The Way the Future Blogs

Hundreds of thousands of Americans were made homeless in the Great Depression, leading to precarious "Hoovervilles."

I remember The Depression pretty well, not only because I saw some of it with my own eyes (I was 11 in 1931) but because I did a lot of research on it for a book I never published. What you youngsters don’t know is that it came in two halves, like a football game.

First half was The Crash, in 1929. As the country was gradually beginning to try to get over that, along came the second half, around 1931. That’s when European banks began to fail, and the contagion spread to American banks, so that when Franklin D. Roosevelt got elected in 1932, America’s banks were going bust so fast that the first thing he did after he was sworn was issue an executive order for a national bank holiday so teams of examiners could see which ones were about to fold, and keep them closed until they could be shored up. Or if they couldn’t, they would at least pay back part of what they owed their depositors. That was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as getting nothing, and the banks that stayed open had the confidence of their depositors, because the weak sisters had been screened out.

If we do come to that over Europe’s present tawdry banking messes — it seems that their bankers aren’t any more honorable than our own — I think Obama, if re-elected, would do something like what Roosevelt did, with, I hope, similar results. Mitt Romney I do think likely to perform more like Herbert Hoover. That is, urge everybody to be calm and not make things worse, while he watched the banks go under, one by one.

Oh — and speaking of Europe’s banking scandals, one of the first things Romney did on arriving in London was to go to a fund-raising gathering of London bankers. A number of them appear to be implicated in the rate-fixing Libor scandal. As long as they’ll give him money, Romney doesn’t seem to care.

From left, Donald A. Wollheim, Milton A. Rothman, me, John B. Michel and Will Sykora in 1936.

The “maybe” is because some doubt has been expressed. Having heard of what we New York fans did by taking the train to Philadelphia, some British fans promptly organized a gathering in Leeds a few months later. This causes some confusion as to which con deserves to be termed “the first.” Some blog readers have asked me, as one of the few survivors of the Philadelphia event, to describe how it came about.

I believe the idea of the two areas getting together was originally Don Wollheim’s, and I believe that after talking about it by phone with at least one Philly fan (I think it was Bob Madle) they set a date. Anyway, it was an adventure. Going there on the train was a considerable part of it, because I had seldom before taken a train away from the city without a grownup in charge.

To be sure Donald turned 21 right about then, but he wasn’t a “grownup.” He was just one of us. And, come to think of it, Will Sykora might well have been a trifle older than Donald. I never had asked his age. It wouldn’t have seemed polite, would have seemed, I don’t know, like inquiring into things we weren’t meant to know, like the reproductive processes of some creatures that had chosen a different pathway when the main line of human evolution was turning into marsupials or mammals.

Anyway, it is true that I was the secretary. I did take minutes and then, true to form, lost them. I have to say, though, that that was really a pretty trivial loss. No recordable business was brought up by anyone since all we had ever planned to do was get together. What we did do was what fans everywhere have done whenever they were in the company of other fans. We talked about what we had recently read, and which authors we liked and what we wished favorite authors would write next … and then about everything. That is what fans have always loved to do. Talk.

Scientists have finally figured out where we all came from, and the answer isn’t pretty. Three billion years ago, an organism named LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) inhabited the Earth, and we all — that’s primates and platypuses, sponges and salamanders, diplodocuses and ducklings — every last one of us, of whatever species, are her (or his, or its) direct descendant.

How big was LUCA? Oh, real big. According to Gustavo Caetano-Anolles of the University of Illinois, it lived in the ocean and filled all of Earth’s global ocean with its mass. Then — after maybe a hundred million years or so — LUCA began to split up One fraction became the ancestor to the bacteria. Another gave rise to the archaea, and the final fraction gave rise to what, among other things, things like butterflies and jellyfish and termites, gave rise to you and me.

So we should all send her-him-it a Mother’s Day card! This address might not work, but it’s all we have:

LUCA
On Earth
Everywhere

— should reach her.

Bluefin tuna: Threatened with extinction.

So far in the history of life on Earth there have been five Great Extinctions. One was caused by the giant meteor that hit what is now the coast of Mexico, two by freezing in the oceans and the lowering of the sea levels, one by huge, widespread volcanic eruptions, one (probably) by gigantic meteorite showers.

They were all many millions of years ago — all but the sixth Great Extinction, which has barely started. That is the one the scientists are calling the “Holocene,” and its cause is annihilation of species of birds, animals and — especially, for example — edible fish.

And the cause of that is Us.

How do we cause extinctions? Oh, we have lots of ways. For fish, we harvest the tastiest ones en masse until there are none left (it’s estimated that we have removed nearly 90 percent of large fish from the sea). We destroy habitats. Most of all, we cause global warming. Anyway, our work in this matter has gone far enough for scientist to refer to the present as a new age, the Holocene.

From left, Donald A. Wollheim, Milton A. Rothman, me, John B. Michel and Will Sykora in 1936.

A congratulations note from Mark Olson reminds me of what I didn’t think of on my own, namely that we just passed the 75th anniversary of that earth-shaking event, the very first science-fiction convention ever, held when a handful of us New Yorkers dared the rail trip to Philadelphia to join with a handful of Philly fans and convene.

Three-quarters of a century! My, how time flies when you’re having fun!