The Way the Future Blogs

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!

Part 2 of Review of the Campbell-Swisher Letters

John W. Campbell in 1957 (from efanzines.com)

Fantasy Commentator
Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles Memorial Issue, Special Double Issue, Nos. 59 & 60.

 
On October 5, 1937, John W. Campbell’s world changed. The powers at Street & Smith, on F. Orlin Tremaine’s advice, appointed him to replace Tremaine as editor of Astounding Stories. That must have been a shock to Campbell, who’d been worriedly wondering who would get the job, as well as a solution to the worst of his money worries.

I had guessed elsewhere the his weekly paycheck was probably $35, but I was wrong. Actually it was $30. Yet that was a sum the young Campbells had only dreamed of having — was enough, indeed, to permit him to buy a Ford (presumably on the installment plan), and thus to manage, among other things, that long desired trip back to New England to visit old friends. But that didn’t happen right away. Getting used to his new job kept him jumping

He would have liked to start afresh, with a lineup of stories that he had chosen in the first place, and edited to make them more like the stories he himself wrote, in the second. He didn’t have that luxury. Tremaine had bought a number of stories, which now sat in the magazine’s inventory and had to be published. This appeared to have filled the magazine through its January 1938 issue; Campbell’s first editorial, in the December 1937 number said February would be a “mutant” issue. It didn’t say what part of the magazine would get mutated. It turned out to be the stories.

The magazine did not show the effect of a new hand at the tiller very quickly. That wasn’t John’s fault. No magazine can show the full effects of a new editorial policy overnight. Not only are there the inventory of stories bought under the old policies to work off, but it takes a while to let the contributors know what the new policies are.

What John did with the submissions that kept coming in was first to give each one a fair reading (sometimes this may not be much more than the first page; you can tell), and then divide them into two parts. The ones he didn’t have any interest in got a printed rejection slip. The ones that had something good about them got a typed note from John saying what he liked about the story and what about the story kept him from buying it. Those went back, too. But sometimes they came back again revised to the Campbell prescription and then got bought, and more frequently the next stories Campbell got from that writer were closer to his wishes. (How do I know so much about John’s reading habits? Because he described them to me, and they were so eminently sensible that, when I became a pro editor myself, I adopted them as my own.)

 
There are two points in the letters where John talks about dealings with me. Both of them are wrong. In the first one, he says I bragged to him that my Astonishing Stories sold more copies than his Astounding. That’s incorrect, though. I didn’t know about the difference in sales figures or I certainly would have bragged about it all over town.

The other is in the discussion about putting a non-Jewish pen name on the stories by Milt Rothman that I sold him as Milt’s agent. In the letters, John says he thought it better not to tell me about his reasoning because it might cause misunderstandings. But he did tell me. That led to my advising Milt to do what he said, in fact. On that one, I do have a theory to explain it. I think when he wrote the letter he hadn’t told me his reasoning, but then changed his mind and on a later occasion did tell me.

Well, this got longer and more detailed than a review should. I apologize for that, and in general for taking so long, when all I really wanted to say was if (1) you want to be an editor, or (2) if you’re interested in Campbell as a person, or (3) if you just like a good read on a science-fiction subject — why, then, this is a book for you.

 
Related posts:

• The Campbell Letters
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Riding High, Part 1, Part 2
• Me and Alfie, Part 6: John W. Campbell and Dianetics

Fantasy Commentator
Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles Memorial Issue, Special Double Issue, Nos. 59 & 60.
 

When John W. Campbell, Jr., washed out of MIT by failing to pass their German course, he didn’t stay in Massachusetts. Instead, he returned to his mother’s home in Orange, New Jersey. He had left some close friendships behind, though, and one of the first things he did after relocating was to write a letter to his Massachusetts friend Robert D. Swisher, a pharmaceutical chemist working for the Monsanto Corporation.

That was the first letter of many, and they were all carefully preserved, misspellings, factual errors and all, by Swisher, and then by his widow. Now they are published, under the guise of an article in the late A. Langley Searles’ fanzine Fantasy Commentator, published as a memorial tribute by Searles’ widow, Alice Becker, M.D. The issue contains nothing but the letters. Its length — 156 large pages — is within accepted book publishing standards. So let’s call it a book, the two of us, all right?

This book, then, contains all the letters John wrote to Swisher over a period of more than twenty years, from John’s early attempts at writing science-fiction stories of his own through his triumphal masterminding of the world’s best science-fiction magazine and his intoxication with L. Ron Hubbard’s invention of Dianetics, followed by his final rejection of that cause — though not of the validity of many of its principles which, called by one name or another, he apparently subscribed to until his death.

As a document bearing on these matters, this is not merely a good, readable book. It is an invaluable one, and the credit for the clarity and completeness that make it such a pleasure to read belongs in no small part to its editor, the late Sam Moskowitz. The source material Sam had to work with was a clutch of actual letters, many of them handwritten and some not easy to decipher, and a considerable fraction of them comprising little more than technical descriptions of the cameras, lenses and films for which the two correspondents shared an affection. All of that photography material Moskowitz skillfully redacted away. What remains is the next best thing to a detailed personal diary of the life of a stand-out major figure in the field of science fiction.

Continue reading ‘The Campbell Letters’ »

 

A simple high-school electrochemistry question for you smart ones: how do you make that excellent, but tricky, fuel for your car, hydrogen?

Simple. You start with plain old water; you dip two terminals from a battery at the ends of the tank and turn on the current. Something starts bubbling at the terminals, hydrogen at one, oxygen at the other. You can use the hydrogen to make your car go, sell the oxygen, perhaps, to the nearest hospital. It’s a great little system, the only problem being that it takes at least 1.23 volts to split the water molecule and electricity costs money.

Okay, forget the water. Let’s electrolyze a different chemical liquid, say urine.

Human urine takes only 0.37 volts to electrolyze. This cuts your power consumption down to not much more than a quarter, and the process is now economical. What makes the difference is that urine contains urea, and a molecule of urea contains four of the hydrogen atoms that constitute your electric current — twice as many as a molecule of water — and the bonds that hold the molecule together are weaker.

So, supposing you want to start building your plant for peepee power right now, where do you get your urine? You might think that that’s a silly question — nearly 7 billion humans alive on the Earth, and every one of them generating your new motor fuel for you every day — but you may have to go to some trouble to get what you need. No, you can’t just pipe your sewage into a tank and run a current through it. Sewage is contaminated with many other materials, and the worst of them for this purpose is plain old water. Any flush toilet dilutes the urine drastically, and thus also seriously dilutes the urea it contains, so much so that you might as well use plain water to begin .with.

There are various solutions to the problem of the urine collection. One was invented for us by the ancient Romans. They liked to wear white woolen garments, but those garments got dirty and couldn’t be laundered in water because they would shrink. Plain urine was fine to wash them in, though, so to provide their cleaning liquid, those old Roman dry cleaners put barrels out at street intersections, with ingratiating little signs urging those who had to go to use the barrels.

Of course, some neighborhoods might not care for that sort of public display. Fortunately, there are other options. The urine doesn’t have to come from human beings. Any large mammal will do. The particularly placid cow would be close to ideal. And how do you persuade your herd of cattle to pee in a barrel? You don’t.

There is a useful bit of minor surgery widely in use for elderly male humans whose prostate has grown so big it interferes with their urination. One end of a catheter is inserted directly through the skin into the gentleman’s bladder, the other end leads to a collection vessel of some sort. From then on the man never has to dash for a public urinal, and his own urine arrives at the electrolysis plant in a nearly pristine condition. (You save a bundle on water bills, too, since from then you never have to flush for pee.)

See how easy it is to solve some pretty big problems if you want to make the effort?

* * *

If you wonder why I know so much about Roman urination, my new novel — All the Lives He Led — is set partly in Pompeii, and I’ve done a lot of writing about those Romans at other times as well.

 
What Fools These Repub — These Mortals Be

In April, U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R., AZ) warned the nation in one of his fact-free orations that if we gave federal funds to Planned Parenthood they would spend 90 percent of it on providing abortions. (The correct number is 3 to 4 percent.) Called at once on the grotesquely untrue remark, the senator hid out, but ultimately sent one of his aides out to explain that the senator hadn’t intended his statement to be taken as “factual.”

Whereupon Jon Stewart that night wondered, “So if I were to say Jon Kyl spends 90 percent of his time in the Senate drooling and farting…?”

And a few days later Sarah Palin, in Boston apparently to start her presidential run, got all reverential about Paul Revere’s ride “to warn the British.” Told that it was the Americans he was warning, not their approaching Redcoat enemies, she got all huffy. She tried a save by claiming she hadn’t “messed up” because it was, after all, Revere’s intention to warn the Redcoats they were going to get people pretty seriously annoyed with them if they didn’t go back to England and leave the Americans alone, wasn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be nicer for us, and less embarrassing for them, if the right-wing dweebs stopped pretending they knew what they were talking about?

 
Related post:
Einstein vs. God: Who’s Ahead?

Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, 2009. (Photo by Cat Sparx.)

From time to time, Robert Silverberg has told the world that he had written himself out and was retiring from the field. Fortunately for the rest of us, these periods of abstinence from the computer were so depressing to his irrepressibly auctorial psyche that he fled back to the keyboard before long each time. Now he maintains a delicate balance between time spent in putting words on paper, as it seems God has intended for him to do, and time spent traveling the world to view art treasures in the greatest museums and the tiniest of ancient churches.

Betty Anne and I were lucky enough to join him once or twice when we found ourselves inhabiting the same land mass at a convenient time. One such episode that sticks in my mind took place in Italy in 1989. Bob with his wife, Karen Haber, and I with my own, Elizabeth Anne Hull — the wives both had elected to keep their maiden names, which tells you something about them, but at least they didn’t make us take theirs — had been attending a World SF annual meeting in a little town, up in the mountains, called Fanano.

The meeting had been good. World SF had been started by a few of us in order to give sf writers in every country that possessed any examples of any such native creatures a chance to interact with the major writers and editors of the world, and it had come to function very effectively, especially in helping writers from travel-restricting countries get permission to join us. The Fanano meeting had people from all over Europe, including a couple of groups from the USSR, as well as people from several countries in Asia and, of course, a large contingent from North America.

When it was over, Bob wanted to visit a bunch of old churches along the Adriatic on the way north to Venice, and Betty and I volunteered to go along with him.

I can’t say that I have a compelling interest in old churches. I do like to wander around new places, though, so Betty and the Silverbergs parked near a church and I went off to explore. I did peer into one or two churches that might have been where Princess Mathaswentha was saved from a loveless marriage by Martin Padway (at least, she was in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, though in the real world she was less fortunate). But really, after a week of concentrated good fellowship with friends from all over the world I was content with peace and quiet.

Venice, of course, was something else. None of the four of us had been there before, though I had barely missed it once when driving from Trieste down along the (then Yugoslavian, now multinational) coast to the Ancona ferry. And Venice itself was a constant delight.

We had pretty much lost any detailed contact with the world we usually lived in, not having any English-language newspaper or TV handy, but more language-gifted friends in Fanano had told us about big trouble in China. Something was going on in Tianenmen Square, the big open space in Beijing usually given over to crowds of young people anxious to try their imperfect English — or their teacher’s — on us so we could help improve their accents. No crowds of happy youngsters were there now, and no tourists. What young people there were were staring down the barrels of Chinese tanks, and the tank captains — we heard when we found an English paper — were said to have their fingers on the triggers.

It was at that point that we ran across a couple of old friends who, like us, had been at the World SF meeting in Fanano and decided to add on a little Adriatic exploration.

Takumi and Sashiko Shibano, from Tokyo, had been doing the Worldcon for years, and once or twice had stayed with us for a day or two before the con. Yang Xiao, from Chengdu in China, was the editor of the very successful Science Fiction World, by far China’s most prestigious sf magazine. Not one of them spoke a single word of Italian, so they had banded together to do their exploration, in spite of the fact that Yang didn’t speak either Japanese or English, either, and the Shibanos had no Chinese. At home in Chengdu, Yang Xiao didn’t need to know languages, having a staff of translators to keep her informed of what was in all those articles, stories and letters, but they were all still in Chengdu, while she was a world away. A clearly courageous human being, Yang had done all sorts of world traveling, with no more English than you can get out of a Chinese-Engish “useful words” booklet.

I admired her pluck, but immediately discovered she had heard nothing about the drama being played out in Tiananmen Square. I began to worry about how to inform her of the problem that looked like it was convulsing her home country.. We all put our minds to it. We succceded, too. Our American team went over the principal stories about Tiananmen Square in the English and Italian papers to clarify any parts that the Shibanos were unsure of. Then either Takumi or Sashiko wrote each story out in Japanese characters. It is a fortunate quality of the two languages that, although the spoken tongues are mutually incomprehensible, the written ones are enough alike that, with some effort, a Chinese reader can make sense of a Japanese story. And Yang Xiao got the news of the dismal encounter that was shaking her homeland up while she was a world away.

Which just goes to show you what a bunch of science-fiction types can do when they put their minds to it.