The Way the Future Blogs

Gertrude and Isaac Asimov. (Photo by Jay Kay Klein.)

When World War II ended, Isaac Asimov’s stint as a war research scientist came to an end. Then he said good-bye (or at least au revoir to his associate researchers, because he was pretty sure to be seeing at least Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp again) and headed for the normalcy of a return to civilian life.

That, however, was not to be. His draft board had other ideas. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard had preserved him from being called up as long as he was doing the work. Now he wasn’t doing it any more. He was quickly promoted to become classified 1A in the Selective Service’s eyes, and shortly thereafter promoted again, now becoming Asimov, Pvt Isaac.

This was not a development Isaac had sought. Worse, it soon became a development he couldn’t live with at all, because the Army had a plan for him. With his education and his record of writing about the future, he was a natural to be selected as an observer at some upcoming military tests.

They were not tests Isaac wanted to observe. Indeed, he saw nothing but trouble, bad trouble, if that scenario was followed.

The USA had invented the atomic bomb and used it to speed the end of the war. Now it wanted to set off test bombs under experimental conditions, several of the things, so it could learn as quickly as possible just how to use this ultimate weapon. The higher-ups had scheduled several such tests, far off in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the plan was that formations of GIs would be present at every firing — to observe and protect, they said, but the suspicious-minded wondered if the tests were also likely to provide useful information about the effects of radiation on healthy young men.

There was also a political problem. The Soviet Union, America’s most potent wartime ally, had with the peace become its deadliest rival. The papers were filling up with lurid stories about Soviet spies lurking everywhere, trying to steal America’s secrets — trying hardest to learn everything that could be learned about the atom bomb and how to make one of their own. And, Private Asimov, in what country did you say you were born?

Private Asimov pointed out that he had warned of this problem to every authority figure he could find who would listen. It took a while before he could find one who was willing to do that, and by then he was well on his way to the test site. But then things improved. Isaac not only was taken off the A-bomb detail, his draft status was reviewed and he was a civilian again.

There was one bad feature. They insisted on flying him back to the States. But Isaac put up with that, confident that if he survived that ordeal he would never have to get in a plane again.

 
Since, being Jewish, Isaac was not going to be allowed to attend any decent medical school, he had no hope of ever putting the letters M.D. after his name. Next best, he thought, would be a Ph.D., and the discipline that he wanted to get the award in, he decided, was organic chemistry. And while he was working toward that goal there was one other accomplishment he wanted to achieve. He wanted to get married, because Isaac had a girl.

Her name was Gertrude Blugerman. If you picked out the letters D-E-A-R-E-S-T on your telephone keypad in those years she was the person (assuming you were dialing in New York City) who would answer.

I think that tells you an important fact about Isaac right there. Oh, of course it was only dumb luck that gave Isaac’s girl an endearing phone number. That sort of pure chance could have happened to anyone. But if it had happened to almost any other young man, it is likely that neither he nor the girl would ever have known. It takes a certain kind of mind to ring up changes on all the numbers and phrases and facts that come one’s way — the kind of mind that Isaac Asimov was born with, and that made him the writer he was.

All this time, of course, Isaac was writing science fiction, mostly for John Campbell but now and then for others. He had already established the two main currents in his fiction: The positronic robot stories (Why were they positronic? I asked him that once and he said, “Because the positron had just been added to the list of particles and no one knew what it could and couldn’t do.”) and the Foundation series.

So what else can I tell you about Isaac Asimov at this stage? His favorite breakfast was a can of Campbell’s vegetable-beef soup. As far as his general dietary choices were concerned, his family didn’t keep kosher but were not very adventurous in diet. But Isaac liked to try new things when he and I ate out together. Not all experiments were successes, When the two of us lunched one day and discovered the restaurant was offering soft-shell crabs, which neither of us had ever tried, we gave them a shot. Once was enough for me — I didn’t like their slippery feel in my mouth — but Isaac’s verdict was that he didn’t really like them but might give them another chance some time.

(More parts to come, as I write them.)

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, from left, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.

The Asimov store and apartment were just off one corner of the immense Prospect Park, on Windsor Place. I lived, with my mother, on the opposite corner, on St. John’s Place near where Eastern Parkway runs into Grand Army Plaza. It was a neat neighborhood to live in, with not only the Park but the fine Brooklyn Museum just across the street. I spent a lot of time roaming the park, which is a beauty, sometimes with Cyril Kornbluth or some other Futurian, more often alone.

Sometimes I would find myself at Isaac’s end of the park, and if the hour was respectable (as sometimes it wasn’t, since several of us Futurians had devil-may-care attitudes about sleep, and in those years Prospect Park was never closed), we might walk the extra block or two to drop in on Isaac. (Two notes here in the interests of full disclosure. I did also have some thoughts of the free malted that Mrs. Asimov was likely to offer me. And I did sometimes suspect that Cyril’s interest involved Marcia, Isaac’s sister. But maybe I was wrong about that. I don’t think anything came of it.)

As his brother, Stanley, began to mature into the role of full participant of candy-store chores, Isaac’s responsibilities began to ease a little. That was a good thing, since he had a busy life. In addition to his interest in science fiction, he had taken on another challenge. His father had given him a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was a gift that might have perplexed some teenagers, but not Isaac. He knew what books were for, so he picked up Volume 1, turned to the beginning of the A’s and began to read. He told me it was his intention to read all the way to the end of the Z’s, but whether he made it all the way, I don’t know.

    Isaac Asimov, 1940.

Isaac and I were pretty much of the same age. (We couldn’t be sure just how close, because neither of his parents was sure when his birthday was — sometime in the fall to mid-winter of 1919–1920, while mine was November 26th.) When we were both seventeen, we both made a major change in our educational status. Isaac graduated from high school and began college (and kept on with schooling until he reached the Ph.D. — one of the only two Futurians to get that far, the other being Jack Robins). While I quit school entirely and never went back.

Around about then, both Isaac and I formed the habit of visiting science-fiction editors in their offices. Isaac concentrated on a single one, John Campbell, who had recently replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding.

What Isaac did was write an actual story, leave it with Campbell and come back a month later to get the rejected manuscript (which he then mailed off to Amazing Stories, who bought it right away), along with a thirty-minute lecture on what Isaac did wrong and what he should have done right. So Isaac wrote a second story, trying to do it as Campbell had described. That got the same treatment; bounce with lecture from Campbell, acceptance by Amazing. And the third story was the charm. It was accepted by Campbell, as were scores of others over the next decades.

While I had followed a different course entirely, visiting nearly all the sf magazine editors there were — now a couple of dozen, as science fiction was having an unexpected boom. Nominally I was an agent offering them stories by my clients. I don’t think I made any actual sales, but when I confided to one of the new editors, a kind man named Robert Erisman, that I, too, would like to be an editor, he pointed me in the direction of Harry Steeger’s pulp chain Popular Publications, currently in the process of adding a number of new titles to their list.

I went there and offered my services to Steeger. Wonderfully, he took me on, allowing me to create two new science-fiction magazines, and suddenly Isaac had a new fallback market for the stories John Campbell didn’t want, and I had a prolific contributor.

 
That was quite a happy time for both of us, but what then came along was World War II.

That affected more people than just the two of us. Campbell suddenly discovered that editing the best science-fiction magazine in the world was no longer enough to satisfy him. Through friends, he found out that the Navy was willing to set up a small research facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to take on problems that the established teams weren’t handling, and set himself to help the war effort by recruiting people to staff it. Robert A. Heinlein was an easy choice: former Annapolis man himself, invalided out as a j.g. and desperate to get back into uniform. L. Sprague de Camp because he, too, couldn’t pass the physical for actual combat. Isaac was a natural. And there was also a good-looking female lieutenant better known by the name she acquired a few years later, Ginny Heinlein.

I’m not sure the team ever made much progress in their researches, but they did give it the old Navy try. Especially Isaac, who was yearning to find some kind of high-tech career to follow, since he had learned he was never going to be a doctor. No medical school would accept him, because there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement to limit the number of Jewish doctors threatening to convert the whole practice of medicine into a Jewish specialty. So quotas had been established, and they were all filled.

 
(Many more parts to come.)

 
Related post:

• Isaac

(*Before Campbell)

Astounding No. 1, January 1930

Astounding/Analog had two (or three) editors before John W. Campbell, Jr., came along with his magnolious “Golden Age” of people like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and all. However, none of those original editors were the ones that made the magazine great. That task was left for John Campbell, on his way to becoming what some authorities (ahem!) would call the greatest editor science fiction has ever had. (I’ll say more about that later.)

The original Astounding Stories of Super Science was the creation of a rather small New York pulp magazine publishing company called Clayton, which, sometime in the vertiginous year of 1929, elected to get bigger by adding some new titles. It was a reasonably intelligent decision, considering that they didn’t know what was going to happen to Wall Street that October, but it had one built-in flaw. It was only for eleven new titles. It should have been for twelve.

This requirement was an artifact of the way pulp magazines were printed. The text interiors were printed on the big black-and-white rotary presses on the cheapest available woodpulp paper. The covers, however, were printed in full color on glossy paper, and the most economical way to do that was to print them twelve at a time. If they were to proceed with only eleven titles it would mean leaving the twelfth space on the special paper empty and throwing away the part of that expensive paper not used.

Since printing a cover was a significant fraction of the cost of printing a pulp magazine it would be a pity to waste the cost of one. It made more sense simply to add a twelfth magazine. The question was, what kind of pulp should it be?

I don’t know who suggested that it be science fiction. Most authorities think it was Harry Bates, but I have a hunch that it might have been a man named Douglas Merriweather Dold. He is sometimes referred to in the old records as the editor of the new magazine but in fact was probably only an assistant, and was also the brother of the science-fiction cover artist (William) Elliott Dold. And I think that what Doug said was something like, “Tell you what we could do. We could put out a book” — all pulp editors of a certain vintage called their magazines books, perhaps because they wished they were— “of this scientifiction stuff that old Hugo Gernsback is doing. We could call it something like Astounding Stories of Super Science.”

And so they did, and so the new magazine came out into one of the worst years for publishing (or for almost anything else in the annals of American business.) in history It was the beginning of what they called the Great Depression.

 
In spite of the calamitous economic conditions, the new magazine survived. The actual editor was that same previously mentioned Harry Bates, who studied the stories in Gernsback’s magazines and the often better ones that from time to time appeared in all-fiction magazines like Argosy, and from them all derived an editorial policy that might have gone something like: “Action-adventure stories that simply could not happen here and now.”

That seemed to be a policy congenial for the writers. Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Lilith Lorraine and Captain S.P. Meek helped to fill the issues, and were generally happy to see some of their work in the new Astounding. One reason for that was the fact that all twelve of the new magazines had been planned in the prosperous and optimistic boom times of 1929 before the October crash. So as a matter of policy, the new magazines paid the writers not only well but, even more important, paid them promptly on acceptance.

Given a better economical climate, the Clayton Astounding might have endured a good deal longer, for it had some pretty good stories and even one or two that have to be called classics, like Farewell to the Master” (aka “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” by Harry Bates himself). Indeed, it was not, or at least it was not directly, the Great Depression that did it in, It was only that Clayton, foreseeing that some crippling charges would be coming due from their printer, sought to forestall them by the bizarre expedient of buying up the printing company first. It was a bold move. It didn’t work. It had required signing some notes, and when the notes came due, Clayton didn’t have the resources to meet them. Then they were out of business.

So for a bit, Astounding Stories — the trailing words “of Super Science” had been dropped after the first year — lay dormant. When Harry Bates discovered that there were enough stories in the inventory and enough printing materials, already bought and paid for, for one more issue, he promptly brought it out, dated March, 1933. Then nothing, until the larger — and solvent! — company of Street & Smith decided to buy it, and Astounding was reborn.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related post:
Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith

MS Ryndam Upper Promenade
 

Every other cruise ship I’ve ever been on, several other Holland-America vessels among them, has had a place which they admitted was a ship’s library, where they kept books made available to relieve passenger boredom when shore visits, lectures and native dance performances by members of the ship’s crew failed. MS Ryndam indeed has just such a place, with even more books than usual, but it isn’t called a library anymore. Now it’s an “Explorer’s Lounge,” I suppose to avoid those boring booky connotations, and to make it trendier still, it even has its own built-in copy of a Starbucks. (O tempora! O mores, for that matter.)

So being bound to the Ryndam’s literary resources for a month has somewhat the feel of spending a month in the country home of a well-to-do friend whose library is significant, but whose interests don’t resemble mine. There isn’t a speck of science fiction on the shelves, for example. No Heinlein, no Clarke, not even a Bradbury, and definitely no me. (This I think pretty chintzy of Holland-America, since such large chunks of one or another of mine were written on Holland-America ships.)

Still, I did find a fair number of volumes I was glad to read. As people do sometimes ask for lists of what books I’ve been reading for pleasure, I will append the record of what I’ve just finished. (You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I won’t mind.)

First, a couple that I started but didn’t finish: Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps was about how the central importance of their revolution in thought wasn’t relativity but the attempt to pin down the concept of simultaneity. (I thought it a interesting idea, but Galison bogged down in an interminable discussion of the struggle to establish time zones around the world, which I had recently read all about from another source, and I gave up.)

Then there was Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? Dowd is one of the acutest, sharp-toothedest political writers around, and when I found this in the same “Science” stacks as the Galison, I had to pick it up. Barring a few pages about future chromosomal possibilities, though, it wasn’t about science but about the current situation in feminism. On this subject I am well informed by my wife, so I put the Dowd back and picked up the fat book on politics, courageously simply entitled Politics, by another of my all-time favorite writers on the subject, Hendrik Herzberg.

This reprints some of his columns of the last four or five decades. It is all good stuff, but all the recent material I had already read in The New Yorker, where it first appeared, and the older pieces are, well, older. Reading about Bernardine Dohrn and Yoko Ono was more interesting in the ’70s than it is toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Finally, Augustine. I picked it up because I had a mild interest in the man whose Confessions have stayed in print for more than a millennium and a half, was interested enough in the lively opening pages to think I might want to read it all the way through and then discovered that those were the only lively pages in the book. Not being greatly interested in the vicious infighting among the various Christian sects (and having anyway got the general idea long before from L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall), I gave it up and started reading something else.

This one not only was good, it made me laugh out loud, startling the dickens out of my somnolent fellow-explorers in the Lounge. The book was called Mary, Mary, and it was written by at least two of the most interesting writers around: Ed McBain, which is a pseudonym of Evan Hunter, which in turn is a pseudonym of Sal Lombino, whom I had known slightly back around 1950, when he was a sort of office manager for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

The story goes that Lombino answered the phone one day when a publisher was calling.

Publisher: “Listen, we have a great novel title and we need somebody to write the novel for it. The title is The Blackboard Jungle and it should be about troubles in our high schools. Got anybody who could do that?”

Lombino: “Sure we do. How about, let me see, oh, yeah. How about, uh, Evan, ah, Hunter?”

Well, something like that, anyway. I don’t guarantee I’ve got all the details straight.

Anyway Lombino did a great job with The Blackboard Jungle and, a little later, an even greater one under the McBain name with his splendid “87th Precinct” stories. Mary, Mary is about crimes in Florida rather than in the somewhat disguised New York City 87th Precinct, but even second-string McBain is worth a read. And this is the part that made me laugh out loud:

(P. 133.) “I’ve always felt,” the narrator of the book says, “that people should be called what they wish to be called, don’t you? If Salvatore wants to be called Evan, I owe him the dignity and respect of free choice, which isn’t always so easy to come by in the land of the free and home of the brave.”

Well, I haven’t got around to talking about some books I’m glad to have read, but I’m using up blog space faster than I like. So I’m going to quit this now. Maybe I’ll get back to the others another time.

Which, as you know, is the largest island in the Marquesas group, and the one in whose harbor we are now anchored so that our shipmates may storm ashore in search of tapa cloth and guaranteed authentic ironwood carved war clubs.

Betty Anne and I, shipboard, 2009.

The other thing about Nuku Hiva is that it is the last dry land we are going to see until, after seven more days at sea, we dock once more in San Diego. This has certain consequences, among them the fact that something we do with our computers is incompatible with something the local comsats do up there in orbit. I won’t bore you by providing a more technical explanation of the problem (as if I could!), but what it means is that the posts I have been writing for transmission to our blogmeisters, Dick and Leah, aren’t going to get transmitted anywhere until we are back in our own home. And then they may not get to you in the proper order, as planned for your maximum reading enjoyment.

Ah, well. Sorry about that. I’ll try to do better. Meanwhile. . . .

I said in the beginning that I intended to provide reminiscences of some people who might interest you, and you might like to get an idea of who these people are. They appear to come in five categories: writers I have collaborated with to one degree or another (Williamson , Kornbluth, Asimov, Hubbard, etc.), writers who were my clients when I was a literary agent (Asimov, Budrys, Wyndham, etc.), writers I published when I was an editor (Asimov, Niven, Doc Smith, Heinlein, etc.), writers I hung around with a lot (Asimov, Silverberg, Ellison, etc. — you will note that some people come under more than one of these headings) and, the smallest of these categories, the nonwriters. This includes editors and publishers (the Ballantines, John Campbell, Horace Gold, etc.) and a few assorted scientists, politicians and other special cases (Carl Sagan, a local Democratic Party boss, a U.S. senator and so on).

Quite a few of these I have already written about in one form or another and those bits just need touchups to pass on to you, and so I will start them soon and keep them going as long as my right index finger permits. Along with whatever other kinds of comments I think you might be willing to sit still for. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Including a little story about Bob Heinlein

Moorea. Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.

All right, you’ve pulled out a map and you know from the long/lat that we’re now leaving Tahiti and heading for the island of Moorea, just across the channel. But did you know what Moorea meant to Ginny Heinlein?

First, I wish to put on record that Moorea is my third-favorite island in the world. (First and second places are taken by Manhattan and England.) What it meant to me when I first got there, 30-odd years ago, was Heaven.

I had taken myself there to spend a couple of blissfully warm weeks one miserable winter because I was feeling frazzled. Moorea totally unfrazzled me. Warm sun, crystalline lagoon, good French food and a little grass shack all my own, but with electricity and a civilized bathroom. I snorkled, I loafed, I let the frazzles melt away. By the time I got back to the airport in Papeete to begin the long trip home, I was at peace with the world — partly, I thought, because I had almost forgotten there was one. Not a living soul, for thousands of miles in any direction, knew my name, nor cared to.

That is when Hayford Peirce, an sf writer who lived in the islands, came galumphing across the airport toward me, crying, “Fred! Why weren’t you at Heinlein’s party last night?”

 
Well, the answer to that was simple, Robert and Ginny hadn’t known I was on the island because I hadn’t told anyone. Likewise, I had had no idea their cruise ship would be putting in at the port across the island from Tia Ora. I was sorry to have missed a good party, but these things happen. It then slipped my mind for some years.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Tahiti, 1980. Photo by Hayford Peirce.

Then Bob was to be awarded an honorary doctorate in Michigan, and Betty Anne and I grabbed a plane to cheer him on. (The photo of Bob and me in The Way the Future Was was taken there.) The Heinleins had chosen to stay at a hotel some distance from the proceedings; Betty Anne and I drove over to join them one evening and I happened to remember that missed connection on Moorea.

I got an immediate look of extreme displeasure from Ginny. “Don’t mention that place! It almost killed Robert. Remember that big, steep mountain in the middle of it? Well, we were walking around at the base of it and Robert wanted a good look at the peak. He tipped his head way back. It hurt. He had damaged his carotid artery, and I hope we never see the place again.”