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.

Admiral of the Little Wooden Navies and Dean of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

L. Sprague de Camp, left, and Fletcher Pratt, 1941.

When I was eleven or twelve I uncritically, but obsessively, read every scrap of science fiction I could put my hands on. This primarily meant every back-number sf magazine I could buy for a nickel (as against the extortionate 25¢ cover price for current issues on a newsstand) in the second-hand magazine store. One of the first of those, I think, was an early Amazing Stories Quarterly, and its principal content was a novel called A Voice Across the Years.

It was, I must say now — though I didn’t realize it at the time — a quite undistinguished story, although an unusual one in two respects. In the story, a couple of human beings from Earth have somehow or other happened to land on a civilized planet far, far away, where they are welcomed by being given wardrobes of new clothing. The garments fit them perfectly, because each one was custom made by a machine that measured every part of them and then cut and stitched fabric to an exact fit.

I had not seen any such voluminous discussion of science-fictional tailoring, or indeed of any kind of haberdashery, in any other story, and I was fascinated. I am afraid that at the time I may have been suffering from the delusion that every marvelous invention I saw described in any story was probably going to become reality before long — after all, that’s what had happened with radio, the airplane, the submarine and many other marvels, hadn’t it? So I thought it likely that before long Macy’s would have these machines in their boys’ department to make my first machine-created pair of knickers. (Please remember that I was then maybe eleven years old.)

The other unusual thing about the story was its by-line. It was signed “by Fletcher Pratt and I.M. Stephens.” I had never seen a joint byline before. I had never heard of collaboration. Did it mean that two different people had somehow written a single story? And if so, how?

However they did it, it sounded sort of unpleasant to me — certainly not like anything I would ever want to do myself.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt’ »

For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s I was picking up a goodly fraction of my annual earnings by talking for pay to almost any audience that cared to hear me. That included groups of all kinds, from colleges to fraternal organizations. I didn’t much care which, although I have to say that talking to, for instance, management groups had some significant advantages.

Not in terms of money, as you might have imagined, though. Some of the biggest and richest management groups were also among the thriftiest when it came time to write a check. That was all right, they explained to me, because what I was really doing was building a career. Every time I spoke to a management audience there would be two or three people among them who had just been told to organize a speaker of their own, so I would have a continuing schedule of dates. That wasn’t untrue, although my new clients knew exactly what I was being paid for my present appearance — because they’d asked their old pal the chairman during the coffee break — and saw no reason to raise it.

Management groups did have one definite advantage over other audiences, though. Management people like to have a little luxury around them when they toil, so they try to make sure their toiling is done in really neat places. My first visits to Hawaii, the Florida Keys and some interesting foreign cities — not to mention any number of pricey resort hotels and country clubs all over the U S of A — were all speaking dates.

And what did I talk about to these junior captains of industry? That took a little working out. At first I talked about things that were likely to happen in the future, but I quickly discovered that there were only two kinds of things that brought them cheering to their feet when I was through. One was the scary kind — a hit by a good-sized asteroid, an ice age, a nearby supernova — and the other was the funny.

Continue reading ‘Have Mouth, Will Travel, Part 1: The Lecture Biz’ »