fritz Leiber and all the other household names and the lesser names that I was bringing along gave me an amazing amount of patience, and most of them didn’t want to give up until I did.

And, most interesting of all, most of them were my good friends for the rest of my life.

Do you wonder why?

I’ll tell you why. It was because I was a hell of a good agent.

First, I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate, and then I worked with the — magazine writers to turn them into book authors, and I kept looking for new and better markets they could sell to. A few I managed to get into television deals, even into syndicated newspaper cartoon strips. Some I managed to promote from the pulps to the slicks, at many times the rate.

In short, I did everything a good agent did for his clients. (I would like to say that, even today, not all agents are quite that good.) But I did something rather more than that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made a good writer — almost any of my dozens of good writers — sometimes be productive and profitable and sometimes be unable to get anything written for days or weeks at a time. I tried several different ways of, first, encouraging the writers to write, and, second, to do so at the top of their form. I finally invented one that worked.

I made a promise to eight or ten of my best (but not always solvent) writers that any time they brought in a new story I would hand them a check for that much wordage.. My rate was low for these incentive checks, at a half cent a word, but then when the story actually sold to a publisher the writer would be credited at the publisher’s scale, not that of my advances.

As a result, if you look at the stories published in the last year or so of my agency’s existence you will find that there were a larger number than usual of really good stories by Budrys, James Blish, Damon Knight and a dozen or so other clients who took me up on that offer. It worked. It got the writers writing more, and sometimes better. It even increased my sales to those markets, a little. And if I were unfortunate enough to become an agent again, I would at once start up something like that for at least a few clients.

But it also represented one more outflow of capital, and there wasn’t enough capital left to flow. Most of my clients didn’t want to leave, but finally, I gave up and folded the agency, and started paying everybody back.

Interestingly, maybe I should say ironically, then two unexpected new lifesavers were thrown to me.

Continue reading ‘What My Clients Thought’ »

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany is a highly intelligent man who comes of a highly intelligent and educated family. His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was an educator and the first elected African-American bishop in the Episcopal church, while his two aunts, Sadie and Bessie Delany, achieved national fame in the ’90s, when both were already over a hundred years old, as the co-authors (with Amy Hill Hearth) of the memoir Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, which stayed six months on the New York Times bestseller list and landed them both in The Guinness Book of World Records as the country’s oldest authors.

Delany is also a long-out-of-the-closet bisexual, as well as being an articulate and pleasant companion in informal gatherings; a college professor whose major worry is that he keeps getting promoted, thus giving him less and less time with those he cares most about, his students; a highly esteemed writer of science fiction; and, finally, a person who is never addressed by his friends as Sam, Samuel or any other variant of the name his parents gave him.

The reason for this is that he wanted it that way. As a child, young Delany was deeply envious of friends and schoolmates who had nicknames, which he did not. His chance to remedy this came on his first day at summer camp, at around age twelve, when another camper asked him what he was called. He saw his opportunity and took it. “They mostly call me ‘Chip,’” he said, and to his friends he has been Chip Delany ever since.

In 1971 1961, he married the poet Marilyn Hacker. It was not because of any over-arching romance between the two of them, and there was nothing about “forsaking all others” in the marriage vows. It was an open, not to say wide-open, marriage, with both Chip and Marilyn having frequent extra-marital affairs with partners of both genders. What both Chip and Marilyn wanted was the comfort of living in a family, and in 1974, they completed it by having a baby daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, who grew up to be a director in New York’s theatrical community before going on to become an emergency physician.

At the time. they were living in London, where Marilyn was working as an antiquarian book-dealer. In that same period Betty Anne and I happened to also be living in London, where Betty Anne was teaching a one-semester course to college students, and I made up my mind to drop in on the Delanys one day to say hello.

That day was a while in coming. Although I love London, I am not really very good at getting around in its maze of short and unplanned streets, so unlike sensible New York’s numbered ones, and I kept putting it off. Then one day, after running some other errand, I realized that I was close to the Delany flat and on impulse headed for their door. My timing was poor. Both Chip and Marilyn were off on other errands, but I did get a chance to meet the baby and her sitter.

Having a child in a foreign country gave Chip and Marilyn a completely unexpected problem. The law, as they knew, is straightforward. A child born of two American citizens is entitled to American citizenship — and an American passport — regardless of where he or she happens to get born, so the Delanys filed Iva’s application and returned to their flat to await delivery of her passport. It, however, didn’t come. Instead they got a note to say that the application had been turned down.

When, in consternation, Chip and Marilyn begged the American consul for an explanation it wasn’t helpful. It was the baby’s name that made all the trouble, the clerk said. If they had named her Iva Delany, or Iva Hacker, or even Iva Hacker Delany there would have been no problem. But what they had recklessly done was throw in a game-altering hyphen between the surnames of her two parents, and “Hacker-Delany,” as anyone could plainly see, was a new name, not borne by either parent, and thus incapable of conferring citizenship on the child.

For a time their chances of ever getting home again looked bleak. But then they were lucky enough to find a higher-up State Department official who was not a certifiable moron. He swept all those finely split hairs aside and ordered the issuance of a passport to Iva Hacker-Delany and the family got thankfully back to New York. (Chip and Marilyn divorced a few years later, but remained the best of friends anyhow.)

 
Apart from an occasional bumping into each other at some science-fiction event I didn’t see much of Chip for a while. While I was still editing If and Galaxy I did my best to get some short stories from him for the magazines, with only limited success. Chip’s most comfortable length was the Ace Books novel of maybe 60,000 words or, for an Ace Double, somewhat less. Indeed, my old Futurian pal, Donald Wollheim, Ace’s editor, had been Samuel R. Delany’s principal publisher, with novels like The Jewels of Aptor.

By then, I had landed a dream job as science-fiction editor for the independent paperback giant, Bantam Books — didn’t have to come in to the office except when I felt like it, had total freedom to publish any property I chose without needing to get anyone’s permission or approval, or even without needing anyone’s okay to offer as high or as low an advance and royalties as I chose. It was the very model of the position that any ink-stained editorial wretch would have given his eyeteeth to be offered.

It did occur to me that it might be nice to add an occasional Delany novel to my list, especially when I noticed that Donald had almost stopped bringing out new Delany titles of his own. But I already had enough irons in the fire to keep me busy, so I didn’t do much more than wish that some such might drop in my lap.

Then, without warning Chip’s agent sent me the manuscript of an unpublished, and uncharacteristically long, Delany novel. It was called Dhalgren.

(The conclusion of the Delany story, covering the Dhalgren miracle, pretty soon.)

 
Related posts:
Chip Delany, Part 2